8 ms·

Forget Shorter Showers (2009)

79 points by raldi 12y ago

vacri 12y ago
Why does something have to be at the magnitude of 'defeat Hitler' to be worth doing? Edit: to add a little content, personal sacrifices also make you aware of others' use. If you're limiting water and everyone in your neighbourhood has brown grass, then there's going to be pressure on the local golf course to follow suit. And plenty of business chiefs, especially in small-to-medium businesses, start applying the lessons they learn at home to their workplace as well. To characterise the equation as merely "the effort stops at your front door" is pretty misleading. If the author wants to effect political change, there's got to be a better way to convince people than 'your individual efforts are worthless', methinks.
- zdean 12y ago
  I don't think the article is suggesting that. What I read was that the "misdirection" about individual impact on these environmental issues is taking focus away from much larger scale issues that are not being addressed (as a result of the misdirection). The author I think implies that environmental challenges seem to be of a "defeat Hitler" magnitude...and that to face the challenge we need to make sure we're fighting on the right front.
  - vacri 12y ago
    I think the article would be better off phrased as "don't just stop here, continue the fight", though.
- derefr 12y ago
  I would put it in the context of effective altruism: take the time you spend each week neatly sorting your cardboard and bottles instead of throwing them in the trash, and instead spend that time participating in a PAC to lobby your local shipping company to use reclaimed materials in their boxes.
brandonmenc 12y ago
The author presents the following options: 1. participate in the industrial economy = lose 2. living more simply = lose 3. stop the industrial economy = win How about a fourth option, which includes: massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue. My understanding is that the damage we've done will take thousands of years to reverse if done naturally. If that's true, the only viable solution, and one that may even let us maintain our standard of living, is the massive all-in application of science and engineering we used to decades ago dream about and assume would naturally come. Are we that spooked as a species that we forgot to think big, or is it simply delusional to think we can engineer the planet?
- kijin 12y ago
  The article exemplifies a pretty common attitude among certain types of environmentalists, which is that there's something intrinsically and irredeemably evil about the modern industrial society as a whole. Not surprisingly, it does not occur to them that we might be able to harness and redirect the formidable forces of the industrial economy to do good instead of evil under certain circumstances. Even though this would be easier and more effective than getting rid of it altogether. This is not a failure to think big. It's just what happens when you think big and only big. Nothing less than the entirety of the industrial economy can be the subject of their moral judgments, because they don't want to spend any time trying to find out which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil.
  - schiffern 12y ago
    >which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil I don't know if I agree with your premise here. Why do destructive (or even self-destructive) systems have to have "evil parts"? These are systems problems, not the type of problem you can solve by taking out one kind of people and putting in another (or technology, or political party, or company, or…).
    - kijin 12y ago
xupybd 12y ago
After reading that, the only conclusion I can draw is it's all too hard.
hackuser 12y ago
I love this essay because it challenges us[1] about things most are too polite to mention. If you feel outrage at the following, then try recognizing that as a challenge to your beliefs.[2] 1) The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting ... Two things we[1] generally promote contribute to this: * 'Free market' economic policy: By reducing citizens' control over the economy and businesses, and by reducing their bargaining power (i.e., via the dominance of money in elections, reduced organized labor, click-wrap agreements, etc.), we reduce people's roles to that of consumers: If you like or dislike something, all you can do is consume or not consume. * Reduction of end-user control in technology: From hosted applications to automatic updates to eliminating confidentiality to mobile devices built for consumption and not content creation to closed systems and data, we train users to passively consume rather than to control and create. Information technology, to some significant degree, establishes the Zeitgeist of our time. 2) So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? Climate change is putting the world at stake. How can you accept your utterly insufficient response? Whatever you are doing, it's probably utterly insufficient.[3] It's nothing new to humanity to walk open-eyed into catastrophe. To borrow the author's analogy, now you know how people in Germany could watch Hitler rise to power and people in the West could watch him start marching across Europe, all knowing the very likely result, and do nothing about it. [1] By "us" and "we", I mean what I imagine to be most HN readers. [2] For the record, I like the author's questions but don't at all agree with his solution of ending modern 'industrial' society; things weren't so great before it [3] Me too
- pdonis 12y ago
  > By reducing citizens' control over the economy and businesses, and by reducing their bargaining power I agree these are bad things, but they are not the outcome of a free market. The so-called "free market" coerces people into engaging in transactions they would not choose to engage in voluntarily; that is the opposite of a free market. (Perhaps you recognize this and that's why you put "free market" in quotes.) > Climate change is putting the world at stake. This statement illustrates part of the problem: we don't all agree on which problems are "putting the world at stake". I don't think climate change is one of them; you do. We can't agree on what actions to take if we can't agree on what we're trying to accomplish. One possible way out is to redefine the goal: instead of "stop climate change", for example, make the goal "stop burning oil and coal". That goal I can agree with, because I have other reasons to support it that don't involve climate change. Of course, then we get to argue (maybe) about whether nuclear reactors are part of how we reach the goal. > I like the author's questions but don't at all agree with his solution of ending modern 'industrial' society; things weren't so great before it I completely agree.
arjie 12y ago
This is very true, but the fact is that I'm not interested in solving the problem. I'm satisfied with contributing less to it. The sacrifice asked of me is too much, and it seems most people think so. Would we rather have catastrophic climate change in the future if it permits our current standards of living? I think I speak for almost everyone when I answer in the affirmative. Sure, I bike, I recycle, and I take public transit instead of driving. But I know that this doesn't change the world. It just reduces my contribution to the problem, and that is sufficient for me.
- fulafel 12y ago
