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
People talk shutting off the faucet while brushing one's teeth but ~70% of global freshwater usage comes from agriculture and ~20% from industry, with municipalities accounting for only 10%
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
Why is going full Amish not scalable? How come I see many cultures living off of the land yet somehow you can’t? Where I grew up there were no stores or jobs, just a small population of farmers.
All you’ve pointed out here is there’s a limit to what you’re willing to do for your beliefs, and that at some point you’ll accept someone performing slave labor to keep your fancy, but still not required, electronics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I have to disagree. I have lived in Drenthe all my life and what you are saying is just not true where I live. Maybe it's different in the south.
Also hard disagree on WFH, NL has an old and well-established WFH culture and the highest rate of working from home in Europe according to some quick searching. [0]
I agree that public transport is too expensive though - I'm still technically a student so I benefit from freedom public transport, but it would be a serious expense if I had to pay for it.
> and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent.
My country (Poland) has been de-urbanizing since the turn of the century for this exact reason.
People can't afford housing in city centres, so they buy properties in the suburbs and opt to drive everywhere instead.
The first generation that did this is currently nearing retirement and they'll soon have to decide on how to proceed. Fuel is expensive, driving skills wane with age and in an aging society finding a buyer for a house that appreciated in value but has scheduled maintenance of key components is going to be difficult.
Unfortunately, that generation is going out with a bang. Car size and driving are correlated with wealth, which explains the average age of new car buyers, specifically the luxurious ones.
What people fail to realize is just how much alternatives have to win out on cars to make a dent. Being marginally less expensive isn't enough when opportunity costs are far higher.
Those alternatives can be much better. That's the real story hidden within The Netherlands: you can't make a half-hearted attempt and expect it to solve itself after because the world believes Utrecht, an already small city by global standards, is the status quo of the entire country. If it doesn't cut deep into car ownership nationwide, it's not the success people claim it is.
As an American who grew up in the country and gets anxiety in bit cities, this seems insane to me. You’re essentially forcing people to cram together in city centers and think this is a good thing?
Politics is downstream from culture though. Mr Money Mustache and those like him are doing a huge amount for politics as well, just by making nonconsumerism sexy on an individual scale.
There's always this chicken-and-egg problem where legislation is talked about as though it could make us want different things, when in fact, the electorate wanting what it wants now, such legislation would be a losing horse for any politician. Making the moral choice seem attractive to one's neighbours is what I'd call true aikido.
>Making the moral choice seem attractive to one's neighbours is what I'd call true aikido.
I agree especially with this, but with the rest of your comment as well. Culture, politics, economy go hand-in-hand, with no clean initiator among them. I currently think that everyone should try their best, and that those with more influence have more responsibility as well.
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).
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).
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.
> 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.
Is there some reason that would continue to be true if Southern California[1] was replaced with swamps?
[1] You're using "Northern California" and "Southern California" differently from everyone else; in normal use, Northern California is the Bay Area, not the north of the state.
> You're using "Northern California" and "Southern California" differently from everyone else; in normal use, Northern California is the Bay Area, not the north of the state.
No, norcal is north of LA, not just the bay area. I’ve never heard of anybody referring to the bay area as norcal, it’s always “bay area”
I mean, I assume there's a vaguely-defined line between San Francisco and Los Angeles that notionally separates the north from the south. It doesn't make any more sense to say Southern California is nothing but LA than it does to say Northern California is nothing but the Bay Area.
But my point is that the region to the north of, say, Berkeley, is not part of "Northern California". It's too far north for that.
I’m from Sierra County, is that north enough for you?
We consider ourselves part of Northern California and have since at least the 70s. For many up there, the Bay Area is only nominally part of Northern California, in fact as a kid I didn’t think it was. But having gone on to live in San Francisco for a long time, I came to realize that the the Bay Area, for better or for worse, has more in common with Redding then it does with Manhattan Beach.
But I can’t figure out what you think the too-northern Northern Californians should call themselves if they let you lop off the Bay Area (and most would thank you for it).
The Aral Sea was used for irrigation. Huge volumes of water were pumped out over millions of acres to evaporate. The water pumped out of the great lakes is far less and it is largely returned to the lakes (closed loop).
Don't make the mistake and rely on current rain. It's not funny how quickly moist regions can turn arid as a result of climate change.
We have currently seen major droughts in Europe and it severely affects the ongoing energy crisis. A lot of power plants, nuclear and others, are in direct danger of not being able to be cooled anymore because you need RIVERS for that. And they need to be cool.
Germany is currently experiencing issues with low water levels in some of its major waterways, such as the Rhine. When they dry up to low levels periodically, and they evidently do nowadays, then you have to shut down the plants accordingly.
In France, rivers are too warm to cool plants [1]. There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.
>In France, rivers are too warm to cool plants. There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.
Just for clarity for others, the reason the water needs to be cool is so that after being used for cooling it doesn't come out too hot and kill wildlife. French plants have applied to temporarily lift these restrictions[1] (which also is not great).
If this becomes a problem longer-term, it might be possible to build larger cooling reservoirs for the water prior to being released back into the river.
> There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.
The water doesn't really need to be cool, it can also be used in cooling towers, which means you don't have to put it back into the stream, and therefore you don't care about water temperature. The issue with river water is that we currently don't have enough to divert it for all our needs, be it for a nuclear plant, for irrigation or for drinking.
This winter and spring have been exceptionally dry in France, with slightly more than half the rain we usually get.
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.
> 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?
Yes, let's pretend that there wasn't an organised campaign to discredit EVs, even though basic science made it clear they would be superior, even if you ignored climate change.
And why would you ignore climate change? Possibly because of the organised campaign to discredit the idea even though basic science made it clear it was a problem.
But now, they'll deny that crime against humanity even happened. "No one actually denied climate change they were just worried about government overreach" while demial is still being done by the same people.
It was all published in newspapers, we have it on record. We have academic studies of how many times certain newspapers admitted that climate change was caused by humans in their op-eds.
We have databases that track their lies over decades:
But no, now the people who let themselves be convinced by those lies bizarrely blame "Greens" or "environmentalists" for complaiming that EVs were too easy. Which despite being obvious lies doesn't seem to be considered "hate", but pointing out the well documented truth is?
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).
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.
> 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].
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.
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?
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.
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.
Damaging the environment by producing water in an environmentally damaging way is optional. You can always get it some other way using money or energy. It's tempting to just take the cheapest option when it's available though.
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.
In my opinion, much of the farming in Southern California needs to end. Or at least we should revisit the now 100-year-old agreement on how the Colorado River water is used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact
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.
People talk shutting off the faucet while brushing one's teeth but ~70% of global freshwater usage comes from agriculture and ~20% from industry, with municipalities accounting for only 10%