Archive link. Observations from a journalist about the incongruous reality of our ever-increasing emissions despite headlines full of scientific breakthroughs on battery or carbon capture...
Archive link. Observations from a journalist about the incongruous reality of our ever-increasing emissions despite headlines full of scientific breakthroughs on battery or carbon capture technology.
This year of fires and floods is on track to be the hottest year on record. And the global ocean, which absorbs the preponderance of the excess energy in the global system, is heating at an accelerating rate; the ocean was the warmest on record in August 2023, according to NOAA. In all likelihood, with El Niño persisting into the new year, 2024 will probably be even warmer.
As the global community prepares for COP28, the next round of international climate negotiations that begins later this month, France, Ireland, Kenya, Spain, and 12 other countries have called for a global accord to phase out fossil-fuel production. There is little doubt that this is necessary; adding more fossil fuels to the pipeline is quite obviously counterproductive to slowing, then stopping, climate change.
Yet in the U.S. alone, a country responsible for at least 20 percent of historical emissions, the current buildout of liquified-natural-gas infrastructure, intended to export the country’s plentiful gas, is the largest fossil-fuel expansion proposed in the world—and it’s happening under a president who recently passed the most impactful climate legislation the country has ever seen. That climate math isn’t adding up. China, which is responsible for about 12 percent of historical emissions according to Alex Wang, who studies Chinese environmental governance at UCLA, has one of the largest clean-power programs in the world. But the country is at the same time dramatically expanding its coal production.
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.
Emphasis mine. Vote for people who want to implement radical environmental policy to minimize the effects of climate change. The long-term economic impacts of pollution and severe weather are almost certainly far worse for you and your community than any temporary localized economic slowdown from pivoting to renewables. It is unacceptable for our society to continue relying on fossil fuels for energy, and it is not constructive for individuals to support that reliance politically. In a democracy, your opinion as an individual is relevant.
[Tangent notice] I also think it is valuable to live your own life as an individual that is at least relatively environmentally sustainable, or meaningfully attempts to be given your unique circumstances. Some portion of educated leftists are fond of vaguely blaming "big corporations" for wreaking environmental havoc but do not seem to acknowledge that their spending habits directly fuel that damage (for example, I have often written here about the extremely polluting and destructive manufacturing process of electric automobiles). It's pointless for me to moralize too much because everyone reading this is either on board with the philosophy of "doing what you can do to the extent you can do it" or completely ideologically opposed to changing their lifestyle for environmental/economic reasons. I don't care what you do personally because I don't know you personally - and it's not like I am a magic forest creature whose lifestyle emits no greenhouse gases (would be nice though). But if your lifestyle is voluntarily more carbon-intensive than it needs to be, you should make up for it somehow! Everyone should. Vote for leaders who want to make it structurally harder for constituents to make environmentally damaging decisions, even if that could make your life marginally or even significantly less convenient/luxurious eventually. Remain educated about what constitutes sustainable policy. Donate meaningful amounts of disposable income to environmental charities, scientific research organizations, and climate-focused political lobbying groups. Perhaps divest from equity investments in particularly environmentally unscrupulous corporations. Find a way to generate your household's and/or business' electricity renewably or sign a power purchase agreement with a 100% green supplier. Involve yourself in your community's local sustainability efforts, even if these happen on a small scale: like advocating for public transportation, supporting ecologically sustainable land use and zoning regulations, organizing community composting, cleaning up your local patch of woods, or whatever. The worst thing you can do is just pretend the problem doesn't exist. At least try!
There is only so much a person can do. This is why the article calls for political change. But you are mistaken to believe that you have no influence: political change can and will happen with effort, especially on the local level. Your beliefs and choices as a social creature influence those of your friends, family, and acquaintances; network theory would suggest that your behavior is more meaningful than you may realize, and empirical research agrees. As activists, it is valuable for us to practice what we preach to the extent that this is possible. It is also valuable to define climate-related problems in a relatively tangible way, by advocating for specific kinds of regulation, and by looking into specific methods of reducing our individual and collective impact.
At this time, it all starts with recognizing that whatever environmental law just passed in your municipality... it isn't enough. Not even close. We would do well to create pathways toward real sustainability for our children, and ultimately ensure we leave a hospitable planet for theirs.
And this is where the problem lies, and has pretty much ALWAYS been. We can go back 20+ years, and still have the same issue, a la Al Gore: People generally choose the comforting lie that lets...
even if that could make your life marginally or even significantly less convenient/luxurious eventually
And this is where the problem lies, and has pretty much ALWAYS been. We can go back 20+ years, and still have the same issue, a la Al Gore: People generally choose the comforting lie that lets them live their current lifestyle over an inconvenient truth which will cause their current lifestyle to change.
Getting people to change their lifestyle or culture in general is the hardest part- once people get a taste of luxury, no matter how harmful it might be in the long run, they want to continue with it and not change back to what it was before.
A lot of people have already downgraded their lifestyles, but not out of any climate concern, but because they've been forced to by economics. Rich people have always been the biggest contributors...
A lot of people have already downgraded their lifestyles, but not out of any climate concern, but because they've been forced to by economics.
Rich people have always been the biggest contributors to climate change, orders of magnitude so.
Yes, I think this speaks to the effectiveness of policy when people are interested in a change but hesitant to do it unless everyone else does. This applies on the business side of things too....
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Yes, I think this speaks to the effectiveness of policy when people are interested in a change but hesitant to do it unless everyone else does. This applies on the business side of things too. Most individuals are never going to install solar panels on their house if it ends up costing more than buying dirty fossil fuel energy. But even modest government subsidies toward manufacturers encouraging technological innovation in renewable energy can significantly decrease the cost of the technology.
I think "downgrades" are a dirty word. At a collective scale, when government is involved, lifestyle changes that reduce environmental impact do not have to be downgrades. If by some governmental mechanism the cost and experience of taking the train for a 500-mile journey becomes better than taking a flight, people... will take the train, happily. No "downgrade" per se, just a switch to something dramatically more environmentally sustainable. That mechanism could be funding for elimination of at-grade crossings, track realignments, and through-running practices to enable much faster service (carrot). Or it could be congestion pricing tolls on car activity (like what New York City is doing), banning short-haul flights to encourage more sustainable rail travel (like what France did), or a carbon tax in general (the most sustainable mode wins). In practice, it is most effective to have both push and pull incentives, or else people don't necessarily make that jump. Anything else is incomplete.
The lifestyle downgrades that people are scared of are usually about housing and materialism in general. To provide a US example, a particularly vocal group of homeowners don't want to accept that having the majority of the population living in low-density, car-centric suburban sprawl is horrifically bad for the environment (and for municipal budgets, but that is a different matter). Specifically, they like their suburban development pattern, and they don't want to leave (they don't actually care what the rest of the country does). That's fine for them -- not everyone has the same preferences -- but they do need to recognize the problem on a political scale. i.e. great, no need to move to NYC Midtown, but you ought to make up for the environmental cost of suburban living by voting for leaders who will enable density in areas where it counts (including near transit in your town), and who want to redesign roadways to be less exclusive to cars. Many Americans also don't want to accept that delivery services for goods are quite environmentally unfriendly (more deliveries = more trucks = more traffic = more emissions), and further that the endless acquisition of material objects is unnecessary to human happiness and harmful to the environment (that's a philosophical realization that people kinda have to figure out on their own, but you can make it easier for them with policies that give people other pathways toward happiness, like making communities more physically accessible to encourage social activity). To be clear, there are many solutions to each of these problems on a societal scale. People mostly decide how luxurious their lifestyle is relative to their peers, not in an absolute sense, which is one reason why policies are effective (if the family next door has a jetski, you may feel poor in comparison, but if no one has a jetski, you don't even consider the possibility that you could be poor for that reason). In some cases, people think the impact of a policy or governmental action will be bigger than it really is, like installing bicycle infrastructure on a street somehow bringing about Armageddon ("oh no where shall we park, it will be the death of our town... oh... wait, we had too much parking already? so this will not stop us from parking, and also decrease car reliance, allowing people to get rid of duplicate cars and therefore freeing up parking spaces? well okay fine JUST THIS ONCE").
Here are some examples of policies that can change the narrative from a "downgrade" to an "improvement":
Federal and state governments should explicitly prioritize environmentally sustainable forms of transportation, especially public/mass transit, and especially trains; and especially not private automobiles (or private jets). Transportation emissions make up a very large portion of global emissions and are some of the most directly consumer-induced emissions out there. People need to get to work, but how they get there is irrelevant to the job (for the vast majority of people). Were they to arrive by car, train, bus, or helicopter, as long as they are there... they can do their job. So it makes sense for government to fund infrastructure investments that make it extremely easy for public transportation to get people where they want to go faster and more smoothly than they could if they were driving. This is completely possible - I mentioned some examples for trains earlier - it's just a matter of political willpower. While many people are used to driving, the majority are not as attached to any particular mode as you or they think they are: they choose their mode primarily based on speed/reliability. (Other factors are relevant too but that is out of scope of this comment.)
Local governments should explicitly adopt transit-oriented development/zoning patterns to encourage more sustainable living patterns, including putting amenities and jobs near transit (not just housing). Many/most areas around train stations in the US, in both urban and suburban municipalities, are literally empty parking lots. That's a waste of an opportunity to pre-empt further suburban sprawl. This also encourages people to walk to local businesses to acquire goods instead of having them delivered to their home, which reduces emissions and is good for their health (which ultimately reduces medical costs). It also increases local engagement in the economy (trip chaining) and community (as a pedestrian, you engage with society more meaningfully than when sitting in your house), including making further strives toward accessibility and sustainability.
By statute, disallow the use of automobiles in local deliveries in cities. Require all local deliveries to be done by those golf cart-sized electric cargo bikes, for example. This reduces most of the emissions from last-mile deliveries. (This has the added benefit of making it much more likely for the city to actively pursue the construction of fully separated bike lanes, which will reduce personal automobile use. It has the other added benefit of reducing noise considerably and traffic modestly, as well as increasing viewsheds (fewer tall trucks = better sightlines), which improves pedestrian safety. And obviously having fewer heavy vehicles on the road reduces pedestrian safety in general.)
