"...people more willing to reduce own carbon footprint if they see leaders doing the same."
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jamesreplied to Cecilia Mjausson Huster last edited by
@mjausson @mekkaokereke The reason so few of us get it is also a systemic issue, which makes it particularly hard to fix. So much of American culture and education structurally emphasizes individualism—everything from roads with giant cars to how students are graded—and so everything is framed as a personal responsibility, etc etc in a self-reproducing cycle
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Cecilia Mjausson Husterreplied to james last edited by
@Jamessocol @mekkaokereke Exactly!
There are also lots of messages floating around about how futile it is to try and enact change through politics. That's the real fatalism we need to get angry at.
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katfeetereplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke Yeah, we’re in the process of buying an EV (Helene took out my car ) and I’m glad we are… but the whole time I’m thinking “what would be EVEN BETTER is having viable bike options or public transit.”
(It’s rural Appalachia. Gonna be… a while.)
Personal responsibility is good, but mostly only in a morale-building sense. Building that habit of thinking of climate change in our lives reminds us to keep our eye on the ball — which is, and MUST BE, systematic change.
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Andyreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke I work for a state-adjacent non-profit that incentivizes individual actions to save energy
1. The individual actions we incentivize have saved energy
2. These individual actions can sometimes collectively bring broader change, e.g. the rapidly diminished market for incandescent bulbs
3. Higher income white people disproportionately benefit from our effortsBasically, it's Democratic climate policy in a nutshell. It's not nothing! but not enough, and badly focused.
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C++ Guyreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke
In the UK, you can't buy electricity produced from coal, because the last coal-fired power station shut down last week. New-build houses won't be able to have gas- or oil-fired boilers from 2025. No new fossil fuel cars will be sold here from 2030. So, yes, we're making progress.But we do still have a broken wholesale price mechanism where the price of electricity on the grid is controlled by the price of the most expensive source. So, when Russia invaded Ukraine, you might have expected people to flock to renewable electricity suppliers such as Good Energy or Octopus. What actually happened was that the green suppliers had to raise their prices along with everyone else. This badly needs to change
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@CppGuy @mekkaokereke @coldclimate
100% agree. This coupling of the prices is a bizarre way to approach a market, and means even people like us who don’t have a gas supply and choose 100% renewable (for which we were already paying a bit extra years ago) are getting screwed by the exorbitant price rises. -
Risottoreplied to james last edited by [email protected]
@Jamessocol @mjausson @mekkaokereke hard to fix but twiddling thumbs is different from forced to fix. necessity is the mother of invention.
e.g., requiring lead acid battery recycling (historically)
or, company doesn't finish massive cost saving project, but suddenly gets split into smaller company and immediately urgently fixes cost-saving project.
"particularly hard to fix" could also be an excuse for delayed carbon offsets and creative accounting,
vs "okay, we've got to make it to the moon, let's do it"
(that is, I don't think it's individualism, I think it's corporate diffusion of responsibility)
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Doug Gregorreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke Thank you. This focus on individual responsibility is a distraction meant to deflect responsibility from oil & gas corporations and the governments that support them.
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@dgregor79 @mekkaokereke i've been thinking about this lately, and i've started to think it's half-right:
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it's correct in the sense that we will not have a course correction until we have serious government policy based on the understanding that the present and future climate disasters are caused by the fossil fuel industry (which, at this point, i'd be 100% on board with those companies just being straight-up expropriated & nationalized so that they no longer have shareholders that influence politics out of a motive for those companies to profit)...
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@dgregor79 @mekkaokereke
(and also, we will not have course correction until we have policies that strongly subsidize solar/wind production like china did.)that said, we have some cultural problems in the u.s., and i think that social pressure could (and should) play an important role in pushing us (politically) toward adoption of policies like the one Mekka suggests.
i mean, "culture eats policy for breakfast", right?
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in particular, we've got a fossil fuel industry that would frame a government takeover as "big brother taking our Freedom", thus inciting push-back from the right.
so it seems like it could help things politically if we had a growing mob of people saying, "i'm doing my part in reducing carbon emissions; why aren't politicians doing theirs (by taking control of the fossil fuel industry and ramping up solar/wind production)?"
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it (the "i'm-doing-my-part" thing) would be *purely* symbolic (and on its own, completely ineffective at influencing global carbon emissions), but sometimes symbols can motivate people, and it seems like we might be lacking motivation (or at least, we might be lacking unified & organized messaging, because it's not always easy to get lefties to fall in line).
without that kind of pressure, i'm not sure how we're going to get to the necessary policy change.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to James Widman last edited by
NFL football is the most popular sport in the US. 51% of the US consider themselves NFL football fans. It's US culture.
NFL Audience Segments Available in BDEX’s Taxonomy
NFL Audience Segments Available in BDEX’s Taxonomy : BDEX Improve your ad performance with BDEX's list of NFL segments.
BDEX (www.bdex.com)
Taylor Swift is the most popular musician in the US. 52% of the US are Taylor Swift fans. She's US culture.
More Than Half Of U.S. Adults Say They’re Taylor Swift Fans, Survey Finds
Most of the star’s fans tend to be white, suburban, millennial and Democrat, Morning Consult found.
Forbes (www.forbes.com)
So when 55% of the US thinks industry should do more on climate change, and 74% believe we should participate in international efforts, that's saying a lot.🤯
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James Widmanreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @dgregor79 i don't disagree, but...
are we large enough in numbers?
are we loud enough?
are we focused/organized enough?
and: if we are all of those things but we also board airliners several times per year... do we come off as not serious (and if so, what's the political cost of that)?
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to James Widman last edited by
Numbers? Yes. Almost 200 million people.
Loud? Yes. Cans of soup at artwork. Greta. Blocking freeways. Etc.
Organized? No. Because as I've said before, all we need to do to get climate action, is "Let Black folk in the US vote." Anything other than that is non-effective. But doing that, leapfrogs the US ahead of where China currently is, and saves the planet.
mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])
See? This is why I'm a so called "climate doomer." 1) Because fixing the climate requires reducing anti-Black racism, and letting Black folk in the US vote, but the US just does not want to do that. There is no viable path to making progress on climate change without reducing anti-Black racism. None. 2) Because so many people will see headlines like this, and not even recognize the problem with it. China is doing the right thing! But we frame that as a negative. https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overproducing-green-tech/a-68782157
Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)
But climate activists are not like "I'm pragmatic, so I'm all in on Black voters!"️
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Doug Gregorreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @JamesWidman If we fixed our democracy so that the actions of government reflected the will of the people, we’d make meaningful steps on climate action. But our policy is set by the party funded by big oil and whose platform is “we hate anyone who isn’t white,” so here we are. Democracy first, then when you get an even slightly more responsive government, those 200 million people need to push hard on our representatives for climate action. It’s just hard to do that when losing an election right now would be such a disaster.
I only don’t believe at all that traveling less is meaningful. Air travel is 2.5% of CO2 emissions, maybe 4% of overall contribution to climate change. Even wildly successful collective action won’t make a dent in those numbers, and letting the dialogue remain on individual contributions (ban plastic straws! Recycle your plastics!) maintains the distraction.