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The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry a

• gruez 4y ago
  > The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry and commerce I agree with internalizing externalities, but let's not pretend that isn't part of individual behavior (consumer demand drives industry), or that individuals don't benefit from them in some way.
  • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    > consumer demand drives industry And industry lobby drives government policy and regulation. Industry apologism will not help us move towards mitigating climate crisis effects. Industry has externalized most of their environmental costs, this needs to change ASAP.
    • tekknik 4y ago
      What is your solution for bulk transport, last mile, etc?
      • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
        You are asking the wrong question. _Total_ Road transport emissions is 11.9% of CO2 emissions. It is still a lot but it will probably be the hardest to get rid of due to the whole car-centric infrastructure. - Energy use in buildings is 17.5% of CO2 emissions - Energy use in Industry is 24.4% of CO2 Emissions, The steel industry alone accounts for 7% of global emissions of CO2 The _number_one_priority_ is to force out Coal and Methane Gas from the Energy production sector and heating. That alone would cut global emissions by more than 40%. This is a gigantic step because it solely depends on government energy policy, Infrastructure investiment, and also requires us to advance against an extremely embedded lobby of both Coal and Oil&Gas.
  • franga2000 4y ago
    The fact that people benefit from something is not enough to assign any blame to them. Even if alternatives exist (they often don't), if they require a significant trade-off, blame is minimal. Even when it comes to buying products it's a tough sell - I know my phone battery is made with slave labor, but it's not like I can choose to buy the one that isn't. So when it comes to industry, we share exactly 0% of the blame - not just as individuals, but consumers as a group[]. The problem is two-fold: industry leaders are greedy and politicians aren't working in our best interests. If either of those went away, the problem would be solved. Unless you're in one if those two groups, none of it is your fault. [] In democratic countries, it can be argued that the voter base is at fault for electing these corrupt politicians. I largely agree with this, but it's a pretty complex topic.
    • Tao3300 4y ago
      > In democratic countries, it can be argued that the voter base is at fault for electing these corrupt politicians. Like the batteries, it's not like I can choose the ones that aren't corrupt. The alternatives don't exist. In the rare event that they do, they get blocked out by the parties or rendered ineffective by their colleagues. At least it's that way here in the US -- which may or may not fit your definition of democracy. The major job requirement for an American politician is how well you can fundraise. And that's just to get a foot in the door of one of the entrenched parties -- they can still just decide to back someone else.
    • tekknik 4y ago
      > I know my phone battery is made with slave labor, but it's not like I can choose to buy the one that isn't. But you can choose to go without the phone that requires the battery. Now I know the canned response is “it’s not practical these days to not have a smart phone”, but going without one will not kill you. If the only phone available killed one person for every phone sold would you still demand to have one?
      • franga2000 4y ago
        Ok, so let's say I don't have a phone. But computers contain thousands of components, many of which contain minerals mined by slaves. So no computer either. Without access to the internet, there's almost no way to get a job. Nevertheless, I go to the employment center and say that my only condition is that the job does not require me to interact with any computers or other devices that contain minerals mined by slaves. None exist, so I go home unemployed (to an apartment building built by an oil tycoon in the 80s). Now I'm hungry, so I walk barefoot and naked (clothing is often is made by child labourers and with no regard for environmental impact) to the shop. Good thing I don't live in North America so I can actually go places without driving a (planet-killing) car! At the store, I want to buy some bread and vegetables, but discover that a rainforest was cut down to build the field where the wheat was grown and dangerous pesticides were used on the vegetables, leaking into the soil and poisoning the groundwater for the locals. Back home, I close the main central heating valve - it's powered by a coal plant after all. It's winter. It's now a race to see what kills me first - hypothermia, starvation or the random infection I got last week from a small cut that I refused antibiotics for because they were developed with animal testing. So who is the criminal here? Me, right now, using my 6 year old phone on the bus? Or is it the capitalists who pushed hypothetical me to the brink of death for trying to live "sin"-free and the politicians who oppose any attempt to keep them accountable? And more importantly, what's the solution? Because going full Amish isn't nearly as scalable as you might think.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    And individual behavior is just the result of the culture and the systems that surround us. We can campaign for individual change all day long, and they'll have less effect than what legislation could bring. In fact I don't think individuals have much choice. They can inconvenience, or hinder themselves, in what effectively amount to a race amongst each other, or they can participate as fully as they can, thereby also dealing as much damage as the system or culture lets them. Circling back to cars and car culture as a prime example, the popular Not Just Bikes channel also talks about this. In their example of a city in the Netherlands, it's not that people love to bike and therefore bike a lot. It's that the environment is optimized to getting around in not just cars, but for pedestrian, and cycling traffic. Therefore people, who just want to get around, choose these two more often. As long as there's a game, they'll be players, so in order to minimize damage by the players, we need to change the game. Not the player.