Economic incentives for companies to produce services which do not use a lot of resources instead of objects which do. For example, The "economy" doesn't necessarily need to produce physical junk to be effective. In practice, this could be applied via carbon taxes, plastic taxes, or whatever other metric (stick). Or it could be applied via subsidies to musical, artistic, athletic, educational, and cultural businesses/industries (carrot), for example making it more profitable to be a record label than a plastic toy company.
And so on and so forth. There are other things going non, like NIMBYism rooted in a desire for housing prices to constantly increase (a fundamentally harmful expectation). You can address that with policy too, but in that case the fact that many people in the United States rely on selling their house to retire speaks to a broader problem with the expectation of retirement and the process by which people acquire wealth. Still addressable with policy, just a way bigger and less specific problem.
Rich people have always been the biggest contributors to climate change, orders of magnitude so.
Per-capita, yes. Orders of magnitude, sometimes for individuals; but not necessarily as a group. It depends how you define richness. While "rich people" shouldn't be allowed to indiscriminately fly private jets wherever they like without paying a heavy carbon tax, their contribution to aviation in general is very small, apparently 4% of the pie. What people would call the "upper middle class" are going to be flying a lot more than the "working class," and therefore have much higher emissions (and business tickets comprise a large portion of airline revenues), but airlines still rely on huge numbers of economy tickets from comparatively lower-income people to be profitable.
When we talk about "rich people" we have to acknowledge that wealth is a scale which we are a part of. If you are a citizen of a developed country, then with very few exceptions you are already rich on a global scale and your lifestyle contributes an unbelievable amount to climate change relative to someone in a developing country. The average American or Canadian's lifestyle, with its electricity, electronic devices and appliances, paved roads, spacious houses, automobiles, prevalence of carbon-intensive foods like meat, etc. is "wealth" whether one feels wealthy or poor relative to other Americans or Canadians. Quantitatively, Canadian CO2 emissions per capita are around 18.72 tons annually compared to a global average of 4.76 or the average in a country like the DR Congo of 0.08 tons/yr. Not to discount the very real poverty which exists in these countries (no need to comment, I know this quite well), but I think it is worth remembering that we are personally contributing to climate change when we do things like fly, or drive, or order junk online, or eat too much meat -- we can't just shift the blame to "rich people" so that we feel comfortable living our lives as we do.
To speak to your point of pricing incentivizing behavior, I’d like to offer my own experience with housing. I don’t mind living dense cities, for the most part. In fact it’s my preference assuming...
To speak to your point of pricing incentivizing behavior, I’d like to offer my own experience with housing.
I don’t mind living dense cities, for the most part. In fact it’s my preference assuming I can find an apartment that’s reasonably soundproof — the tradeoff of space is well worth the ability to easily meet with friends and colleagues, the plethora of activities it puts at one’s fingertips, and general access to services.
That’s not what’s incentivized by costs, however. In the US, especially prior to the jump in interest rates, if one’s situation is amicable to living in a suburb it can be massively financially beneficial to do so. In my case it allowed me to not only cut my housing costs in half, but make them effectively fixed rather than subject to yearly increases, and that doesn’t even include other reductions in costs of living.
That kind of improvement in money saved is difficult to ignore for any working class individual. It can make the difference between just keeping one’s head above the water and being able to achieve true financial security, and in some cases can even put reaching financial independence at a relatively young age within grasp. It’s such a massive boon that even many of the ecologically conscious have a hard time passing it up.
So through some combination of mechanisms, the costs of living in dense ecologically-friendly cities needs to be driven down such that working class can not only afford it, but also have a decent chunk of paycheck left over. Cost of suburb life should probably increase to reflect its ecological cost too, but it’s important for that to happen after cities become cheaper so you don’t wind up putting anybody out on the street.
Honestly, size and soundproofing are the two major impediments to making apartments viable for the masses. Where are the 2400 sq ft suites that could double as recording studios? Anyone who says...
Honestly, size and soundproofing are the two major impediments to making apartments viable for the masses. Where are the 2400 sq ft suites that could double as recording studios? Anyone who says the daily noise of neighbors is part of the human experience (not to mention those who say “just rent it” for cars or large equipment impractical to store in an apartment) is deeply unserious about urban densification.
I don't think recording-quality soundproofing is necessary for most individuals. Residential building codes should not mandate an excessive amount of soundproofing for the typical person, as there...
Exemplary
Where are the 2400 sq ft suites that could double as recording studios?
I don't think recording-quality soundproofing is necessary for most individuals. Residential building codes should not mandate an excessive amount of soundproofing for the typical person, as there are diminishing returns on advanced sound transmission classes and having really stringent requirements drives up cost a lot. Recording is a specialized use-case and the user should have to pay for that level of isolation.
I used to live close to a recording engineer. Even in their very suburban and rather quiet house, they had to make special modifications to the floor and walls to dampen low-frequency vibrations from vehicles and other sources. This wasn't an anechoic chamber or anything. For near-complete isolation you would need a particularly abnormal setup, probably an anechoic room within a room (like with decoupling/isolation brackets), or something underground. Post-processing can remove some background noise, but isolating literally all of that noise to begin with is a major challenge.
But to your point, I agree in general that soundproofing is important. Many urban residences lack sufficient soundproofing, especially in low-income areas where developers skimped on these "luxuries." If you can hear your neighbors' conversations, your walls are too thin. Depending on the municipality, new multifamily residential development in the United States is generally mandated to have a Sound Transmission Class around 50 or 60, which is enough to eliminate essentially all noise from your neighbors. I think there is a lot of regional variation on the specifics. An STC of 60 is not prohibitively expensive, though it is more expensive than a lower STC.
Directly elicited responses are used to determine STC 55 as a realistic goal for acceptable sound insulation and STC 60 as a more ideal goal that would practically eliminate negative effects of neighbour's noises.
For reference, hollow drywall apparently has an STC of about 34 and does not isolate voices. At 50–55 STC, you would not be able to hear a normal conversation, but you could potentially hear shouting. For most units, that is an acceptable minimum. At 60 STC you are effectively completely isolated from sound. The source provides a few figures for relatively advanced insulation at a range of STC values. I think these figures are in Singapore dollars:
Depending on the usage of the space and the budget, you may or may not wish to install floated walls. A drywall with insulation may be sufficient for your project and will cost lesser. The costs for insulated walls can range from S$85 to S$317 per m².
The approach to soundproofing construction on the ceiling is similar to wall soundproofing, adding insulation materials like Tecsound (high density polymer-based synthetic membrane) which can easily be applied to ceiling surfaces and layers of gypsum board will effectively reduce sound transmission. The costs to insulate the ceiling with 2 layers of gypsum board range from S$113 per m² (non-floated) to S$248 per m² (floated).
A timber floated flooring would cost around S$279 per m². For reference, a normal subfloor with no resilient underlayment (usually wood or concrete) is around 40 IIC, a treated flooring will have an IIC around 60 and higher.
If those are Singapore dollars, then in USD, according to this source the costs would be $63–$235/m² (wall), $84–$184/m² (ceiling), or $207/m² (floor). So if you were to install floated sound isolation floors on a 100 sqaure meter apartment (about 1075 sqft), that would be about $2000 USD for the floor alone, a similar amount for a floated ceiling, and somewhat more for expensive treatment of the walls. But clearly there is a major price differential depending on the exact solution taken and the resulting STC/IIC. The lower end of their estimates would be 25–50% of the cost of the high-end option. It's not clear to me what exact STC values those ranges correspond to, though. To get to an even higher STC, the price would jump up a lot more.
When soundproofing is mandated, the costs are borne on the homeowner upfront in the cost of their down payment/mortgage. When soundproofing is not mandated, they do not necessarily have to pay those costs, but they may or may not want to personally. For general comfort and to encourage people to live in urban areas they would otherwise prefer to live in, it makes sense to mandate relatively high STC insulation for new development. In this case, there is probably no reason to go above 55 to 60 STC in apartments by municipal statute, though a developer may choose to go higher.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to request information about a unit's STC from a potential landlord if you are looking into renting an apartment.
I don’t even need that much space personally, just decent natural light, great soundproofing, and smart floor plans that make it easy to maximize usage of the space. The latter two of those are...
I don’t even need that much space personally, just decent natural light, great soundproofing, and smart floor plans that make it easy to maximize usage of the space. The latter two of those are surprisingly hard to come by.
Agree that larger condos shouldn’t be out of reach though for those who need them, which includes families along with cases like your example of a recording studio.
I'm in this boat - I much prefer a suburban lifestyle of single-family home ownership in a quiet neighborhood where I have my own personal indoor and outdoor spaces and don't share a wall, floor...
Specifically, they like their suburban development pattern, and they don't want to leave (they don't actually care what the rest of the country does). That's fine for them -- not everyone has the same preferences
I'm in this boat - I much prefer a suburban lifestyle of single-family home ownership in a quiet neighborhood where I have my own personal indoor and outdoor spaces and don't share a wall, floor or ceiling with anyone else. But I'm suspect that I'm not at all in the minority of this viewpoint.
I remember on my local subreddits, when discussions about hosting prices came up, many people were advocating for the building of more dense urban housing not necessarily because they had any interest in renting one, but because they actually wanted to themselves buy a single-family suburban home and felt that other people buying/renting in dense housing would take those people out of the real-estate market and in turn provide less competition for themselves.
Yeah, there are certainly people who prefer to actually be in dense, urban living. But the availability and competition for single-family real estate purchases compared to the vast availability of apartment rental options (in most areas) tells a different story. Same goes for townhomes - most people I know who bought a townhome settled for one. It wasn't their first preference, but price drove them out of the single-family housing market and owning a townhouse was at least one step better than renting an apartment.
a particularly vocal group of homeowners don't want to accept that having the majority of the population living in low-density, car-centric suburban sprawl is horrifically bad for the environment
I accept this, but I still prefer the lifestyle that I've chosen. I'll make up for it in other ways.
