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Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Anything we attribute to individuals pales in comparison to the transport industry, production of goods like ste

Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Anything we attribute to individuals pales in comparison to the transport industry, production of goods like steel and concrete, resource extraction, power generation and production of consumer goods. Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Yes, but those things do not exist in a vacuum, they are produced based on demand. If we care so much about our own convenience that we are unwilling to change the things we can on an individual level, how will we ever be willing to sacrifice things as a society? Are you going to give up your 2-day prime delivery because we no longer ship things by truck? Or a wide variety of items at your grocery because we stop gathering food from the four corners of the earth?
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Come on, it's not that GP, or me, or you willed 2-day prime delivery into existence. It's something Amazon, and other companies, offer. It can be "given up" by everyone, without any objection, by said companies deciding not to offer it anymore. People will grumble and adapt, because they can't really do much about it. The leverage over this, and all other conveniences, rests squarely with the companies offering them. People choose out of what's available on the market, not from the space of possible offerings.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    And Amazon will stop offering it if people stop using it. It seems to me that people are using this argument to put all the blame on corporations and big industry while ignoring that their own actions are the reason such entities exist in the first place.
    - pnt12 5y ago
      You can tell every consumer to check every purchase they make, and put an enormous burden on them which will not happen. Or you can legislate companies and actually get it done. That's the point of legislation: when the free market doesn't solve something, you add rules and enforce them. That's why food products must be edible and you wouldn't ask consumers to research and pick the right ones.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        > Or you can legislate companies and actually get it done. Politicians write legislation, and are elected by the people. If the people are unwilling to sacrifice any amount of their comfort then they won't elect politicians who will make them. And let's not kid ourselves, forcing industry to be more green will come at a cost to everyone: things will be more expensive, less readily available, and possibly of lower quality.
  - amarant 5y ago
    but if Amazon did that, a competitor would start to offer it and soon replace Amazon as the Status Quo. Amazon knows this, and thus won't stop offering it. Consumer Responsibility isn't the whole picture, but it is part of it. Pollution-based taxes is the only realistic solution to the problem IMO, but they seem far away from being implemented anywhere.
  - Bedon292 5y ago
    Sure, Amazon could stop offering it, and that may be a good thing. However people are not used to the convenience and will stop using them and use Walmart's two day shipping. Or just drive to the store themselves, which is likely even worse for emissions. Although I am not certain it would be a good thing. It is my understanding that delivery services like USPS, UPS, Amazon, etc. are better for emissions than making little trips to the store. Its dozens or hundreds of deliveries aggregated into a single highly optimized trip that keeps many other people off the road. If you give people the convenience of having it within a day or two, it may actually save entire round trips to the store. Without it, I think you have more cars on the road with more emissions. There could be some good in more incentives around Amazon Day deliveries. Where all your goods show up on the same day each week. Reduced packaging and potentially reduced emissions. It would actually be cool of they did something and produced routes, where each neighborhood gets the same day, rather than individuals get to pick and change their own. That might make some decent impact. But you still have to convince people to wait a week. Although that is not getting into the consumerism that Amazon fuels, and the extra plastics and trash that are produced because of it. Which are bad. But that I don't think you can put that entirely on Amazon, that's a society problem.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Fair enough. Delivery services are perhaps not the best topic to talk about in this context - there's a strong argument for them being net better for climate than brick&mortar shops, particularly in car-centric cultures. My comment was less about the particulars of 2-day delivery, and more about the general problem of punting the responsibility to consumers for things they're structurally unable to affect. The concept of "voting with your wallet" is one of the biggest modern-day scams.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Even last mile delivery isn't that polluting... We're talking things like steel and concrete production, massive ocean container ships, coal plants, the extraction of every type of ressource, etc... Again, the things you mention are putting the onus on the consumer and are relatively small. Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions. The entire global agriculture system accounts for only 10% of emissions and of that, 80% occurs during the production stage. By contrast, concrete alone is 8% of global emissions. Forestry is 10%. Steel production alone is 9% of all emissions. Simply producing these base products creates more emissions than absolutely everything consumers do. Energy production is 25% and of that, industrial producers use most of it.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > Even last mile delivery isn't that polluting... We're talking things like steel and concrete production Right, but reducing consumption has knock-on effects across the board. Less need for ocean shipping when we demand fewer non-local goods, less need for concrete and steel when we build less stuff with it, etc. > Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions. Until you account for how many industries would exist if there were no consumers for their products. This whole argument stinks of trying to push the blame away from ourselves, just like the corporations are doing. We are all responsible for this, but we're all too self-centered to ever do anything about it because our comfort is much more important to us than the future of the world.
  - manux 5y ago
    > massive ocean container ships, coal plants, the extraction of every type of ressource but all these things... serve consumers. Container chips contain goods that people buy, that required resource extraction and transport.