    • Smithalicious 4y ago
      As someone who lives in the Netherlands it's certainly true that our country is well-optimized for bicycles, and I personally do everything either by bicycle or by public transport as I do not even have a driving license, but it's also true that the Netherlands is easy mode for building the necessary infrastructure - extremely flat, densely populated, and wealthy. This isn't meant to disagree with you or the people who bring the Netherlands up as a positive example.
      • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
        It isn't well-optimized. It's certainly more optimized, but anything outside a major city is optimized for cars first and foremost. Anything below the size of Eindhoven included. The stats reflect this (car usage is still going up / barely going down, car size increasing) and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent. On top of that, infrastructure outside cities is getting worse for car-free enthusiasts. Public transit is getting actively worse and more expensive, roads are still optimized around cars first and foremost, and WFH is still barely pushed. The Netherlands is a great example of how difficult it is, and how easy it is for a government to stop trying beyond the lowest of lowhanging fruit (carfree city centers). A few Americans gasping at the infrastructure of Utrecht not being atrocious doesn't change the 1 hour commute from a popular driveby town 25km away from a medium-sized city.
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    Why fight against the current? We aren’t going to convince billions of people, most of whom are struggling for survival, to make dramatic sacrifices. Moreover, in the overwhelming majority of cases consumers can’t tell which item is more environmentally friendly (the state of the art is “does the packaging have a faux burlap aesthetic?” which lends itself to pervasive greenwashing). We simply cannot solve the problem by asking consumers to care more about the planet than feeding their kids, particularly when “caring about the planet” in this way is basically guesswork. Climate change and other environmental problems are systemic, and thus we need systemic solutions—in the case of climate change, the ideal and gold standard is carbon pricing (with border adjustments).
• maxerickson 4y ago
  What is freshwater usage? My water comes out of a Great Lake and substantially ends up back in it, about as clean as it came out. It's not used up. Some energy is consumed making it potable and pumping it around, and then treating it. Farms in the Midwest happen to catch a lot of rain, are they using freshwater in a different way than an almond orchard in California, or is it the same (my expectation is that the almond orchard is considered a user and the Midwest farm is often not).
  • noahtallen 4y ago
    Completely different scenarios, right? The rainy parts of the Midwest aren’t in a drought which makes water consumption important to track. California is. Anyways, they do use in freshwater differently. Where I grew up in NW Ohio, there is practically no irrigation. It rains enough there’s no need. Freshwater use is passive, in other words. Out west, farms have to actively pump water to irrigate since there’s not enough rain. They can control how much freshwater they take out of the water source in a way the Midwest farmer can’t.
    • maxerickson 4y ago
      They are both consuming some of the natural growth/agricultural capacity of the planet.
      • eru 4y ago
        But that capacity is localised. Me preserving water here in rainy Singapore doesn't help anyone in Spain, nor vice versa.
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Where I grew up in NW Ohio, there is practically no irrigation. It rains enough there’s no need. Freshwater use is passive, in other words. Out west, farms have to actively pump water to irrigate since there’s not enough rain. Interestingly, the natural state of much of California was a swamp. We put in a lot of effort converting the swamp to desert. If we reestablished the swamps, California would be a much less pleasant place to live, but it might be a better place to grow stuff like rice.
• sacrosancty 4y ago
  Water shortage isn't a real environmental issue. It's a result of people building enough water production capacity for most of their needs but not too much excess for peaks. We can simply buy more fresh water if we want more. And of course it's renewable so there's no long term value in trying to reduce usage.
  • milesvp 4y ago
    Huh? water usage is a huge environmental issue. Only people far upstream really can say it’s not. We are amazing at not only diverting freshwater from streams and rivers, we’re also really good at pumping it out of the ground and diverting aquifer water from reaching downstream as well. While fresh water is largely renewable, it’s not like it’s an infinite resource and it’s very hard to see the long term effects of changes we’re making to our water shed. To say there’s no long term value in trying to reduce water usage is just wrong in much of the world. Worse, is drying up rivers and swamps can have an exascerbating effect. Dry soil doesn’t hold water nearly as well as wet soil, and results in greater risks of flooding from what would otherwise be typical rain patterns in an area.