  It seems to me this is the de facto situation of most environmentally conscious people. A good first step is to acknowledge that baby steps are OK as long as they are on a good trajectory, and you show people around you that you can admit the facts to yourself without immediately falling into a funk of bad conscience and apathy.
PhantomGremlin 12y ago
When an article says, in a casual matter of fact way: we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed then it has lost 99% of its potential audience. Without electricity we couldn't be much more than stone age hunter gatherers. To which my response is: NO FUCKING WAY!!!
- joeyo 12y ago
  While I certainly would not cheer on a return to a pre-electric era, electricity has only been available for 125 years or so. We have done and could do very much better than hunting and gathering in the complete absence of electricity.
zaroth 12y ago
The first part of this essay is actually really interesting. Consumers are being asked to cut back, even though the things they are cutting back are not actually the problem? Municipalities are paying $3+/sq ft to dig up lawn, if that's a pointless endeavor, then it should stop. The second part I think is completely BS. The three options are all ridiculous. I think technology is moving very fast right now. We need tight regulation of obviously bad behavior, we need appropriate investment in infrastructure. But to some extent if you want to invest in anything just invest widely in technology.
steven2012 12y ago
The article brings up a good point. It's a good way of making us feel responsible when in fact we make little impact. For example, the 15 largest freighters create more pollution as every single car in the world. If this is the case why aren't we trying to fix pollution on these 15 ships instead of all this nonsense with fixing individual cars? Eliminating the pollution from these industrial ships by 10% is akin to taking millions of cars off the road. Yet all we talk about is car pooling, proudest and Teslas, etc. http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-more-pollution-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/8182 http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo...
- zaroth 12y ago
  "15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars." First step is countries ban the vessels from coming anywhere near land. I guess that keeps pollution out of sight, out of mind. Next step.... I don't know. But I'm hopeful soon enough the powerplant will be significantly greener. In the short term you can get 1 order of magnitude from regulation. In the long term it's new technology.
- qq66 12y ago
  The "15 ships" claim doesn't really pass the sniff test.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  That re-post of a re-post of an Guardian article about a study seems to have mutated to a point of becoming untrue. The study claims, among other things, that the freighters create a lot of sulphur emisions, and that the EU has currently cleaned up car requirements so that they don't emit much sulphur in exhaust - thus, 15 largest freighters emit as much SOx as all the cars. It assumes that world's cars fit EU emission standards, which is false, and posting in this context seems to assume that the sulphur oxides cause global problems, which is also false - the bad effects of SOx pollution are rather localized, and if we can replace 1 unit of SOx in the middle of a city with 2 units of SOx in the middle of an ocean, then I'd treat that as good thing. A more appropriate citation (from the same original article, actually) is the following - it still shows some space for improvement, but is significantly diffferent than the untrue alarmist claim in the parent post. "Shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world's nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution."
yummyfajitas 12y ago
By the accounting of the article, I'm a wonderful person. I've cut back all my consumption to virtually the bare minimum, vastly below the poverty level in the US. For example I recently purchased a flight from NY to Delhi. By the accounting of the article, the only waste I produced was the (now discarded) boarding pass. The only waste and pollution that was produced by the evil Air India corporation. And if I (and sufficiently many other consumers) were to cut back on consumption, it would have virtually no effect - those evil folks at Air India would continue burning jet fuel and polluting. Spot the flaw? I paid Air India to pollute on my behalf. If I (+ 50% of a planeload of people) did not pay them they would not have wasted money polluting. There are many specific cases where this is not true, agricultural water consumption being one of the most egregious. These are (economically, not politically) low hanging fruit and should be fixed. But if the article wants to argue that huge fractions of pollution fall into this category, it needs to do a lot more quantitative work.
- plafl 12y ago
  What you say is interesting, but I don't think the article is flawed. What the article implies is that the correct action is not using, for example, electronic tickets to avoid printing your boarding pass, but instead lobby to ask for legislation taxing jet engines which pollute above a certain threshold. Or maybe, increase the cost of water to truly reflect the environmental cost. Of course, all of these actions will increase the price for you, the final consumer.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    ...all of these actions will increase the price for you, the final consumer. Thereby inducing consumers to pay more and fly less. The effect is the same as if I (and others like me) were to decide never to leave NY. I'm not disputing that fixing the cost of water specifically is a fantastic idea or that externalities should be properly taxed. What I'm disputing is the idea in this essay that the industrial economy is somehow a bunch of evildoers polluting in order to get super rich and then light cigars with 1000 bills, unrelated to the rest of us. The industrial economy exists for the sole purpose of providing us with goods and services we enjoy and reducing the supply side is basically identical to reducing the demand side.
schalab 12y ago
The problem with a decentralized evolutionary economy is that it is blind to long range problems. The solution is not to abandon the status quo. We are not smart enough to centrally plan even a small portion of it at the moment. But rather educate the populace through solid, irrefutable facts over a period of time, until it becomes common knowledge that a particular action causes a disastrous effect. Analogous to how smoking has receded from popular use.
byEngineer 12y ago
If you can read between the lines then you will know that the author of "inconvenient truth" mr al gore tells you to cut down on co2 emissions when he flies his private jet between McMansions that he owns from your taxes and owns a business trading co2 quotas internationally. But you prone to his propaganda peddle your little funny bike. The Chinese put online 20 new coal burning plants a week while we are shutting down ours. The chinese, ISIs, Russia, etc don't even need to do anything kick our asses. They just need to sit and patiently wait as the cancer of socialism and cultural Marxism do all the hard work for them. At the end they will just need to knock on the door of our country and the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

