I'm happy to pay the extra cost to heat the room I'm in with a space heater in the winter time.
I'm happy to pay the extra cost
As an aside, we've got the externalities of climate change all wrong. Oil is a non renewable resource. We can't just give the planet a bunch of money and have it produce more oil for us to burn when we're uncomfortable. This cost is not really borne by you; it'll be borne by future generations.
If you care about climate change, you should be advocating for completely green electricity generation, and carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. That would completely solve the fundamental problem.
Our society is fundamentally based on energy, and people like to use energy towards things that give them comfort. Taking away comfort is going to be a "nope" for most people.
It's unfortunate, but it does appear to have the opposite effect on some section of the populace. They just get pissed off and consume more out of spite. One thing to temper that is to massively tax (over-) consumption. Use taxes tend to be regressive, so to avoid targeting the poor, there needs to be some thought put into the tax structure.
And thus create a Veblen good, or a political status good.
Big trucks are a status symbol in part because they are gas guzzlers.
> completely green electricity generation
The problem with green electricity is that there is no such thing as green electricity.
The wind turbines? Massive blocks of concrete in the ground, heavy machinery to put it in, lifespan not so great. Solar? Destabilizes the grid, takes plenty of minerals to produce, do you know what happens with solar panels after their lifespan?
The only "green" electricity is one that isn't even produced to begin with.
Thing is with wind and solar, that’s the total harm done. When averaged out over the MWh they produce, you realise that in comparison to coal, oil or gas based power their CO2 impact is utterly negligible.
Is there more that can be done to reduce it further? Sure.
But saying because there is some lifecycle CO2 in their usage means they should be considered harmful is like saying cycling to work is harmful just like taking a helicopter, because rubber tyres aren’t entirely environmentally friendly. It’s honestly that absurd a comparison.
> The wind turbines? Massive blocks of concrete in the ground, heavy machinery to put it in, lifespan not so great. Solar? Destabilizes the grid, takes plenty of minerals to produce, do you know what happens with solar panels after their lifespan?
These are all things that can be recycled given the correct application of energy. Not profitably as a standalone enterprise of course, but energetically positive in comparison to what a given installation produces in its lifetime. Therefore the added cost can be baked into the final cost of the energy produced.
> The only "green" electricity is one that isn't even produced to begin with.
Most of us don't care for your extreme version of "green", so I'll point back to my original comment. You're not going to be able to convince people to willingly give up comfort, so focus on reducing the impacts of people deciding to live that way. "Much better" is worse than "perfect", but "much better" is still better than what we're doing today. You're not going to get "perfect" unless humanity is wiped out completely.
You know without any energy generation limitations, I once calculated that we could grow enough food to feed the world in less than 10000 skyscraper farms and return all those millions of hectares of cropland, pastures and plantations that we have terraformed over thousands of years to nature.
Yes, but we can try to do something about those "Green" activists who prevent the proliferation of the cleanest power on Earth: nuclear energy. Look at what did they do to Germany!
"Has Russia Been Financing Western Environmentalism?" (2022) [0]
"Putin Is Funding Green Groups to Discredit Natural Gas Fracking" (2017) [1]
"German green group branded a Russian ‘puppet’ over Nord Stream II gas pipeline" (2021) [2]
[0]: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18330/russia-funding-envi...
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
[2]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/german-green-group-brande...
Increased low carbon energy by more than the first twelve years of the messmer plan in spite of being betrayed by the SDR immediately and then having the conservatives cut funding further?
It's not customer's duty to pay more than they are asked, either in money or in inconvenience.
Citizen has no meaning in context of economy (except for taxation). So using it in context of economic activity mixes up two unrelated things.
Bad actors in the economy tend to exploit such mix ups to shift the burden away from them.
Read up on introduction and promotion of the concept of individual carbon footprint. Or the reality of recycling which was promoted as alternative to producers of plastic being directly responsible for introducing plastic into the environment.
