To resent the cognitive dissonance that exists around climate change

[JacquesHarlow]

Let’s be real - will anything get better when folk’s priorities are usually about themselves?

Let me explain my rather emotional opening point.

There’s been lots of news this week unsurprisingly about how we had the hottest year on record last year. The last 10 years have been the hottest on record. Wildfires, floods, you name it - the earth is changing.

Yet here in the temperate, largely rainy UK, many people I see around me are very happy to have their head in the sand, while also bizarrely choosing just one or two lines of attack on the climate crisis to shame others.

One of the parents i know has an electric car. It’s nice, I’m happy for them. They also take at least five flight a year. They have three children.

Yet if you hear them talk about diesel cars… it’s as if the owners are personally killing everyone around them.

Now don’t get me wrong. Emissions locally are important, the air our kids breathe is important. that might be a focus.

However you see it in the choice of car journeys over trains, of large SUVs over a normal family car like a Golf.

The latter particularly grates. We have a huge climate crisis. Yet Joanna or Nicola has to have a Discovery Sport for her three kids because she needs to sit high up, it’s easier to load them in, and she worries about crash worthiness.

The history books will show that rather than looking up and out for each other, we’re actually turning more inwards. Our own personal economy will always triumph over needing to protect others. If I’m able to pay £400 a month PCP on a Dispcvery Sport, then “I’ll protect my family over anything”, even though the entire thought process is irrational.

We need to take fewer flights and more rail journeys. working from home should mean more walking to school as the commute has gone. instead we’re seeing more car journeys. More flights. More large purchases; throwaway electronics; fast fashion.

AIBU to think there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and head in the sand about climate change in the UK, and spending power (and the choices it unlocks) is king?

I am not asking anyone on here to live a "joyless" life

I'm just pointing out that whatever is important to someone's personal economy, is where they draw the line.

I think you sound like you have a VERY small carbon footprint. At the end of the day, that's great.

For others with three kids, four cars, five mobile phones, six flights a year, superfast broadband, Amazon accounts, streaming services, etc...

but who then carp about folk who live alone, no kids, but happen to drive a 20 year old diesel?

Those folk I have an issue with. There are a lot of "single issue" environmentalists who are angry about choice of car, or not using refillable cereal boxes, but who live extaordinarily consumptive lives.

And there’s the point in a nutshell. You could close the entire UK down and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference so getting hot under the collar because Naomi has a Range Rover is utterly ridiculous.

It wasn't aimed at you! I was just saying I'm not going to give up every single thing. I've given up quite a lot if you read my post, but my pet would be a step too far for me. That's all.

I'm just pointing out that whatever is important to someone's personal economy, is where they draw the line.

But that’s the case for everyone, we all have our reasons and lines in the sand. I drive to the office because the train is ridiculously expensive for what it is, I abhor food waste so am tight on that, I don’t do fast fashion and outgrown kids clothes get recycled or repurposed. I have a dog and a cat who I’d never consider giving up. My kids are adopted, which you could say is environmentally friendly though that wasn’t remotely a consideration when starting a family.

I think awareness of climate issues will always come into conflict with what people feel are acceptable impacts on family life and finances. Your limits will be different to mine, but both choices will suit our circumstances at the time. There’s a limit to which people are prepared to martyr themselves for something that seems remote, out of their control or where they have very limited personal effectiveness.

Gently, you list all the things we should be doing to cut our carbon footprints but having a second child (and I presume you have more than 1 as you say 'children') was more harmful than doing all of those together.

I am not criticising your choice, but you are no different from those who you call out, you've just picked a different set of choices to justify. We all have our heads in the sand.

It’s not that people are “single issue” environmentalists- it’s more that everyone has things they care about more than others.
Everything you do as a human is consumption and has environmental impact. Some people value consumption of big cars more than flights and some people value consumption of air freighted avocados more than intensively farmed bacon. It all has an impact. You just value different things to them.

We can stop buying the cheap rubbish they produce that has to be transported across the world to us

I want us in the UK to be better, it's not a race to the bottom to be the worst for climate change, why can't we try and be the best. It would be nice to be good at something for a change

My personal take on this is the focus should be more about environmental preservation. Humankind has been “lucky” that the Holocene period has so far been extremely stable when it comes to global climate. This is an exception and not the norm when we look back over thousands/millions/billions of years.

