Edit: I wanted to apologize after reading some of the comments. You raise some legitimate points, I realize that there is a subtle malthusian element to this chart and some of you feel like a burden already. Furthermore, you raise a good point about corporate pollution, oil companies, and how their footprint is much greater than average plebs like us.
That’s 100% valid and I don’t disagree with you at all. My “compromise” I guess would be that continue to apply pressure and protest against large corporations, but in terms of ourselves, just pick a few things you can cut down on yourself, it does not have to be everything on this list.
For example, I really prefer having animal products in my diet, but I am willing to live in a small apartment , car-free, and not go on vacation much in my adulthood. In the same way, you guys can pick what you are comfortable with in reducing and what you do not want to compromise on.
All of us have different standards of living and we are flexible on some things, and some things we are not flexible. That is alright, just consider changing what you are comfortable with, but please do not think you are a burden. Your presence and your life is valuable to me. I don’t like to demoralize people.
Before you read what I’m about to say. Understand that I have an electric bicycle, car and I recycle almost everything. I throw out one one bag of trash per week.
This chart is good but let’s not kid ourselves for even a second. Everyone in the world could take up these practices but that change would pale in comparison to the major issue at hand. Major corporate pollution.
We need to address that first before anything else. It will have the biggest and most dramatic change. Getting everyone caught up on better habits is something that can be taught over time. Considering the situation, I think getting the most bang for our buck by regulating large companies is the best way to go.
Agreed, chart needs “Don’t be Amazon” added for scale.
Thank you. This is the point I’m trying to make. We need to address both but one is far more urgent than the other.
I mean… I look at this chart, and I see that a single transatlantic flight has more impact than completely eliminating the use of your car?
I’m with you, but not for any semblance of the same reason :) I’m with you because im a hostler, a commercial driver that just moves cargo around a local yard. We send roughly 400 tons of bulk paper down the road and rails every 12 hour shift. Most of that is used to manufacture goods like cups, straws, and takeout boxes, within roughly 800 miles of here, but the majority of what goes on railcars is bound for Japan… it’s literally going to be transported to the other side of the globe. Japan wants incredibly specific quality paper, and they get it from here. That’s a huge amount of tonnage going across the Pacific, and going by this chart might be roughly equivalent to every single car driven in an entire less populous state. Just the shit I move around the yard here… And then basically everything bought in the US is made in China… all that stuff goes across the Pacific.
A long haul truck gets 6mpg, and runs 100k miles a year… every truck, every year… A whole ass lifetime worth of fuel for an average commuter in a “gas guzzling” SUV, in a year. One single truck. Every few days one of these trucks comes to your Walmart, your Home Depot, your Costco.
This chart is peanuts compared to JUST “economy of scale”… Not corporations or manufacturing, just the simple economics of shipping the spork you got at Taco Bell across the Pacific and driving it from the spork warehouse to 2,000 different taco bell joints…
Your personal carbon footprint is a fucking joke. Not in the sense that you shouldn’t care, but in the sense that what we do individually, despite being incredibly laudable at its own scale, is such a tiny tiny impact at the scale of economy…
I feel you. Not the way you mean it, but I really do feel you :)
While this is true, also consider the reason those trucks are necessary. If no one took a spork from taco bell, and used dishes at home instead, that truck would never need to come. Do this with many other non-essential items, and the impact starts becoming measurable. Using electric trucks for the essentials could eliminate that pollution entirely, though that last step is policy, not individual.
Making a policy out of this introduces a choice in enforcement tho:
is it more feasible to make sure every individual brings their own flatware, or is it more feasible to make sure taco bell doesn’t stock flatware?
A lot of the time, these things boil down to supply side vs demand side, and regulating the supply side ends up being the better choice.
I wonder how many of the large meat and dairy companies will still be such huge polluters if everyone ate a vegetarian or even vegan diet? I wonder how much less pollution fast fashion producers create if everyone prioritised high quality clothing that lasts a long time over cheap clothing that doesn’t even last a year? I wonder how much pollution oil and gas producers would make if everyone decided to stop using gas boilers and petrol cars and taking long polluting flights?