I grew up in a SFH in a little tiny town, and my entire family still lives in that kind of home, so I understand the appeal. I don't mind sharing walls because it's very possible to insulate sound...
I grew up in a SFH in a little tiny town, and my entire family still lives in that kind of home, so I understand the appeal. I don't mind sharing walls because it's very possible to insulate sound (see: STC), and idk, you still share walls with family members in a SFH (including loud and unruly teenagers). But it is nice to be somewhere you can sit on the porch without being startled by car horns and accelerating diesel engines.
There is also a range of sustainability metrics for detached suburban SFHs. While urbanist commentators often compare SFHs to mixed-use apartment development, there is also value in evaluating different kinds of SFH construction as a developer (or regulator) and use as a homeowner. For example:
The land footprint of the house. There's nothing wrong with having an alleyway between two homes, but most SFH zoning regulations mandate a huge frontage setback from the road and a considerable amount of distance in all directions between structures. (This is despite the "front yard" itself being minimally utilized by most homeowners, who often prefer the privacy of the backyard.) While this may be some people's preference, it is not appropriate in near-urban suburbs, and it is not good for this to be mandated by law even in outer suburbs, where that preference can and will be met by the market to a more reasonable extent. For example, consider the difference between older "streetcar suburbs" and post-WWII Levittown-style suburbs. The former meets most/all your criteria but is illegal to build in most municipalities today because zoning regulations prohibit even moderately dense suburban development (this is where there is the most "competition" among buyers for SFHs by far). The latter has a significantly higher land footprint and contributes strongly to suburban sprawl, which is not environmentally sustainable.
Whether there is a lawn, and whether the lawn is a monoculture or something more ecologically sustainable. Generally grass lawns do not harbor local species adequately. They are also very water-intensive, so if sprinklers are necessary to keep it lush and green, that species of grass is not appropriate in your climate. Additionally, fast-growing grasses require significant maintenance, and unless you're using a push-mower, that means more emissions. My preference for lawns is generally to populate them with local species and/or specifically transform them into pollinator gardens. In areas unsuitable for dense vegetation, like the desert, rock gardens are ideal.
How large the house itself is. Even on a relatively small lot, a large house has an environmental impact because of the electricity we use to power it. This includes lighting but especially heat and air conditioning, which make up the majority of household electricity use, as well as some use by appliances. To some extent you can address this with energy-efficient appliances, like washing machines, but square footage is a bigger contributor to emissions because of temperature regulation. While I think having a bit more space is an appeal for moving to a suburb, especially if you have kids and need another bedroom, there is a distinction between having "enough" space and having "more" space for its own sake. The larger the house, the more you are psychologically encouraged to fill it with material objects, whose production also has an environmental impact.
Where your electricity comes from. Personally if you own your own home in the suburbs I see very little reason not to install rooftop solar panels unless you have newly installed slate shingles or something. Even in high-latitude locations and even if the orientation is not perfect, being able to generate part, most, or all of your electricity comparatively sustainably is beneficial. The cost of panels has become so low that they can pay for themselves rather quickly even if your situation is not perfect. In situations where rooftop solar is not possible, if you have a large lot, it is possible to build ground-based panels, maybe even ones that rotate (a few family members in the country did this). Alternatively many/most power delivery agencies allow you to opt into a green energy supplier who sources electricity from renewable methods only. You might have to go out of your way to find this service but it exists in many municipalities.
In the US, most suburban development corresponds to car-centric development. I think there is a difference between living in a suburb and taking the train to work and biking for groceries and living in a suburb and taking 100% of trips by car. It can be hard/unrealistic to fully eliminate cars, but lots of people don't really need more than one, and most local trips can be taken by other modes at no significant inconvenience. Just yesterday while visiting a friend, a suggestion was made for us to buy sandwiches from the shop nearby. Instinctively my friend hopped in the car despite it being a 10 or 15 minute walk at the very most. It wasn't even cold, and we weren't carrying much, the trip would have been safe, and neither of us were disabled or had any other reason not to walk or cycle there. In that case we had unconsciously abided by the American suburban expectation that one drives everywhere - completely unnecessarily. (So was my host's insistence that I be driven to the train station, which I could walk to comfortably in seven minutes.) This was a small journey but it speaks to the attitude that these places can enforce. So whenever I find myself in places where cars are culturally enmeshed, I try to think about whether there is a genuine reason to drive an automobile somewhere or if I am just being lazy.
The house's insulation. Apartments and townhomes are comparatively energy efficient because of their shared walls; heat radiates not just outward but into other dwellings. In a SFH you do not have this advantage so it is especially important to have a well-insulated structure. Unless your climate is quite temperate and you do not use heat/air condition frequently, it is energy-inefficient and therefore not environmentally ideal to have a drafty house; escaping heat (or air conditioning) can easily double emissions from maintaining a steady temperature. And you don't necessarily have control over this as a homeowner short of rebuilding your home, but it's possible to design buildings to be more or less passively energy-efficient based on the materials and natural airflow; many pre-AC structures were designed in this way but very few modern SFHs are (nor most other building types).
So as a suburban homeowner, you can certainly adjust your lifestyle a little bit to minimize your impact. But this really is minimizing and not avoiding impact, so the "other ways" to make up for it would have to be beyond the household itself. Personally I have found charitable donations to be the easiest way to do this, and probably one of the more equitable strategies, although it can be an abstract process. To properly "make up" for one's footprint, financial compensation probably has to be significantly more than a token donation of $5/mo. I don't know how to exactly quantify an "appropriate" amount though. It depends on which environmental organizations you're funding and what projects they're working on, which is not constant. I guess it also depends on where that money comes from. Like, if you work for a coal power plant, your capital itself is environmentally unsustainable.
As far as community initiatives go, there is only so much to do in a smallish town (I mean, how many miles of woods does any town have to protect or maintain?). I think it is useful to be vocal about sustainability metrics with neighbors though. For example, maybe your house is unsuitable for solar panels, but your neighbor's house would be great for it. Having conversations with them individually encouraging such a switch is useful; as are conversations with local officials encouraging a subsidy to make the investment more affordable. I have personally find these strategies more fulfilling than donating to charities because I can see the positive impacts firsthand, though I still recognize that both are important and necessary.
This is changing in many areas. I serve on the board of an affordable housing nonprofit organization, and municipalities are continually modifying setbacks (front setbacks are still governed by...
most SFH zoning regulations mandate a huge frontage setback from the road and a considerable amount of distance in all directions between structures.
This is changing in many areas. I serve on the board of an affordable housing nonprofit organization, and municipalities are continually modifying setbacks (front setbacks are still governed by things like utility easements, sidewalks and their distance from a road, and driveway length), but they're allowing for houses to be closer together. I purposely bought in a neighborhood where houses are more spread out because I want my space, but land price is driving a push for smaller lots anyway. This does impact affordability, however. Once houses are closer together, alternate fire codes set in. This makes it so that affordable exterior cladding materials like vinyl are replaced by more expensive and difficult to install materials like fiber cement and aluminum. Some municipalities may even require firewalls. This all has a negative impact on affordability.
Whether there is a lawn, and whether the lawn is a monoculture or something more ecologically sustainable.
I agree with this. It's typically not a municipal issue, as much as it is an HOA issue. I would love to see governmental restriction on HOA covenants that ban grass alternatives, much like many have banned restrictions on solar panels and clothes lines. Because HOAs by themselves will be hard-pressed to allow people to turn their lawns into alternatives.
Personally if you own your own home in the suburbs I see very little reason not to install rooftop solar panels
Cost is that reason. The ROI is poor, and utilities are continually pushing changes to make the ROI even worse. Our utility does net metering, but the rollover credits are dropped in May just before the hot summer starts. They also force solar panel owners onto a more expensive time-of-use rate that makes it so that you pay more for electricity during peak hours, and peak hours tend to be in the evenings when solar generation is low. Utilities have little incentive to provide financial incentives for solar. It doesn't allow them to decrease investments in the grid and power production, since the grid and power both need to be sized for things like providing heating in sub-zero temperatures at night or on a cloudy day. The nonprofit I work with occasionally has them installed on homes when local companies donate them, but otherwise, it results in cost increases that our homeowners can't accept.
The house's insulation
This has been getting better for years. In addition to increased insulation standards, things like passive cooling of attics via soffit and ridge vent, radiant barrier roof sheathing, expansion foam / calking around penetrations and under wall plates, house pressure/blow tests to measure and validate air leaks, etc are all becoming more and more standard in new residential construction. But these issues are not limited to single family homes. While heat radiation to other dwellings might be nice in the winter, it's not so nice in the summer for the units on the top floor that need to run their ACs harder to deal with the absorption of the head from below them. There are also plenty of drafty, poorly-insulated apartment buildings where the residents have no choice but to deal with it. In fact, if you're in that situation, your landlord has no incentive to fix those issues and you have no power to do so yourself, and you're the one stuck with the higher energy bill.
so the "other ways" to make up for it would have to be beyond the household itself
I decided not to have children. Not bringing one or more additional people into this world that will need to consume resources for 80 years is one way is one way that I deal with it. I'm very selective about charities. Most of my donations go to the charity whose board I serve on and who I volunteer with, because I believe in their mission and know that they're spending money wisely. But sustainability is indeed part of their charter.
In my experience, lifestyle "downgrades" due to economics don't necessarily automatically equate to being less consumptive. For instance, as housing costs rise, people may be forced to move...
In my experience, lifestyle "downgrades" due to economics don't necessarily automatically equate to being less consumptive. For instance, as housing costs rise, people may be forced to move farther from work or living areas to afford livable housing, in turn necessitating that they drive at all/more, increasing carbon emissions.
I'll readily admit this example as coming from personal experience. Most of my adult life, I lived in fairly walkable (or at least bikeable) areas, and almost never drove day-to-day, even when owning a car. I studied in environmental fields, and I tried to make sound decisions on my knowledge; on occasions of plugging rough info into footprint/CO2 calculators, I usually wasn't too far over sustainable benchmarks.