    • Gordonjcp 4y ago
      Water usage isn't an environmental issue. There's as much water now as there ever was, barring a few hundred litres aboard the ISS. The issue is that you want to live in a desert but with a lifestyle like you're not in a desert. The hard conversation you need to have is that California is not habitable. There's no water and there's nowhere to grow food. If you want to make it habitable you'll need to turn all those golf courses into farms, raise cows on them, plant more trees, and try to expand those green areas as much as you can. If you want to live in a green city, move to Glasgow, where there's loads of water and because it never gets above about 25°C or below about 5°C it's t-shirt weather all year round and you don't need to refrigerate your house.
      • throwaway894345 4y ago
        California is habitable, but they need to import food from the midwest and elsewhere rather than insisting on growing it in the desert with borrowed water.
• psi75 4y ago
  The corporates bank on the idea that if they tell you that you're an oppressor too for using drinking straws, you'll see them as the good guys who can be trusted to keep the world safe (from you, and from the 8 billion poors just like you) and therefore not, say, overthrow them using force. You bought a latte last February? Well, then, you're also a buyer of human labor. You're a capitalist, too. The only difference between you and Elon Musk is that he's smarter. If capitalism is a problem, then you're part of the problem, because you do after all buy things. If you really believed in your anti-capitalist rhetoric, you'd grow the beans hydroponically in your basement (capabilities that, if you were serious, you would surely possess even if you weren't born into the tiny minority who actually benefit from the widespread and rigid enforcement of asymmetric state services called "property rights"). Meanwhile, the world is on track to be J. G. Ballard's Drowned World by the end of the century due to the persistence of a moribund socioeconomic system with no exit strategy or real means of improvement.
• epolanski 4y ago
  Well, the freshwater argument could be extended to individual behavior simply by saying: eat less meat. We produce most of our food for cattle, and cattle needs tons of freshwater (both consumed directly and indirectly).
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    In many places freshwater isn’t a bottleneck. I live in the midwest—the cattle here drink rainwater and they eat food grown with rainwater. It’s not like foregoing meat here is going to leave more freshwater for people in Africa (we can’t feasibly transport this freshwater across the Atlantic).
• mschuster91 4y ago
  > The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry and commerce That is the result of a decades old campaign strategy by BP and others [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
• throwaway894345 4y ago
  It’s a convenient distraction for people in industries that depend on externalized costs, and it indulges those prone to self-righteousness and judgment (e.g., people who moralize their transportation and diet). Heavy industry and pseudo-environmentalists are unusual bedfellows. I distinctly remember when Teslas became popular, the reaction from environmental types was often frustration because apparently environmentalism is supposed to be about sacrifice and yet Tesla is allowing the unwashed masses to help save the planet. Similarly, when debating climate policy, some of the strongest opposition to carbon pricing would come from self-professed environmentalists who were repulsed by the idea of aligned incentives—environmentalism is a bout rejecting one’s own interests; if the cheap thing and the environmental thing are the same, how will the True Believer distinguish himself from the unwashed masses? There is a deep attachment to pennywise and pound foolish “personal responsibility” solutions.
  • bbzealot 4y ago
    > I distinctly remember when Teslas became popular, the reaction from environmental types was often frustration because apparently environmentalism is supposed to be about sacrifice and yet Tesla is allowing the unwashed masses to help save the planet. Honesty this is hard to believe, do you have any source/example to back it up?
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm thinking that such people, if they exist at all, are heavily outnumbered by the people saying * Not actually physically possible * Its just coal powered * It's worse for the environment because batteries die after 3 years * Rare earths!! * Subsidized foolishness * Toys for rich people * Communism And weirdly those people all get paid to write op-eds in right wing tabloids.
      • tekknik 4y ago
        What are you even saying here? > And weirdly those people all get paid to write op-eds in right wing tabloids. Oh, spreading hate. Got it.
• paul_f 4y ago
  As an example of this, most trash on the side of roads comes from stuff falling off commercial trucks, sanitation trucks, work trucks. Not from people chunking junk out the window of their car. Yet all the guilt is placed on individuals.
  • tekknik 4y ago
    I once got community service for reasons, and will have to disagree with this. Sanitation trucks are usually covered, commercial trucks are sealed and work trucks tend to not want their tools to fall off. Most of the trash we picked up were soda cups, cans, cigarette butts and empty cigarette packs (and in one case weed stashed in an empty cigarette pack). What gives you the idea that most of the trash is not from people throwing crap out of their cars?