The title is editorialized, the original title is "Income-based U.S. household carbon footprints (1990–2019) offer new insights on emissions inequality and climate finance" and the abstract says "In 2019, fully 40% of total U.S. emissions were associated with income flows to the highest earning 10% of households".
This is a ridiculous hammering of numbers, designed to pass some ideological message totally devoid of any root in reality.
USA total CO2 emissions are less than 14% of global emissions. You aren't doing the environment any favors by pretending that it's by targeting a subset of US population, that you are going to change anything relevant on global emissions.
Meanwhile, the private jets continue to fly, and the little people think 'well, there's no way I'm giving up my car/meat/heating/AC while the elite are still globetrotting via private jets and superyachts', and our leaders still refuse to set a half-decent example.
It's a great thing the "little people" don't give up on their car/meat/heating/AC. Forcing anyone to give up on any of those - either by direct prohibition or taxation - its a totalitarian move.
It's a great thing the "little people" don't give up on their freon. Forcing anyone to give it up - either by direct prohibition or taxation - its a totalitarian move.
Honestly though, limiting harmful things and/or pushing people towards the better solution is one of the roles of government. This is how we beat the prisoner paradoxes of modern life. For example I don't believe we should ban cars (nobody does), but I welcome good, affordable and available public transport. People living in places with good public transport don't have to depend so heavily on their car, and everyone is happier.
It's potentially about centralised power literally taxing people to death (unaffordable housing/energy/transport) in a probably-futile attempt to modify the climate.
Yes, climate change is very real. But my current opinion is that 'solutions' are not. Especially while we're still fighting/escalating/anticipating wars between nations.
Solutions would take a truly global effort, but people generally don't want to sacrifice their democracies and have a 'new world order/world government' imposed upon them, let alone have their elected leaders puppeteered by shadowy forces 'above' them.
When the irresistible force meets the unmovable object something will have to give.
Cars, meat, heating and AC are not rights, and banning them - at at least moderating them within reason - is not totalitarian. And when it comes to the difference between living and at least cars and meat it's actually not such a hard choice.
Heating and AC are more complex: those can be life savers, especially when the climate gets more extreme. But there are other options: migrate to places where it isn't that hot or cold. And that's where we have a nice little feedback loop: on account of climate change the temperate zone where you are not expected to require much heating or much cooling is shrinking so you'll need more heating and more AC which will cause more energy to be pumped into the atmosphere.
Those 'little people' are still by and large the richest fraction of the world population (they have cars, eat meat, have heated houses and AC). It's the real poor who pay the price for all this.
There are a lot of things that aren't defined as rights. Are you fine with the State going after those as well?
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, some things that aren't rights, are:
- Gay marriage;
- Abortion;
- Self Determination of Gender;
- Education above the fundamental level.
They wrote "moderating them within reason", sounds more like taxes to me.
What if gas taxes were higher in the US (maybe a bit proportional to income?), and after 20 years there were instead lots of subways, and streets were bike and pedestrian friendly ... (like here where I live)
We have no right to prerequisites for being a productive worker (safe shelter, food, the ability to travel to a workplace)
But we have to maintain the right for people to breed a dozen kids if they feel like it, despite population being the multiplier that scales every single problem the world faces.
> ... despite population being the multiplier that scales every single problem the world faces
That's the big one which people don't understand. The poor that has five kids is doing more harm to the planet than the rich who has only one kid.
Wife and I decided, on purpose and for that reason, to have only one kid.
And no matter what we do during our lifetime, we're polluting less than people having more than one kid. It's a fact and a simple one. Yet people simply don't understand.
My father had four kids. Today's world problems are his fault and nobody is changing my mind on that.
And don't even get me started on people having many kids for religious purposes, to conquer the world with the women's bellies (as they say): they'll get the planet they deserve.
To them, it's not about logics or understanding anything (and also not about religion, I don't think, even if some might say). It's biology, an animal species, built to reproduce.
The argument that X country it's "only" Y% of global population effectively rewards over population and put in question people being allowed to migrate into the West.
USA is a huge country, and compared to many Asian countries, it's not polluting anywhere near the same amount compared to their available natural resources.