To argue that we can’t affect the amount of pollution going in to the world makes someone else less likely to try. If we all do our part the companies are forced to change, not via laws and regulations, but by the fact that they will lose money if they don’t. The fact of the matter is, most people say they care about climate change and the environment, but when you ask them to give up their highly polluting luxuries, they suddenly don’t care as much. And obviously there are exceptions to this, you and I for example probably care about the environment and actually act in a way as to reduce our own footprints. But the average person does not care enough.
Average people are sometimes not going to care. Changing laws to force businesses not to pollute is something that can have a major impact.
We can teach people better habits over decades and generations but if we don’t stop dumping tons of oil into the oceans or CO2 in the air we are not going to be around to teach anyone anything.
This is true, in reality it’s what has to be done, and it will be against the will of the people, it would be undemocratic and would require agreement on both sides of the political spectrum. When one side makes unpopular but necessary change to regulation to reduce our environmental impact, you have to pray that come next election, your hard work isn’t immediately undone after almost certainly being voted out.
People generally aren’t unreasonable, adding additional regulation on say oil producers is fine for people in rich nations, people who can afford (begrudgingly) to pay more money for their petrol. But the only way to make such a change fair is to increase the amount of aid sent to lower income countries. When the price per litre of petrol in Kenya is about €1.2 and the average income is €2000 it becomes unfair to give them higher prices for necessities without also loading these developing nations with significant amounts of financial aid. Oil and gas is the ladder which developed nations climbed to become who they are to day, and it is the same ladder which we need to kick down behind us to prevent or limit climate change. We can not leave those behind us ladderless however. We must use money to help them reach our levels.
And money comes from taxes, and taxes come from people, and when people in these developed nations look at the state of their country, large expenses, large mortgage payments or rent, increased price of fuel increased price of meat and dairy. Most will not understand why it is necessary to also start sending hundreds of billions of dollars to poorer countries. You either need to educate the general population to a level where they can understand what must be done to save ourselves. Or you must do it against the will of the people, undemocratically.
I understand that this comment may be slightly irrelevant but it came to my mind and I thought it had to be voiced. If you can see any way in which the logic is not sound in my comment here please let me know and correct me. Thank you in advance.
Can you point to examples where this has worked to change mass social behaviour where it hasn’t been underpinned by laws or regulation or taken multiple generations to achieve?
We need change now. Targeting companies is the only way to change things now - not some years down the line when eventually we get every common person to understand that taking on hardship voluntarily is prevents collective hardship even more years down the line.
All I can buy here where I live is disposable fast fashion. Quality clothing is not readily available.
Also, quality stuff I could buy from the internet (and gamble wether it would fit me or not) is way, way too expensive for someone living in a lower income country. I just can’t afford 500+€ boots or 200€ shirt that may or may not last for 5+ years.
Which brings another point—you can never know if the products a company makes today are the same they made a few years ago that got praised for their quality. Enshittification is everywhere.
You can get high quality clothing for much much less than these prices you have said. Solovair boots are about €200, and they’re still pretty expensive for high quality stuff. €80 for a high quality charles tyrwhitt shirt. It doesn’t even need to be specifically branded as high quality, but when you are browsing in whatever store, check the thickness of the teeshirt or shirt, check the strength of the trousers, think about how easy it would be to repair if it broke. Last year I bought a thick plain teeshirt from H&M for €8, I have worn it a lot and it shows no signs of wear. You just have to be conscious about what it is you are buying.
If fast fashion wasn’t an option would you be naked? No, your country would have it’s own cottage industry of clothing much like used to exist before fast fashion flooded your markets. You get rid of fast fashion and now you have local quality back.
Lets assume one dairy farm serves 2000 people. In order to limit the emissions from the farm, you must either regulate the farm, or convince 2000 people to give up dairy.
In your time as an advocate, how many people have you convinced to give up dairy? How long would it take to convice all dairy consumers?
This is true, but when 2000 people find out that the price of milk and cheese they love so dearly is going to have to go up, a perhaps decently sized portion of those 2000 would protest and fight to stop the regulation that causes them to have to change their diet. It’s incredibly difficult to change the way people think in a democracy. The only democratic way to make the change we need is to already have more than 50% of the people on board with the proposed regulation.
No, we can simply address it at the same time, especially since we are the consumers of the products those awful companies produce.
Eh, I’m not sure addressing it at the same time is as helpful as it seems.
