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Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

theguardian.com

191–200 of 285 posts

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#191

There is a heck of a lot of this that goes on within the energy and environment community where I have been involved for a decade. Tragedy of the Commons basically means that individual responsibility is a complete dead-end to solve any kind of shared resource issue. We've known this formally within economics for 200 years. Government, law and enforcement is the only solution, whether we're talking a city park or the…

> I should guiltily stop having children The unintended consequence is that only the conscientious people take themselves out of the gene pool, which is counterproductive.

Well, their kids could still end up being assholes.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#192
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda. It depends. The other 95% of the population might be agnostic or unaware of the idea, or the other 95% of the population might be opposed to the idea. If Congress were to pass a law mandating funding for WWVB radio until 2050, for example, would even 5% of the population have an o…

Probably, if you used words they know instead of acronyms they don't. "Do you want the radio signal that allows clocks to sync to keep running? Here is a list of devices you might know and use that rely on them: ..."

I guarantee nobody would care. Even when you tell people the impact it might have on them... they may only have to replace one clock, or not any at all. Their cell phone clock works just fine.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there exists a collective responsibility to make individual adaptations to combat climate change. Individual adaptations do not matter unless they are undertaken collectively. My personal lifestyle changes don’t impact the state of CO2 emissions in any significant way. Leading by example AND talking about it has more impact, but still negligible unless/until enough people do it. Changing incentives, by making produ…

> My personal lifestyle changes don’t impact the state of CO2 emissions in any significant way. Collective action requires personal changes. You, and everyone else, must alter your personal lifestyle. You are only a little bit responsible for the harm, but in aggregate, the collective you are enormously responsible. Each individual must change. > It’s the same reasoning behind targeting drug dealers and cartels more…

I think we are talking past each other a bit. I guess it boils down to the question “where does the incentive to make widespread personal changes come from?”

Perhaps the CFC problem is a better analogy. CFCs cause problems with the ozone layer, so CFCs were mandated to be removed from products that people bought like ACs and hairspray. In that instance, the supply chain was fixed, so the option to buy CFC hairspray was removed.

I think the same fix applies here. Renewable energy, ending single-use plastic packaging, etc. are all things that should be done in order to decrease negative effects. That’s not to say people don’t have to or shouldn’t also make our own personal changes, only that the impact of changing the supply chain is much greater.

[edit: rogue apostrophe]

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#194
post #17

I love how people who drive cars, fly on planes, use plastic, get goods delivered by truck, etc etc, act like oil companies just pump oil out of the ground for fun then light it on fire. The mental gymnastics are impressive.

Big changes need government intervention. The government needs to take away the option to run cars, trucks, etc on gasoline, and restrict flights that don't use renewable energy (such as via Hydrogen). Otherwise the individual can only do a very little, and often can't afford to do that.

I strongly agree with you and the parent comment.

Yes, people who refuse to recognize the problem beyond the greed of oil companies are a problem. Yes, oil companies are in fact a bigger problem. However, the biggest problem is if you want a government to stay in power long enough to actually do anything meaningful about eliminating carbon emissions, then announcing some kind of imminent intention to take away gasoline-powered cars and trucks is one of the worst things you can do.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#195

A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact do have some personal responsibility. This seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not…

I mean, if we're going to talk about forest and trees, consider that the whole "big oil lobbies governments" thing flies right in the face of the "democracy is the voice of the people" argument. If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament? Or more philosophically speaking, whose fault is it that people living under democratic rules don't challenge the efficacy of their governments? Or, perhaps more importantly, why?

I think the problem with finger pointing is that it distracts from meaningful introspection. I think there are far deeper connections between oil and consumption than the "I do my part" crowd seems to realize, from the economics of the logistics industry, all the way down to the fundamental assumption that modern growth-oriented economics and consumption are even "normal" (compared to, say, how native tribes lived eons ago). In other words, merely being aware of the need for unsustainable resources in various cases doesn't fully detach us from the reality that the system we rely on to live is broken.

