this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
146 points (83.2% liked)
Asklemmy
44152 readers
730 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are a TON of issues with EVs as a first line approach to emissions. Manufacturing emissions is a big one, admittedly that one will come down as infrastructure gets up to date with what we have already for vehicle manufacturing.
A much more important factor, however, is the fact that the individual's contribution to emissions is negligible. It doesn't really matter what we, as private citizens, do when corporations or billionaires produce so much carbon emissions. When Taylor Swift's JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn't matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.
We need infrastructure, and we need governance. Pointing the finger at regular guys and saying you're the problem because you drive a combustion engine is folly at best.
Amazingly, you're missing your own point. If it's not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.
But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift's emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of "corporations/billionaires". So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.
But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.
It doesn't mean it's the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.
I pointed out in another post that yes, please, do what you can as an individual. That means, when your car reaches its natural end, then yeah, go for an EV. The point I'm aiming for though is that if each and every person switched to EVs overnight, it's not going to have the impact we need it to to arrest the carbon emissions problems we have.
We have megacorps that don't have a reason to limit their production. We have countries seemingly actively working to make shit worse. EVs aren't a magic bullet, they're not something that we need to be quite so aggressively pursuing when there are other very real things that we can do to make an actual impact.
We need to shit down billionaires planes indeed. But we also need to remove all cars that produce co2. Their emissions are significant. It means we won't survive if we don't remove them.
The problem you're touching is the one of whom will pay the price of the transition. And indeed it'd be better if rich people were paying.