Regulate

To fix climate change, we need regulation change first and foremost. The richest, and the corporations, are doing more harm than random normal people are doing.

Me making changes in my own life (on the “consumer level”) does have a couple of advantages:

1. It helps a little bit
2. It cushions the blow in my own life, like if suddenly meat is rationed I’ll be okay because I already switched to plants in the 90s
3. It’s paving the way for more people to change, or for the changes to become regulation. Without drops there’s no ocean.

And I’m now gonna torpedo all three of those advantages:

1. A little bit of help won’t be enough. I’ll be the smuggest skeleton on the cinder but I can’t stop doom on my own. It’s a pointless ego trip.
2. This shouldn’t be about my own selfishness of what would be the most comfy. The world is at stake and I need to think bigger.
3. This shouldn’t be necessary. Politicians need to sober the heck up (and get free from corruption) and regulate beyond what people are spontaneously doing. Like when smoking was banned, my friends who all smoked were so happy for the fresher air and I’m like guys you were among the smoking ones just last week. But that’s the nature of game theory dilemmas like the chicken game. One person changing and nobody else changing is gonna just be hard times for that person with little to no benefit.

Now, don’t take this rant as an excuse for folks to hang on to their cheeseburgers and airplane tickets. It’s a rant for policy-making to urgently change which requires cross-aisle support since the changes are going to be impopular. And we’re very far from this, with colorless green ideas sleeping more and more furiously in our political parties as they sell out to gasoline populism.

I’m gonna stick to the plan. I’d rather be a smug skeleton than a sad one.

Sometimes I feel like the fossil industry was very clever in their two phase attack. Step one, shunt all responsibility onto guilt-tripped hippies with talk of “carbon footprint”, “carbon budget” etc. Step two, as those ideas gain widespread support, undermine it all and make people go back to their cars and cows, saying “it’s only the corporations that need to change”. And all the while nothing happens.

The way we make policy is the problem and is going to stay a big problem in the infocalypse.