[Torture]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

No. This is forest and trees stuff here.

Personal sacrifice was never the way this is going to happen. It needs policy changes and that needs governments getting together. Aviation is responsible for only 2% of emissions, so cutting these flights is more performative theater than going.

For example concrete is responsible for about 8% of greenhouse emissions. Even if going green doubles the price of concrete, it would only add a few percent on to total construction costs for some buildings. Companies themselves won't choose this route, butt policies could start a shift. Same with steel. Road transport is a bigger emitter than aviation and the switch to electric transport needs massive policy and investment shifts. To make these shifts, corporations need signals from government that this is going to happen and the policy environment is going to require it. If there's no EV incentives, nor fleet emission targets, does GM invest $30B in battery development? No, because they need some certainty it'll be money well spent

On the flip side, the politicking going on in Glasgow when there's an existential crisis is beyond infuriating. But these are politicians, and by definition they need to go where the political winds push them, so here we are. Symbolism matters when needing to push big change because the voters need to push this.

Exactly this. We need large structural change, not a couple small changes at an individual level. Personal carbon footprint is BS propaganda to distract from the real issues.

It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint" in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe. A decade and a half later, “carbon footprint” is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.” Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled “How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.” Outdoorsy brands love the term.

“This is one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever,” said Benjamin Franta, who researches law and history of science as a J.D.-Ph.D. student at Stanford Law School.

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-...-campaign-sham

It’s also worth remembering that the very concept of a personal carbon footprint was popularised by a wide-reaching 2005 BP media campaign. “It was the most brilliant example of ‘It’s your fault, not ours,’” says Westerwelt. “It's a framework that serves them really well because they can just say ‘Oh well, if you really care then why are you driving an SUV?’”
....
But it is crucial to also acknowledge that we are all part of a bigger system that not everyone is equally complicit in holding up. “The we responsible for climate change is a fictional construct, one that’s distorting and dangerous,” writes climate scholar and author Genevieve Guenther. “By hiding who’s really responsible for our current, terrifying predicament, [the pronoun] we provides political cover for the people who are happy to let hundreds of millions of other people die for their own profit and pleasure.”

What Guenther is saying boils down to the question of who holds the power to create and change the systems that cause climate change. If you can only afford a home in an edge-of-town housing estate without access to public transport, is it really your fault for becoming dependent on a car?

“Just because you can allocate [emissions] to an entity or to a location in a supply chain, does not mean that the power of agency lies with that entity or that location in the supply chain,” says Steinberger. “If you’re thinking about these supply chains, are you going to say that final consumers actually have the final decision-making over everything that happens upstream? Who is actually taking the damaging decision?”

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...does-it-matter