The same way you may feel it's acceptable to tell Americans: "well, consume less", others else should feel acceptable to tell China and others: "well, procreate less".
How did China's fertility rate drop so quickly? They were at 1.81 in 2017 and then...1.16 in 2021? It doesn't seem to be related to just the pandemic. The only thing that makes sense is maybe the government going from discouraging fertility to encouraging it (i.e. people just do the opposite of what the government encourages them to do).
Is that the US' direct emissions? Or does that include international emissions that are the result of US economic activity?
Surely if an American citizen buys a product from China, the emissions involved in producing that product and shipping it over are counted against America, right?
If the US ships rubbish to a foreign country where it's burnt (because they were the cheapest option), are those emissions counted against the US?
But every country on Earth can say the same, right? Everybody is 'only responsible for a fraction of the total polution'.
It's a tragedy of the commons kind of situation.
Do you think that private jets and yachts are a significant portion of CO2?
First of all, such things are of the top 0.1%, not the 10%. You need to be thinking of more mundane things. As someone on this forum you very likely belong to the top 10%.
How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out? Do you have a heated pool? How often do you fly? How often do you eat beef or pork? How long is your daily commute?
Those are the sort of things that influence your CO2 expenditure. Sure you could 10x that with flying private jets, but almost no one does that so it's not as significant.
The proportion of people in the top 10% of the general population here is expected to be much higher than 10% but I would expect most probably less than 50%.
You don't need a house as big the one you have, and you (as an example of the average middle class american) don't need to live in the suburbs, with inefficient construction techniques, dependent on a car to go anywhere, ordering ubers to conveniently bring packages of food twice a week, etc.
Between banning private jets and banning parking lots, guess which one would be better for the environment?
Americans really don't understand (a) how wealthy they all are and (b) how a lot of this wealth is based on completely wasteful spending.
High density destroys plant life, increases traffic delays for delivery of goods, and increases the number of goods that are delivered. Transporting humans to their jobs is a very small fraction of our carbon footprint overall. And there are more pressing environmental concerns than just carbon emissions.
Larger homes promote sharing. One vacuum cleaner for example.
Stop parroting high density marketing. Stop destroying the environment to enrich investors.
As you get wealthier, you believe you need things, like a 3 br home where each kid has their own room. If money gets tight, you realize a 2 br is actually fine. Problem is, when you consider downgrading you feel that need a lot more than if you’d never had it. Same goes for the jet. That 2 hr trip suddenly feels really critical compared to just planning your travel better.
Wasn’t there a post here recently where Musk redirected his cousin’s plane to go unplug some servers? Where was he going that was so important in the middle of the night? And could that detour have waited for a normal flight booking? And apparently the decision turned out do be a mistake according ti Musk himself.
I guess the point is there's only 1 of him, and thousands of you (i.e his peons).
So it doesn't matter what he does, it's not statistically significant.
Sidebar: your boss's boss's boss's should be allowed his private jet - he should just pay a fair price for the fuel that reflects the damage he is doing. Like 10x the current price.
I don’t think the argument being made is that the cost should be proportionate to wealth, but proportionate to impact or alternatives.
If flying private incurs 10x or 100x the externality costs of flying coach, it should be priced (taxed really) to reflect that a significant portion of those externality costs are an unnecessary luxury benefit.
The point being that even though your boss’s boss’s boss has an outsize impact, there aren’t many people like him, whereas there are millions of people like you, so in absolute terms “your” emissions matter too.
Sure, tax the 0.1% in proportion to the damage they are doing, but don’t use that as an excuse for the rest of us to sit back and think we’ve made much of a difference to the overall problem.
Climate change is not some game where the goal is to enact petty revenge on people who are trying to lose the game.
It's not about accountability, it's about stopping climate change so our current biomes don't degrade.
Directing your anger and energy at some small group of people that have an insignificant impact as small as the country of Uganda is simply not worth it or even relevant.
While you're whining about rich people, wealthy people in general are destroying the fucking planet. It's them who should be held responsible. It's them who complain when gas prices get high, it's them who vote against participating in the Paris accord. It's them who vote against stopping trade with China. It's them who should have been educated, who should have taken it seriously.