The pandemic hit and for a variety of reasons I move home with family (outside a city); I made the decision knowing I'd be forced to drive a lot, but assumed it would be a short-term move. Between inflation and rising housing costs/rent, I'm having a very difficult time moving back to a place where I can cut out driving. These days, I have to drive so much electric vehicles are not only out of my price range, I'm that "special" case where they are very much out of the distance I regularly need (side-note: I kind of hate driving; this isn't even fun for me). Even with attempts to consolidate my trips as much as possible, my CO2 emissions are in no way 'sustainable' any longer. Anecdotally, I don't think I'm alone in this type of story.
It makes me sad. I've consciously tried to make decisions within my power to live in a less-consuming way. But, I also feel like I'm too often faced with too many obstacles between me and the best decisions, and have come to realize how, in absence of sound, environmentally driven policies, living "sustainably" really can be a costly luxury.
I'll end by noting: I hope this doesn't read as though I'm making excuses, or sounding too woe-is-me. It's not my intention. I still do try to be mindful of various choices. Just trying to add a personal anecdote that I think mirrors the point scroll_lock was making in terms of the importance of policy in driving the availability of personal choices; downgrades aren't enough, or even right. Meaningfully sustainable options need to be abundantly, easily available with relatively low barriers of access, so people barely even have to think of them as changes.
Although globally, emissions are still rising, if you look at national and regional numbers, there are signs of progress. US emissions peaked in 1974 and has been dropping since. Similarly for...
Although globally, emissions are still rising, if you look at national and regional numbers, there are signs of progress. US emissions peaked in 1974 and has been dropping since. Similarly for Europe.
Also, increasing US natural gas exports makes sense, temporarily, for geopolitical reasons. What's worse than depending on natural gas? Depending on Russian natural gas.
I expect things will get worse before they get better, though.
Yes, there are signs. I try not to be too negative on this website because I know that it just makes people disengage. Certainly there is much to celebrate, like Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction...
Exemplary
Yes, there are signs. I try not to be too negative on this website because I know that it just makes people disengage. Certainly there is much to celebrate, like Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act which for whatever reason has a bunch of climate-relevant legislation in it. And the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has a significant amount of funding for rail transportation in particular, both for passengers and freight, which is the most energy-efficient and environmentally friendly form of ground transit/shipping. The European Union has also passed a meaningful amount of climate legislation over the last few years.
My caveat: any signs of progress shouldn't be taken as a chance for us to ease up or become apathetic. Even if wealthy Western nations achieve net-zero emissions in the next couple decades, they have a moral obligation to offset the emissions they spawned by investing extremely heavily into research, technologies, and systems that can be generalized for use by developing countries. It is the latter group which is going to produce the most emissions in the next century, but they do not have the resources to go net-zero while maintaining stable economies and civil life. I feel it is fair and (more importantly) efficient/optimal for wealthy countries such as the one I live in to do an extraordinary amount of research and development now, and over the next several decades, that the fruits of their labor might be appreciated by the rest of the world.
I will also note that going net zero is really just an interim goal. It stops things from getting worse but does not change the fact that they are presently worse than they once were. Also, in practice, "net zero" systems still have some emissions because there is no such thing as a completely neutral manufacturing or energy generation process. So we cannot be satisfied solely with slowing rates of increasing emissions, or even with overall decreases in emissions; we have to also concern ourselves with initiatives to remove carbon from the atmosphere to return to safer and less extreme pre-industrial conditions, reduce per-capita and overall resource consumption, restore worldwide ecological habitats, repopulate endangered species, and redesign our own "habitats" (cities) to cooperate with natural ecosystems more effectively, including processes like permeability and rainwater management but also providing spaces for animals we do not traditionally care for. Going net zero is just the prerequisite for fully realizing that.
Also, it's not even necessarily a good interim goal - getting to "net 10%" (i.e. reducing emissions to 1/10th of current levels) within a few years is far more important than e.g. net zero by...
I will also note that going net zero is really just an interim goal.
Also, it's not even necessarily a good interim goal - getting to "net 10%" (i.e. reducing emissions to 1/10th of current levels) within a few years is far more important than e.g. net zero by 2050. Because reducing emissions quickly staunches the wound quicker.
That chart specifically mentions that it does not account for traded goods. I fear the peak ignores that we in the West have continued to increase our per-capita emissions, simply flying a bit...
That chart specifically mentions that it does not account for traded goods. I fear the peak ignores that we in the West have continued to increase our per-capita emissions, simply flying a bit further under the radar by offshoring a lot of our consumer products' emissions abroad, particularly to china.
We might not be producing those emissions directly, but we are the ones consuming the fruits of them.
Yeah a good chunk of emissions in China are from manufacturing stuff that’s sent to the US and elsewhere. [citation needed but I’m about to board a plane]
Yeah a good chunk of emissions in China are from manufacturing stuff that’s sent to the US and elsewhere. [citation needed but I’m about to board a plane]
Yes, that's definitely something to be wary of. It's hard to get good numbers. I'm not actually doing the homework and understanding the scientific literature isn't easy.
Yes, that's definitely something to be wary of. It's hard to get good numbers. I'm not actually doing the homework and understanding the scientific literature isn't easy.
I’ve probably told this story before on tildes, but it bears repeating. I once went to a Bill McKibbon lecture, popular climate change advocate in the aights and ‘10’s. This was in Asheville, NC,...
I’ve probably told this story before on tildes, but it bears repeating.
I once went to a Bill McKibbon lecture, popular climate change advocate in the aights and ‘10’s. This was in Asheville, NC, ostensibly progressive town. There were about 1000 of us in attendance, maybe 4 of us rode bikes.
Now, any ordinary event, sure, few people ride bikes anywhere in America. But this was an event where people paid money to go see a guy talk about impending catastrophe due to anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide loading, and less than 0.1% didn’t arrive in a small, motorized car. Probably half arrived from <3 miles away (avl is small).
Personally, I only see that as a sign cities are designed solely with cars in mind. For decades, auto-makers, marketers, politicians, and urban planners have all worked together to make cars the...
Personally, I only see that as a sign cities are designed solely with cars in mind.
For decades, auto-makers, marketers, politicians, and urban planners have all worked together to make cars the default option. They succeeded; cities are built for cars and are hostile to any other transportation method. In the US for the most part, public transit barely exists, cyclists are grudgingly permitted to use the same spaces as cars to the detriments of both, and pedestrians suck down exhaust fumes while trudging distances designed for cars, without any shade and sometimes even without a sidewalk.
Then there's the media side of things. Cycling is the province of extreme fitness types or those too immature to have a car. Public transportation is usually a punchline, the joke being just how awful it is to use, or is the sign of a character who's fallen on hard times and can no longer afford a vehicle. But cars are for everyone. They're a personality indicator, a status symbol, freedom (if you've got the thousands and thousands of dollars to spend every year for that "freedom").
So overall, I don't find it surprising that when everything is set up to support cars, people choose to drive. If we want to change that, we first have to make it so that the other options are actually good, rather than afterthoughts, and a culture shift away from cars as the default. And there is progress on that front. People are increasingly aware of the damage cars do, and increasingly vocal about support for alternative options. Cities are slowly rolling out better options, from bike lanes to more bus routes.
I mean, sadly public transport in the USA is generally awful to use. But it's mostly that bad because of all the cars making it harder for busses to move around. And lack of public access to...
I mean, sadly public transport in the USA is generally awful to use. But it's mostly that bad because of all the cars making it harder for busses to move around. And lack of public access to toilets, criminalizing of homelessness, obsession with alcohol, and bad access to mental healthcare result in a lot of busses smelling like piss, shit, and vomit in perpetuity. Not even thinking about the assholes who smoke and vape on the bus.
Non-bus options are usually at least marginally better, but stations have no less of these problems.
In the case of buses, having dedicated bus lanes painted red meaningfully improves bus travel times, as cars mostly stay out of them. Of course drivers still sometimes block the bus lanes though....
But it's mostly that bad because of all the cars making it harder for busses to move around
In the case of buses, having dedicated bus lanes painted red meaningfully improves bus travel times, as cars mostly stay out of them. Of course drivers still sometimes block the bus lanes though. Fortunately, new camera-based ticketing systems seem to offer an escape from this. In Philadelphia, SEPTA recently adopted a new enforcement system which caught tens of thousands of violations. As a result, delays from cars have decreased significantly. New York's MTA has a similar program.
And lack of public access to toilets
Whenever I'm in Europe I'm reminded of how much of a difference the sainisettes make. These are virtually nonexistent in most of the United States. I have always been very impressed with their cleanliness in Paris in particular. I think that having more of these stateside would go a long way toward addressing the issues you bring up.
An optimistic way to look at it is that it's a good sign that people who aren't committed environmentalists (or at least not in the way you hoped) were curious enough to hear what he had to say.
An optimistic way to look at it is that it's a good sign that people who aren't committed environmentalists (or at least not in the way you hoped) were curious enough to hear what he had to say.
Here's the hard truth everyone is too afraid to admit: To reduce consumption, you need limits. Incentives/disincentives can work, to a point. But anything that relies on merely raising costs just...
Here's the hard truth everyone is too afraid to admit: To reduce consumption, you need limits.
Incentives/disincentives can work, to a point. But anything that relies on merely raising costs just increases burden for the poor while letting the rich (companies included) do whatever they want and/or pass the buck downstream. Hence why carbon taxes are grossly insufficent.
The national governments need to be the middleman for all oil, to be able to limit the supply. Then they need to create ration credits. Say one ration per barrel of oil. With modern debit cards, would be trvial to have a electronic fractional ration system. The nation's full usage gets split equally between all people in the nation, being distributed monthly. Setup a market system where people can buy and sell rations. Companies seeking oil for production must buy rations from citizens. Citizens will have more than enough rations to cover their consumption. There also needs to be part of the ration cost baked into every good, to insure reducing consumption from consumer side is incentivized as well.
Rations can no longer be traded 6 months after issuance, and they expire entirely a year after being issued. And then the next year, you issue X% less rations.
Doing this is far more fair than any other system, and also serves as a method of wealth redistribution, as wealth does not factor into your issued rations. As the belt tightens on rations, the prices on the market will rise. Since the rations expire, there will be a constant supply of buyers. Hoarding to game the system becomes difficult and expensive compared to buying rations as you need them, as it requires storage of the oil itself.