Those kind of timelines combined with the fact the human psyche doesn’t like what it can’t control, provides a false illusion that where we are now should stay the same and not change.

Human activity may contribute to climate change but these things are inevitable anyway so we should prepare ourselves for it. Our focus should be on making our world as habitable as possible so, recycle, reuse, make decisions based on need rather than to make ourselves look good (individuals and governments!). For example, electric cars reduce pollution in the immediate area, but they create problems in countries where the rare metals and minerals are mined, so the reality there is that countries who want to adopt electric cars in the name of becoming “carbon neutral”, are actually just pushing the problem somewhere else instead of working to resolve the fundamental issue.

Everybody lumps the US and China together. US CO2 emissions peaked in 2007 and have been falling ever since, mostly through the use of new technologies. China's emissions continue to increase.

The US uses 16% of the world's energy each year to produce 26% of the world's GDP. China uses 24% of the world's energy to produce 18% of the world's GDP. The UK uses 2% of the world's energy each year to produce 2% of the world's GDP. The EU uses 10% of the world's energy to produce 13% of the world's GDP.

It is not the US that is using energy inefficiently. Nor is the rest of the world forcing China to make its cheap tat. China is doing that voluntarily. Buying less cheap Chinese tat would go along way toward cleaning up the mess.

But it did reduced their population by at least 250 million, which has a huge ongoing environmental benefit.

Last year was not the hottest at all we barely had a summer!

Your last point doesn't really make sense. At the time of the last ice age, humans were still hunter gatherers and I imagine they'd have just very gradually made their way south. I know you haven't said that there will be an ice age but how do you imagine uk residents would adapt to an ice sheet one mile thick over most of the country?

I'm not a scientist but I imagine they probably take temperature readings from various locations around the planet. I don't think they just think "Oh what a rubbish summer I'm having" and come up with a figure based on that.

But as I said, I'm not a scientist and it's a difficult concept to grasp so I may be wrong.

I'm quite happy to complain about anyone driving when a reasonable alternative exists.

(I get to draw the "reasonable" line, and I don't expect many people to agree with my strict implementation)

Bickering and point scoring isn’t going to help. We need a massive positive pulling together global change. The issue is our whole society is predicated on economic growth and consumption that funds the taxes which funds our services. It’s going to be incredibly difficult to move away from that. It’s an economic issue. Surely we should be smart enough to be able to fix it.

I agree with the point that politicians are too short termist and just want to curry favour with the electorate.

Average Brit = 13 tonnes
Average American = 21 tonnes
Average Malawian = 0.2 tonnes

The thing is that while a large Malawian family has a tiny footprint today, surely we all aspire for them to be able to achieve a comfortable lifestyle, as the rest of the world takes for granted. Which would increase their carbon footprint. So at the same time that we look at reducing our own footprints, we also need to be helping places like Malawi develop in a clean way - using development funding to build Concentrated Solar Power for example. In addition we do need to proactively look to avoid a population explosion as development makes death rates fall drastically while birth rates remain high. Equality between the sexes is key to this, educated women with career opportunities have fewer kids.

Oh, and for comparison:
Roman Abramovich = 33,859 tonnes

That one man's emissions equate to the emissions of a small town in the UK. It's time to take a stand against superyachts.

I don't think the stop having children idea is good. And we don't really want to impose a ban on the number of children allowed like China did

You don't need to impose bans. You just need to make reliable contraception and safe abortion available to as many women worldwide as possible and let women decide how many children they would like.

Around 45% of all pregnancies in the UK are unintended. Slightly more in the US. That's not to say every unintended pregnancy is unwanted, but if we had a pill without side effects for example or better long-acting contraceptives we would probably see a natural drop in the birth rate.

This was found to be the case in many countries in Asia and South America (although not Africa for some reason!)

Everyone should do their bit. Everyone should probably give up some stuff; everyone should have some small pleasures, whilst trying not to consume egregiously. A balance, trending downwards. With governments taking action on the big stuff and targeting societal resources to work that really matters, like teaching and caring and innovation and farming and (some) manufacturing.

