Really good points. It’s funny, I have a draft of a similar point about personal behavior change that I tried to make as provocative-sounding as possible:
But note the PS where I suggest a counterargument: making personal sacrifices for climate change may shape your identity, drive you to greater activism, and make your activism and climate evangelism more persuasive (to those who don’t appreciate the economics and game theory of it).
Yep I’m sympathetic to your post. As for the counterargument, I have two rebuttals:
1. I would agree if we were talking about e.g. money-limited people donating small token amounts to effective charities to build their identities, but “one who limits personal carbon footprint outside of a strategy to stop global warming” isn’t even an identity people should want :)
2. Even if we give up on talking about strong causal mechanisms and just talk about weak effects of one’s carbon-footprint-reduction efforts like “raising awareness of the issue”, there’s also the self-licensing effect where people are satisfied to think of themselves as a good person after just taking one or two actions, so actions that don’t help can drive out actions that would have helped.
Really good points. It’s funny, I have a draft of a similar point about personal behavior change that I tried to make as provocative-sounding as possible:
http://doc.dreev.es/carbonfoot (Trying To Limit Your Personal Carbon Footprint Hurts The Environment)
But note the PS where I suggest a counterargument: making personal sacrifices for climate change may shape your identity, drive you to greater activism, and make your activism and climate evangelism more persuasive (to those who don’t appreciate the economics and game theory of it).
Yep I’m sympathetic to your post. As for the counterargument, I have two rebuttals:
1. I would agree if we were talking about e.g. money-limited people donating small token amounts to effective charities to build their identities, but “one who limits personal carbon footprint outside of a strategy to stop global warming” isn’t even an identity people should want :)
2. Even if we give up on talking about strong causal mechanisms and just talk about weak effects of one’s carbon-footprint-reduction efforts like “raising awareness of the issue”, there’s also the self-licensing effect where people are satisfied to think of themselves as a good person after just taking one or two actions, so actions that don’t help can drive out actions that would have helped.