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Originally Posted by JayBuoy
How do you live a low-carbon life in a high-carbon world? I certainly try, but its impossible to exit society. Change has to be structural, not individual. An excellent way to reduce your carbon footprint is by living in an apartment in a dense neighbourhood, but the last half-century has been dedicated to eradicating that way of life. You could go vegan/vegetarian, but there are so many subsidies on meat and dairy, the highest carbon foods.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
There is a huge gap between the rhetoric and the action. People that claim that climate change is the biggest threat to the world are only willing to support measures that affect somebody else. When people believed Hitler was the biggest threat to the world they were willing to enlist, buy bonds, plant Victory Gardens, accept rationing etc. My hypothesis is that they don’t really believe their own rhetoric.
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Can't speak for others. But I live in condo, commute to work by transit, drive a hybrid the rest of the time, limit my meat consumption substantially (vegan spouse) , and drive a hybrid. Now, I didn't do a lot of this out of some great concern for the planet. I did it because it's better for my health and my wallet. And that there is the key. The incentive structure has to be there to cut emissions. And so do the pathways to do so.
We make it way too damn hard. We don't build enough transit. We design condos mostly for young singles. We don't want to limit sprawl. Etc.
I don't know if Trudeau was just honestly naive or simply dismissive of the idea that more effort would be needed beyond simply putting on a carbon tax.
@acottawa, I actually do think people need to look at this almost like a war effort. Because it's that critical for our fewer generations. And that is increasingly the comparison being made.
I personally prefer the comparison to the space race. It was a steady, driven, national, decade long industrial and scientific effort to put a man on the moon. At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA's budget was 4% of the American federal budget. If developed countries did that today, they'd hit net zero by 2035-2040.
While not quite going that far, I really, really wish we actually dedicated the resources to simply catch up to the rest of the developed world on housing and transit and intercity transportation. It would legitimately improve our quality of life while cutting emissions.
Boggles my mind that Trudeau said he cared about climate change and most of his pledged deficit funding for infrastructure wasn't to public transport or retrofitting buildings. Went on to run even higher deficits, most of which didn't go to infrastructure. Starting on HFR or HSR between Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal would have massively help cut emissions in the busiest aviation corridor in the country.