simion314 5y ago
>Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Can industry exists without consumers? If you don't buy any cars then you have an impact. If you don't buy a new laptop/phone each year you have an impact on electronic industry. If you don't order online a 1$ gadget daily you have an effect.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Your individual effect is a rounding error. It's not even measured. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else buys new laptops/phones/cars/gadgets makes it hard for everyone to individually forgo these things. On the other side of the table, the choices made by the industrial players have immediate, large scale impact. A single board can decide to shut off some of the operations - stop making a gadget, stop making 100 different models of the same thing to try and segment the market, etc. - and, while they will have to convince dozens of other influential people to approve, if they succeed, the effect will be immediate and greater than a million consumers voluntarily changing their purchasing patterns.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > Your individual effect is a rounding error. It's not even measured. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else buys new laptops/phones/cars/gadgets makes it hard for everyone to individually forgo these things. No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh? This is why the problem will never be dealt with.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh? Indeed. Have you ever seen meteorologists appealing to raindrops? Have you ever seen a hydrologist counting water in fraction of CCs? A flood management system where individual droplets mattered? No, a flood is a bulk event. It's managed like a system, using means with leverage over whole flows. Measurement starts with cubic meters. Nobody gives a damn about single raindrops, they're immaterial. Same applies here. Focusing on regular individuals, and trying to get them to change their life style one by one, against the gradient of economic incentives controlling all of our lives, is like trying to pluck individual raindrops from rushing flood water. It's insane to even try. The answer is in redirecting the water stream; the droplets sort themselves out. > This is why the problem will never be dealt with. No, the problem will never be dealt with for as long as we focus on attempts to brow-beat everyone into self-sacrifice - to which people naturally react by ignoring the beating and resenting the beaters.
cool_dude85 5y ago
That steel and concrete builds new buildings, it doesn't get sent down to the dump to rot. This is a common refrain I hear against individual action, but those industrial emitters aren't doing it because they love how CO2 smells. They are producing consumer goods or in a supply chain to produce consumer goods.
pjerem 5y ago
Aren’t industrials working to sell things to individuals ? You are the customer of the transports industry, you live in a concrete and steel building, you buy the devices made with extracted lithium or gold, power generators are running for every one of those … and for heating your house. The problem is difficult because no one is responsible, but our entire civilization as such is responsible. Yeah, we could probably make marketing people accountable for over consumerism. But they are just materialization of the ugly side of our civilization.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Show me where I have consumer choice about which transport company my goods are shipped on (as well as a shipping company that isn't a huge polluter), and I'll happily wield my influence.
  - gruez 5y ago
    There are many places where there are consumer choice (eg. electric cars, carbon offset credits for flights, renewable energy electricity providers, organic foods at the supermarket[1]), and the uptake there is tepid at best. The critical mass of demand is just not there. [1] I'm not saying that organic food helps climate, but it captures a similar idea. People complain that industrial food production is bad because of pesticides/hormones, organic mostly solves these problems, but people strangely aren't taking up on it.
    - jwagenet 5y ago
      The problem with Organic food is the same with carbon emissions; the cost of is generally too high compared to the perceived individual benefits of the organic/low-emissions alternative.
      - gruez 5y ago
        It's actually better with organic food, because you can benefit yourself by not ingesting pesticides/hormones/whatever, whereas with carbon emissions the most you'll achieve is save the earth from 0.00000001 degrees of warming.
the_biot 5y ago
Yes, and this needs to be the top comment, and should be in every article about climate change.
callmeal 5y ago
>Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions. That's not quite true. Individual action leads to societal change. Climate change will never be treated as an emergency until we believe that it is, and until it makes us change our individual behavior to show that it is. The other problem is that this behavior change needs to start at the top. We need to see that our elected leaders are treating this like an emergency. Unfortunately that will never happen because of a certain political party in the US that ignores science and delights in human misery. https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climate-change-personal-action-collective-action.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climat... Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley tested this exact scenario in a now-classic study. Participants filled out a survey in a quiet room, which suddenly began to fill with smoke (from a vent set up by the experimenters). When alone, participants left the room and reported the apparent fire. But in the presence of others who ignored the smoke, participants carried on as though nothing were wrong.
adolph 5y ago
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f=M https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f... Industrial is the largest energy consumer by sector, but doesn't pale in comparison to transportation, commercial and residential. If anything C19 has brought residential up to industrial levels.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Yes, but those things do not exist in a vacuum, they are produced based on demand. If we care so much about our own convenience that we are unwilling to change the things we can on an individual level, how will we ever be willing to sacrifice things as a society? Are you going to give up your 2-day prime delivery because we no longer ship things by truck? Or a wide variety of items at your grocery because we stop gathering food from the four corners of the earth?