> Because a small group of people refuses to fly commercial, more CO2 emissions are produced than the entire country of Uganda.
Commercial flight is not great for CO2 emissions either. Because a small group of people flies instead of walking or bicycling, a lot of CO2 emissions are produced.
I bet the sum total CO2 of commercial flight is way higher the sum total of CO2 from private flights. Neither is necessary.
> Because a small group of people flies instead of walking or bicycling
I tried walking across the Atlantic once but didn't get very far.
Yesterday I also couldn't find any commercial flights to the grocery store either, so I had to bike there.
> I bet the sum total CO2 of commercial flight is way higher the sum total of CO2 from private flights. Neither is necessary.
The notion that flying is "unnecessary" ignores those of us who immigrated across an ocean. Unless I never want to see my aging family again I will have to fly every now and then.
Because setting a minimum quality of life as being able to fly anywhere around the world is environmentally untenable for 8B people. So if it cannot be accessible to all 8B people, then it brings up the question for how to determine who deserves it and who does not.
Which then leads to who deserves first class rather than coach, which then leads to who deserves a private jet versus a plane. Or even who deserves a personal car rather than using the bus or having to carpool.
I think the reason it's discussed is "if I cannot destroy the planet in your country, I'll do that in another country (which won't change anything for the planet) where I'll go invest my money too (which means less money for your country)". And politians seem to buy on the threat, either because they truly believe it, or because they don't want to piss of the rich guys so they can get an overpaid job in one of their companies after their political career.
Because it creates an easy scapegoat for our problems. It's much easier to point to the behaviors of a very tiny group of individuals and lay all the blame on the them than it is to grapple with the real truth of climate change: that our modern society is unsustainable. Barring some grand technological revolution, reversing climate change means bringing us all back to a pre-modern society. And that really sucks.
You need somewhere to live. He needs to get somewhere.
Neither house nor private jet is an environmentally conscious choice. Either way you've both told every other inhabitant on the planet to suck it, you're getting yours.
> How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out?
You took the bait. Swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
I bought shrimp the other day, they were farmed locally, transported to Malaysia, peeled there and transported back. I bought canned pears, they traveleled the world too.
So while you are arguing and pointing fingers at other consumers over irrelevant cocempts like eating out, industry continues its destructing practices that are actually responsible for majority of emissions
I'm not pointing fingers at other consumers, I'm just pointing out the sort of things that have impact. I eat out regularly, I have a transcontinental flight planned for a holiday with my family this year. And I'm sure I've bought products that have had less than ideal CO2 footprint.
Industry and consumers will continue these destructive practices until they're forced to not engage in them.
By the way, not that it's relevant. But the locally produced tomatoes that I buy in the super market have a way higher CO2 footprint than your shrimp that have been shipped to Malaysia and back. But that might be a quirk of the country I'm in.
edit: eh unless the shrimp have been cultured in heated pools, that might be even worse than our heated tomato farms.
But your point about carbon footprint of tomato vs shrimp perfectly ullustrates that the issue is too complex to lay on the consumer.
You can't be expected to do hours of research on every grocery item you buy. And most people don't even have the required knowledge for this kind of analysis. And the companies mislead consumer on purpose.
Recently relatives sent me a viseo which claims avocados are terrible because they need much more nutrients per kilo of product than tomato does. Which is not a reasonable comparison because avocado has fats and calories and tomato is mostly water. But they were convinced by this misinformation.
So I think the responsibility lies with the industry first, and consumer second.
Correct, I'd like to add two big mundane factors; Intercontinental flights and heating and cooling your house - the second one is a big contributor to global CO2 expenditures and is strongly influenced by the size of your house.
There aren't that many private jets, the article talks amount their investments causing 40% of their emissions, so not directly causing it.
I suspect house size is mostly to blame.
But the solution is simple, tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and then use that money to clean up the pollution. If importing from a country that does not to this, tax the imports.
That would mean a carbon tax of $1000 per ton because direct air capture of CO2 and storing CO2 is on the same order of difficulty as storing nuclear waste. Possibly worse because CO2 is a gas that can leak out through tiny gaps so every storage site has to be inspected for leaks forever. Pumping CO2 underground is the equivalent of letting a tree capture CO2 with a random chance of the tree starting to rot and releasing all its CO2.