There will almost certainly be some degree of black market that springs up, and any companies complacent in it need to face swift and complete destruction, as is the case with distributing alcohol to minors.
We've tried rationing - it's called cap-and-trade and it fails horribly, because all the most powerful oil-users lobby to be given high quotas in proportion to what they currently use, and then...
But anything that relies on merely raising costs just increases burden for the poor while letting the rich (companies included) do whatever they want and/or pass the buck downstream. Hence why carbon taxes are grossly insufficent.
We've tried rationing - it's called cap-and-trade and it fails horribly, because all the most powerful oil-users lobby to be given high quotas in proportion to what they currently use, and then they systemically overestimate how much they're currently using. The moment the system starts, they sell off the excess and flood the market, but then block any attempts to lower the cap, because it would increase their costs and why would they want that.
I'm not against a rationing system, but let's get a proper carbon tax in place first, and ramp up the cost per tonne first, and then focus on extra systems afterwards.
That's not what studies are showing. In fact, one key phrase: It works, because in the face of shortages, where nobody can have enough, rations are the only fair way to distribute goods. It worked...
We've tried rationing - it's called cap-and-trade and it fails horribly
Overall, we found that cap-and-trade systems, if well designed and appropriately implemented, can achieve their core objective of meeting targeted emissions reductions cost-effectively.
It works, because in the face of shortages, where nobody can have enough, rations are the only fair way to distribute goods. It worked in WW2, it worked in the 1970's. It's not exactly popular, but then, it's far more popular than the alternative where the majority get nothing. It's just...usually we institute rations before the riots start, not after. So few people really experience what it's like to go fully without.
What you have described is merely corruption, and putting a corporation-first approach to rations. In the method I describe, corporations don't get any say at all...the government sees exactly how much is coming in and out, and then just starts putting limits in place. By forcing the rations to be bought from people, rather than being handed directly to corporations, you sidestep the ability of the corporations to game the system...especially if you have the rations expire to prevent hoarding.
Not to say I think it has a chance of passing in the form I've described...merely one that I see as far more optimal than most other alternatives.
I see your point about the ease of implementing certain policies. I am not sure how fossil fuel companies lobbying against cap-and-trade limits is substantively different than fossil fuel...
I see your point about the ease of implementing certain policies. I am not sure how fossil fuel companies lobbying against cap-and-trade limits is substantively different than fossil fuel companies lobbying against carbon taxes though. I think these things are not mutually exclusive.
I will comment that California's Cap and Trade program is directly funding California High-Speed Rail, the only HSR project in the United States under construction. It's only a portion of the megaproject's funding because the C&T program isn't as extensive as it could be, but it's not insignificant. In this case, the program is both directly reducing emissions (limiting overall use of fossil fuels) and indirectly doing so (by constructing infrastructure that will enable sustainable transportation).
The cap-and-trade usually starts off with compensation to the polluting companies equivalent to their existing emissions (i.e. it starts with handouts), whereas a carbon tax is just a tax. In...
The cap-and-trade usually starts off with compensation to the polluting companies equivalent to their existing emissions (i.e. it starts with handouts), whereas a carbon tax is just a tax. In other words, cap-and-trade can be worse than nothing while creating an illusion of progress. It's not a theoretically inherent limitation of cap-and-trade, but it's what tends to happen.
My core issue with cap-and-trade, IMO, is that companies can profit by overestimating or underestimating their emissions, whereas a carbon tax can only be gamed by underestimating. This means that carbon taxes are much easier to loophole-proof.
Also, cap-and-trade schemes that match existing emissions indirectly reward everyone who've dragged their feet on reducing their emissions.
Some have gotten close, but since no one has mentioned it yet: a lot of our climate problems stem from producing goods at industrial scale. As a society that's focused on cultivating hyperconsumer...
Some have gotten close, but since no one has mentioned it yet: a lot of our climate problems stem from producing goods at industrial scale. As a society that's focused on cultivating hyperconsumer lifestyles to promote spending on trivial shit, I think that reducing our production of those (hyperconsumptive) goods as close to zero (as what could be possible) would likely be the only really meaningful step forward to solving the climate change crisis.
We just produce so much useless bullshit, that's meant to be bought on impulse. Trying to identify goods explicitly made for that purpose would be tricky, but it will be a problem that will need to be tackled at some point, if we want a realistic chance at reducing and/or reversing climate change.
As a thought experiment; think about mugs. All the varieties that exist within the pantheon of 'traditionally' built mugs. All the colors, all the sizes, shapes, materials, glazes, stains, etc. Recognize that, as a society we seem compelled to demand that we should have access to all these permutations to the 'classical mug' be available to us, 24/7/365, either online or by a collection of nearby stores, competing or cooperating to provide an ample selection at all times.
Now realize that all I've mentioned is the basic, humble mug. A rather utilitarian product, of which I've already given some leeway for 'self-expression' and 'identity' by allowing all the permutations mentioned in the above. That's already an incredible, unfathomable amount of mugs to be stamping out on a production line on a monthly basis, at an industrial scale.
But it isn't enough. We demand a holiday specifically for mugs, so mug consumption increases as a part of our culture, and thus "Father's Day" was born, as if Christmas wasn't already enough. We demand mugs that aren't really "mugs," in that they're too elaborate a design to drink from, but rather serve as pen/pencil holders on our desks. (again: father's day gifts) People buy mugs not to drink from, but simply to "collect" them and admire them, an action that can only be described as "consumption for the sake of consumption." We have mugs adorned with graphics and logos for any and every occasion, location, movie, TV show, snarky one-liner, fandom, meme, YouTube channel, corporate entity, governmental entity, whatever! You better believe there's a mug for it, and if there isn't, there's certainly a company that would be willing to take your order and stamp a few pallets into existence for you, and ship it halfway around the world, for a price.
And this is just how we treat mugs. Now broaden your horizons and consider entire industries, like souvenirs. Gifts. The industries that surround the holidays, and the annual consumption each one demands. Think about how we treat complex consumer goods, like fucking cars. We need to change how we consume, and how we think about the act of consumption itself. We need to remove hyper-consumerism from our zeitgeist entirely, or else nothing will change and we all die buried in a mountain of green-washed Furbys redesigned for Generation Alpha.
Sure, changing to electric vehicles will help in reducing carbon emissions, and it needs to be done. But in the long run it's probably not going to really help much if we treat electric vehicles the same as we treat ICE vehicles; with new annual iterations with differing models and choices and offerings and luxuries in every color of the fucking rainbow stamped out in annual increments in the hundred-thousands, if not millions, and that's before the even more absurd shit we'll inevitably follow up with, if shit like Hyundai's 2019 Kona, "Iron Man Edition," was of any indication. It won't simply be "enough" to have solar panels on your roof, I guarantee there will be demand created for 'nostalgic, old school' solar panels of the 1970's. Maybe bring it up after Jimmy Carter's death, his addition to the White House.
I'm absolutely terrible with endings. I'm sure if I think up of anything later, I'll edit it in. I can only rant so much.
Archive link. Observations from a journalist about the incongruous reality of our ever-increasing emissions despite headlines full of scientific breakthroughs on battery or carbon capture technology.
Emphasis mine. Vote for people who want to implement radical environmental policy to minimize the effects of climate change. The long-term economic impacts of pollution and severe weather are almost certainly far worse for you and your community than any temporary localized economic slowdown from pivoting to renewables. It is unacceptable for our society to continue relying on fossil fuels for energy, and it is not constructive for individuals to support that reliance politically. In a democracy, your opinion as an individual is relevant.
[Tangent notice] I also think it is valuable to live your own life as an individual that is at least relatively environmentally sustainable, or meaningfully attempts to be given your unique circumstances. Some portion of educated leftists are fond of vaguely blaming "big corporations" for wreaking environmental havoc but do not seem to acknowledge that their spending habits directly fuel that damage (for example, I have often written here about the extremely polluting and destructive manufacturing process of electric automobiles). It's pointless for me to moralize too much because everyone reading this is either on board with the philosophy of "doing what you can do to the extent you can do it" or completely ideologically opposed to changing their lifestyle for environmental/economic reasons. I don't care what you do personally because I don't know you personally - and it's not like I am a magic forest creature whose lifestyle emits no greenhouse gases (would be nice though). But if your lifestyle is voluntarily more carbon-intensive than it needs to be, you should make up for it somehow! Everyone should. Vote for leaders who want to make it structurally harder for constituents to make environmentally damaging decisions, even if that could make your life marginally or even significantly less convenient/luxurious eventually. Remain educated about what constitutes sustainable policy. Donate meaningful amounts of disposable income to environmental charities, scientific research organizations, and climate-focused political lobbying groups. Perhaps divest from equity investments in particularly environmentally unscrupulous corporations. Find a way to generate your household's and/or business' electricity renewably or sign a power purchase agreement with a 100% green supplier. Involve yourself in your community's local sustainability efforts, even if these happen on a small scale: like advocating for public transportation, supporting ecologically sustainable land use and zoning regulations, organizing community composting, cleaning up your local patch of woods, or whatever. The worst thing you can do is just pretend the problem doesn't exist. At least try!
There is only so much a person can do. This is why the article calls for political change. But you are mistaken to believe that you have no influence: political change can and will happen with effort, especially on the local level. Your beliefs and choices as a social creature influence those of your friends, family, and acquaintances; network theory would suggest that your behavior is more meaningful than you may realize, and empirical research agrees. As activists, it is valuable for us to practice what we preach to the extent that this is possible. It is also valuable to define climate-related problems in a relatively tangible way, by advocating for specific kinds of regulation, and by looking into specific methods of reducing our individual and collective impact.
At this time, it all starts with recognizing that whatever environmental law just passed in your municipality... it isn't enough. Not even close. We would do well to create pathways toward real sustainability for our children, and ultimately ensure we leave a hospitable planet for theirs.
