Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
No. Just no.
This is not an “individual action will solve this” case anymore. WE can’t do jack about it, individually. If we get the corporations to stop doing harm, and the rich cut down traveling in their superjets, maybe then. But some schmuck driving a Toyota corolla a few hundred miles on a vacation, or taking a commercial passenger jet on a vacation with 100-some-odd people isn’t the problem here.
Significant parts of the global climate usage are directly tied to individual actions. 12% is consumer car driving alone. So yes, the schmuck driving a Toyota Corolla is making a significant impact. The sooner you realize that the better, we need action on both corporation and end users.
There are about 1.5 billion of total cars + buses + trucks in this world. Even if we assume only 1 billion of them are consumer cars (which is already a VERY conservative estimate), all of them combined make 12% impact, so that schmuck driving a Toyota Corella would contribute less than 0.000000012% of the global climate change.
Significant my ass.
Climate change is a phenomenon happening on planetary scale, so the impact of individuals are always going to be astronomically small. This is a crisis that requires nation-state or mega-corp scale of efforts, and blaming individuals for the failure of nation-states and mega-corps on what they should be held responsible for, is extremely disingenuous.
It’s disingenuous to suggest that governments and companies are not run by individuals, and it ignores that real change doesn’t mean life continuing as the same.
Consuming less would effect the corporation a though.
Every single person is part of the problem. Some more, some less. Corporations do not harm the environment because they are inherently bad. They do it because people (all of them!) love stuff.
They do so because of perverse incentives. They socialize the costs and privatize the gains. This is a fundamental design flaw of Capitalism and in turn Corporations.
Humans harm nature in EVERY form of society.
This is a bit of a cop out though. At the moment a very small number of humans do a very large amount of the harm because there is no cost to doing so.