People have limited bandwidth and energy. Better to rally them to supporting climate action targeting companies, which has the knock on effect of influencing people’s personal climate responsibility. (e.g. if you put a carbon/GHG tax and include the meat industry, then all of a sudden veggie/vegan alternatives are a lot cheaper and people end up buying them without having to personally and collectively motivate themselves.)
Edit: at this point I’m beginning to think that people arguing for consumer responsibility as equally or even more important than legal regulation on emitters are at best useful idiots propping up polluting industries or at worse bad faith actors.
Those people are the target and purpose of this type of industry propaganda.
So what I said? What part of “teaching people over time” meant stop teaching?
Ah yes, so when you said “Let’s do this, before we do anything else”, you meant “Let’s do these things at the same time”. Makes sense.
I was implying that we should lead with that first. Sounds like you’re looking for any reason to pick a fight with someone who is advocating for major changes over minor ones.
Who’s side are you on anyways?
Yes and I said that there is no reason for that and that we can address both at the same time, to which you replied that this is what you are saying, yet now it appears again to not be what you are saying. Are you confused?
I will ignore the rest of your comment as the weak attempt to derail the conversation, that it is.
You know what. I’m going to extend an olive branch here. I think we got off on the wrong foot and we both want the same thing overall. I think we are both nitpicking the minor details looking for a reason to be outraged.
So what do you say, friends?
Being friends is not neccessary for staying on topic and I am not outraged.
Each individual needs to act in a climate conscious way NOW and every corp needs to be heavily regulated to be climate conscious NOW.
Okay cool. So you’re a dickhead. Got it.
Make it illegal for corps. to use anything other than biodegradable plastics (starch-based, etc), for single-use products, unless there is a very good and specific case to be made (eg long-term storage, or storage at extreme temperature needs). Outlaw unsolicited snail mail (leafleting, etc). With reasonable exceptions for municipal stuff.
Why not both? Doing these other things does not prevent you from fighting for regulations etc. However, arguing they aren’t regulated yet so you don’t give a shit about what you do is absolutely worse.
The most bang for our buck? We’ve been arguing that companies should be regulated for decades. These other habits have been known to be an improvement for years already.
Don’t push off what you can already do today simply because companies still polute. That’s pointless and counter productive.
That’s not at all what I’m implying. I never said wait. I said we can teach it over time. You’re mincing my words to be divisive.
Yes it’s been talked about for decades and it still needs to be the first part of any climate change conversation.
I literally quoted you. You said it needs to be first. Do you know what that phrase means?
And this information is literally 6 years old even and the information itself is older than that. What gradual time to teach this do you want?
You sound like a company saying you can’t regulate now, give us time first.
I mean, stopping commercial passenger flights is on regular people, so is not buying food produced 10 000km away (no, it’s not normal that we can eat oranges or bananas in Canada, we would be supposed to eat a whole lot more squash instead of letting them rot in the fields though) or buying Chinese made crap…
This argument always comes up. But corporations are no independent evil agents trying to destroy the world for the sake of it. They facilitate and produce what people want. So it does have to start with regular people because even though the onus should be on politics, history has shown that this is not working in a democracy.
The decisions politicians would have to make are hugely unpopular and would result in their opposition being voted in to undo those changes.
Not to mention the corruption that’s also a pretty big factor in all of this.
That’s a dumb take. “The corporations are only doing what we’re asking them to do so it’s all our fault”
No one wants modern packaging on kids toys, it’s annoying to deal with, makes tons of trash, and it’s designed to make kids want more junk toys at home. The only reason corporations do this is that they know colorful packaging and uselessly large boxes draw kids in more than a brown paper box with the name of the toy on it. It’s pure emotional manipulation of children, which already has (ineffective) laws to prevent it. The reason these laws are ineffective is corporate pressure in politics undermining the democratic desires of the population, because manipulating kids is profitable.
Nearly every product can be made in a manner that is more earth friendly and supports good labor practices. Corporations choose NOT to do these things because of profits not because it’s what we want to buy.
Even “what we want to buy” as a concept itself has been under assault by targeted ad campaigns for decades now such that it’s hard to separate consumer desires from corporate profit motives. Apple is a great example of this type of “lifestyle” brand.
I can’t believe ANYONE believes that “corporations are just a reflection of the material desires of society, so changing them won’t fix the real problem” what boot licking brown nosed bullshit.
Don’t simp for corporations.