Examples:
-using glass and aluminum drinks
-opt out of wasteful plastic packaging
-fight for right to repair
- take the bus, train, or bike
etc
Basically in daily life do things that you ask the world to do to reduce climate change and give up some convineance of daily life
1,000
3.00@MatthewWatsonRoughlyHewn I also
dont drive
dont have a car
dont have children
moved money to a bank that doesnt invest in fossil fuels
dont eat meat
But interestingly, climate change was not a factor in making any of these decisions!
In fact, I wonder if there's any change I can make to my daily life without terrible inconvenience to me that'll help mitigate or delay climate change.
As I understand it, personal level changes are going to be negligible compared to wide-scaled policies and in that sense, what I do won't matter really (at a low-ish level of time/energy investment). I just do what I can to not overly do things that contribute to climate change .
Please feel free to try and change my mind.
@firstuserhere I don’t really understand the comparison between “personal level changes” and “wide-scaled policies” (not on you specifically, just as made in general).
Like obviously policy changes will vastly outstrip a single individual’s lifestyle changes, but that could be said of any individual impact on the world, from “not littering” to “donating to charity” to whatever else. If you were president and choosing between putting solar panels on your house and passing a carbon tax, then that’s great, but for individuals you have to weigh your individual contribution to climate change against what your hypothetical contribution to the likelihood of policy would be.
If there’s a fixed amount of effort/resources you’re willing to put in, and the RoI is highest on policy advocacy, then I guess the tradeoff makes sense. But I think things are more complicated than that. An individuals marginal push on the likelihood of policy is likely to be “negligible” as well. A lot of that policy is essentially going to be using markets to influence individual choice anyway - you can have a person-weighted equivalent impacting by just buying the induction stove to begin with or whatever.
I think, on the margin/within what makes sense for your life, putting some priority on climate-friendly life choices is likely going to be higher RoI than (or at least not mutually exclusive with) policy pushes. Buy a heat pump heater, choose public transit, fly less, eat less meat, whatever makes the most sense. Sounds like you’re doing a lot of this already, so this is more of a general point about how it should be a factor in decisions, not a condemnation of your life.
And I think most people who say policy is greater than individual lifestyle changes aren’t doing much to push policy (not saying you, just a personal gripe).
@firstuserhere Maybe for you personally, since you're already doing many fairly high impact things (not eating meat, not owning a car, etc.) there aren't any further high-impact changes you can make without great inconvenience. But the choices you've already made are going to mean you have a lower carbon footprint than many people. Their individual choices can make a large difference to their impact, we can't generalize from "firstuserhere's personal choices, beyond the ones he's already made/considering only the choices he may make in future, are unlikely to have a big impact without great inconvenience to him" to "people's personal choices don't make much difference, what matters is policy".
I think policy makes a big difference through two routes:
1. Affecting people's choices (making it easier to go car-free by having good public transit and active transportation infrastructure and doing things like congestion pricing, for example)
Affecting large emitters and large producers of the things we'll need for an energy transition (mandates for non-emitting electricity, streamlining permitting processes for renewable energy infrastructure and battery manufacturing, for example).
I think that people's personal choices can also have a greater impact than just their personal carbon footprint - for many people, whether the people around them are doing a thing will influence how likely they are to do the thing, independent of other factors like whether the thing makes sense logically. So by doing a thing which other people can see you do, you make the people around you more likely to also do the thing, unless the thing has externally-obvious bad consequences for you. I believe it was Cass Sunstein's book How Change Happens that goes into this in greater detail, looking at the percentage of the population who will go first without anyone else doing a new thing, vs. the people who need at least one person in their social graph to be doing a thing before they will copy, vs. people who need X people in their social graph to be doing a thing before they decide it's socially acceptable/not weird, vs. people who will only do the thing once most other people are doing it and they feel some social pressure to conform, etc.
Changes in policy aren't the only way broad-scale social change happens, is my point. Sometimes how those broad scale changes happen are a few people make a change, and that change spreads. And polls that ask "are you behaving in this way?" and get a large majority to say yes, are both a result and a cause of social change.
