Moaning about individual "cognitive dissonance" is absolute nonsense when talking about global scale problems that require policy solutions. The activists' intuitions are more correct than yours, I'd wager. Climate change is not an engineering problem.
If they were protesting the government to massively increase oil taxes then you might have a point. Alas, they don’t have any economic intuition.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/11/climate-...
> The international agency’s analysis, in contrast, assumes countries will follow through with more climate-friendly policies and renew the ones they already have on the books. “Look how different things could be,” Bowman said. The difference is night and day, despair and hope.
> Policy, and only policy, appears to make that difference. It represents the choices that our leaders make about when to finally change course. Naughten, the Antarctic-ice scientist, reminded me that “climate is a spectrum; it isn’t an on/off switch.” Whenever we do make a different set of decisions, ones that make the math properly compute, we will be saving what we have left, preventing some layer of livability from being irrecoverably sloughed off and swept away.
Is it more or less hypocritical than someone who pays lip service to climate change, flies 3-4 times a year and doesn't go to sit ins? Their total overall alignment of their actions and their words are probably greater than vast majority of people who also don't even consider emissions from flying but say they care about climate change.
It's legitimate to agitate for change at a higher level while maintaining individual behaviours that align with status quo.
That’s like saying the catholic priest is more aligned with their sermons, even if they’re having random hookups too?
I'm bothered that anti-oil westerners are unaware of how heavily their existence is subsidized by oil. Every part of life we take for granted exists because of readily available petroleum. Western students are taught the environmental consequences of fossil fuel burning without ever really learning the degree to which every first-world nation in the world relies on petroleum for plastic, fertilizer, fuel for shipping food/fuel/goods, etc. For the record, I would like to divest from oil wherever possible, but I am actually ready to give up many of the modern benefits of the oil-consuming first world. I don't think the people I know who sit in at the banks are.
