i pledge to improve the environment by exclusively making good posts
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And people come to view leftism as the Feel Guilty All The Time folks, when you really want it to be Feel Empowered To Make Change.
guilt is a totally healthy thing to have on a sliding scale, better guilt than rationalizing opposition to everything
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Both individual and systemic changes are important and they should not really be opposed
Why not both
Individual consumption choices are important because changing the law to make governments and companies behave better won’t change the issue that western-style rampant consumerism is unsustainable and our individual ways of living actually does need to change!
Planes will continue to be absolutely terrible for the environment there
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yeah people who feel guilty all the time are too busy worrying about themselves and how they appear to others to actually get anything done anyway. let them wallow in self pity
Dunno about nerve damage, but I used to have an exercise bike with a standard seat that made my groin numb after 10-15 minutes, so I replaced the seat with what I think was an ISM Touring Saddle or something very similar. It was really comfortable and I never felt numbness again.
oh cute! yeah that’s probably fine
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Yeah seats with a split or channel in them, have been around for a long time now. Specialized was one of the first brands to do it. Probably like 17 years ago.
If y’all are gonna claim things like this, you have to give some specifics and/or do some math for me and/or specify if you’re talking in general theoretical terms or in practical use.
Like, are you just talking about one or two hour flights? Even so, I think you need to do the math on emmissions for 200-500 people individually driving 12-24 hours. Even with buses, I don’t know that planes are a bad environmental deal. Trains are almost certainly better for those distances, but if you’re talking about currently available consumer choices, I don’t think most short plane routes that are mirrored by train routes.
And yeah: when it comes to 5-24 hour flights, I’m pretty sure a half-full jetliner is more emmissions efficient than hundreds of people taking combinations of cars, public transit, and boats for those long distances, unless there is some kind of mostly train option. Of course, even then…can you really ask someone to take three days to travel somewhere when they could take one?
The short term ideal would be to strictly regulate private jets and helicopters. Longterm: yeah there are probably lots of instances in which bullet trains could compete with relatively short train routes and maybe pull some power from green grids.
imo the issue with planes isn’t just about how emissions competitive they are (I know enough Europeans who are adamant that there’s no good reason not to take a train for a continental journey that I’d rather not contest that one given the state of the rest of the world’s infrastructure) but the extent to which some professions (like mine) trivialize air travel as professionally indispensable when it really shouldn’t be. asking people to significantly curtail flight seems impossible from the point of view of technological progress, but treating it as less of a given is overdue. “I’m successful in my career therefore I fly a lot” is one of the more glaringly obvious neoliberal sins.
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100% what Felix is saying though I’d say this also applies to personal trips too.
Air traffic has dramatically raised in recent years and is projected to continue to grow
Flying to Dubai is more efficient than flying somewhere close by but it’s still worse for the environment. The question is why should people fly so frequently to Dubai at all?
Everybody in the west flies to the other side of the planet for one week on holidays like it’s nothing when it should be a big deal
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can we really foster the sense of global solidarity to achieve support for things like multilateral treaties and schemes for the betterment of us on the planet without affordable ability to chuck people all over the world to see that hey there are humans here and they’re just like me innit
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I’m hoping China at some point goes “Okay, that’s enough pollution for us. No more gas cars, no more coal power, we’re doing 100% nuclear and renewables now.” and starts using it as a wedge in all their diplomacy.
As much as I hate the idea of authoritarian rule I think of all the countries they have the highest chance of actually doing that, esp. because it’s not democratic.
At first I was going to say this is a pipe dream, because President Xi literally thinks that his entire government will collapse if
A) too much ideological or cultural heterogeny is allowed.
B) they have a down quarter.
But I looked into it a little, and it seems like there has been some posturing from China about slowing growth and trading rapid GDP growth for slower “green” growth. This would be a pretty smart move, because their current rate of growth is completely unsustainable, whereas a move to green development allows the PRC to transition into a self-conception as being better than the West in a sort of moral sense.
So…yeah…interesting. If anybody has any links to an expert on Chinese economics, talking on this topic it would be interesting to read/hear more.
This report is pretty neat: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf
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I dunno. This seems like you weighing anecdotal experiences heavily. Meanwhile, I work in the luxury travel world, so my anecdotal perspective is based on seeing how common private jet travel actually is.
Each one of those (perhaps) frivolous commercial business flights produces about 10x less emissions than an equivalent private flight. In a private flight with 2 passengers, they’re responsible for something like 35x more emissions than if they had flown commercial. And owners of private jets generally like to keep them in use, either as moneymakers or to curry favor (if only there were a story in the news that dovetailed into that last point…). Think of all the daily flights politicians are taking.
Companies and individuals have long gotten tax breaks for buying private jets, but under Trump’s new tax plan, many companies can now write the cost off completely.
So I’m inclined to think that private air travel is a small cut that bleeds almost as much as a gaping wound.
And–this can’t be stressed enough–for most private travel, there’s no reason that the person couldn’t have just flown commercial. So when I talk about focusing on private air travel, I’m talking about focusing on the area that is most clearly and obviously inherently wasteful.