And this is where the problem lies, and has pretty much ALWAYS been. We can go back 20+ years, and still have the same issue, a la Al Gore: People generally choose the comforting lie that lets them live their current lifestyle over an inconvenient truth which will cause their current lifestyle to change.
Getting people to change their lifestyle or culture in general is the hardest part- once people get a taste of luxury, no matter how harmful it might be in the long run, they want to continue with it and not change back to what it was before.
A lot of people have already downgraded their lifestyles, but not out of any climate concern, but because they've been forced to by economics.
Rich people have always been the biggest contributors to climate change, orders of magnitude so.
Yes, I think this speaks to the effectiveness of policy when people are interested in a change but hesitant to do it unless everyone else does. This applies on the business side of things too. Most individuals are never going to install solar panels on their house if it ends up costing more than buying dirty fossil fuel energy. But even modest government subsidies toward manufacturers encouraging technological innovation in renewable energy can significantly decrease the cost of the technology.
I think "downgrades" are a dirty word. At a collective scale, when government is involved, lifestyle changes that reduce environmental impact do not have to be downgrades. If by some governmental mechanism the cost and experience of taking the train for a 500-mile journey becomes better than taking a flight, people... will take the train, happily. No "downgrade" per se, just a switch to something dramatically more environmentally sustainable. That mechanism could be funding for elimination of at-grade crossings, track realignments, and through-running practices to enable much faster service (carrot). Or it could be congestion pricing tolls on car activity (like what New York City is doing), banning short-haul flights to encourage more sustainable rail travel (like what France did), or a carbon tax in general (the most sustainable mode wins). In practice, it is most effective to have both push and pull incentives, or else people don't necessarily make that jump. Anything else is incomplete.
The lifestyle downgrades that people are scared of are usually about housing and materialism in general. To provide a US example, a particularly vocal group of homeowners don't want to accept that having the majority of the population living in low-density, car-centric suburban sprawl is horrifically bad for the environment (and for municipal budgets, but that is a different matter). Specifically, they like their suburban development pattern, and they don't want to leave (they don't actually care what the rest of the country does). That's fine for them -- not everyone has the same preferences -- but they do need to recognize the problem on a political scale. i.e. great, no need to move to NYC Midtown, but you ought to make up for the environmental cost of suburban living by voting for leaders who will enable density in areas where it counts (including near transit in your town), and who want to redesign roadways to be less exclusive to cars. Many Americans also don't want to accept that delivery services for goods are quite environmentally unfriendly (more deliveries = more trucks = more traffic = more emissions), and further that the endless acquisition of material objects is unnecessary to human happiness and harmful to the environment (that's a philosophical realization that people kinda have to figure out on their own, but you can make it easier for them with policies that give people other pathways toward happiness, like making communities more physically accessible to encourage social activity). To be clear, there are many solutions to each of these problems on a societal scale. People mostly decide how luxurious their lifestyle is relative to their peers, not in an absolute sense, which is one reason why policies are effective (if the family next door has a jetski, you may feel poor in comparison, but if no one has a jetski, you don't even consider the possibility that you could be poor for that reason). In some cases, people think the impact of a policy or governmental action will be bigger than it really is, like installing bicycle infrastructure on a street somehow bringing about Armageddon ("oh no where shall we park, it will be the death of our town... oh... wait, we had too much parking already? so this will not stop us from parking, and also decrease car reliance, allowing people to get rid of duplicate cars and therefore freeing up parking spaces? well okay fine JUST THIS ONCE").
Here are some examples of policies that can change the narrative from a "downgrade" to an "improvement":
And so on and so forth. There are other things going non, like NIMBYism rooted in a desire for housing prices to constantly increase (a fundamentally harmful expectation). You can address that with policy too, but in that case the fact that many people in the United States rely on selling their house to retire speaks to a broader problem with the expectation of retirement and the process by which people acquire wealth. Still addressable with policy, just a way bigger and less specific problem.
Per-capita, yes. Orders of magnitude, sometimes for individuals; but not necessarily as a group. It depends how you define richness. While "rich people" shouldn't be allowed to indiscriminately fly private jets wherever they like without paying a heavy carbon tax, their contribution to aviation in general is very small, apparently 4% of the pie. What people would call the "upper middle class" are going to be flying a lot more than the "working class," and therefore have much higher emissions (and business tickets comprise a large portion of airline revenues), but airlines still rely on huge numbers of economy tickets from comparatively lower-income people to be profitable.
When we talk about "rich people" we have to acknowledge that wealth is a scale which we are a part of. If you are a citizen of a developed country, then with very few exceptions you are already rich on a global scale and your lifestyle contributes an unbelievable amount to climate change relative to someone in a developing country. The average American or Canadian's lifestyle, with its electricity, electronic devices and appliances, paved roads, spacious houses, automobiles, prevalence of carbon-intensive foods like meat, etc. is "wealth" whether one feels wealthy or poor relative to other Americans or Canadians. Quantitatively, Canadian CO2 emissions per capita are around 18.72 tons annually compared to a global average of 4.76 or the average in a country like the DR Congo of 0.08 tons/yr. Not to discount the very real poverty which exists in these countries (no need to comment, I know this quite well), but I think it is worth remembering that we are personally contributing to climate change when we do things like fly, or drive, or order junk online, or eat too much meat -- we can't just shift the blame to "rich people" so that we feel comfortable living our lives as we do.
To speak to your point of pricing incentivizing behavior, I’d like to offer my own experience with housing.
I don’t mind living dense cities, for the most part. In fact it’s my preference assuming I can find an apartment that’s reasonably soundproof — the tradeoff of space is well worth the ability to easily meet with friends and colleagues, the plethora of activities it puts at one’s fingertips, and general access to services.
That’s not what’s incentivized by costs, however. In the US, especially prior to the jump in interest rates, if one’s situation is amicable to living in a suburb it can be massively financially beneficial to do so. In my case it allowed me to not only cut my housing costs in half, but make them effectively fixed rather than subject to yearly increases, and that doesn’t even include other reductions in costs of living.
That kind of improvement in money saved is difficult to ignore for any working class individual. It can make the difference between just keeping one’s head above the water and being able to achieve true financial security, and in some cases can even put reaching financial independence at a relatively young age within grasp. It’s such a massive boon that even many of the ecologically conscious have a hard time passing it up.
So through some combination of mechanisms, the costs of living in dense ecologically-friendly cities needs to be driven down such that working class can not only afford it, but also have a decent chunk of paycheck left over. Cost of suburb life should probably increase to reflect its ecological cost too, but it’s important for that to happen after cities become cheaper so you don’t wind up putting anybody out on the street.
Honestly, size and soundproofing are the two major impediments to making apartments viable for the masses. Where are the 2400 sq ft suites that could double as recording studios? Anyone who says the daily noise of neighbors is part of the human experience (not to mention those who say “just rent it” for cars or large equipment impractical to store in an apartment) is deeply unserious about urban densification.
I don't think recording-quality soundproofing is necessary for most individuals. Residential building codes should not mandate an excessive amount of soundproofing for the typical person, as there are diminishing returns on advanced sound transmission classes and having really stringent requirements drives up cost a lot. Recording is a specialized use-case and the user should have to pay for that level of isolation.
I used to live close to a recording engineer. Even in their very suburban and rather quiet house, they had to make special modifications to the floor and walls to dampen low-frequency vibrations from vehicles and other sources. This wasn't an anechoic chamber or anything. For near-complete isolation you would need a particularly abnormal setup, probably an anechoic room within a room (like with decoupling/isolation brackets), or something underground. Post-processing can remove some background noise, but isolating literally all of that noise to begin with is a major challenge.
But to your point, I agree in general that soundproofing is important. Many urban residences lack sufficient soundproofing, especially in low-income areas where developers skimped on these "luxuries." If you can hear your neighbors' conversations, your walls are too thin. Depending on the municipality, new multifamily residential development in the United States is generally mandated to have a Sound Transmission Class around 50 or 60, which is enough to eliminate essentially all noise from your neighbors. I think there is a lot of regional variation on the specifics. An STC of 60 is not prohibitively expensive, though it is more expensive than a lower STC.
For reference, hollow drywall apparently has an STC of about 34 and does not isolate voices. At 50–55 STC, you would not be able to hear a normal conversation, but you could potentially hear shouting. For most units, that is an acceptable minimum. At 60 STC you are effectively completely isolated from sound. The source provides a few figures for relatively advanced insulation at a range of STC values. I think these figures are in Singapore dollars:
If those are Singapore dollars, then in USD, according to this source the costs would be $63–$235/m² (wall), $84–$184/m² (ceiling), or $207/m² (floor). So if you were to install floated sound isolation floors on a 100 sqaure meter apartment (about 1075 sqft), that would be about $2000 USD for the floor alone, a similar amount for a floated ceiling, and somewhat more for expensive treatment of the walls. But clearly there is a major price differential depending on the exact solution taken and the resulting STC/IIC. The lower end of their estimates would be 25–50% of the cost of the high-end option. It's not clear to me what exact STC values those ranges correspond to, though. To get to an even higher STC, the price would jump up a lot more.
When soundproofing is mandated, the costs are borne on the homeowner upfront in the cost of their down payment/mortgage. When soundproofing is not mandated, they do not necessarily have to pay those costs, but they may or may not want to personally. For general comfort and to encourage people to live in urban areas they would otherwise prefer to live in, it makes sense to mandate relatively high STC insulation for new development. In this case, there is probably no reason to go above 55 to 60 STC in apartments by municipal statute, though a developer may choose to go higher.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to request information about a unit's STC from a potential landlord if you are looking into renting an apartment.
I don’t even need that much space personally, just decent natural light, great soundproofing, and smart floor plans that make it easy to maximize usage of the space. The latter two of those are surprisingly hard to come by.
Agree that larger condos shouldn’t be out of reach though for those who need them, which includes families along with cases like your example of a recording studio.
I'm in this boat - I much prefer a suburban lifestyle of single-family home ownership in a quiet neighborhood where I have my own personal indoor and outdoor spaces and don't share a wall, floor or ceiling with anyone else. But I'm suspect that I'm not at all in the minority of this viewpoint.
