What if Everyone Did Something to Slow Climate Change? Researchers are looking at the impact that individuals’ actions can have on reducing carbon emissions — and the best ways to get people to adopt - eviltoast
  • nofob@lemmy.today
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    10 hours ago

    Why do you think BP produces emissions? They may be evil, but it’s not out of malice, it’s for profit. People, like the 26 million residents of Australia, pay BP to give them more fossil fuels.

    A top-down response, where governments just outlaw all extraction and burning of fossil fuels, would be a lovely, quick solution to the climate crisis. By all means, try and make that happen, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

    One thing you can do today to make an impact is to adjust your lifestyle to give less money to the fossil fuel industry. An individual carbon footprint is small compared with a company, just like the money they give to BP is relatively small, when compared with their total profits. But when you add up all the customers, their money adds up to the revenue of the industry, and their carbon footprints add up to the footprints of the relevant companies.

    • Robust Mirror@aussie.zone
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      9 hours ago

      My mum never owned a car, we walked, biked, bus’d or train’d every day of my life. Because I was used to it and don’t have a lot of money, I don’t own a car either. I don’t know what exactly you want me to do to give them less money, but what I do know is me walking everywhere every day has influenced exactly 0 people to do the same, and it’s affected global carbon emissions by such a small fraction it can barely be measured.

      It’s not relatively small, it’s essentially non existent, and there’s no way as an individual to force others to give up their conveniences, any more than an individual can have the government ban all fossil fuels.

      How much profit do you possibly think Australia provides to BP and other companies? How much of Australia doing business with them contributes to their global emissions? Because the fact is the entirety of Australia could return to tribalism with no modern technology and it would barely move the needle on either global profits or global emissions. Even a country that has 5% global emissions wouldn’t achieve much by going to 0. It’s near meaningless.