I am kinda tired of this narrative that I am part of some responsible group and should walk through life riddled with guilt about each plastic bottle or gallon of gas that my existence consumes. I am not saying you should be throwing soda cans from your Hummer, but I feel a sort of fatalism around environmental issues and don't think individual self-deprivations is going to fix it. The people with actual power in the richest nations don't seem to care, and most developing nations don't even have it on their radar as an issue to care about.
I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don't want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Having concern for the environment and being conscious of your consumption isn’t some kind of mentally debilitating guilt that should keep you from functioning normally on a day-to-day basis. What’s the worst that environmental consciousness could do to you? Make you buy an electric over a gas-powered vehicle when electric vehicles finally become widely available? Avoid buying oily junk food and sugary drinks in non-recyclable plastic packaging? Properly segregate your waste? These aren’t “tiring” and “horrifying” things.
We all should be apologetic of our choices that are environmentally harmful and actively avoid as much of those choices as we can, because that collective individual disregard for nature is precisely what creates the “market demand” whom “people with actual power” would claim to be simply fulfilling. You’re passing all the blame on one side of the equation when, really, everyone across the board has a part to play here.
Most people on the planet cannot afford the time and money to change their lifestyles to be environmentally-friendly. And among those few who do, most have other priorities. It is naive to believe that a collective change in consument behaviour will scale up as the solution to Earth's environment problems.
I don't think the parent commenter meant the producers of goods as the "people with actual power". It is just as unreasonable to believe that businesses will suddenly start caring about environment, since that would put them at a disadvantage on the market. (Though I imagine the whole narrative that it is the consumer's responsibility to fix the environment is very convenient for some of the less-environmentally friendly corporations who might be afraid of additional burdens on them so there's an incentive to push that message)
In my opinion the root of the problem is that damaging the environment is not associated with an inherent cost. In my opinion, scalable solutions are those which "use the free market to regulate itself", i.e. things like carbon taxes (to make CO2 emission a cost), shifting cost of garbage utilisation to packaging producers (to make non-recyclable packaging a cost) etc. (+ corresponding change to social programs to lessen the impact of this change on consumers who would not afford increase in the price of goods). But for this to happen there needs to be a political will. For this reason I think that the most environmentally conscious things those of us who live in democracies can do is to vote for environmentally conscious representatives who understand the issue well.
Those changes you listed aren't nearly enough to stop the environmental onslaught. It seems our current trajectory is inevitable since there's so much short term profit to be made from mass consumption. Perhaps we'll turn it around once our actions cause resource scarcity, but that time isn't now.
Of course it's not enough, but isn't that such a trivial, impractical point to make? What small act is ever enough to make an impact on a large complex systemic effect? That's why you need an aggregate of counteractions--and you will never have that aggregate when you have too many individuals being defeatist and actively choosing to do nothing about a problem that threatens their very own survival.
And sure, short-term profits drive people towards a certain behaviors, but no collective behavior is set in stone and people's tastes are actually changing, which is why more and more companies are publicly positioning themselves to be sustainable even if it's just woke theater for many of them. Being cynical and defeatist about not compounding to the problem of environmental pollution is such a valueless position. It's really not impossible to make the reverse politically viable.
The point is that for almost every metric, consumers changing their habits will have a negligible impact on global aspects of this disaster. Even if everyone changes, companies are so extremely polluting that it will not change the fact that everything will turn to shit. What needs to change is companies.
It's not an excuse. I'm already actively limiting my own pollution by being frugal. I'm observing humanity-level trends and making conclusions. If you're definitely going to lose, being defeatist is also being realistic.
You don’t know that you’re going to lose, and trends can be reversed. They have been before. We’re doing the same thing to the global pandemic now with all these vaccines.
This captured everything I find upsetting about white backlash to anti-racism. Pointing out a problem doesn’t mean the response expected of you is guilt. Identifying that you benefit from it and have an opportunity to do something about it doesn’t mean self deprivation.
Imagine if the zillion things people admire on HN reacted this way. “Launch HN: infrastructure as a service being characterized as lock in, we didn’t build anything because we’re sick of being told what’s wrong with existing things!” “Show HN: I got tired of people complaining about privacy so I made my website purely out of tracking cookies!”
"Guilt is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated universal moral standards and bear significant responsibility for that violation."
I think if one is truly doing their best then it wouldn't make sense for them to be feel guilty. I'm not accusing you of you not doing your best (only you can know that) but maybe you haven't integrated it all. The purpose of emotions such as guilt was to motivate us to action but if you're already doing what you think you should according to your own standards then you should recognize that and be confident that these movements either aren't targeting you specifically or are being unreasonanle as to what they're asking you.
I share the sentiment, but I noticed that sometimes I use it as an excuse for not doing what I can within my reach. One benefit I see with individual action is that it's a way to stimulate political change (another one being economical). Plus, it may be contagious and make changes for the next generations. Thus, nothing prevents us from adopting bidirectional planning, i.e., both top-bottom (political, schools, etc.) and bottom-up (individual). It intuitively seems faster than top-bottom only.
Restricting the greatest excesses of the rich and militaries (the US specifically) and some form of aggressive carbon sequestration, but I don't think any of that requires some kind of Year Zero political program.
Try to see money as a ablative material that allows to set up "alternative" realities. It has to be worn down and away by conflict, refugee streams, economic, environmental and social collapse before actual change can happen.
I live in Trump country. My faith in humanity is at its nadir. I won't give up, not ever. But I think its clear what will make a difference (e.g. banning SUVs, coal, and fracking, restarting nuclear, subsidizing solar, population control, etc), and what won't (banning plastic straws, putting recycle bins everywhere), and I think its wise to accept that humanity, in the best case, will undergo a (voluntary, controlled) Contraction. In the worst case, it will be involuntary, and catastrophic. That's it. Those are our only two options.
What do you think is the root of the problem? You say faith in humanity but do you mean these people are failing? If so, are they the cause of it or possibly the media they/we are consuming? If you agree with that and that vested interests influence that media then what can we do? It seems like a fatal cacth-22 for the kind of democracies we have.
I live in Trump country, too. Which means I know a handful of people (not even anywhere near a majority) love to throw their impotent tantrums and we need to stop letting that scare us.
Many here at HN are financially literate, or at least conscious. Is that some sort of innate knowledge? No. You've learned and honed this new intuition, to think in terms of resources you have, can acquire, spend or invest. Climate and environment are no different, and you don't feel guilt over doing you finances either.
Its just being conscious of how you spend or create ecological resources, that's all. I find it even fun! (More fun than investing, and my financial ineptitude sometimes feels like something I should feel guilty about.)
I just look at the endless cars on the freeway and don't want to spend this brief slice of time I am alive for apologizing for the fallout from my existence.