The only realistic storage option is solid carbon and that is why I put the price tag so high.
Cleaning pollution is hard, carbon capture is insanely expensive.
We could take this take money and instead of storing that carbon (as other comments suggest) we could further the transformation of grid from fossil fuels to green energy, R&D and to make impact more meaningful provide "carbon tax" to developing countries to ditch fossil fuel as so on.
That would happen automatically, as no one would buy your products as they were too expensive, the companies would race each other to install more solar and wind, and to massively reduce their emissions.
> the article talks amount their investments causing 40% of their emissions, so not directly causing it.
I don't think it's investment in real estate, but more: a 0.05% stake in GM for instance. If the 40% is as a result of investments in companies that pollute, then I fail to see the point of the article. It makes little difference if those positions are held by the richest 10% or the poorest, the environmental impact is the same.
There is a question of whether climate change is a minor concern for the wealthiest individuals, compared to the middle class. Most evidence seems to show that the rich simply do not care or at least do not feel like they should make changes to their lifestyle.
Currently taxing seems like the only viable solution, but can we really tax a private jet enough that those who use them the most would scale back? I doubt it. What would a flight from San Jose to San Francisco need to cost to stop someone like Elon Musk from firing up the jet?
Since there is no way currently of removing CO2, and we don't even know how that technology would work, there is no fair tax amount. Any amount you set will just be a robbery. Might as well make it a cent per ton, or a gorillion dollars per ton.
Presumably it would work similar to taxes on cigarettes, alcohol etc. by discouraging excessive consumption and making low CO2 alternatives much more attractive financially.
>it would work similar to taxes on cigarettes, alcohol etc
The money that these things cost to the public health service is easily quantified. I expect the taxes to reflect that.
>making low CO2 alternatives much more attractive
If there were "low CO2 alternatives" you wouldn't have to tax stuff, you could just force people to use them, and no one would really complain. Like it happened with CFCs. But taking a train instead of driving your car is not an alternative, it's rubbish.
Taking a train isn't an alternative because train tracks were literally torn from the ground. As were tram tracks.
Bikes aren't an alternative because instead of adding bike infrastructure that costs 10% of car infrastructure, the freaking 6 lane stroad needs a 7th lane, because that's going to solve traffic!
Walking isn't an alternative because US cities and suburbs are largely devoid of trees and any sort of protection from the sun or rain along their sidewalks, if they even have sidewalks to begin with. Oh, trees also make for a nice view and protect pedestrians from bad drivers, instead of lawns everywhere (!!!!). Plus trees and some bushes contain the crazy, deafening, ear damaging levels of noise cars make at speeds higher than about 70kmph.
Trees are a way to temporarily store CO2. If you just plant a massive forest and do nothing else, today's trees will eventually die, rot, and re-release all that CO2. That forest will regenerate itself if left alone and be a store of CO2, but any individual tree is lifecycle approximately zero.
I mean you're not wrong, but if we take that view the only permanent solution if to capture the CO2 and stuff it back into the ground, preferably as a relatively stable substance such as coal or oil.
Most of the worlds large forests are no more, many European countries are stripped of their old forests, so replanting those are required anyway, for other environmental concerns. They could on a permanent basis capture some percentage of the CO2. It is permanent if you view it as a forest and not individual tree.
> if we take that view the only permanent solution [is] to capture the CO2 and stuff it back into the ground
I think that's basically correct on the scale that's needed. I don't even think turning trees into building materials is enough.
Planting a lot of trees and letting forests grow has the advantage that it's obviously possible with current tech, while the forest is expanding in mass that CO2 is being scrubbed, and it's conspicuously visible to people (garnering feelings of goodwill and participation), but I don't believe the relatively small amount of incremental forest that we could reasonably create will make a meaningful change on a 100-year basis.
I think there’s some stats about the amount of co2 captured by planting an absurd amount of trees is pretty negligible
There are other reasons to plant trees (well, plant plants in general), notably around rehabilitating land that is on the verge of desertification or the like.
Trees also cool their environments through evapotranspiration as well as literally converting sunlight into sugars. There's more benefit than just carbon capture per se.
