I walked by a guy chatting near his 4x4 engine turned on, asked him if he could turn it down, [some not polite response], I explain it's because of pollution, [we don't care about pollution], I said we very much do. That tells how far we are from this concern with average people
Do we (as a society/species) though? If we cared about climate change we'd be doing something about climate change. And we're really not.
Everybody cares about somebody else making changes in their life to reduce pollution but how many people actually make meaningful change in their own lives?
And if you ask somebody to consider drastic change in their own life – driving as little as possible, never flying in airplanes, buying significantly less stuff in general, not having kids, not eating meat, living in apartments rather than single-family homes, etc. they'll just say the corporations are the problem and anything they do wouldn't matter at all.
I'm kind of at the point where I say we just all let our own metaphorical 4x4 engines run and see what happens. Most of us reading this will be long dead before anything heinous happens to us (or we're wealthy enough to be insulated enough from the effects to where we'll get by OK).
A lot of people argue what’s the point when the normal individual is so much less responsible than the billionaires, and the normal country is so much less than the largest
The trouble is that notably cutting personal carbon emissions comes at a fairly high individual cost, but has basically no effect unless a whole lot of other people do it, too. If they don’t, you’ve harmed yourself significantly for effectively no reason—no meaningful good was accomplished.
The greater direct effect at much lower real personal cost, for billionaires, plus the greater likelihood of their influencing others to follow suit, makes the calculus a bit different for them.
>The tragedy of the commons is a real sonofabitch.
The "tragedy of the commons" is a propaganda tool used to justify privatization of the commons. The commons were reasonably well-managed until a small number of people decided to extract maximum profit from them (and damn the consequences).