I remember on my local subreddits, when discussions about hosting prices came up, many people were advocating for the building of more dense urban housing not necessarily because they had any interest in renting one, but because they actually wanted to themselves buy a single-family suburban home and felt that other people buying/renting in dense housing would take those people out of the real-estate market and in turn provide less competition for themselves.
Yeah, there are certainly people who prefer to actually be in dense, urban living. But the availability and competition for single-family real estate purchases compared to the vast availability of apartment rental options (in most areas) tells a different story. Same goes for townhomes - most people I know who bought a townhome settled for one. It wasn't their first preference, but price drove them out of the single-family housing market and owning a townhouse was at least one step better than renting an apartment.
I accept this, but I still prefer the lifestyle that I've chosen. I'll make up for it in other ways.
I grew up in a SFH in a little tiny town, and my entire family still lives in that kind of home, so I understand the appeal. I don't mind sharing walls because it's very possible to insulate sound (see: STC), and idk, you still share walls with family members in a SFH (including loud and unruly teenagers). But it is nice to be somewhere you can sit on the porch without being startled by car horns and accelerating diesel engines.
There is also a range of sustainability metrics for detached suburban SFHs. While urbanist commentators often compare SFHs to mixed-use apartment development, there is also value in evaluating different kinds of SFH construction as a developer (or regulator) and use as a homeowner. For example:
So as a suburban homeowner, you can certainly adjust your lifestyle a little bit to minimize your impact. But this really is minimizing and not avoiding impact, so the "other ways" to make up for it would have to be beyond the household itself. Personally I have found charitable donations to be the easiest way to do this, and probably one of the more equitable strategies, although it can be an abstract process. To properly "make up" for one's footprint, financial compensation probably has to be significantly more than a token donation of $5/mo. I don't know how to exactly quantify an "appropriate" amount though. It depends on which environmental organizations you're funding and what projects they're working on, which is not constant. I guess it also depends on where that money comes from. Like, if you work for a coal power plant, your capital itself is environmentally unsustainable.
As far as community initiatives go, there is only so much to do in a smallish town (I mean, how many miles of woods does any town have to protect or maintain?). I think it is useful to be vocal about sustainability metrics with neighbors though. For example, maybe your house is unsuitable for solar panels, but your neighbor's house would be great for it. Having conversations with them individually encouraging such a switch is useful; as are conversations with local officials encouraging a subsidy to make the investment more affordable. I have personally find these strategies more fulfilling than donating to charities because I can see the positive impacts firsthand, though I still recognize that both are important and necessary.
This is changing in many areas. I serve on the board of an affordable housing nonprofit organization, and municipalities are continually modifying setbacks (front setbacks are still governed by things like utility easements, sidewalks and their distance from a road, and driveway length), but they're allowing for houses to be closer together. I purposely bought in a neighborhood where houses are more spread out because I want my space, but land price is driving a push for smaller lots anyway. This does impact affordability, however. Once houses are closer together, alternate fire codes set in. This makes it so that affordable exterior cladding materials like vinyl are replaced by more expensive and difficult to install materials like fiber cement and aluminum. Some municipalities may even require firewalls. This all has a negative impact on affordability.
I agree with this. It's typically not a municipal issue, as much as it is an HOA issue. I would love to see governmental restriction on HOA covenants that ban grass alternatives, much like many have banned restrictions on solar panels and clothes lines. Because HOAs by themselves will be hard-pressed to allow people to turn their lawns into alternatives.
Cost is that reason. The ROI is poor, and utilities are continually pushing changes to make the ROI even worse. Our utility does net metering, but the rollover credits are dropped in May just before the hot summer starts. They also force solar panel owners onto a more expensive time-of-use rate that makes it so that you pay more for electricity during peak hours, and peak hours tend to be in the evenings when solar generation is low. Utilities have little incentive to provide financial incentives for solar. It doesn't allow them to decrease investments in the grid and power production, since the grid and power both need to be sized for things like providing heating in sub-zero temperatures at night or on a cloudy day. The nonprofit I work with occasionally has them installed on homes when local companies donate them, but otherwise, it results in cost increases that our homeowners can't accept.
This has been getting better for years. In addition to increased insulation standards, things like passive cooling of attics via soffit and ridge vent, radiant barrier roof sheathing, expansion foam / calking around penetrations and under wall plates, house pressure/blow tests to measure and validate air leaks, etc are all becoming more and more standard in new residential construction. But these issues are not limited to single family homes. While heat radiation to other dwellings might be nice in the winter, it's not so nice in the summer for the units on the top floor that need to run their ACs harder to deal with the absorption of the head from below them. There are also plenty of drafty, poorly-insulated apartment buildings where the residents have no choice but to deal with it. In fact, if you're in that situation, your landlord has no incentive to fix those issues and you have no power to do so yourself, and you're the one stuck with the higher energy bill.
I decided not to have children. Not bringing one or more additional people into this world that will need to consume resources for 80 years is one way is one way that I deal with it. I'm very selective about charities. Most of my donations go to the charity whose board I serve on and who I volunteer with, because I believe in their mission and know that they're spending money wisely. But sustainability is indeed part of their charter.
In my experience, lifestyle "downgrades" due to economics don't necessarily automatically equate to being less consumptive. For instance, as housing costs rise, people may be forced to move farther from work or living areas to afford livable housing, in turn necessitating that they drive at all/more, increasing carbon emissions.
I'll readily admit this example as coming from personal experience. Most of my adult life, I lived in fairly walkable (or at least bikeable) areas, and almost never drove day-to-day, even when owning a car. I studied in environmental fields, and I tried to make sound decisions on my knowledge; on occasions of plugging rough info into footprint/CO2 calculators, I usually wasn't too far over sustainable benchmarks.
The pandemic hit and for a variety of reasons I move home with family (outside a city); I made the decision knowing I'd be forced to drive a lot, but assumed it would be a short-term move. Between inflation and rising housing costs/rent, I'm having a very difficult time moving back to a place where I can cut out driving. These days, I have to drive so much electric vehicles are not only out of my price range, I'm that "special" case where they are very much out of the distance I regularly need (side-note: I kind of hate driving; this isn't even fun for me). Even with attempts to consolidate my trips as much as possible, my CO2 emissions are in no way 'sustainable' any longer. Anecdotally, I don't think I'm alone in this type of story.
It makes me sad. I've consciously tried to make decisions within my power to live in a less-consuming way. But, I also feel like I'm too often faced with too many obstacles between me and the best decisions, and have come to realize how, in absence of sound, environmentally driven policies, living "sustainably" really can be a costly luxury.
I'll end by noting: I hope this doesn't read as though I'm making excuses, or sounding too woe-is-me. It's not my intention. I still do try to be mindful of various choices. Just trying to add a personal anecdote that I think mirrors the point scroll_lock was making in terms of the importance of policy in driving the availability of personal choices; downgrades aren't enough, or even right. Meaningfully sustainable options need to be abundantly, easily available with relatively low barriers of access, so people barely even have to think of them as changes.
Although globally, emissions are still rising, if you look at national and regional numbers, there are signs of progress. US emissions peaked in 1974 and has been dropping since. Similarly for Europe.
Also, increasing US natural gas exports makes sense, temporarily, for geopolitical reasons. What's worse than depending on natural gas? Depending on Russian natural gas.
I expect things will get worse before they get better, though.
Yes, there are signs. I try not to be too negative on this website because I know that it just makes people disengage. Certainly there is much to celebrate, like Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act which for whatever reason has a bunch of climate-relevant legislation in it. And the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has a significant amount of funding for rail transportation in particular, both for passengers and freight, which is the most energy-efficient and environmentally friendly form of ground transit/shipping. The European Union has also passed a meaningful amount of climate legislation over the last few years.
My caveat: any signs of progress shouldn't be taken as a chance for us to ease up or become apathetic. Even if wealthy Western nations achieve net-zero emissions in the next couple decades, they have a moral obligation to offset the emissions they spawned by investing extremely heavily into research, technologies, and systems that can be generalized for use by developing countries. It is the latter group which is going to produce the most emissions in the next century, but they do not have the resources to go net-zero while maintaining stable economies and civil life. I feel it is fair and (more importantly) efficient/optimal for wealthy countries such as the one I live in to do an extraordinary amount of research and development now, and over the next several decades, that the fruits of their labor might be appreciated by the rest of the world.
I will also note that going net zero is really just an interim goal. It stops things from getting worse but does not change the fact that they are presently worse than they once were. Also, in practice, "net zero" systems still have some emissions because there is no such thing as a completely neutral manufacturing or energy generation process. So we cannot be satisfied solely with slowing rates of increasing emissions, or even with overall decreases in emissions; we have to also concern ourselves with initiatives to remove carbon from the atmosphere to return to safer and less extreme pre-industrial conditions, reduce per-capita and overall resource consumption, restore worldwide ecological habitats, repopulate endangered species, and redesign our own "habitats" (cities) to cooperate with natural ecosystems more effectively, including processes like permeability and rainwater management but also providing spaces for animals we do not traditionally care for. Going net zero is just the prerequisite for fully realizing that.
Also, it's not even necessarily a good interim goal - getting to "net 10%" (i.e. reducing emissions to 1/10th of current levels) within a few years is far more important than e.g. net zero by 2050. Because reducing emissions quickly staunches the wound quicker.
It doesn't change the core point but most of the sources I've seen put the US emissions peak in 2007 rather than the 70's.
One source
You are right. I was looking at the graph for per-capita emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
That chart specifically mentions that it does not account for traded goods. I fear the peak ignores that we in the West have continued to increase our per-capita emissions, simply flying a bit further under the radar by offshoring a lot of our consumer products' emissions abroad, particularly to china.
We might not be producing those emissions directly, but we are the ones consuming the fruits of them.
Yeah a good chunk of emissions in China are from manufacturing stuff that’s sent to the US and elsewhere. [citation needed but I’m about to board a plane]
consumption based co2 emissions aren't as large as you might think, and don't affect the big picture massively, whether absolute or per capita
Yes, that's definitely something to be wary of. It's hard to get good numbers. I'm not actually doing the homework and understanding the scientific literature isn't easy.
