Climate Change Thoughts
Jan. 4th, 2022 02:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorJust me thinking about climate change, and what to do about it.
I often wish there was more I could do to help with climate change. There are many things I do as an individual, and I do think encouraging certain lifestyle actions has its place-- in fact I don't really think we can address the climate crisis and have individuals make no effort towards this in their personal lives.
On the other hand, these problems absolutely aren't going to be fixed if there's not a societal shift away from fossil fuels and away from unsustainable consumption as a whole. Our economy is fundamentally broken and is destroying our entire world, and individuals like me opting out of what we can is not going to be adequate because there are too many things about the way our world is built that we can't opt out of.
For example, I don't own or drive a car, but every item I buy was shipped to me using transportation that largely uses fossil fuels. Furthermore, even before that transportation happens, nearly every item we purchase has required fossil fuel inputs of some form. And sometimes I've had to have other people drive cars for me due to the lack of any other reasonable method to get from point A to point B, which still uses fossil fuels exceedingly inefficiently as cars are the worst offenders in this regard.
And I have to use electricity in my apartment, with which I have little choice in regards to whether it was designed or built in a power-saving way or not. I also have little choice but to use a lithium ion battery to power my phone, an item which promises to cause its own intense problems whether we ultimately move away from fossil fuels or not (already there are conflicts brewing over control of lithium deposits and I have little optimism about how battery waste is handled given what I know about other electronics 'recycling' programs). Any future wars that result from this will, in addition to their unacceptable destruction of human life, also further contribute to that loss through their certain environmental degradation. And any new mines built for this will likely also cause both direct human harm and environmental harm.
The solutions to these problems and others wont be found through individual choice, even if some few individuals can manage to opt out of some of these specific choices or others, because they will not be able to opt out of all such choices, and as a society, most people can't realistically do so. We can't adequately address the climate crisis until these things are feasible in a widespread way, which requires major institutional changes that can't be implemented merely on an individual level.
I often wish there was more I could do to help with climate change. There are many things I do as an individual, and I do think encouraging certain lifestyle actions has its place-- in fact I don't really think we can address the climate crisis and have individuals make no effort towards this in their personal lives.
On the other hand, these problems absolutely aren't going to be fixed if there's not a societal shift away from fossil fuels and away from unsustainable consumption as a whole. Our economy is fundamentally broken and is destroying our entire world, and individuals like me opting out of what we can is not going to be adequate because there are too many things about the way our world is built that we can't opt out of.
For example, I don't own or drive a car, but every item I buy was shipped to me using transportation that largely uses fossil fuels. Furthermore, even before that transportation happens, nearly every item we purchase has required fossil fuel inputs of some form. And sometimes I've had to have other people drive cars for me due to the lack of any other reasonable method to get from point A to point B, which still uses fossil fuels exceedingly inefficiently as cars are the worst offenders in this regard.
And I have to use electricity in my apartment, with which I have little choice in regards to whether it was designed or built in a power-saving way or not. I also have little choice but to use a lithium ion battery to power my phone, an item which promises to cause its own intense problems whether we ultimately move away from fossil fuels or not (already there are conflicts brewing over control of lithium deposits and I have little optimism about how battery waste is handled given what I know about other electronics 'recycling' programs). Any future wars that result from this will, in addition to their unacceptable destruction of human life, also further contribute to that loss through their certain environmental degradation. And any new mines built for this will likely also cause both direct human harm and environmental harm.
The solutions to these problems and others wont be found through individual choice, even if some few individuals can manage to opt out of some of these specific choices or others, because they will not be able to opt out of all such choices, and as a society, most people can't realistically do so. We can't adequately address the climate crisis until these things are feasible in a widespread way, which requires major institutional changes that can't be implemented merely on an individual level.