I dunno, this becomes a pretty abstract discussion of efficacy at this point. Your point is based on the idea that these consumer flights are frivolous, which leads you into austerity thinking that I don’t consider productive.
I really think you should lay out specific examples of what you think people should do instead of flying. Are you saying that people should consider taking the train between European countries instead of flights? That’s…fine. But it’s a super-Eurocentric view that has little if anything to do with the vacation habits of the rest of the world (who don’t have train options for their vacation destinations). Are you saying that people should vacation more domestically? Okay, I guess… Though…perhaps there’s something to be said for the middle class broadening their horizons (more on that below)? Are you just talking about business travel? For that I’d want to know how big a problem that is vs. tourism, because I truly have no idea. I could imagine it being 50/50 or 80/20 in either direction. Or are you saying that people should abstain from travel altogether?
If you want to decrease general commercial flight, the way to do it isn’t by encouraging consumers to fly less. For the average consumer, a flight is already a large, carefully weighed decision. It’s no impulse purchase. On the other hand, it is an impulse purchase for many companies, but in order to get a bureaucracy to consider this as a global issue, you would need a lot of activism.
So…the solution for both problems would probably just be to tax some aspect of flight in a way that is passed onto the consumer.
However, unless tourism is excepted from these taxes (it’s just a business tax or whatever), your stated goal is to chill middle class travel, which doesn’t seem like a public good to me, if it can be avoided. Local tourism industries aside, for the average person, minor immersion in another culture is a formative experience that can create positive ideological change. Just as we can cut social programs to curtail government expenditure, we should first ask ourselves if we can cut military spending instead.
So…before we discuss shaming average people out of a holiday (or telling them to further culturally isolate), I would want to see the numbers directly connecting emissions to the personal choices of certain cohorts (average vacationer vs. business traveler vs. private travel).
But…again: almost all private travel is essentially frivolous. Why not hit there the hardest?
(Also, we might consider some regulations to limit the number of flights offered by airlines, as half-full planes are quite wasteful, and I think this would probably be largely invisible to average consumers and so probably wouldn’t chill travel.)
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And before y’all say, “Why not both?” in response to my post above, please note that no one itt other than me even brought up how inherently wasteful private air travel is in comparison to other travel. You brought up “air travel” as if all people who fly are equally responsible. But that is simply not the case. Some people are 10-35 times more responsible. And yet the current national discourse seems to completely elide that distinction. You know where I found articles about private air travel emissions? Forbes and The Economist: both saying it’s not such a big deal.
And that is the point.
Consumer choice activism plays into a narrative that just so happens to be very convenient for powerful people and also counterproductive to actual change (because actual change is necessarily inconvenient for powerful people).
And–again–in 2017 all travel (that includes both cars and air travel) in the US accounted for 25% of carbon emissions, whereas “industry” accounted for 22%.
Sure you can talk about consumer choice activism as a “why not both?” thing to do in addition to policy advocacy. But we all know that the “air in the room” for these issues is limited, and spending any amount telling people what lightbulbs they should buy is a tremendous waste. You know what will get them to buy the eco-friendly lightbulbs? The packaging that says they’re eco-friendly and the overall savings on their electricity bill. That machine is in progress; it no longer needs your advocacy.
At scale, consumer choice activism in genuinely harmful, not simply because it stresses out people who don’t need more stress in their lives, but because it massively distracts from the real problems and the real solutions. I would recommend that ANY energy you spend talking about consumer choices instead be spent on policy. If the extent of your advocacy is just occasional Facebook posts, then why not make those posts about how much of a cut-and-dry evil private air travel is, rather than how much of an ambiguous evil vacation travel is? If your activism goes beyond that, then certainly put that energy in a more useful direction like calling legislators or protesting, etc.
Consumer choice activism is all about giving people the illusion that they have direct control over climate change and thus results in distracting them from the indirect control they actually have.
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At IKEA yesterday they had the typical kid’s rug with the aerial view of the town but they had constructed a figure eight rail line on top of all of the roads
The Swedes are fomenting a generation of choo choo heads on American soil
When I was a kid I was obsessed with the LEGO “Life on Mars” series that featured pneumatic transportation tubes a la futurama.
In conclusion I have to really really work to not blow up when people talk about plastic straws, like, bite down on something
Let’s start with banning glitter
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I feel like all the generations after the Boomers in America missed out on the choo choo head life, so I am glad someone is trying to bring it back. But let me tell you, those Boomers had some real heads in them. Hanging out in my dad’s shop talking to model train dudes was always a good time.
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I am both the subject of this phenomenon and fascinated by it but lots of autistic American kids were obsessed with trains even with the table scraps of Amtrak and freight rail. Like, is there something inherent to trains? (eg predictable path, mesmerizing mechanical movement, etc)
My first trip to Japan was 0% anime 10% food 10% music and 80% riding every kind of train
Free Darius
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Yeah, no idea why the train thing happens, but thanks to my dad, I inherrited a bit of it and spent a lot of time on trains in Japan because fuck yeah trains.