Sometimes I contemplate the "weird" trees in this forest: people investing into off-grid living, or people stocking up bunkers, or isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere; and I wonder if thinking about regular society in terms of scalable homogeneous solutions isn't in a way similar to breeding cavendish bananas - highly optimized in one specific metric, but susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat (or in our case, by one of the many potential global catastrophes that scientists have been warning about)

If darwinism applies to civilizations, things ain't looking great for the vast majority of us precisely because we're stuck in a rut talking about ifs-and-buts instead of physically adapting to the logical end state of the trends we see in scientific data.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#196

Genuine question to all the anti "Big Oil" commenters here: what's your alternative? Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like? We have known for years that climate change is real, and yet the vast majority of people simply won't actually change their consumption when push comes to shove. This is the largest, most s…

I find it infuriating that your perfectly reasonable question/comment is so heavily downvoted, and yet it's followed up my many thoughtful and interesting responses. Boggles the mind.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or at least require the cost of putting carbon back into the ground to be factor price. The problem is when you slow gdp it's the most marginalized that are hit the hardest. So, the CEO only makes 10M instead of 50M(or whatever number) but what about the poor farmer that was making just enough to run his tractor to get by and feed his family.

Carbon externality pricing is another attempt at market intervention that faceplants in practise. It doesn't get properly implemented, because it's politically unpopular, it gets fudged with highly speculative green-washing "offsets" that amount to planting a few trees and then counting your forests before they're grown (the trees subsequently die of neglect), and the costs get passed on to the little guy. The correc…

Carbon pricing can't work because it's politically unpopular so the solution is to ban gasoline. Come on now.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#198

A lot of comments here seem to be focusing on the fact that individuals use oil products beyond what is necessary for basic life and in fact do have some personal responsibility. This seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not…

That's totally true, but it's also true that if we reined in consumption, altered our habits and focused on reusing more then we are doing two things. First, we're taking ownership for our responsibility in this whole mess (acknowledging that there are trees in this forest), and second we're hurting oil companies where it counts. If we don't consume they can't supply. If we wait for our governments to hold them to ac…

I don't think focusing on individual responsibility will work. In order to make a meaningful difference we need to make sure that

a) everyone knows what the issues are and what changes need to be made b) everyone is willing to make the sacrifices necessary

If we've learned anything from (the entire history of the human race) it's that people who know and care will shoulder the burden of making changes while those who don't will benefit from it all.

If we want to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption, we need meaningful action at the national and global scale by major political powers. Taxes, regulation, criminal consequences are the only way to move the needle.

edit: dougmwne said it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#199
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology. Think about how many engineer's have spent their entire lives optimizing ICE powertrains, with all this tech actively harming us with smog shortening our lifespans, acid rain and climate change.

> 50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology. You're missing the point. This didn't happen because it wasn't economical. You're just wishing for fanciful things. You might as well just wish that CO2 weren't a GHG. Consumer demand forced R&D into ICE instead of electric.

Consumer demand is not, realistically, an isolated phenomenon, though. There's a tangled web of feedback in many directions among what people want to buy, what industry offers people to buy, what technologists are can work on, what R&D risks industry wants to take, and probably other factors. Advertising drives culture to some extent and reflects culture to some extent, not just one or the other.

The key point to figure out, I think, is so we know which lever(s) is most effective to fix the problem, rather than just assigning blame.

Re: Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed

#200
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who do you mean by "we"...because some countries don't give a shit about the impact they are having on the world and still pollute the air and water worse than EU and US countries 50 years ago (China, India, etc).

China has a lower CO2 per capita emissions than the US. Of course, the environment doesn’t care about who has the most per capita emissions, just “cares” about the total emissions, but in terms of measuring efficiency of “how much CO2 needed to support the lifestyle of each person” it seems they currently have a better rate. Like, if you replaced a random subset of China with the population of the US, with another co…

I'm not even sure what this comment is about. The important bit right now is trajectory. China is definitely not trending lower. They have added huge amounts of coal generation in the past year, and their carbon market is broken by design (to keep emissions cheap).
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