To be fair, all other carbon capture technologies are still net-positive emissions-wise, after accounting for (what's typically dismissed as mere) externalities. The fact that trees, ie forests, are net-negative and also have other benefits (QoL for lots of organisms, increased biodiversity leading to resilience, etc.) puts them at the top of the list in this category for me.
Its easy to forget - after all, this particularly heinous polluter of the world operates in near-total secrecy - but it must be taken into account in all of these assessments.
When you add its military pollution, the numbers for the American people are even more atrocious.
(Disclaimer: I've worked on products designed to reduce these emissions .. I know full well how monumental the task is ..)
The truth is that even the "extremely" rich Americans do not consume "extremely" more than the average American. Elon Musk is, give or take, a million times richer than the average American. But he doesn't consume a million times as much food as the average American, nor does he fly a million times more, nor is his living space a million times larger, etc. Sure they consume more, but not orders of magnitude more.
Jet + yacht + mansions + ... I'm fairly sure that Musk and is entourage's consumption is probably at least 1 order of magnitude higher than the regular person's. Probably 2 orders of magnitude.
Still, there aren't that many of them and we can probably create an overconsumption tax that would handle most of it. At least we could get money from them to repair the damage.
Of course the top percentage has a higher per capital footprint? Most economic activity[0] distills down to energy expenditure, and therefore emissions.
Some richer people buy carbon offsets or products from companies that claim to be zero emissions, and such. These things are expensive and so much more affordable for the wealthy. It could easily be the top 0.00001% entirely offset their emissions impact -- but probably they'd still have more externalised impact in other things, micro plastics, resource wastage, ...
It's not essential that the rich have a greater impact. Similarly, rich nations are in a better position to take action.
The line about judging investments purely from a holding standpoint is kinda fraught and I'm surprised to see it so confidently printed. What the authors are appealing to is the E in ESG investing. Freakonomics recently did a great interview with Kelly Shue about the effects of ESG investing and viable counter examples like Engine Number 1: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-e-s-g-investors-actuall...
The gist of the study that Kelly performed showed that many, if not most, companies with good E values are companies who never had environmental impact in the first place. They exist in well trodden spaces whose biggest impacts were office space and data centers. The net action of divesture causes less money available to be able to innovate, doesn't provide the kind of momentum an activist investor like Engine Number 1 can, and works by proliferating the idea that change can be claimed by effectively ignoring that problematic companies exist and will continue to exist. The last bit, for those unaware, comes from the fact that even if all cars today were made fully electric there is still a huge line of demand for essential products, like fertilizer, that include oil derivatives.
My point more broadly being in order to judge consumers you can't just look at holdings, you need to see what they're materially supporting. If they materially support the indefinite expansion of oil extraction and not trying to innovate away from oil then they're doing harm. Simply investing in a company is not indication of how an investor would vote when presented an opportunity to change the company direction by a group of activists. Engine Number 1 did exactly this with Exxon and shareholders voted as I described.
If wealth was redistributed, so would pollution. There are a lot of good reasons for wealth distribution (or to prevent its accumulation), but preventing pollution isn't one of them.
> If wealth was redistributed, so would pollution.
If wealth was redistributed, some people would be able to start affording rent and groceries (instead of have to choose one or the other): they would not necessarily be able to start flying on private jets. If wealth was redistributed, some folks may be able to afford to buy a newer more fuel efficient car (or hybrid/EV) instead of limping along in their 2004 Chevy.
The premise seems absurd: by owning stocks in companies that create pollution, the rich are responsible for said pollution but not the people who consume the companies' products.
I was hoping for a tally of extensive air travel, multiple homes, helicoptering in and out of burning Man, and similar follies.
Why is that absurd? Surely the people who own the company are more responsible for the actions of the company than people who don’t own the company. If my local barbershop where I get my hair cut turns out to be a money laundering operation, surely the owners of the barbershop are responsible for that and I am not.
Good to know! So now I can go ahead and buy a SUV, take the airplane for travelling whenever I want, put a couple of airco's in my house and I don't have to feel too responsible for the environmental consequences because the shareholders are the ones who are responsible.
