“No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living”
Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
In 2024 why are we worried about AI using too much electricity? Because we never decarbonized the grid. 25 years of saying “let’s use nuclear power “ was shot down. Not to worry, global peak fossil fuels by 2030.
Here in Germany lack of individual sacrifice is absolutely a big part of the problem. NIMBYs protest the construction of new transmission towers at every step because "it ruins the landscape". And when the power company caves in and decides to burry high-voltage transmission lines instead the NIMBYs still fight them because the waste heat might turn some grass brown and reduce some crop yields. The end result is that when there's lots of wind in the North of the country the South still has to run coal or gas plants because we can't transport enough electricity across the country. And don't even get me started about the silly opposition to wind energy, and regional politicians that make ridiculous minimum distance laws to appeal to those voters.
I'm not demanding that everyone only bikes to work and lives off their garden and locally grown produce, but it would be nice if we could all agree on a level of personal sacrifice that involves not sabotaging the decarbonization of the grid for selfish reasons.
Germany's bigger problem is caving to the anti-Nuclear sentiment, which, sure, NIMBYs (or environmentalists as they call themselves today) had a hand in defeating.
>> No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living
> Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
Not the OP, but I think the statement holds even when talking about systemic solutions.
We're reaching breakpoints with climate change faster than expected, and we only started to decouple _some_ country's economic growth from CO2 in the last 10 years or so. Even if we can in theory decouple growth from CO2 completely (or near completely) and in so doing maintain the standard of living we enjoy in the global north, in practice we aren't doing it fast enough.
If we want to get emissions under control fast enough to not hit 2 degrees of warming I think it's reasonable to say that the solution will involve a reduction in some standards of living, and that is something no one wants to say because of how hard a sell it is.
We are at the point where the energy grid is hampering EV adoption and technological (AI) progress - optimistically there is a real economic incentive that renewables will pick up the pace now, pessimistically it's too late.
I think that's a bad attitude. It's very possible that it's too late for an unmodified climate, but with some combination of solar radiation management and a record-setting transition to renewables, our civilization could make it out in (something like) one piece.
What's depressing is all the people who are still trying to disrupt that chance, even now.
Please explain to me, why individual sacrifice is not a solution to the problem. I really am interested what people are thinking here. Naively it would seem that individual sacrifice is surely one possible (though certainly not the only) solution or at least an important contributor. Simply because less consumption directly translates into less greenhouse gas emissions. However, a lot of people dismiss this out of hand. I never fully get why.
Individual sacrifice is a solution. If everybody ate a bullet today, we would drastically reduce greenhouse gas production. Problem solved?
Of course, declaring it as a solution is the easy bit. The hard bit is actually doing it, and this is where I see personal sacrifice falling short. I assume mass ritual suicide isn't what you had in mind, so what level of personal sacrifice is appropriate? How do you convince people? Are there rewards for adherence of penalties for not? If the government provides incentives, is it still "personal" sacrifice? I heard China and India are the biggest contributors these days, shouldn't they be the ones sacrificing instead of me? How many vegans does it take to offset one new AI datacenter?
It's like asking "why don't we just emit less?" Right, that's the problem. What are you proposing?
Ok, point taken. Saying that individual sacrifice is a solution is not saying much. But can we agree that it is saying something? And that that something is better than handwaving at big corporations?
As for concrete proposals, I don‘t have any. I don’t think that there need to be universal prescriptions. if everybody takes a good look what he or she really needs for a fulfilled life and what in the end are luxuries. I honestly think that that is enough. But I think the responsibility to decide there is real even if it is in no way enforced. And it should not be easily dismissed.
I think they're both pretty handwavy. In my opinion, both diagnose the problem correctly (we consume too much), but both lack actionable advice beyond that.
I don't think I've experienced many quick dismissals. Here's some of the conversations around personal responsibility I've personally experienced:
- reduce reuse recycle (this was drilled into my head at a young age)
- plastic vs paper vs reusable supermarket bags (pretty trivial)
- plastic vs paper straws (infuriatingly banal)
- EVs vs ICE vehicles (currently the only viable options are luxury cars, cutting a whole segment of the population out of the market)
- reduce meat consumption (as unpopular as it is effective)
- do not have children (extreme, extremely polarizing)
- reduce air travel (easy in theory, I just really like travel)
While it is heartening to hear that you have not heard many quick dismissals of personal responsibility (it really is), I certainly have quite often (and among them is the GP above, whose comment prompted me to ask for an explanation).
I concede that both attributions (personal or corporate) might be handwavy. Let's continue to wave our hands in both directions not only in one, is all I want to say.
From an article I read recently (https://www.earthday.org/dear-big-oil-its-you-not-me/), it states that individual contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is only a small percentage and that industry and refining is to blame for nearly all of it.
From another article even more recently (no link, was on HN recently) it shows that energy usage by the biggest companies is up a significant percentage (30-50%) and that they won't hit their carbon-neutral or carbon-zero targets. All of this increase is because of investment in "AI" and its massive energy requirements.
So even if you were doing all you could to reduce your impact, all it takes is a single person in charge of one of these companies to do something like build out a datacentre or build a new plant or dig a new coal mine, and all your hard work is for naught.