What's the point of resources if they're not consumed? If we follow your advice to its logical conclusion, then we'd have oils that are consumed by nobody, because every generation doesn't want to consume it for fear of "cost [...] borne by future generations".
Just to add some nuance, this seems to imply everyone has the same environmental psychology. There are lots of (often competing) perspectives. If you have a utilitarian environmental psychology, you may think resources are there to be consumed for human benefit. If you instead have a stewardship environmental psychology, you may feel its your duty to protect those resources from being pilfered.
Stephen Kellert has a good description of these different perspectives in "The Biological Basis for Human Values of Nature". Some of his categories include: utilitarian, naturalistic, ecologistic-scientific, aesthetic, symbolic, humanistic, moralistic, dominionistic, and negativistic. Other researchers define the human-environment interactions differently. For example, [1] defines them in terms of master, apathy, steward, partner, participant, and user. So it's not hard to see why people's thoughts differ on this issue. Like with most human value systems, it's not likely that there is a singular "right" perspective.
[1] https://www.academia.edu/download/53480185/Yoshida_et_al._20...
That's not really the logical conclusion of my advice. In actuality, there's a lot of possibilities between "I'm the one buying it, so I'm the only one dealing with the consequences" and "Not use any oil at all". But I get it, it's easier to argue against strawmen.
It's also easier to feel smug and accuse people of strawmanning when you're engaging in motte and bailey :^)
Accusations of fallacy aside, what is your actual argument then? That there's some non-zero harm inflicted on future generations when we consume fossil fuels, because they won't be able to use them anymore? That would seem like the motte argument, because it's trivially true, but what does this translate in terms of how we should behave? A cost of $0.000001 would be trivially easy to defend, but also means I can turn my thermostat to 78F guilt free.
You also argue that we've "we've got the externalities of climate change all wrong", implying that the future generations not being able to use fossil fuels is somehow worse than people being displaced by climate change today. What is your basis for that?
(Using oil for heating is outrageous, of course; as Mendeleev have said, it is exactly the same as heating your fireplace with money bills).
this is because we don't use very much nuclear power. There is currently enough known uranium reserves to provide 2 years of global energy production at current rates.
Everyone's all "we must care about the environment" but then you ask them why Germany isn't reforesting (after razing the cities they built on old forests) and why Europe is deforesting at an accelerated rate and it's all this and that.
We could easily have abundant nuclear energy so that “home heating” would be a non-issue and trivial cost.
It goes against common sense but is human nature.
I don't fault them for it, I'm guilty of it in some situations.
Moving the blame from corporations to the individual is how companies have avoided doing anything to combat climate change and only serves to make the individuals who do the blaming self righteous and the ones being blamed bad.
In fact, the person trying to shift blame here is you: by downplaying the smaller yet still significant role of individuals in a sustainable future.
My favorite t-shirt is now a lightweight filson 100% wool shirt that is just as comfortable by itself at 80 deg as it is under a button up shirt at 30 deg.
And doesn't get cold when wet like cotton does.
It really does fit the "life changing" topic if you've never tried it.
https://www.filson.com/tops/210g-merino-wool-short-sleeve-cr...
> Merino wool is able to ditch the itch thanks to its fiber's smaller diameter, or being “finer”. These fibers are more flexible and softly bend when pressed against the skin and, therefore, don't itch like other wool.
https://www.smartwool.com/discover/why-merino-wool/merino-wo...
(But if you've got some kind of super-insulated house, then never mind.)
Plus, y’know, winter clothes are the best clothes. Tweeds, woolens, gloves, coats, scarves, hats: all these are great!
I was amazed to find out that even in this air conditioned age we spend far more heating buildings than air conditioning them (four times as much, according to the first Google hit I just found). That means that it makes a lot more sense to dress warmly in the winter than lightly in the summer.
"radiant IR" (red glowing elements) type heaters are wonderful tools for heating the body instead of the air.