The CEO gets the money, you get the product, this mutually beneficial arrangement has led to the emission of CO2. However, the CEO can't force you to buy his products, you have to do that on your own.
The difference is that the money laundering was not caused by you getting a haircut. Money laundering is not an inherent externality of getting your hair cut.
Amazon's emissions are created by producing and shipping the crap you buy. You triggered the bad action.
If that's the accepted approach, then ask what's at the root of that again: Their centralized, clickbait marketing everywhere triggers a high % of the action.
So at least, going by the logic of "who triggers" _(not going into sensibility or customer IQ/EQ, but purely sticking to the point that was OP described clearly – "who triggers")_ – the company's Marketing departments are definitely a direct trigger, and at least that portion (% of non-organic) should be held accountable by the company.
Just to make it clear: Coming from a village in rural India, I have a far tinier, frugal life footprint than most. My family takes public transport daily. It's still untrue the way the GP comment is phrased, that companies do absolutely nothing wrong and everything is only because of "people". Reality is a proportion.
We in India know tragedy of commons too well: blame everybody and nothing significant happens. It's not a solution, it's a rant.
This sort of argument is something that annoys me incredibly. There isn't a simple answer. Responsibility is shared between the shareholders for failing to demand action, the board for failing to act, the customers for supporting a climate-unfriendly company, and the government for failing to regulate well enough, and probably many others. The result is the action of a system that has complex interlinked parts. You can't just point a finger and say "no, it's their fault" and absolve all the other parties. This is a major part of why climate change is a problem - no single party can solve it without action from the rest, and most of the parties have antagonistic goals.
If you're intelligent enough to read and comment on HN, you should be capable of thinking about things in a more nuanced way.
>..action of a system that has complex interlinked parts.
This is such a well formulated response and I just wanted to include part of it that I feel clicked with me.
If I understand correctly, one entity cant take all blame because that entity also depends on actions from another entity.
The government is made up of employees, politicians, and lobbyists. The employees are trying to act, the politicians are doing whatever they need to get reelected, and the lobbyists are actively sabotaging any progress that might interfere with corporate profits.
And this comment annoys me incredibly too. (I'm not trying to fight, honestly) Yes, there no simple answer, but we have to somehow define the answer. If someone did something wrong we can indefinitely add "but someome have valid reasons to do it.." but thats does not invalidate fact that someone did something wrong and should be punished for it.
I mean, does customers/people while buying something from big company should check big company logistic, partners, technologies,travel records to define climate impact of this company?
thats does not invalidate fact that someone did something wrong and should be punished for it
No one did anything illegal, and that's the only standard that really counts. Whether something is legal is society's agreed level of whether something is wrong or not. Otherwise it can only be described as disagreeable or maybe immoral. That's why the government are partly responsible - they failed to legislate well enough.
That is true. It's called Possession with the intent to supply here in the UK ... intent is the important bit. The crime of "selling drugs" is actually "holding enough drugs that no one believes they're for personal use". Many crimes are based around 'conspiracy', or the act of planning to do something illegal, without actually doing it.
Yeah, the article pretty much proves the opposite. Namely, that the average man in the top 10% are not really much more (or, only a very little bit) responsible for pollution than the average man in the rest 90%.
> the rich are responsible for said pollution but not the people who consume the companies' products.
Neither would be. That's just how markets work. If you think the market produces more harm than good, than that is a government issue, and what you want is more regulation. Which fairly impacts both profit and consumption equally.
> I was hoping for a tally of extensive air travel, multiple homes, helicoptering in and out of burning Man, and similar follies.
Yea, I prefer a little more entertainment in my class warfare, too.
Whyy are not the externalities owned by the owner of the product?
I can think of only 2 reasons:
- the consumer was forced to purchase the product without an option with dire consequences. In this case, the dominator is responsible. This is pretty much anything your taxes buy.
- the producer lied or hid something about the product. In this case, the liar is responsible. E.g., the lies about recycling plastic, the outcome of using internal combustion engines, the safety of leaded gasoline. The list of that is simply enormous.