79 points by raldi 12y ago

vacri 12y ago

Why does something have to be at the magnitude of 'defeat Hitler' to be worth doing? Edit: to add a little content, personal sacrifices also make you aware of others' use. If you're limiting water and everyone in your neighbourhood has brown grass, then there's going to be pressure on the local golf course to follow suit. And plenty of business chiefs, especially in small-to-medium businesses, start applying the lessons they learn at home to their workplace as well. To characterise the equation as merely "the effort stops at your front door" is pretty misleading. If the author wants to effect political change, there's got to be a better way to convince people than 'your individual efforts are worthless', methinks.

zdean 12y ago
I don't think the article is suggesting that. What I read was that the "misdirection" about individual impact on these environmental issues is taking focus away from much larger scale issues that are not being addressed (as a result of the misdirection). The author I think implies that environmental challenges seem to be of a "defeat Hitler" magnitude...and that to face the challenge we need to make sure we're fighting on the right front.
- vacri 12y ago
  I think the article would be better off phrased as "don't just stop here, continue the fight", though.
derefr 12y ago
I would put it in the context of effective altruism: take the time you spend each week neatly sorting your cardboard and bottles instead of throwing them in the trash, and instead spend that time participating in a PAC to lobby your local shipping company to use reclaimed materials in their boxes.

brandonmenc 12y ago

The author presents the following options: 1. participate in the industrial economy = lose 2. living more simply = lose 3. stop the industrial economy = win How about a fourth option, which includes: massive geo and atmospheric engineering, nuclear/fusion research/dissemination, desalination and water pipelines, and large-scale laboratory meat production from real animal tissue. My understanding is that the damage we've done will take thousands of years to reverse if done naturally. If that's true, the only viable solution, and one that may even let us maintain our standard of living, is the massive all-in application of science and engineering we used to decades ago dream about and assume would naturally come. Are we that spooked as a species that we forgot to think big, or is it simply delusional to think we can engineer the planet?

