cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/1097575
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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This is a false choice between huge lifestyle changes for everyday people and regulating the polluters. Regulating the polluters is going to cause huge lifestyle changes for everyday people.
The idea that any of us get to go on as usual is the main roadblock to meaningful climate action.
Well can't we just ban Shell from selling oil, and then get in our F150s to drive to the airport?
Gotta use at least a 350 to transport one person to the airport
Or, better yet, people who "love nature", so they drive an SUV every weekend for an hour to get to a cottage / camp / cabin. Or go camping, or canoeing, or whatever.
i assume F150 is an electric vehicle. electricity doesn't come from nowhere. where does the energy come from?
F150 is a huge American ute that burns tons of gasoline to get around.
they make electric f150s, according to my just right now internet search. i buy japanese cars when i buy cars. statesian brands are soiled.
I'm cool with that. I also don't think it would necessarily be huge in terms of inconvenience for the average person because alternatives would pop up before long. For example, if air travel became prohibitively expensive we might actually see an expanse of passenger rail for domestic travel. It's ridiculous that it's still cheaper/more convenient to take a 45 min flight (plus the time the whole airport experience takes) vs a couple hours (or less with high speed rail) train ride. Certain plastics might also become too expensive so we might see the return to more sustainable packaging. A lot of the oil and byproduct consumption from the average person comes down to lack of choice ratger than people choosing products made from oil ober alternatives.
BLIMPS
It would be a massive inconvenience, but it'll still be worth it. High speed rail takes many years to build. People hate lifestyle changes. Hell, people will be unhappy at the changes to food packaging. Everything will become more expensive and the economy will contract.
If we go in promising it'll be easy people will get mad and balk when it gets hard. If we go in explaining how it'll suck, but that we've got a plan to fix the problems and it'll be worth it then we can succeed
This is a political non-starter, and you've pretty much gotten to the point all the people criticising this post are trying to make. Almost no one is willing to make a significant sacrifice in their lifestyle for the sake of the climate, which is why memes like the above exist. They create a make-believe fairytale land where we just have to beat the big bad, and we can all live happily ever after.
But imagine what would happen in any democratically elected nation if a politician actually started making everyones lives worse. Sure, some would keep a stiff upper lip and bear it - but the vast majority would put them out on their ass asap in favor of the first person who said they would make things better.
That's why literally every climate proposal includes policies to improve things for the average person. Carbon dividends or UBI or trains or street trees or green jobs, etc. You have to be realistic about politics as much as you are realistic about carbon economics.
No, we are past that point. A gradual reduction in CO2 levels is not enough any more. If you want to save billions of lives we need to cut CO2 production hard and right now. Since that is never going to happen you happy go lucky scenario becomes impossible. In any realistic climate scenario humanity is already fucked, it's only matter of how much exactly.
Correct, we are likely going to need to do geoengineering for a 100-200 years while CO2 gets reduced gradually.
Baking soda aerosols are looking promising. They can just at 2-3% sodium additive to all jet aircraft exhaust and it will be enough to reverse the current levels of elevated CO2.
Start doing some real chemtrails.
i mean, i'm not sure where you live but we're seeing sizeable towns [populations <10,000] getting eaten by fire on my side of the continent (pacific west coast, north america [i'm in california. it's been a mild year so far but fire season officially started two weeks ago in my town. so far only three fires worth mentioning!]) and before you start on any "need to rake your forest or manage it better or let it burn", people been living there for 400 years if not longer at the one close to me that burned a few seasons back. much longer at the one with 200,000 people that half burned a few more seasons back. kindly leave that victim blamey bullshit at the door.
agreed, we're already fucked. the question now is how fucked and whether we'll be around when the planet recovers.
The planet isn't going to "recover". We're fundamentally changing the atmosphere, and it'll never go back. The planet will be fine, some forms of life will go on, but the planet will not settle back into something hospitable to current complex life.
megafauna never really came back. like, this one is very different from the ones before, but it's not going to extinct everything.
So oxygen in the atmosphere is relatively new geologically speaking, and oxygen is incredibly reactive, it oxidizes things which is a fancy way of saying it dissolves things slowly. It pretty well killed most things that weren't already equipped to either process or release oxygen as waste. We're good at dealing with it but we're pretty sensitive to the exact mixture of air (which is mostly nitrogen anyway) and we're likely past a point of no return for cascading runaway effects changing that mixture. That'll kill most air breathers. The greenhouse runaway effect will acidify the oceans, killing most ocean life. The increased energy in the system from the greenhouse effect causes continent-wide superstorms that literally scour the face of the earth into something unrecognizable. Most of what survived before won't survive that.