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Come on, it's not that GP, or me, or you willed 2-day prime delivery into existence. It's something Amazon, and other companies, offer. It can be "given up" by everyone, without any objection, by said companies deciding not to offer it anymore. People will grumble and adapt, because they can't really do much about it. The leverage over this, and all other conveniences, rests squarely with the companies offering them. People choose out of what's available on the market, not from the space of possible offerings.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  And Amazon will stop offering it if people stop using it. It seems to me that people are using this argument to put all the blame on corporations and big industry while ignoring that their own actions are the reason such entities exist in the first place.
  - pnt12 5y ago
    You can tell every consumer to check every purchase they make, and put an enormous burden on them which will not happen. Or you can legislate companies and actually get it done. That's the point of legislation: when the free market doesn't solve something, you add rules and enforce them. That's why food products must be edible and you wouldn't ask consumers to research and pick the right ones.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > Or you can legislate companies and actually get it done. Politicians write legislation, and are elected by the people. If the people are unwilling to sacrifice any amount of their comfort then they won't elect politicians who will make them. And let's not kid ourselves, forcing industry to be more green will come at a cost to everyone: things will be more expensive, less readily available, and possibly of lower quality.
- amarant 5y ago
  but if Amazon did that, a competitor would start to offer it and soon replace Amazon as the Status Quo. Amazon knows this, and thus won't stop offering it. Consumer Responsibility isn't the whole picture, but it is part of it. Pollution-based taxes is the only realistic solution to the problem IMO, but they seem far away from being implemented anywhere.
- Bedon292 5y ago
  Sure, Amazon could stop offering it, and that may be a good thing. However people are not used to the convenience and will stop using them and use Walmart's two day shipping. Or just drive to the store themselves, which is likely even worse for emissions. Although I am not certain it would be a good thing. It is my understanding that delivery services like USPS, UPS, Amazon, etc. are better for emissions than making little trips to the store. Its dozens or hundreds of deliveries aggregated into a single highly optimized trip that keeps many other people off the road. If you give people the convenience of having it within a day or two, it may actually save entire round trips to the store. Without it, I think you have more cars on the road with more emissions. There could be some good in more incentives around Amazon Day deliveries. Where all your goods show up on the same day each week. Reduced packaging and potentially reduced emissions. It would actually be cool of they did something and produced routes, where each neighborhood gets the same day, rather than individuals get to pick and change their own. That might make some decent impact. But you still have to convince people to wait a week. Although that is not getting into the consumerism that Amazon fuels, and the extra plastics and trash that are produced because of it. Which are bad. But that I don't think you can put that entirely on Amazon, that's a society problem.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Fair enough. Delivery services are perhaps not the best topic to talk about in this context - there's a strong argument for them being net better for climate than brick&mortar shops, particularly in car-centric cultures. My comment was less about the particulars of 2-day delivery, and more about the general problem of punting the responsibility to consumers for things they're structurally unable to affect. The concept of "voting with your wallet" is one of the biggest modern-day scams.
Mikeb85 5y ago
Even last mile delivery isn't that polluting... We're talking things like steel and concrete production, massive ocean container ships, coal plants, the extraction of every type of ressource, etc... Again, the things you mention are putting the onus on the consumer and are relatively small. Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions. The entire global agriculture system accounts for only 10% of emissions and of that, 80% occurs during the production stage. By contrast, concrete alone is 8% of global emissions. Forestry is 10%. Steel production alone is 9% of all emissions. Simply producing these base products creates more emissions than absolutely everything consumers do. Energy production is 25% and of that, industrial producers use most of it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Even last mile delivery isn't that polluting... We're talking things like steel and concrete production Right, but reducing consumption has knock-on effects across the board. Less need for ocean shipping when we demand fewer non-local goods, less need for concrete and steel when we build less stuff with it, etc. > Everything consumers and non-industrial businesses do accounts for only 13% of global emissions. Until you account for how many industries would exist if there were no consumers for their products. This whole argument stinks of trying to push the blame away from ourselves, just like the corporations are doing. We are all responsible for this, but we're all too self-centered to ever do anything about it because our comfort is much more important to us than the future of the world.
- manux 5y ago
  > massive ocean container ships, coal plants, the extraction of every type of ressource but all these things... serve consumers. Container chips contain goods that people buy, that required resource extraction and transport.

