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No, it won't save the planet. But millions of people making millions of small changes might save the planet. Refusing to do anything at all unless it makes a
by OldHand2018 6y ago
No, it won't save the planet.
But millions of people making millions of small changes might save the planet. Refusing to do anything at all unless it makes a huge change is not helpful.
- cure 6y agoThis. And the most important thing is the awareness it builds. You can't solve a problem if you don't know it exists.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoYou never know what small changes might inspire big things down the line.
- pizza234 6y agoI'm a contrarian when it comes to this subject :-) Millions of people make small changes to distract themselves from changes that would make a real difference. Not doing anything may at least have a chance of making them aware that something must be done. You'll notice this phenomenon in lots of areas, first of all fitness. But that's just my opinion.
- jugjug 6y agoThis. Less flying, less buying, less meet, less consumerism, more local & seasonal food. No need to go full 100%: it would be enough if critical mass reaches a good-enough level.
- adrianN 6y agoNo, it wouldn't be enough. This year has been the perfect experiment: Through massive, massive, restrictions in our normal life we managed to reduce CO2 emissions by what, 30%? Say we could do it even better if everyone became vegan and only rode bicycles and we reduce them by 70%. Awesome. That about triples the time we have until we need to reach net zero emissions. It probably also crashes the economy that's supposed to pay for the modernization and replacement of our whole energy infrastructure.
- bluntfang 6y agoYou're right, but if enough people include thoughts like "what can I do personally to reduce my carbon footprint" and take action, then those conversions and actions end up making their way into the meeting rooms and board rooms.
- orwin 6y ago>Through massive, massive, restrictions in our normal life we managed to reduce CO2 emissions by what, 30%? most likely 4-6% by the end of the year is europe goes back to the same lockdown as in march. To reduce that to needed levels by 2050 (to reach the 2°C by 2100 "best" scenario), you need -5% every year since last year. Its in the bag for 2020 at least, so that's great.
- jackdh 6y agoCan you expand on what you mean by fitness here?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pizza234 6y agoYes. Not many people enjoy physical activity; this is totally fine - everyone has their own taste. However, a certain amount of activity is required to maintain a minimal amount of fitness. Smart training can even take, in worst case, one hour a week. What I typically observe in people who refuse to do even the bare minimum of activity, is that they find a "non-activity", and pretend it works. What they're actually doing is instead to find something that takes virtually no effort while giving the illusion that they've absolved the duty. Very typical non-activities: walking and climbing stairs. (This is a bit complex suject of course, because if we take somebody who sits 24/7 on a chair/couch, of course walking is better than nothing - but I'm referring to the principle)
- nojvek 6y agoWalking an hour would require a decent amount of fitness. Not sure why you’re saying it’s a non-activity
- pizza234 6y agoWell, unless one is severely overweight, walking is a very light activity - it actively employs very few muscles and has a very minimal cardiovascular impact. However, this is a bit odd in context. If one considers a population where 60%+ of the population has 30%+ of bodyfat percentage, then it's impossible to define what constitutes fitness - even one flight of stairs, in a sense, requires a decent amount of training. In at least northern Europe, hiking is relatively common for elderlies (people in their 60s) - and this amounts to hours of walking in rough terrains, so definitely, for a person who's not (considerably) overweight, and hour of walks in the city is... a walk in the park.
- legulere 6y agoThe internet is the fastest growing polluter.
- vkou 6y agoNot in absolute values.
- getlawgdon 6y agoHabit research disagrees completely with your contrarianism. It says that most long term changes are initiated with small changes that built a framework for more radical change over time.
- Kinrany 6y agoI think this article makes a convincing case that small changes of this particular type are a waste of time: it's much worse than throwing an equivalent amount of money at the problem. It follows that scaling them would only waste more time.
- Bukhmanizer 6y agoThis is one of those things that sounds nice, but is completely meaningless when you think about it. Essentially it boils down to “sometimes, things help”. No need to qualify or quantify “when”, “which things” and “how much” they help by. If you want to argue that website fonts or whatever have a meaningful impact on climate change, then argue it, with actual data, or statistics, or anything more than bs “we’re all in this together” platitudes. I see it as a particular type of green-washing where people can feel like they’re acting pro-socially while actually making trivial differences in the actual issue. The time and attention of people isn’t infinite, by getting people to invest in ideas that don’t work, you actively take away from ideas that do.
- scarmig 6y agoIt's very difficult for people to calculate what set of small changes is most impactful. And you've also got to account for the costs of spending hours every week trying to optimize for that. The most efficient solution is to implement some market pricing mechanism for carbon, and have consumers automatically enact change through the existing, legible process they use for making decisions: comparing prices.
- leptons 6y agoThere are vastly far more bytes transferred and data processed for porn than there ever will be for bloated HTML/CSS/JS.
- sethammons 6y agoNo single raindrop believes it is to be blamed for the flood