Mmh, I don't see how the article you linked in the first paragraph gives clear figures regarding individual greenhouse gas emissions. It says that 80% can be _linked_ to 57 Big Oil companies, but that does not mean that these 80% were caused by the companies (they didn't order the cars/trucks/ships to drive and deliver shiny products, they didn't fly in the planes etc.) so I am somewhat hesitant and would like to see more figures for the claim that only a small percentage is _caused_ by individuals. What greenhouse gas emission is in the end not also linked to some bloke wanting a shiny new thing to play with, a great experience or simply a piece of meat?
I am sympathetic to the argument that a simple persons influence is small compared to that of a company CEO. But of course there are many more simple people and their influence together is cumulative.
I still see very much a shared responsibility. Big firms could easily do better, but individuals could as well. In the face of the magnitude of the problem, can we really ignore any part of the equation? Can we really say that only the corporate world has to change or that the corporate world has to change first, when we need change on every level, corporate and individual, as fast as possible?
In developed societies it doesn't make sense to let individuals solve collective problems.
For instance you might sacrifice flying to save the climate but airlines actually have CO2 quotas. So if you aren't flying somebody else is likely going to take your place because it will be cheap. CO2 quotas will be reduced year by year so flying will get more expensive and you will move from individual sacrifice to market dynamics.
> In developed societies it doesn't make sense to let individuals solve collective problems.
This is simply restating the dismissal that OP brought up, not providing an answer. The example does not do much as CO2 quotas are nowhere near universal.
It’s highly disincentivized by basic game theory. Any individual sacrifice has highly negative effects on the individual player, and undetectable positive effects on the problem we’re supposed to be solving.
What principle of basic game theory would that be? You also need to justify the incredibly strong assumption that "any sacrifice" has "highly negative effects" on the individual player. An immediate counterexample would be beef consumption. For many people, reducing their intake would have positive effects on their health.
I'll raise my hand here. The anxiety of seeing the Earth on an inevitable path towards ruin became overwhelming for me a few years ago. In order to deal with it, I have made some sacrifices. I live with roommates in order to reduce my energy use. I eat in ways that are more sustainable. I do not fly on planes. I drive a very efficient car and would walk/bike more, but I have a bad hip and am already fairly limited by it. The car still causes me some guilt. I don't believe that my individual sacrifices make any difference at all, and perhaps are just my own way of engaging in denial.
> Please explain to me, why individual sacrifice is not a solution to the problem
Technological progress that leads to higher quality of life is a far better solution than individual sacrifice, not at the least because unlike individual sacrifice, it is self-incentifying.
For example, in a large percentage of the developed world, we don't need to burn fossil fuels directly anymore to heat indoor spaces. Heat pumps (even those powered by fossil fueled electric grids) reduce both overall CO2 emissions and improve indoor and local air quality, all of which improve individual, community, and global quality-of-life, so therefore no "sacrifice". It's similar for electrified transport (both personal and mass transit), and manufacturing.
The problem is that switching to newer emissions-free technology can be capital-intensive in the short term. In the long term it is not only cheaper, but will improve average quality of life.
If the entire US residential sector were magically made emission free with everything else remaining the same, global output would be 37.24 billion metric tons instead - negligibly different and still the highest ever recorded.
I don't have figures for the EU available, but you figure it'd be a similar order of magnitude for residential. So if we just estimated it to be about the same, and made the entire EU zero-emission as well, we'd be at 36.93 billion metric tons, which is about where they were in 2018-2019, as well as 2021 due to the pandemic.
Now, you may say: ok, what about transportation and etc? In the US, it's about 28% of emissions from transportation, and of those, 57% are light duty vehicles (including most personal vehicles) - see https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-.... That was from 2022, but if we assume the percentages were about the same in 2023, they'd be about 767 million metric tons (=4.807 * .57 * .28).
So if we magically made all US residential AND personal vehicle emissions go to 0, global emissions would be 36.47 metric tons or about 2017-2018 levels.
If you again assume the EU is around the same as the US, and magically made all US/EU emissions go to 0, we'd have 35.394 metric tons of CO2, or about where levels were hovering in 2013-2016.
TL;DR: if you magically made the entire US residential and personal transport sectors 100% emissions free, global CO2 emissions would only go back to where they were in 2017-2018. If you throw the EU in as well we'd be in the 2013-2016 range.
True, residential emissions and personal transport might not make up the majority of emissions (though they make up a sizable amount). However, the effect of personal choices is not restricted to these two sectors. What things you buy and how often you buy new things an where they are built or grown, directly influences transportation and manufacturing of these goods. If we want to effectively combat climate change, we might need to consume less overall not only watch emissions at home or from personal transport.
Or maybe, for those not totally lost to climate change denial propaganda, there was always low hanging fruit that would have made our lives better and saved money and we just didn't do it because of climate change denial propaganda?
Insulating houses?
More efficient hybrid cars?
A carbon fee that is returned to the people, mildly diverting the market incentives towards cleaner, greener while putting money in ordinary people's pockets?
Fixing pipeline leaks, moving from coal to methane, from gas boilers to heat pumps, solar water heaters, better urban planning, public transport, modern agriculture, recycling food waste, better landfill design, the list goes on and on.
Imagine the head start we'd have had, and how the market for solar wind and batteries would have been expedited. But no, we spent decades pretending there wasn't a problem and that those who believed there was a problem were Marxists trying to undermine capitalism.
Has no one explained that individual sacrifice is not the solution to the problem?
In 2024 why are we worried about AI using too much electricity? Because we never decarbonized the grid. 25 years of saying “let’s use nuclear power “ was shot down. Not to worry, global peak fossil fuels by 2030.