The entire western economic system is structured in such a way that ethical consumption is difficult and expensive. While certainly I would agree that economically advantaged groups bear some responsibility to make ethical choices about what they consume, expecting someone on minimum wage to pay extra for a lower carbon product seems unreasonable (e.g. taking a train from london to paris is often significantly more expensive than flying).
Fixing the problem of climate change requires deep economic restructuring, and much of the responsibility there lies with those who have the most power to enact these changes (i.e. politicians, ceos, large shareholders). Treating climate change as an issue of individual consumer responsibility has been a long term tactic of large polluters (e.g. oil firms) to shift attention and blame from their damaging activities.
Why does the responsibility solely fall on the product owner? Is it because the product owner is using the product for their own benefit? Is it not true, though, that the product manufacturer is also benefiting from the product’s usage? Why does this benefit not confer any responsibility?
And manufacturers have many choices in what they produce. Your answer explains why consumers have responsibility for their actions. You haven’t explained why, in your opinion, manufacturers can benefit from CO2 emissions but have zero responsibility for their choices.
It seems to mean I can rent a gas-guzzling car and drive it everywhere, while resting easy knowing all the emissions and pollution are actually the capitalists’ fault.
They have to introduce that argument in order to create a tenuous chain of logic to their goal:
> Results suggest an alternative income or shareholder-based carbon tax, focused on investments, may have equity advantages over traditional consumer-facing cap-and-trade or carbon tax options and be a useful policy tool to encourage decarbonization while raising revenue for climate finance.
If you are not an active investor in any shape or form - e.g. shaping the company/suggesting how things could be more sustainable, then you're just in it for the money/playing a game.
You're not an active participant functionally in society - as a shareholder/investor I'm pretty sure you can directly influence company policy if you extend yourself. You may not be able to dictate it if you do not have decision-making power, but nevertheless your words would most likely be more valued than the average person's.
People are assaulted by ad campaigns. Advertisement companies and corporations have subverted or even hacked the average person's brain - you are convinced in 50+ different directions to buy X product, get the latest version, or get a new subscription. It's easy to depend on corporations to solve all your problems. It's a carefully crafted dopamine rush; seeing the ad(s), buying the product, using unsustainable services like Amazon or even the major shipping companies to ship your item from wherever with copious amounts of emissions.
Do the people want a new iPhone every year? Well, even if they didn't, they are coerced to upgrade by the cellular phone companies (who probably recycle to some degree if you trade-in, but I digress). Or - they are convinced by Apple themselves - which is some sort of cult in its own right.
Planned obsolescence should be illegal, and I'm sure these mostly wasteful practices are not necessary in the grand scheme of things.
Apple has done a lot of harmful things to the phone to perpetuate this business model: removing the ability to easily replace the battery as a consumer/non-licensed repairman (which is probably a major cause of failure/new phone purchases) and AFAIK not allowing aftermarket/third-party components with a DRM restriction (e.g. screens). Why get your phone repaired (or mess around with their self-repair kit) when you can get yet another phone that was senselessly made because one thing got a little better. I wonder how many phones exist currently in the United States vs. our population. Something to look into I suppose.
But regardless, the biggest sickness (in my mind) of the US with how we do business is the fact that we choose to clog the highways with trucks loaded to the brim/airplanes to ship products domestically/commercially.
I'm only a layman, but I can't imagine that's an efficient use of energy when compared to alternatives like high speed rail - which is something we absolutely need to consider investing in as a society if we ever want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. For transportation we need to consider this, and most assuredly for freight. If we could lay rail way back then; we can now + we can 1) plan it exponentially better with many technology advancements 2) fully power these services with renewable energy.
The best I can do as a non-investor, as somebody who has little resources/no clout, is this post right here. In a world of unelected corporations (read: anti-competitive monopolies) who essentially govern over me (legalized bribery/lobbying), rape the environment and make people dependent on them, and nobody in "power" is truly playing hardball with them and their unlimited greed -- I'm pretty helpless to do anything, but go with the flow (besides, though very unlikely, get filthy rich from a lottery ticket and emulate Musk). That's what the average American does, even the average voter who votes blue.
If you have money, you can effect change. If you know people with money, you can effect change.
>If you have money, you can effect change. If you know people with money, you can effect change. //
How's your record go on this. Even with family members (not rich, but much richer than me) my influence is essentially zero versus the influence advertising has on them.
