this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I am not against easing one's conscience, so long as that's not the only thing people do. It's a perverse turn in our culture that we've started to shame people for trying to act morally. We have a conscience for a reason: to motivate good behaviour. This reminds me of the right's claim that everything is "virtue signalling", as if moral action itself is undesirable. It coheres with a hyper individualistic and self-interested worldview.
My question is precisely whether "in fact it is exactly as bad". That is an empirical claim, not one that you can declare with a serene wave of the hand. That John Oliver reporting is useful in that regards, whereas your comment, devoid of argument or evidence, is not.
Seeking to ease one's conscience by means of spending excess money is hyper-individualistic and conforms with a self-interested worldview.
The perverse thing is how neoliberalism has left people with the idea that they can meaningfully impact the world through deciding where they spend the pittance left them after their bosses and government warmongers have taken their cut.
If you give a shit about the environment stop believing the propaganda that market forces will be swayed by your hobby of guilt spending. It will be the hard work of organizing people and uprooting the financial interest who direct national and global policy.
Fair enough!
The problem is: Once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, itβs there. It does damage. No money in the world will undo that, unless we build massive factories that extract CO2 from the atmosphere and make coal- or oil-like stuff that we put back in the earth. At the same moment your consumption blasts CO2 out in the atmosphere.
That does not exist. There is no system in place (except for some small but ludicrously expensive labs) that could do that.
Planting trees (or something similar) might help in a few decades, if the trees are still alive then and not being harvested. Until then the CO2 is in the atmosphere, doing its damage. Every day, every minute, every second.