Climate change and personal responsibility

[greatnoob]

I thought this article was an interesting read, particularly the following:

Emphasising individual responsibility doesn’t need to distract from corporate and federal responsibility. We absolutely need structural change – we need a global shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. We need to enforce something akin to a carbon tax, mandate environmental-impact labels for products, replace plastic with sustainable solutions and build walkable cities. We need to end subsidies to the factory farming industry, and hold it accountable for the environmental destruction it incurs. We need to ethically address the west’s relationship to the global south. We might even need a political revolution. These changes will require shifts that individuals alone cannot realise. But putting aside the fact that collective revolutions are made up of individuals, led by individuals, and reinforced by thousands of individual revolutions, we would have no chance of achieving our goal of limiting environmental destruction if individuals don’t make the very individual decision to live differently.

Every time we say “crisis”, we are also saying “decision”. The word “decision” derives from the Latin decidere, which means “to cut off”. Every decision requires loss, not only of what we might have done otherwise but of the world to which our alternative action would have contributed. Often that loss feels too small to notice; sometimes it feels too large to bear. Usually, we just don’t think about our decisions in those terms. We live in a culture of historically unprecedented acquisition. We are prompted to define ourselves by what we have: possessions, dollars, views and likes. But we are revealed by what we release.

Jonathan Safran Foer: why we must cut out meat and dairy before dinner to save the planet

Animal products create more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector, but we don’t want to confront this inconvenient truth: our eating habits are a problem

www.theguardian.com

Last year I was a "carnivore" meaning I would eat meat 2-4 times a day, every day. In the beginning of the year I decided to limit my meat, egg and dairy consumption to only 3-4 days a week. I did it with ease and now consume fish (at most) only once a month. There are the obvious positives of giving up meat, eggs and dairy for health reasons some of which I experienced: longer running endurance, higher protein levels, higher testosterone levels, significantly reduced C-reactive protein levels (inflammation markers), reduced LDL/bad cholesterol levels, decreased visceral fat and general weight loss.

These are all great signs of my diet change, but as somebody who was already pretty fit and active I didn't even consider these health benefits before making the switch. I mainly did it because of my guilty conscience -- the amount of money I've spent on supposedly "free range" and "grass fed" stickers without realising they were all from the same inhumane, factory-farmed supplier made me sick and angry enough to change for the better. The best part of this change: Being able to sleep soundly knowing my carbon footprint is smaller than the majority of the first-world (barring those super dedicated vegans, I guess) and that I don't contribute to the torture and slaughtering of tens of billions animals.

I've heard it way too often from colleagues, "but meat tastes too good, how could I ever give it up?" or "I'm just one person, <China/India/China and India/our government/big corps> need to take responsibility for this destruction, I'm helpless to do anything worthwhile". This defeatist mindset is prevalent in every individual I've met, no matter where in the pol-spectrum they lie. Key difference between libs and cons seem to be that one group loves to harass a certain teenage girl while the other supports "token" measures like.... uhhh... banning straws. Climate protest seems like a fad right now. We are all shouting "do something" to each others' faces while we, ourselves, continue exacerbating the problem with our purchasing behaviour, supporting an industry of unnecessary torture, and one directly linked to the issue we apparently want to solve.

Do you know anybody who thinks like this, or are you, yourself, this type of person? What steps have you taken to reduce your footprint?