In our family we do what we can. We have one child but tbh I’d have had another if we’d been able to. Happy with one now. We don’t fly, we stopped seven years ago. We’re mostly vegetarian. We have solar panels. We one EV (better than ICE but still problematic I guess) and one diesel vehicle (would love this to be EV too but probably makes more sense overall to run that one into the ground). We don’t do fast fashion but we do have pets.

As pp have said, it’s all a balance, a compromise. I personally feel we are now doing pretty much everything we can within our means and our current housing and vehicles etc. It would take moving or govt grants for us to do more (getting a heat pump or swapping a vehicle for example). But that’s where the big stuff comes in - there’s only so much the individual or family can do before legislation or central planning has to kick in.

Not having billionaires would help. Other than that - make some choices and don’t be a dick.

I think people can’t get to grips with this and there’s also general cynicism. I’ve noticed on our local Next Door, that the bottom line is, if people are feeling a bit chilly around here, then it’s apparently blindingly obvious that global warming is a fiction.

Yes the new EPC coming will based on electric heating rather than gas.

HP or an electric boiler system, instead of gas, and to get to a C, it will need in many cases, additional insulation, that can be very expensive in an older property.

Yes the tenant will get a warmer house, possibly cheaper bills too but their rent will go up to pay for this or they get evicted if the LL sells.

Once again, those at the bottom will get hit, meanwhile the MC in a house with an EPC of D or even E carry on as before.

Oh no, if the landlords sell up I suppose the houses will stand empty for evermore. Such a shame 😢

the problem with most of the policies to achieve this, even the ones that don't go far enough hugely disproportionally affect the poor.

it is the rural poor that need the 15-20 year old diesel car, they can't afford even an second hand electric or even a more modern ULEZ compliant car they can't use the bus as there are only 4 a day and don't run early or late enough to use for commuting, and even if they did they go to the nearest big town not the place where they actually work. the urban poor that will have mouldy flats as they can't afford the increase in fuel prices due to carbon tax, both groups will suffer with increased food prices.

Even with electric cars if you live in a flat or house where the only parking is on the street you can't get a EV point at your house; public chargers cost a lot more per charge, so the only people that can afford the cheaper home EV points are those with more money to have private parking. It has always cost more to be poor

while some may argue that the increase in food / fuel prices is the same for everyone it affects the poor more; if your take home is £1600 a month and your bare bones expenditure is 1550 leaving 50 for anything pleasureable or an emergency; an increase of 10% in costs leaves you with an overspend of £105 so you have to eat less food or have less heating than you need because you are already at the level where you can't cut anything else out

however if your take home is £4000 and your expenditure is £3000 you have £1000 left for fun but when costs go up by 10% you still have £600 spare so porportionally though you have same increase in costs the effect on your finances is a bit less fun not debt or depravation

It’s us, we are the problem.

I think the real issue is the lack of joined-up thinking and in the case of disasters, bad management overall. What I mean by that: it's really hard to get a full overview of what the real CO2 impact of a product is - and other environmental impact. For example, the electric car emits no particles or CO2 however if you think of all the crap that goes into producing its batteries, the human cost of mining those rare earth minerals (they don't come from countries with great human rights records, to say the least), and the total CO2 footprint that goes into producing them, I'm not convinced they're such a win for the planet. (This is a question by the way, I'd love to hear from knowledgeable posters that they are a great solution, but I'm personally not sure).

@StandFirm they're an improvement on ICE cars (probably about a third to half of the emissions per mile, once you include embodied emissions), but still far more damaging than not owning a car in the first place. There's also the other negatives associated with cars to think about: congestion, land use, collisions, microplastics from tyres... none of them are solved by BEVs. Mass car ownership simply isn't sustainable.

Mumsnet is full of this sort of thing:

“I’ve done my bit by not having any children - I’m not giving up any of my four foreign holidays a year. My emissions are still lower than yours.”

”There’s no point in the UK cutting its emissions unless China cuts theirs. Yes, I suppose many of the things I buy are made in China, but it’s still their pollution.”

”I eat red meat every day - it’s better for the environment than eating avocados and quinoa which have been flown in by private jet”.

“We do our bit by recycling. Our family NEEDS three cars for work (me, DH and eldest DC), so no, we won’t give one up. We work hard and deserve our treats and holidays.”

”It’s the climate activists’ fault for being annoying. Now I go out of my way to spite them”.