A large part of the population is like this. Whining at and shaming them is not going to get the result you want.
If you care about climate change, you should be advocating for completely green electricity generation, and carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. That would completely solve the fundamental problem.
Our society is fundamentally based on energy, and people like to use energy towards things that give them comfort. Taking away comfort is going to be a "nope" for most people.
> A large part of the population is like this. Whining at and shaming them is not going to get the result you want.
It's unfortunate, but it does appear to have the opposite effect on some section of the populace. They just get pissed off and consume more out of spite. One thing to temper that is to massively tax (over-) consumption. Use taxes tend to be regressive, so to avoid targeting the poor, there needs to be some thought put into the tax structure.
If one reads my comment and construes it as whining and shaming, I don't think we're dealing with reasonable people. The problem is that conservative politicians like MTG make this ID pol issue, vis a vis her comments about Pete Buttigieg and EVs being emasculating. Because of these influences, they see any attempt to curb fossil fuel use as a personal attack, even if it isn't.
If politics is the issue, let's not start about politics and partisanship? I don't know much about USA politics but it seems to me that this automatically turns your comment into something to ignore and dismiss for precisely half your population, as they're part of the party you're blaming as a whole (which might or might not be a fair thing to do).
It's not just politics, and I did specifically mention the attempt to make this about ID politics. In politics, there's discussion, there's give and take, OK. But when one uses their power from the top down to convince their constituency: using fossil fuels is a part of who you are, and they are trying to take a piece of your identity away from you, then it becomes something different.
When one decides to pass over clearly defined technical solutions that actually solve the problem, and instead decide to shame those who live differently than them, perhaps that individual isn't a bastion of reasonableness themselves.
Clean energy production is an everyone problem. I'd encourage not letting politicians pit you against other parts of the population, which is just an emotionally satisfying substitute to actually addressing fundamental problems.
It's not an either option though. If one can't have 100% clean energy right now, spending a lot more of non-renewable energy resources just because "I like to be in a t-shirt while it's -20C outside" doesn't sound very reasonable.
You can both work with the current reality, where energy produced by non-renewable means should be used with more thought while advocating for a better solution for the future so you can have your luxury of heating the house to 25C if you so wish and can afford to...
I agree on not letting politicians pit one against other parts of the population, I also believe that people should take responsibility and be mindful of the luxuries they want and what's the cost to the general society, not only that you can afford to do it even though it's detrimental to others.
Although I agree that it isn't, in practicality most people do actually think that way, and have room in their heads for only one approach to a given problem.
And many people, for whatever reason, tend to prefer "solutions" that involve hating on some other part of the population. Politicians use this to great effect to avoid actually addressing problems.
This is the reason I so strongly advocate for focusing on fundamentals instead of the limited-return shame-based approaches.
And even stronger, everyone is and should be like this. Everything takes energy and I bet almost everything in your house is technically unnecessary and for your comfort. Trying to police all uses of energy into good/bad is just a reflection of your own preferences of the things you can personally live without without too much of a quality of life drop.
We price in externalities all the time. A lot of the time it's priced in as the cost of complying with government regulation, like food safety and labeling. Other times it's priced in the other direction, like subsidies for green energy or particular crops (corn/ethanol). We just don't necessarily price them appropriately, or in a way that some people may think is accurate, but we certainly don't ignore the concept of externalities.
Absolutely. I wasn’t making case that we are always ignoring them. But I think there are some subset of cases where we don’t price them in proportionally to consumption. One example apropos to this thread is pricing in atmospheric carbon (or the externalities of extracting/protecting those resources). Based on your reply, I’m assuming you think regulation is a suitable way pricing in externalities?
You are of course right shaming is not going to help.
> completely green electricity generation
The problem with green electricity is that there is no such thing as green electricity.
The wind turbines? Massive blocks of concrete in the ground, heavy machinery to put it in, lifespan not so great. Solar? Destabilizes the grid, takes plenty of minerals to produce, do you know what happens with solar panels after their lifespan?
The only "green" electricity is one that isn't even produced to begin with.
One time build and destruction costs are also present in fossil fuel power generation.
Thing is with wind and solar, that’s the total harm done. When averaged out over the MWh they produce, you realise that in comparison to coal, oil or gas based power their CO2 impact is utterly negligible.
Is there more that can be done to reduce it further? Sure.
But saying because there is some lifecycle CO2 in their usage means they should be considered harmful is like saying cycling to work is harmful just like taking a helicopter, because rubber tyres aren’t entirely environmentally friendly. It’s honestly that absurd a comparison.
In this context, "green" means carbon-neutral, which (the lack of neutrality) is generally accepted as the dominating "bad" factor with how humanity harnesses energy today. Anything else is goalpost moving. But I'll entertain the goalpost moving nonetheless.
> The wind turbines? Massive blocks of concrete in the ground, heavy machinery to put it in, lifespan not so great. Solar? Destabilizes the grid, takes plenty of minerals to produce, do you know what happens with solar panels after their lifespan?
These are all things that can be recycled given the correct application of energy. Not profitably as a standalone enterprise of course, but energetically positive in comparison to what a given installation produces in its lifetime. Therefore the added cost can be baked into the final cost of the energy produced.
> The only "green" electricity is one that isn't even produced to begin with.
Most of us don't care for your extreme version of "green", so I'll point back to my original comment. You're not going to be able to convince people to willingly give up comfort, so focus on reducing the impacts of people deciding to live that way. "Much better" is worse than "perfect", but "much better" is still better than what we're doing today. You're not going to get "perfect" unless humanity is wiped out completely.
You know without any energy generation limitations, I once calculated that we could grow enough food to feed the world in less than 10000 skyscraper farms and return all those millions of hectares of cropland, pastures and plantations that we have terraformed over thousands of years to nature.
If you care about climate change, you should be advocating for completely green electricity generation, and carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. That would completely solve the fundamental problem.
Our society is fundamentally based on energy, and people like to use energy towards things that give them comfort. Taking away comfort is going to be a "nope" for most people.