Part of the reason I'm going to get solar panels on my roof soon is because it's now pretty low cost when considering the present value of the stream of future savings and I want there to be more renewable energy. It might even turn out to be a good investment in purely financial terms, if power rates spike like they might, over the next 10-20 years. Another part is it's a big flashy social signal that this is a thing you too can do, which everyone who drives by my house will see.
An individuals marginal push on the likelihood of policy is likely to be “negligible” as well.
I agree!
A lot of that policy is essentially going to be using markets to influence individual choice anyway
I want to see some stats on what causes the most pollution and what contributes the most to climate change. Your statement that a lot of policy going to be eventually influence individual choices surprised me somewhat. I realize I don't really know what contributes to climate change heavily. How correlated is it with contributions to pollution and release of pollutants? Are industries responsible for a significant chunk of it, or do individual choices add up to a large fraction?
And I think most people who say policy is greater than individual lifestyle changes aren’t doing much to push policy (not saying you, just a personal gripe).
Yep! Seems correct. It's used more as an excuse than as a reasoning tool.
@equinoxhq I wonder if we take an entire city and measure the carbon footprint and then simulate "firstuserhere's lifestyle" in these above categories to see what stuff has the most ROI. How much better things would be if an entire <insert city here of your choice> did things in a certain way that's good for the environment without considering other ripple effects like signalling or the cost of getting there. Things like a better public transport are obviously very useful and will be better but they're most feasible in areas with high population density - go lower and the cost per capita goes up, making it infeasible in most places.
@robm I was researching online banks because I was discontent with Wells Fargo's terrible savings interest and overall shady dealings. I found Aspiration bank, which also gives me a 10% discount on some environmentally-friendly services like grocery delivery from Imperfect Foods, which I was already using.
Here is an article about some other options: https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/best-environmentally-friendly-banks
You can also check policies for local credit unions, as in populated areas there may be enough of a market for "environmentally conscious bank" to be a selling point for young people.
Currently, I bank with Sofi as well since its savings account is extremely good.
@firstuserhere You could figure that out by:
Finding a decent carbon footprint calculator that has figures for the different things you do.
Playing around with it to see what difference it says those things make.
Finding population totals for a city
Multiplying your individual impact by that number (gives you an upper bound on how much the impact can be, assuming 0 of the people in the city were like you initially, and all of them magically switched)
Subtracting some estimate of the number of people in the city who do the thing in question * the impact of doing the thing in question, from this total, with error bars based on how good your estimate is.
For example, if let's say cutting out meat saves you 1 ton CO2 in carbon impact/year, and the population of a city is 10 million people, then you save at most 10 mt per year of CO2. A quick Wikipedia check (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country) says vegetarians are around 5-10% of the population depending on your country, so let's say 9 mt.
For comparison, the total amount of CO2 emitted per year is a little over 35 gigatons, and the CO2 equivalent of all greenhouse gases is a little over 50 gigatons. Not shocking that modifying 10 million people's behaviour in a world of over 8 billion wouldn't have gigaton-scale impacts. For another comparison, from memory I think Canadians have an average carbon footprint of around 14 tons/year, so 1 ton would be about 7%. The US is about that from memory, Europe is 7.2 according to a quick Google. So we're talking about a 6-13% reduction, ish.
I'm not going to do all the calculations for all the things, but if I were going to, I'd do it in a spreadsheet and "carbon impact per capita for changing this behaviour", "number of people in city" and "number of people who are already doing this thing" would be the variables that went into my spreadsheet, then I'd play around with it to get a sense of the impact under different guesses at what those variables could realistically be.
My quick guess at the easiest thing that would have a high impact-to-effort ratio for most people would be "save beef and lamb for special occasions". They really are lots more impactful than other meats, and it's less of a lift for people to go non-beefan than to go vegetarian (not that I think it's that big a lift to go vegetarian). I'm really looking forward to the day when various meats and cheeses (cheese also being quite high impact. sad-face.) are lab grown and don't require growing feed at a 10:1 ratio to the meat you get out at the end.