Some things are easier to change than others - and the really hard things often don’t require money, but a change in people!
Edit: Sorry for the shitty OP, I should have known better than to post in a hurry.
It reads as if the population is primarily responsible for combating the climate crisis, while industry and government are off the hook because money has little effect.
What I actually meant to express was that technological adjustments that only cost money are easier to implement than changes to people’s habits. Perhaps this is a naive idea because it assumes that there is the political will to make these investments and that the industry is forced to cooperate accordingly. Addressing the climate crisis requires many changes, and economic profitability must be secondary. But achieving this is perhaps one of the most difficult adjustments society requires.
This is the CRACK ADDICT model
The dealer is constantly selling crack without shame and impunity.
Users keep buying and taking the crack.
Everyone blames the user for not quiting crack.
In case anyone is wondering about my metaphor, industry has lots of power and they produce a lot of pollution in order to give us the junk we think we want to buy. They have all the ability to take on more efficient and environmentally safer solutions but they don’t because it will affect their profits. So they shift the responsibility to us and tell us that we need to stop buying this stuff and they’ll stop making them. Unfortunately we’re hooked on this stuff and they know it.
They’re blaming the junkies for making them sell the stuff that is destroying everyone.
There’s some truth in that but the last graph option is very easy to implement individually. Switching to a plant-based diet is easy, fun and healthy. It can also be cheaper.
It’s a bit harder for society to change when unhealthy food options are constantly being marketed, promoted, pushed and managed by those who sell this stuff.
It’s still the same crack addict analogy … we keep saying that the addict should change but we never talk about the crack dealer that is allowed to maintain their drug house, seller network, distribution network, payoff to corrupt cops / politicians.
You are right, we are capable of changing … I make the change myself and eat far less meat products than I did when I was younger and do a higher uptake of vegetables and meat alternatives … but it’s hard when money is short, it’s hard to find good food products and hard to find reliable food products. Eating healthier is more cost efficient but what many people fail to recognize is that it is time intensive because you have to make, prepare, store, organize and manage all the food yourself.
The counter argument I often run into with people on this debate is that it is far easier to buy a cheap $2 hamburger and a $1 soft drink than it is to spend an hour or more preparing healthy food, storing, sorting, managing it all day. It isn’t a terrible amount of work … but it is work compared to just walking up to a counter, handing over money and being given a hamburger in five minutes.
The counter argument I often run into with people on this debate is that it is far easier to buy a cheap $2 hamburger and a $1 soft drink than it is to spend an hour or more preparing healthy food, storing, sorting, managing it all day. It isn’t a terrible amount of work … but it is work compared to just walking up to a counter, handing over money and being given a hamburger in five minutes.
This is an indirect way of saying that your time is more valuable than that of the workers in the restaurant and food processing facility.
Similarly, the professional private childcare (babysitter) can mean some professional couple deciding that their time is more important than that of the babysitter who, as you can imagine, doesn’t get a babysitter.
Transcending the ‘imperial mode of living’ – Canadian Dimension
Why is decarbonisation of individual heating and electrify individual mobility not on a similar level? Seriously most people do not care where the heat comes from, but that it comes. Nobody is braging that they have the GasBoiler MilleniumXX at home. However a lot of people are really into cars and the sound and feeling of a combustion engine has been made into something cool by car advertisments. So people are going to switch to low cost green heating, if it is cheaper and practical. I do not see that for cars.
Maybe because people don’t change their heating until it breaks, but plenty of people change cars often
Rich people yes. Most people buy cheap polluting cars and change them when they it’s too expensive to repair.
Yeah but in the USA, the too expensive to repair threshold is fairly low
I agree, people aren’t as emotionally attached to their boilers. But while there are already plans discussed to phase out gas heating in the EU, for many buildings the cheaper and practical alternative has not arrived yet. That takes some convincing.
More like people can’t afford them.
Electric cars need competitive racing like F1 and NASCAR. There needs to be a culture built around the power of electric vehicles to get the muscle car culture to switch. Make electric cars “cool”.
There is Formula E. We also have some all electric super cars by now. Porsche has Taycan, Rimac is all electric and there are some other sports cars around as well.
That’s awesome. Hope they start to make their way into the mainstream soon. I’m ready to go all-in on electric. Besides the climate, imagine what our cities will sound like with less combustion engines running.
Rethinking mobility doesn’t require behavioral changes, it requires massive political will to massively invest in public transports.
No, bycicles won’t be the solution. This is a dream for hippies living in cities. You don’t take your children to school on a bike when there is 15km to do. You don’t go to the grocery store with a bike when it’s 5km away. You don’t take the children or yourself to the doctor or the hospital with a bike.
This post is merely liberal propaganda that free companies and governments from their responsibilities.
Public transport and bikes require the exact same thing: density, mixed use and paying attention to walksheds.
A lot of the US is suburban sprawl with Euclidean zoning. Neither public transit nor bikes work well there now by design: there’s long distances between destinations. A bus that drops you off at a Walmart parking lot isn’t all that useful unless you want to go to Walmart. A bus that drops you off in front of a dozen businesses is way more useful.