So yeah, earth will move on and there will likely still be some form of life on it in a few thousand years. But it won't be us, or anything like us, and it never will be again. We are this planets only shot at producing space-faring life.
Americans simply have no idea how much of what they take for granted is simply an unsustainable luxury. That absolutely includes leftists, too.
K that's fine
Nothing changes until the price of an electric car is less than the cost of a gas one when it comes to the vehicle cost.
A Hyundai Sonata is 35k CAD
A Hyundai IONIQ 6 is 55k CAD
Miss me with that bullshit.
Hyundai Sonata is a budget sedan. Ioniq is their top of the line electric. Perhaps look at Hyundai Inster or Hyundai Kona or something.
Budget 😂. In South Africa the Sonata is one of their largest sedans.
Hyundai Accent is the budget one. Elantra is the mid-size one. I doubt either are available in the US.
Dollar converted, the Accent costs about $12k.
The US car market is so cooked.
Ah yes, you're right. I just googled the model and read "affordable midsize sedan" in a result.
This is why buying new cars is dumb,
A used Hyundai sonata 2024 is ~20k USD
A used Hyundai ioniq 6 2024 is ~24k USD
Yeah it may be more upfront, but most people finance any way and your monthly payment will be offset buy your fuel savings.
There's enough of a stock of used EVs, quite often with low mileage, at this point that cost is becoming less of an issue for people then the perceived lack of convenience. That and dealerships/manufacturers not promoting them because they get less maintenance fees and they're lower margin then a giant SUV or pickup.
most people at this point chosing fuel over electric, the main motivation is best case "habit" or worst case political statement, it has very little to do with money or the technical limitations of the vehicles anymore. They just don't like change, they're scared of it. They have driven a fuel car all their lives and they will continue their habits as long as they are allowed to. The range on EV's is crazy now. For christ's sake, an electric bicycle has a reach of 100km! How far out away from what they need do the average 90% of people live... less than a few kilometers.
It's really not that hard to put a price on societal collapse and the end of humanity: the money it costs to try to mitigate that is infinite and every decision every person makes right now should be made in that light of exponentially higher costs later if bad choices which now seem slightly less expensive are made now...
Yeah. If you're paying for the car outright, your free cash every month will be higher, which can go back into savings. If you're financing the car, your monthly expenses will quite possibly be the same or lower, because you pay for gas every month, too.
I just looked in Canada
2024 sonata. 28k
2024 IONIQ 6. 39k
I'm sorry I'm not paying over 10k more for an electric car that's absolutely insane.
Not equivalent, the IONIQ is luxury
Slate is 25k
Now factor in lifetime costs of repairs and gas/electricity!
BTW I have no idea which one is which of your two cars 😅
Isnt byd and other chinese ves a lot cheaper compared to the brand new normal cars? No wonder china has majority ev owners and drivers. It can be done, gas cars can be replaced, but the main problem with the oil company's is that they have huge influence in the government and hmthey have huge power, boyboy has a wonderful video about this topic. They destroy nature, they only care about profits, they lobby against any ev or even hydrogen cars, they are the main reason why climate change is only accelerating in the west. At this point we as humans cant do anything legally to change this.
I bought my fully loaded ioniq 5 for 31K euros Used…
idk. i got an ebike and my lifestyle didn't change a while lot. just had to get one with a trunk, uh, big basket strapped to the back.
Honestly, I believe the main roadblock is the idea that change will need to happen at all. The sad truth is that most people are fine with contributing to climate change so long as they can keep doing what they're accustomed to doing.
The only way I can see for meaningful climate action to happen is to get people on board with regulation polluters while allowing them to be ignorant to the fact that lifestyle changes will have to follow, and then when they're forced to adapt, they will. People are much better at changing when they can't afford not to than when they have the option to just keep on doing what they always have.
People are also a lot more likely to make sacrifices to keep up momentum after a win like regulating polluters; few people are going to change first when they can see a company like Shell - polluting more every day than they have in their entire lives - going unchecked. A change has to happen to give them hope that the climate can even be saved before they try to make changes themselves to save it.
Yes, but regulating pollutors requires a populace that won't accept anything less. Instead people are placated by paper straws.