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Well, this is not much different from other emergent phenomena like election results. The outcome of the 2020 election was not under any one person's control, b

by samhw 5y ago

Well, this is not much different from other emergent phenomena like election results. The outcome of the 2020 election was not under any one person's control, but that's a shoddy argument for claiming it's outside of everyone's control in aggregate. (I mean, it's certainly not in any company's control either.) The answer is that we need to coordinate, get serious, and fix these problems. But part of getting serious is not using obvious sophistry to trick dull-witted people into thinking that 'corporations' are just magically burning carbon for reasons that have nothing at all to do with their consumption, and therefore there's no point in their changing their own behaviour –– which is a very prevalent argument on social media, and is what I was alluding to initially.

kragen 5y ago
I think there's a stronger argument for personal responsibility with carbon emissions than for voting. If you buy one new car, that increases the demand for cars by 1, which increases the demand for steel by about 1 tonne, which increases the production of steel by almost exactly 1 tonne. (It also increases the price of steel slightly, but probably not enough to decrease the demand for steel by even 1 kg.) Producing a tonne of steel emits 1.85 tonnes of CO₂, so in a year or two, there will be 1.85 tonnes of CO₂ more in the atmosphere than if you hadn't bought that car. By contrast, the result of any one person's vote in the 02020 election was nil. I don't think there's any person in the world whose vote in 02020, if you'd changed it to some other candidate, would have resulted in a different candidate winning. Whether this is valid consequentialist moral reasoning or not is related to, for example, whether participants in a firing squad are killers. On the other hand, if you live in Los Angeles, your life is going to suck pretty hard without a car; you won't be able to go to college and you probably won't have a job. Good luck convincing anyone in LA to follow your example after that! Unilaterally opting out of car culture mostly hurts you, though it also has a first-order effect of helping the planet a little bit, in a way that giving your vote to a marginal candidate doesn't. Substantially reducing your carbon footprint requires not self-sacrifice but some kind of collective action, like the massive installation of solar panels across California over the past few years, which in turn was made profitable by the mostly Chinese research and development that has dropped the resources required for solar panels by over an order of magnitude over the last decade. Or, for example, like the collective action in which NCL (owned by Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Mack Trucks) bought up the nearly-bankrupt Los Angeles public transportation system in 01944, an act for which they were convicted of antitrust violations in 01949, and converted it from electric to internal combustion engines over the following 19 years, completing the job in 01963. Corporations are organs of collective action—"coordination", as you put it—so they can sometimes achieve things that individual efforts cannot; because all the people in a corporation can act together (for example, under the command of management) to do something that would be counterproductive if only a few of them were doing it. Also, though, there are better uses of computers than congratulating yourself on seeing through "obvious sophistry" and not being so "dull-witted" as to think [insert obvious strawman argument].
- samhw 5y ago
  What's the crux of your point here? I think you're imputing some wider meaning to what was actually a very simple point (i.e. saying that N people have no power, just because 1/N people can't individually make a difference, is like saying the electorate has no power over an election result because one of them can't change the outcome). My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described. In the car example you gave, the "corporations are responsible for most of climate change!" argument would attribute the emissions involved in manufacturing your car to the corporation instead of you. It's a compelling argument until you think about it, in concrete terms like that, for even thirty seconds.
  - kragen 5y ago
    > My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described. I agree with that as far as it goes—certainly attributing the emissions to the car buyer is less foolish than attributing them to General Motors, US Steel, or Peabody Coal—but I think it's still an oversimplification, and that personal action isn't enough. And I would like you to stop using HN to congratulate yourself on how smart you are.

by samhw 5y ago

kragen 5y ago

I think there's a stronger argument for personal responsibility with carbon emissions than for voting. If you buy one new car, that increases the demand for cars by 1, which increases the demand for steel by about 1 tonne, which increases the production of steel by almost exactly 1 tonne. (It also increases the price of steel slightly, but probably not enough to decrease the demand for steel by even 1 kg.) Producing a tonne of steel emits 1.85 tonnes of CO₂, so in a year or two, there will be 1.85 tonnes of CO₂ more in the atmosphere than if you hadn't bought that car. By contrast, the result of any one person's vote in the 02020 election was nil. I don't think there's any person in the world whose vote in 02020, if you'd changed it to some other candidate, would have resulted in a different candidate winning. Whether this is valid consequentialist moral reasoning or not is related to, for example, whether participants in a firing squad are killers. On the other hand, if you live in Los Angeles, your life is going to suck pretty hard without a car; you won't be able to go to college and you probably won't have a job. Good luck convincing anyone in LA to follow your example after that! Unilaterally opting out of car culture mostly hurts you, though it also has a first-order effect of helping the planet a little bit, in a way that giving your vote to a marginal candidate doesn't. Substantially reducing your carbon footprint requires not self-sacrifice but some kind of collective action, like the massive installation of solar panels across California over the past few years, which in turn was made profitable by the mostly Chinese research and development that has dropped the resources required for solar panels by over an order of magnitude over the last decade. Or, for example, like the collective action in which NCL (owned by Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Mack Trucks) bought up the nearly-bankrupt Los Angeles public transportation system in 01944, an act for which they were convicted of antitrust violations in 01949, and converted it from electric to internal combustion engines over the following 19 years, completing the job in 01963. Corporations are organs of collective action—"coordination", as you put it—so they can sometimes achieve things that individual efforts cannot; because all the people in a corporation can act together (for example, under the command of management) to do something that would be counterproductive if only a few of them were doing it. Also, though, there are better uses of computers than congratulating yourself on seeing through "obvious sophistry" and not being so "dull-witted" as to think [insert obvious strawman argument].

samhw 5y ago
What's the crux of your point here? I think you're imputing some wider meaning to what was actually a very simple point (i.e. saying that N people have no power, just because 1/N people can't individually make a difference, is like saying the electorate has no power over an election result because one of them can't change the outcome). My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described. In the car example you gave, the "corporations are responsible for most of climate change!" argument would attribute the emissions involved in manufacturing your car to the corporation instead of you. It's a compelling argument until you think about it, in concrete terms like that, for even thirty seconds.
- kragen 5y ago
  > My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described. I agree with that as far as it goes—certainly attributing the emissions to the car buyer is less foolish than attributing them to General Motors, US Steel, or Peabody Coal—but I think it's still an oversimplification, and that personal action isn't enough. And I would like you to stop using HN to congratulate yourself on how smart you are.