On a slightly popular (for Mastodon) #climate post I got two people saying that climate change was caused by ordinary people's bad behavior. That's a level of ignorance that we can't afford: the fossil fuel industry's campaign of public propaganda and political lobbying is well documented, and it is just as much of a factual claim to refer to it as it is to refer to climate science.
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I'm seeing some "soft" versions of this that say that it is a mixed problem. Just to answer multiple people at once:
1) Ordinary people have no real ability to choose what infrastructure they use. They use whatever is built. Individual exceptions are not large enough to matter.
2) To make social change in this regard, you build or destroy infrastructure. It has nothing to do with individual virtuous or immoral decisions, because see (1) above.
We did a natural experiment in this regard -- Covid. Covid caused a dramatic decline in plane flights and other travel, a dramatic increase in work from home, a decrease in large ship luxury travel, all of it far beyond what the most ambitious volunteer campaign might expect. None of it mattered in the long term at all. We are past time for demonstration campaigns and into the time where we need actual changes in infrastructure.
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes
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