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Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

cam.ac.uk

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Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#11

Post by surgical_fire »

actionfromafar wrote: post #4
paulcole wrote: post #2

Any time you spend thinking or breath you spend talking about someone else’s carbon footprint is a total fool’s errand. Nobody will ever change their carbon footprint because of what someone else tells them. There will always be someone worse than them who they can point to and say, “Well I’m not as bad as them so they should change. If people cared at all about this, they’d change their own behavior. And it’s fine t…

Woah, I expected you to get to the point that concerted effort, legislation and better technology is the only thing which will lower carbon dioxide outputs. Instead I got fatalism. :-P

He is not entirely wrong.

The last to starve will be the first to suffocate.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#12

Post by actionfromafar »

surgical_fire wrote: post #11
actionfromafar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, I expected you to get to the point that concerted effort, legislation and better technology is the only thing which will lower carbon dioxide outputs. Instead I got fatalism. :-P

He is not entirely wrong. The last to starve will be the first to suffocate.

No of course not, but with enough people choosing the fatalistic approach, they will be right by fiat.

(Almost the same can be said for all more positive approaches, except we can't know for sure they will work, we can only hope. This goes for everything in life. Only Death and allegedly Taxes are certain.)

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#14

Post by twoodfin »

david-gpu wrote: post #5

This is why I am in favor of a carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents. This way the average person doesn't experience any difference. The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.

Imports aren’t so challenging: You’re effectively imposing a new tariff, and tariff calculation is already a complex business of defining categories and setting rates.

It’s a drop in the proverbial bucket for some Federal agency to annually assess the rough carbon intensity of a dollar’s worth of exports from 150 nations across a few dozen industries.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#15

Post by surgical_fire »

actionfromafar wrote: post #12
surgical_fire wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is not entirely wrong. The last to starve will be the first to suffocate.

No of course not, but with enough people choosing the fatalistic approach, they will be right by fiat. (Almost the same can be said for all more positive approaches, except we can't know for sure they will work, we can only hope. This goes for everything in life. Only Death and allegedly Taxes are certain.)

We are making some progress towards a greener future with the plummeting birth rates. I wonder if that contains some sort of feedback loop.

Otherwise we are not making any real progress. We certainly pretend that we are though.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#16

Post by newsclues »

This has been obvious for quite some time, and is a key criticism of the "climate deniers".

The poor and middle class pay and suffer from climate change initiatives while the rich and powerful fly around on private jets to climate conferences. Clearly there is something going on here.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#17

Post by actionfromafar »

surgical_fire wrote: post #15
actionfromafar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No of course not, but with enough people choosing the fatalistic approach, they will be right by fiat. (Almost the same can be said for all more positive approaches, except we can't know for sure they will work, we can only hope. This goes for everything in life. Only Death and allegedly Taxes are certain.)

We are making some progress towards a greener future with the plummeting birth rates. I wonder if that contains some sort of feedback loop. Otherwise we are not making any real progress. We certainly pretend that we are though.

We have slowed down the acceleration of Co2, so that's proof we can do something. Maybe also dirt cheap solar will at some point make a dent. A huge problem is fertilizer made from fossil fuels.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#18

Post by actuallyalys »

max_streese wrote: post #13
fsndz wrote: post #3

[flagged]

The article itself states this too (though without the undertone). To me this does not undermine the research though. Why would it?

Agreed. One of the researchers quoted has a good take on this:

> “There are definitely groups out there who would like to push the responsibility of reducing carbon emissions away from corporations and onto individuals, which is problematic,” said co-author Dr Ramit Debnath, Assistant Professor and Cambridge Zero Fellow at the University of Cambridge. “However, personal carbon footprints can illustrate the profound inequality within and between countries and help people identify how to live in a more climate-friendly way.”

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#19

Post by jvanderbot »

david-gpu wrote: post #5

This is why I am in favor of a carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents. This way the average person doesn't experience any difference. The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.

I agree. Imagine if we had tried to tackle ozone depletion by saying "thou shall not buy CFCs nor use products or services which make use of CFC" and had created a "CFC personal footprint" and set about finding those individuals whose choices seemed to create the worst measure of CFC footprint.

It's just madness! Instead we regulated them and the problem resolved.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#20

Post by LUmBULtERA »

I don't think I disagree with anything in the article. However, I'd weary that many people extrapolate the conclusions to mean that the average person shouldn't do anything differently. For many many people in the world (not all yet), their ROI is positive for most household and transportation electrification projects. That is, they not only help the environment by switching to electric appliances and cars rather than fossil fuel, but they also can help out their own pocketbooks. New EVs are on the more expensive side of this, but electric bikes and other forms of electric transportation is much more affordable up front.
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