kijin 12y ago
The article exemplifies a pretty common attitude among certain types of environmentalists, which is that there's something intrinsically and irredeemably evil about the modern industrial society as a whole. Not surprisingly, it does not occur to them that we might be able to harness and redirect the formidable forces of the industrial economy to do good instead of evil under certain circumstances. Even though this would be easier and more effective than getting rid of it altogether. This is not a failure to think big. It's just what happens when you think big and only big. Nothing less than the entirety of the industrial economy can be the subject of their moral judgments, because they don't want to spend any time trying to find out which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil.
- schiffern 12y ago
  >which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil I don't know if I agree with your premise here. Why do destructive (or even self-destructive) systems have to have "evil parts"? These are systems problems, not the type of problem you can solve by taking out one kind of people and putting in another (or technology, or political party, or company, or…).
  - kijin 12y ago

xupybd 12y ago

After reading that, the only conclusion I can draw is it's all too hard.

hackuser 12y ago

I love this essay because it challenges us[1] about things most are too polite to mention. If you feel outrage at the following, then try recognizing that as a challenge to your beliefs.[2] 1) The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting ... Two things we[1] generally promote contribute to this: * 'Free market' economic policy: By reducing citizens' control over the economy and businesses, and by reducing their bargaining power (i.e., via the dominance of money in elections, reduced organized labor, click-wrap agreements, etc.), we reduce people's roles to that of consumers: If you like or dislike something, all you can do is consume or not consume. * Reduction of end-user control in technology: From hosted applications to automatic updates to eliminating confidentiality to mobile devices built for consumption and not content creation to closed systems and data, we train users to passively consume rather than to control and create. Information technology, to some significant degree, establishes the Zeitgeist of our time. 2) So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? Climate change is putting the world at stake. How can you accept your utterly insufficient response? Whatever you are doing, it's probably utterly insufficient.[3] It's nothing new to humanity to walk open-eyed into catastrophe. To borrow the author's analogy, now you know how people in Germany could watch Hitler rise to power and people in the West could watch him start marching across Europe, all knowing the very likely result, and do nothing about it. [1] By "us" and "we", I mean what I imagine to be most HN readers. [2] For the record, I like the author's questions but don't at all agree with his solution of ending modern 'industrial' society; things weren't so great before it [3] Me too

pdonis 12y ago
> By reducing citizens' control over the economy and businesses, and by reducing their bargaining power I agree these are bad things, but they are not the outcome of a free market. The so-called "free market" coerces people into engaging in transactions they would not choose to engage in voluntarily; that is the opposite of a free market. (Perhaps you recognize this and that's why you put "free market" in quotes.) > Climate change is putting the world at stake. This statement illustrates part of the problem: we don't all agree on which problems are "putting the world at stake". I don't think climate change is one of them; you do. We can't agree on what actions to take if we can't agree on what we're trying to accomplish. One possible way out is to redefine the goal: instead of "stop climate change", for example, make the goal "stop burning oil and coal". That goal I can agree with, because I have other reasons to support it that don't involve climate change. Of course, then we get to argue (maybe) about whether nuclear reactors are part of how we reach the goal. > I like the author's questions but don't at all agree with his solution of ending modern 'industrial' society; things weren't so great before it I completely agree.

arjie 12y ago

This is very true, but the fact is that I'm not interested in solving the problem. I'm satisfied with contributing less to it. The sacrifice asked of me is too much, and it seems most people think so. Would we rather have catastrophic climate change in the future if it permits our current standards of living? I think I speak for almost everyone when I answer in the affirmative. Sure, I bike, I recycle, and I take public transit instead of driving. But I know that this doesn't change the world. It just reduces my contribution to the problem, and that is sufficient for me.

fulafel 12y ago
It seems to me this is the de facto situation of most environmentally conscious people. A good first step is to acknowledge that baby steps are OK as long as they are on a good trajectory, and you show people around you that you can admit the facts to yourself without immediately falling into a funk of bad conscience and apathy.

PhantomGremlin 12y ago

When an article says, in a casual matter of fact way: we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed then it has lost 99% of its potential audience. Without electricity we couldn't be much more than stone age hunter gatherers. To which my response is: NO FUCKING WAY!!!

joeyo 12y ago
While I certainly would not cheer on a return to a pre-electric era, electricity has only been available for 125 years or so. We have done and could do very much better than hunting and gathering in the complete absence of electricity.

zaroth 12y ago

The first part of this essay is actually really interesting. Consumers are being asked to cut back, even though the things they are cutting back are not actually the problem? Municipalities are paying $3+/sq ft to dig up lawn, if that's a pointless endeavor, then it should stop. The second part I think is completely BS. The three options are all ridiculous. I think technology is moving very fast right now. We need tight regulation of obviously bad behavior, we need appropriate investment in infrastructure. But to some extent if you want to invest in anything just invest widely in technology.