Parts of that are solvable. For example, mixed use zoning, and pedestrian paths that cut through the mazes of residential cul-de-sacs. It’s much easier to bike to a corner store or pub that’s .5km or 1km from your house than one that’s 5km.
It requires massive political will to build something closer to traditional streetcar suburbs rather than modern car-dependant suburbs.
Yes, that really only works for people in cities and suburbs, but most people live in cities, small towns and suburbs and not on a rural farmstead.
No. In many places people live mostly in rural areas. Even suburbs are cities in comparison to suburbs. It depends on the country of course. In mine, at least half the people live in truly rural areas, and they need a car for groceries, doctor, school or about anything actually.
When half the people can’t use bikes, it’s not a realistic solution. That is all. Even if 10% of the people would fit this solution it would be a dramatic politic problem. Here, it’s about half the people. It’s not 1km. It’s between 5 and 20 for basic stuff. I am not exaggerating. I’m talking about France today.
In the US, 80% of people live in metro and micropolitan areas, and only 20% of people are truly rural.
Bikes are never going to be the solution for everyone, or for every trip. What they can be, though, is an 80/20 solution. Particularly in combination with public transit.
That is to say, bikes can be a large part of the solution for the average person, even if the general solution still requires electric cars for the last 20%
I firmly disagree that bikes are the best solution for cities. Public transports are far better in cities than anything else. In cities with bikes you also have the problem of thefts btw.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone who suggests that bikes as a single mode of transportation is the solution.
No single mode of transportation is the solution. The solution isn’t “subways”. The solution isn’t “busses”. The solution isn’t “trams”. Or “cars”.
Instead, in cities, the solution is a mix of modes. Sometimes that’s using one mode locally and a different mode to get across the city. Sometimes that’s multimodal trips - taking a bike to the train then biking the rest of the way, for example.
Bikes are particularly good at solving the “last mile problem”, which public transit is pretty lousy at solving. That’s why, if you go to train stations in the Netherlands they have bike garages. Because trains and bikes are better than trains without bikes and bikes without trains.
And again, bikes won’t solve the last km problem, for the reasons I gave already.
Decarbonization of industry & shipping should be much more important than individual mobility or heating.
What the fuck are those axes?
I disagree that the really hard things don’t cost money.
Eating less meat does, at the surface, cost the consumer less money. If I go in to the supermarket, it’s cheaper to buy a bunch of chicken wings than it is to buy some plant based protein (not to mention my kids will actually eat the chicken). And yes, I know, “ThErE aRe pLeNTy oF cHeAPeR WaYs to EaT a nOn-MEaT DiEt.”. Thank you, Mr Vegan, we’re talking about converting the masses here. Government’s can change that by changing subsidy weights, but then it’s not really an individual-led change at that level.
Same for decarbonisation of heating - if I want to install a heat pump and insulate my home better, that costs money!
As for flying yes, that’s more about regulating air travel to make it cost more and stopping the practice of airlines having to fly empty flights to retain their use of that flight plan. Again, not really an individual-driven change. Especially because the impact of flying disproportionately leans towards the more wealthy and business.
Same for decarbonisation of heating - if I want to install a heat pump and insulate my home better, that costs money!
And older multi-story apartment buildings are often practically impossible to switch to heat pumps. These older buildings make up a vast majority of european city dwellings. All you can realistically do is update insulation and the central heating system to be more efficient, but decarbonizing the latter—I don’t even know if there are heat pump based solutions that can heat water to 50…60°C needed if it gets to -20°C and colder. And if there is, installing it would be a nightmare.
Individual heat pumps for each apartment? Where to put the 2 to 4 external heat exchangers per apartment that is needed? If they’re on the walls 30 meters from ground how do you have access to them for deicing if they clog up with snow and ice? If they’re on rooftops you need mighty long piping to lower floors.
Heat pumps are awesome, but for apartment buildings you have to plan them in from the beginning.
I agree, “the really hard things often don’t require money, but a change in people!” despite what I’m sure are OP’s best intentions, is juts more of the same corporate shifting of responsibility away from themselves and on to the individuals they have trapped. Unless the change they mean is becoming an active anti-capitalist and plotting the demise of the rich, which I somehow doubt.
As long as profit is the priority of society, those who make it off of the backs (and eventual destruction) of the rest of us aren’t going to stop, and as long as they keep going, anything we do in terms of personal eating habits/recycling/travel and so on is an irrelevant drop in the ocean. The only way to have any real impact is remove them and destroy their system.
Sorry about that, that was really badly worded by me. I meant to express that behavorial change is a hard challenge, while (some) technological issues can ‘simply’ be solved by throwing money at it.
I am fully convinced that we need a radically different economic system that steers away from profit as ultimate goal.
Many poor people already have a mostly plant-based diet because it’s cheaper. All you really need is rice, beans, and veggies
And therefore all those poor people are not the people you’re trying to convert to a plant-based diet.
No, my point was that the amount of people to convince is low
I’m not sure that’s true.
This article implies an awful lot of people are meat eaters, globally.
I agree there - if decent public transport is available, it will be used. And it’s clearly the governments responsibility to provide that. Going by the chart, I would put “rethink mobility” in zone 2.
Damn, my OP really reads like liberal propaganda.