I’ve probably told this story before on tildes, but it bears repeating.
I once went to a Bill McKibbon lecture, popular climate change advocate in the aights and ‘10’s. This was in Asheville, NC, ostensibly progressive town. There were about 1000 of us in attendance, maybe 4 of us rode bikes.
Now, any ordinary event, sure, few people ride bikes anywhere in America. But this was an event where people paid money to go see a guy talk about impending catastrophe due to anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide loading, and less than 0.1% didn’t arrive in a small, motorized car. Probably half arrived from <3 miles away (avl is small).
I have yet to emotionally recover.
Personally, I only see that as a sign cities are designed solely with cars in mind.
For decades, auto-makers, marketers, politicians, and urban planners have all worked together to make cars the default option. They succeeded; cities are built for cars and are hostile to any other transportation method. In the US for the most part, public transit barely exists, cyclists are grudgingly permitted to use the same spaces as cars to the detriments of both, and pedestrians suck down exhaust fumes while trudging distances designed for cars, without any shade and sometimes even without a sidewalk.
Then there's the media side of things. Cycling is the province of extreme fitness types or those too immature to have a car. Public transportation is usually a punchline, the joke being just how awful it is to use, or is the sign of a character who's fallen on hard times and can no longer afford a vehicle. But cars are for everyone. They're a personality indicator, a status symbol, freedom (if you've got the thousands and thousands of dollars to spend every year for that "freedom").
So overall, I don't find it surprising that when everything is set up to support cars, people choose to drive. If we want to change that, we first have to make it so that the other options are actually good, rather than afterthoughts, and a culture shift away from cars as the default. And there is progress on that front. People are increasingly aware of the damage cars do, and increasingly vocal about support for alternative options. Cities are slowly rolling out better options, from bike lanes to more bus routes.
I mean, sadly public transport in the USA is generally awful to use. But it's mostly that bad because of all the cars making it harder for busses to move around. And lack of public access to toilets, criminalizing of homelessness, obsession with alcohol, and bad access to mental healthcare result in a lot of busses smelling like piss, shit, and vomit in perpetuity. Not even thinking about the assholes who smoke and vape on the bus.
Non-bus options are usually at least marginally better, but stations have no less of these problems.
In the case of buses, having dedicated bus lanes painted red meaningfully improves bus travel times, as cars mostly stay out of them. Of course drivers still sometimes block the bus lanes though. Fortunately, new camera-based ticketing systems seem to offer an escape from this. In Philadelphia, SEPTA recently adopted a new enforcement system which caught tens of thousands of violations. As a result, delays from cars have decreased significantly. New York's MTA has a similar program.
Whenever I'm in Europe I'm reminded of how much of a difference the sainisettes make. These are virtually nonexistent in most of the United States. I have always been very impressed with their cleanliness in Paris in particular. I think that having more of these stateside would go a long way toward addressing the issues you bring up.
An optimistic way to look at it is that it's a good sign that people who aren't committed environmentalists (or at least not in the way you hoped) were curious enough to hear what he had to say.
Here's the hard truth everyone is too afraid to admit: To reduce consumption, you need limits.
Incentives/disincentives can work, to a point. But anything that relies on merely raising costs just increases burden for the poor while letting the rich (companies included) do whatever they want and/or pass the buck downstream. Hence why carbon taxes are grossly insufficent.
The national governments need to be the middleman for all oil, to be able to limit the supply. Then they need to create ration credits. Say one ration per barrel of oil. With modern debit cards, would be trvial to have a electronic fractional ration system. The nation's full usage gets split equally between all people in the nation, being distributed monthly. Setup a market system where people can buy and sell rations. Companies seeking oil for production must buy rations from citizens. Citizens will have more than enough rations to cover their consumption. There also needs to be part of the ration cost baked into every good, to insure reducing consumption from consumer side is incentivized as well.
Rations can no longer be traded 6 months after issuance, and they expire entirely a year after being issued. And then the next year, you issue X% less rations.
Doing this is far more fair than any other system, and also serves as a method of wealth redistribution, as wealth does not factor into your issued rations. As the belt tightens on rations, the prices on the market will rise. Since the rations expire, there will be a constant supply of buyers. Hoarding to game the system becomes difficult and expensive compared to buying rations as you need them, as it requires storage of the oil itself.
There will almost certainly be some degree of black market that springs up, and any companies complacent in it need to face swift and complete destruction, as is the case with distributing alcohol to minors.
We've tried rationing - it's called cap-and-trade and it fails horribly, because all the most powerful oil-users lobby to be given high quotas in proportion to what they currently use, and then they systemically overestimate how much they're currently using. The moment the system starts, they sell off the excess and flood the market, but then block any attempts to lower the cap, because it would increase their costs and why would they want that.
I'm not against a rationing system, but let's get a proper carbon tax in place first, and ramp up the cost per tonne first, and then focus on extra systems afterwards.
That's not what studies are showing. In fact, one key phrase:
It works, because in the face of shortages, where nobody can have enough, rations are the only fair way to distribute goods. It worked in WW2, it worked in the 1970's. It's not exactly popular, but then, it's far more popular than the alternative where the majority get nothing. It's just...usually we institute rations before the riots start, not after. So few people really experience what it's like to go fully without.
What you have described is merely corruption, and putting a corporation-first approach to rations. In the method I describe, corporations don't get any say at all...the government sees exactly how much is coming in and out, and then just starts putting limits in place. By forcing the rations to be bought from people, rather than being handed directly to corporations, you sidestep the ability of the corporations to game the system...especially if you have the rations expire to prevent hoarding.
Not to say I think it has a chance of passing in the form I've described...merely one that I see as far more optimal than most other alternatives.
I see your point about the ease of implementing certain policies. I am not sure how fossil fuel companies lobbying against cap-and-trade limits is substantively different than fossil fuel companies lobbying against carbon taxes though. I think these things are not mutually exclusive.
I will comment that California's Cap and Trade program is directly funding California High-Speed Rail, the only HSR project in the United States under construction. It's only a portion of the megaproject's funding because the C&T program isn't as extensive as it could be, but it's not insignificant. In this case, the program is both directly reducing emissions (limiting overall use of fossil fuels) and indirectly doing so (by constructing infrastructure that will enable sustainable transportation).
The cap-and-trade usually starts off with compensation to the polluting companies equivalent to their existing emissions (i.e. it starts with handouts), whereas a carbon tax is just a tax. In other words, cap-and-trade can be worse than nothing while creating an illusion of progress. It's not a theoretically inherent limitation of cap-and-trade, but it's what tends to happen.
My core issue with cap-and-trade, IMO, is that companies can profit by overestimating or underestimating their emissions, whereas a carbon tax can only be gamed by underestimating. This means that carbon taxes are much easier to loophole-proof.
Also, cap-and-trade schemes that match existing emissions indirectly reward everyone who've dragged their feet on reducing their emissions.
Some have gotten close, but since no one has mentioned it yet: a lot of our climate problems stem from producing goods at industrial scale. As a society that's focused on cultivating hyperconsumer lifestyles to promote spending on trivial shit, I think that reducing our production of those (hyperconsumptive) goods as close to zero (as what could be possible) would likely be the only really meaningful step forward to solving the climate change crisis.
We just produce so much useless bullshit, that's meant to be bought on impulse. Trying to identify goods explicitly made for that purpose would be tricky, but it will be a problem that will need to be tackled at some point, if we want a realistic chance at reducing and/or reversing climate change.
As a thought experiment; think about mugs. All the varieties that exist within the pantheon of 'traditionally' built mugs. All the colors, all the sizes, shapes, materials, glazes, stains, etc. Recognize that, as a society we seem compelled to demand that we should have access to all these permutations to the 'classical mug' be available to us, 24/7/365, either online or by a collection of nearby stores, competing or cooperating to provide an ample selection at all times.
Now realize that all I've mentioned is the basic, humble mug. A rather utilitarian product, of which I've already given some leeway for 'self-expression' and 'identity' by allowing all the permutations mentioned in the above. That's already an incredible, unfathomable amount of mugs to be stamping out on a production line on a monthly basis, at an industrial scale.
But it isn't enough. We demand a holiday specifically for mugs, so mug consumption increases as a part of our culture, and thus "Father's Day" was born, as if Christmas wasn't already enough. We demand mugs that aren't really "mugs," in that they're too elaborate a design to drink from, but rather serve as pen/pencil holders on our desks. (again: father's day gifts) People buy mugs not to drink from, but simply to "collect" them and admire them, an action that can only be described as "consumption for the sake of consumption." We have mugs adorned with graphics and logos for any and every occasion, location, movie, TV show, snarky one-liner, fandom, meme, YouTube channel, corporate entity, governmental entity, whatever! You better believe there's a mug for it, and if there isn't, there's certainly a company that would be willing to take your order and stamp a few pallets into existence for you, and ship it halfway around the world, for a price.
And this is just how we treat mugs. Now broaden your horizons and consider entire industries, like souvenirs. Gifts. The industries that surround the holidays, and the annual consumption each one demands. Think about how we treat complex consumer goods, like fucking cars. We need to change how we consume, and how we think about the act of consumption itself. We need to remove hyper-consumerism from our zeitgeist entirely, or else nothing will change and we all die buried in a mountain of green-washed Furbys redesigned for Generation Alpha.
Sure, changing to electric vehicles will help in reducing carbon emissions, and it needs to be done. But in the long run it's probably not going to really help much if we treat electric vehicles the same as we treat ICE vehicles; with new annual iterations with differing models and choices and offerings and luxuries in every color of the fucking rainbow stamped out in annual increments in the hundred-thousands, if not millions, and that's before the even more absurd shit we'll inevitably follow up with, if shit like Hyundai's 2019 Kona, "Iron Man Edition," was of any indication. It won't simply be "enough" to have solar panels on your roof, I guarantee there will be demand created for 'nostalgic, old school' solar panels of the 1970's. Maybe bring it up after Jimmy Carter's death, his addition to the White House.
I'm absolutely terrible with endings. I'm sure if I think up of anything later, I'll edit it in. I can only rant so much.