steven2012 12y ago

The article brings up a good point. It's a good way of making us feel responsible when in fact we make little impact. For example, the 15 largest freighters create more pollution as every single car in the world. If this is the case why aren't we trying to fix pollution on these 15 ships instead of all this nonsense with fixing individual cars? Eliminating the pollution from these industrial ships by 10% is akin to taking millions of cars off the road. Yet all we talk about is car pooling, proudest and Teslas, etc. http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-more-pollution-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/8182 http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo...

zaroth 12y ago
"15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars." First step is countries ban the vessels from coming anywhere near land. I guess that keeps pollution out of sight, out of mind. Next step.... I don't know. But I'm hopeful soon enough the powerplant will be significantly greener. In the short term you can get 1 order of magnitude from regulation. In the long term it's new technology.
qq66 12y ago
The "15 ships" claim doesn't really pass the sniff test.
PeterisP 12y ago
That re-post of a re-post of an Guardian article about a study seems to have mutated to a point of becoming untrue. The study claims, among other things, that the freighters create a lot of sulphur emisions, and that the EU has currently cleaned up car requirements so that they don't emit much sulphur in exhaust - thus, 15 largest freighters emit as much SOx as all the cars. It assumes that world's cars fit EU emission standards, which is false, and posting in this context seems to assume that the sulphur oxides cause global problems, which is also false - the bad effects of SOx pollution are rather localized, and if we can replace 1 unit of SOx in the middle of a city with 2 units of SOx in the middle of an ocean, then I'd treat that as good thing. A more appropriate citation (from the same original article, actually) is the following - it still shows some space for improvement, but is significantly diffferent than the untrue alarmist claim in the parent post. "Shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world's nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution."

yummyfajitas 12y ago

By the accounting of the article, I'm a wonderful person. I've cut back all my consumption to virtually the bare minimum, vastly below the poverty level in the US. For example I recently purchased a flight from NY to Delhi. By the accounting of the article, the only waste I produced was the (now discarded) boarding pass. The only waste and pollution that was produced by the evil Air India corporation. And if I (and sufficiently many other consumers) were to cut back on consumption, it would have virtually no effect - those evil folks at Air India would continue burning jet fuel and polluting. Spot the flaw? I paid Air India to pollute on my behalf. If I (+ 50% of a planeload of people) did not pay them they would not have wasted money polluting. There are many specific cases where this is not true, agricultural water consumption being one of the most egregious. These are (economically, not politically) low hanging fruit and should be fixed. But if the article wants to argue that huge fractions of pollution fall into this category, it needs to do a lot more quantitative work.

plafl 12y ago
What you say is interesting, but I don't think the article is flawed. What the article implies is that the correct action is not using, for example, electronic tickets to avoid printing your boarding pass, but instead lobby to ask for legislation taxing jet engines which pollute above a certain threshold. Or maybe, increase the cost of water to truly reflect the environmental cost. Of course, all of these actions will increase the price for you, the final consumer.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  ...all of these actions will increase the price for you, the final consumer. Thereby inducing consumers to pay more and fly less. The effect is the same as if I (and others like me) were to decide never to leave NY. I'm not disputing that fixing the cost of water specifically is a fantastic idea or that externalities should be properly taxed. What I'm disputing is the idea in this essay that the industrial economy is somehow a bunch of evildoers polluting in order to get super rich and then light cigars with 1000 bills, unrelated to the rest of us. The industrial economy exists for the sole purpose of providing us with goods and services we enjoy and reducing the supply side is basically identical to reducing the demand side.

schalab 12y ago

The problem with a decentralized evolutionary economy is that it is blind to long range problems. The solution is not to abandon the status quo. We are not smart enough to centrally plan even a small portion of it at the moment. But rather educate the populace through solid, irrefutable facts over a period of time, until it becomes common knowledge that a particular action causes a disastrous effect. Analogous to how smoking has receded from popular use.

byEngineer 12y ago

If you can read between the lines then you will know that the author of "inconvenient truth" mr al gore tells you to cut down on co2 emissions when he flies his private jet between McMansions that he owns from your taxes and owns a business trading co2 quotas internationally. But you prone to his propaganda peddle your little funny bike. The Chinese put online 20 new coal burning plants a week while we are shutting down ours. The chinese, ISIs, Russia, etc don't even need to do anything kick our asses. They just need to sit and patiently wait as the cancer of socialism and cultural Marxism do all the hard work for them. At the end they will just need to knock on the door of our country and the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.