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Americans misunderstand their contribution to deteriorating environment
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Corporations aren't forcing you to buy a bigger house, a bigger car, to eat meat or to fly across the country regularly, those are personal consumption choices that are driving climate change. You can blame the corporations for pushing you to consume with advertising or not doing there best to minimize the impact of that consumption but fundamentally there's no way to make a carbon neutral meat burger that the average person could consume regularly. It's not just corporations that benefit from ignoring climate costs, the average consumer does as well
Sure, all those things can minimize impact, and together we can all effect maybe one and a half a percent of a change. Alternately, we could hold companies responsible for their illegal and absurd amounts of emissions and knock a good 20-30% off.
Could you please give some sources instead of pulling numbers out of thin air. Because the numbers don't seem to align with what your saying since industry only accounts for 23 % of emissions, so unless holding companies responsible includes completely eliminating them and there emissions you aren't going to get a 20-30 % reduction in emissions. That 20-30% your talking about can actually be obtained if Americans just stopped driving and flying. Hell we can get almost double that "measly 1.5%" by Americans just driving 10% less then they are. Cars and air travel are emitting just as much as those evil corporations everyone likes to blame, and to stop climate change we'll need to rein in both. Thats just cars, it doesn't account for other consumer choices like eating meat and fast fashion that also have huge impacts.
Ah, you're making the traditional error here- you're assigning only 22% to the industry, and thinking only people transport items or use electricity.
Most of the 'electricity' emissions on that nice pie graph isn't joe bob's playstation, it's industrial power. And while a larger percentage of that 'travel' graph is people rather than train/semi/etc output for corporate use, corporations ARE responsible for the deplorable state of american transportation, as they've intentionally destroyed all our public transportation options and endlessly pushed to make things less safe and more profitable like stroads, the invention of the concept of jaywalking to shift blame for terrible drivers, and intentional lobbying to increase overreliance on cars.
We COULD drop that transportation amount, but again, that would mean less profits for industry, which spends millions if not billions ensuring that can never happen. Right now we can't reduce transportation emissions, because it would leave people stranded. We need to improve things past requiring cars for everything, and that can only be done when corporations are held accountable for their actions.
Again please cite some sources and look at the actual data. Adding in electricity and looking at end use does up industrial but only up to 30% . It ups commercial and residential far more to 31%, your right though most of the electricity isn't going towards joes PlayStation it's going towards heating and cooling joes house.
Again personal consumption choices have an effect on this, even barring the choice of where to live the amount of energy needed to heat and cool a home goes up as the size of the building increases. Heating and cooling a large detached single family home is way less efficient then heating and cooling a small apartment. Like a big truck no one's forcing you to get a big house and the choice you make has climate impacts.
I agree auto companies are largely responsible for the mess we're in with transportation, but the solution isn't to just put our hands up and say we need to hold them accountable, that won't happen in the current environment. We all need to make the personal choice to drive less, and take more public transit. If public transit numbers go up then politicians will actually start prioritizing it and improvements will be made which will cause more people to take transit causing a positive feedback loop. If traffic numbers go down as well the government won't have to spend money on adding another lane to the freeway and would save on road maintenance due to cars wearing them down less, allowing more money to be available for transit and adding to the feedback loop.
To kickstart that feedback loop though we'll need people to choose to take a more inconvenient transport option at the beginning, and you aren't going to get people to make that choice by saying there actions don't matter and that it's all the corporations fault so you driving a mile to CVS is fine.
And again, you're attributing residential use to what is mainly corporate/industry use. HVAC for warehouses, data centers, skyscrapers, etc are far more than residential.
As for claiming we need to change before corporations do, that's just bootlicking. You say we need to use less convenient methods of transportation to make a statement, but the problem is there _are not more inconvenient methods available to most people _. And they cannot simply stop traveling. Increasing amounts of public transit does not increase funding- it reduces funding. Just look at the USPS. Increase the use- and thus revenue- of a service just means Republican lawmakers get greedy for privatizing that income and we're right back to where we were, but two steps back.
This needs changed at the top, because bottom-up change will simply be suppressed, ignored, or subverted. And the only way top down change happens is if those at the top feel they will lose their money or their power by not supporting it- that is the ONLY way change from the bottom happens- by the bottom threatening to remove the top, via voting for example