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The personal carbon footprint was also a public relations invention of fossil companies. The whole point is to blame individuals for the systems they were depen

by plorg 4y ago

The personal carbon footprint was also a public relations invention of fossil companies. The whole point is to blame individuals for the systems they were dependent on that created by extractive industry in order to make some people fabulously rich, and to forestall changes in law and culture that would upend those business models.

myrmidon 4y ago
I strongly disagree here. How are individuals not to blame if they refuse to bear the costs for all the negative externalities they cause? We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions. Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.
- plorg 4y ago
  The point of the personal carbon footprint was to convince people that they could individually make the world less bad by making choices within the existing system and didn't need to change anything (hence that paying for it was unnecessary). It's an influence tactic. I do not think it's hypocrisy to say this. My goal in bringing it up is to note to whoever is reading it that you have better options than just eating Impossible burgers or paying some huckster for a paper that says someone in the Amazon didn't cut down a tree every time you fly on a plane. You can demand that the system change, that you have better options. That probably means that Exxon should stop existing. If you're worried about it costing you more now, it might, but it probably won't in the long run.
makomk 4y ago
Talking about personal carbon footprints gets in the way of the narrative that fossil fuel companies were the main beneficaries of the fossil fuel era and they were the ones who'd lose out if fossil fuels weren't available, that much is true. The trouble is, the "personal carbon footprint" narrative is much closer to the truth than the "fossil fuel companies benefit" narrative. I actually had a look at some of the leaked internal documents and even internally they couldn't figure out a way to meet consumer energy demand without fossil fuels on the timescales needed if global warming was as bad as forecast - renewables would take about as long to be in widespread use as they ended up taking in the real world, and the only feasible alternative was nuclear which ran headlong into a bunch of difficulties in reality. (I also read the press release by the showboating US prosecutor characterising this as proof they secretly knew the world needed to switch to renewables much sooner in order to prevent global warming.)

by plorg 4y ago

myrmidon 4y ago

I strongly disagree here. How are individuals not to blame if they refuse to bear the costs for all the negative externalities they cause? We still live in a democracy, and have known about climate change for over 40 years- the central problem is just that people are (still) NOT willing to pay the price to avoid/mitigate emissions. Because the options are plentiful, like just taxing CO2 emissions and imports, throwing massive funds at low-CO2 energy sources + storage, but taxpayers are simply unwilling- blaming corporations and politicians NOW is the absolute height of hypocrisy.

plorg 4y ago
The point of the personal carbon footprint was to convince people that they could individually make the world less bad by making choices within the existing system and didn't need to change anything (hence that paying for it was unnecessary). It's an influence tactic. I do not think it's hypocrisy to say this. My goal in bringing it up is to note to whoever is reading it that you have better options than just eating Impossible burgers or paying some huckster for a paper that says someone in the Amazon didn't cut down a tree every time you fly on a plane. You can demand that the system change, that you have better options. That probably means that Exxon should stop existing. If you're worried about it costing you more now, it might, but it probably won't in the long run.

makomk 4y ago

Talking about personal carbon footprints gets in the way of the narrative that fossil fuel companies were the main beneficaries of the fossil fuel era and they were the ones who'd lose out if fossil fuels weren't available, that much is true. The trouble is, the "personal carbon footprint" narrative is much closer to the truth than the "fossil fuel companies benefit" narrative. I actually had a look at some of the leaked internal documents and even internally they couldn't figure out a way to meet consumer energy demand without fossil fuels on the timescales needed if global warming was as bad as forecast - renewables would take about as long to be in widespread use as they ended up taking in the real world, and the only feasible alternative was nuclear which ran headlong into a bunch of difficulties in reality. (I also read the press release by the showboating US prosecutor characterising this as proof they secretly knew the world needed to switch to renewables much sooner in order to prevent global warming.)