simion314 5y ago

>Of course the biggest emitters are industrial. Can industry exists without consumers? If you don't buy any cars then you have an impact. If you don't buy a new laptop/phone each year you have an impact on electronic industry. If you don't order online a 1$ gadget daily you have an effect.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Your individual effect is a rounding error. It's not even measured. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else buys new laptops/phones/cars/gadgets makes it hard for everyone to individually forgo these things. On the other side of the table, the choices made by the industrial players have immediate, large scale impact. A single board can decide to shut off some of the operations - stop making a gadget, stop making 100 different models of the same thing to try and segment the market, etc. - and, while they will have to convince dozens of other influential people to approve, if they succeed, the effect will be immediate and greater than a million consumers voluntarily changing their purchasing patterns.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Your individual effect is a rounding error. It's not even measured. Meanwhile, the fact that everyone else buys new laptops/phones/cars/gadgets makes it hard for everyone to individually forgo these things. No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh? This is why the problem will never be dealt with.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > No raindrop is responsible for the flood eh? Indeed. Have you ever seen meteorologists appealing to raindrops? Have you ever seen a hydrologist counting water in fraction of CCs? A flood management system where individual droplets mattered? No, a flood is a bulk event. It's managed like a system, using means with leverage over whole flows. Measurement starts with cubic meters. Nobody gives a damn about single raindrops, they're immaterial. Same applies here. Focusing on regular individuals, and trying to get them to change their life style one by one, against the gradient of economic incentives controlling all of our lives, is like trying to pluck individual raindrops from rushing flood water. It's insane to even try. The answer is in redirecting the water stream; the droplets sort themselves out. > This is why the problem will never be dealt with. No, the problem will never be dealt with for as long as we focus on attempts to brow-beat everyone into self-sacrifice - to which people naturally react by ignoring the beating and resenting the beaters.

cool_dude85 5y ago

That steel and concrete builds new buildings, it doesn't get sent down to the dump to rot. This is a common refrain I hear against individual action, but those industrial emitters aren't doing it because they love how CO2 smells. They are producing consumer goods or in a supply chain to produce consumer goods.

pjerem 5y ago

Aren’t industrials working to sell things to individuals ? You are the customer of the transports industry, you live in a concrete and steel building, you buy the devices made with extracted lithium or gold, power generators are running for every one of those … and for heating your house. The problem is difficult because no one is responsible, but our entire civilization as such is responsible. Yeah, we could probably make marketing people accountable for over consumerism. But they are just materialization of the ugly side of our civilization.

brundolf 5y ago
Show me where I have consumer choice about which transport company my goods are shipped on (as well as a shipping company that isn't a huge polluter), and I'll happily wield my influence.
- gruez 5y ago
  There are many places where there are consumer choice (eg. electric cars, carbon offset credits for flights, renewable energy electricity providers, organic foods at the supermarket[1]), and the uptake there is tepid at best. The critical mass of demand is just not there. [1] I'm not saying that organic food helps climate, but it captures a similar idea. People complain that industrial food production is bad because of pesticides/hormones, organic mostly solves these problems, but people strangely aren't taking up on it.
  - jwagenet 5y ago
    The problem with Organic food is the same with carbon emissions; the cost of is generally too high compared to the perceived individual benefits of the organic/low-emissions alternative.
    - gruez 5y ago
      It's actually better with organic food, because you can benefit yourself by not ingesting pesticides/hormones/whatever, whereas with carbon emissions the most you'll achieve is save the earth from 0.00000001 degrees of warming.

the_biot 5y ago

Yes, and this needs to be the top comment, and should be in every article about climate change.

callmeal 5y ago

>Telling consumers to cut back on X is essentially passing the back and making consumers feel bad without actually addressing the bulk of emissions. That's not quite true. Individual action leads to societal change. Climate change will never be treated as an emergency until we believe that it is, and until it makes us change our individual behavior to show that it is. The other problem is that this behavior change needs to start at the top. We need to see that our elected leaders are treating this like an emergency. Unfortunately that will never happen because of a certain political party in the US that ignores science and delights in human misery. https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climate-change-personal-action-collective-action.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/carbon-footprint-climat... Psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley tested this exact scenario in a now-classic study. Participants filled out a survey in a quiet room, which suddenly began to fill with smoke (from a vent set up by the experimenters). When alone, participants left the room and reported the apparent fire. But in the presence of others who ignored the smoke, participants carried on as though nothing were wrong.

adolph 5y ago

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f=M https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f... Industrial is the largest energy consumer by sector, but doesn't pale in comparison to transportation, commercial and residential. If anything C19 has brought residential up to industrial levels.