That probably pales against the influence those who pay them have.
Perhaps you meant "if you know people, with money, who are already won over to your cause; then you can effect change by partnering with them". Which is effectively "rich people can use they're influence on poor people, and their resources, to effect change".
Are there laws against collaborating with other shareholders/investors to push an agenda (e.g. green energy)?
Just as strikes by employees cause major companies to bend, I'd imagine the same would be true if there was a consensus among those who have a stake in the company/work there. I'm not suggesting that there necessarily needs to be strikes or market manipulation, just that applying focused, intense pressure collectively would cause the companies to bend. It may not be the smartest thing to do with your money in the short-term, but we desperately need to (yesterday) rally behind things like green energy and sustainability.
Changing hearts, moving minds, changing policy individually is hard. I do agree with you. I personally choose to reject the learned helplessness instilled by only voting correctly by calling people to action - to encourage discourse among their peers. If you're knowledgeable or have specific insight, speak out, make appearances or encourage and lift up those who are willing/capable to be in the spotlight.
I do absolutely realize that whatever I do is a drop in the bucket because I am essentially a nobody and am physically unwell. My heart is hardened by this backwards world, and I probably don't do many favors for the things I am passionate about because I rarely sugarcoat how I express myself. Still, I do what I can when I think can be a rational voice.
Putting yourself out on a limb - being gutsy and inspiring others, is something that has been forgotten largely in part (in my mind) due to the shattering of the middle class and because of mainstream media (and the divisiveness they instill).
But I'd like to say that moving forward as a society, in a way that makes everybody happy - with plentiful benefits to our economy, is something that only people with stakes in absolutely unethical companies (e.g. companies involved with fossil fuels) would openly take issue with.
The research is pretty clear: we need to shed this dirty habit if we want the Earth to be a good place.
Customers/the many should be more active in their purchases/the way they vote. But as I explained, advertisements largely brainwash people, and there aren't enough alternatives to simply boycott these companies.
Intelligent people, skilled people, (edit:) and people with money need to take the stage and move this world forward.
A lot of progressives are angry at the cheap plastic crap that Action sells but they conveniently forget that poor people don't scuba dive in the Carribbean much.
The argument is that we’re going after the wrong things, usually. Of course we want to improve things across all vectors, but we’ve been disproportionately asking the lower and middle classes to make sacrifices; and have been too lenient with corporations and the ultra-rich. Most pollution isn’t caused directly by the things we’ve been fighting.
So you thing that `progressives` are going just after these things?
There are many comments in this thread that are just blame shifting from one side to another. That is why there is not going to be done anything about it. There is always someone else to blame.
probably yeah, and it makes sense as long as you stay in the bubble of thinking that your plastic trash doesn't get shipped to some place to be dumped and forgotten
If I am understanding correctly, this is a very dishonest study:
If Elon Musk owns 30% of Tesla, and Tesla produces 1 Gigaton of CO2 each year the study would assign 300 Megatons to Musk, even though the cars are produced for someone else(!).
When I watched this TV show where real estate agents were selling massive houses to the rich and famous in Beverly Hills, expansive multi-million dollar homes, I just though of all the concrete and materials used to build such homes (all of which emit CO2 when made) and the heating and cooling bills associated with that.
It's all unnecessary stuff, you don't need a collosal mansion, that's the sort of thing which contributes to these figures. Their extremely vapid, "luxurious" lives ... It's sad
Waste is a well defined concept to most people - if you have several houses and sevrral cars that you cannot possibly use most of the year, thats a waste.
And what are people doing in detached homes that they cannot be doing in dense multifamily housing?
Space itself is a luxury (it has a knock on effect of increasing the distance everything within and around that space has to travel).
I might define multiple unused houses as not being a waste just like someone with multiple unused bedrooms defines it as not being waste. A “spare” house and an “spare” bedroom. And vice versa.
Uhm, no. Current, America isn’t even responsible for 40% of the planet’s warming. Therefore, 10% of America cannot be responsible for 40%. I assume they mean 10% of america is responsible is for 40% of america’s planet heating. Which is of no surprise.
