You’ve got to start somewhere though. And anywhere is marginally better than nowhere. As opposed to throwing your arms up in the air saying “it’s pointless we should be doing something else instead so let’s do nothing at all”. That’s exactly what the industry is aiming for, learned helplessness.
Nope, this is completely wrong. People want to help but they have limited bandwidth. When you give them someway they can feel like they are helping without meaningfully doing anything, you’ve reduced their attention/effort that will go into real solutions.
Doing minuscule shit is absolutely harmful to the cause. This is one of those areas where a compromise is as bad as doing nothing with the additional downside of patting yourself on the back thinking you made progress.
I know a woman who regularly drives almost an hour round trip to the recycling center for plastics, as our village does not have plastic recycling bins. She's certain that she is doing her part, and absolutely does not want to hear that recycling plastic emits more CO2 than creating new plastic, nevermind the fuel she's burned.
Though driving an hour to recycle a few plastic bottles is obviously bonkers, I do want to point out that there are more reasons to recycle than just reducing CO2.
This isn't (just) about landfill space or resource availability.
It's a shame that a couple of generations have been led to believe that the only real environmental disaster is climate change. It's certainly a big and pressing one, but it's like we've all but forgotten the many other issues that our lifestyle of ready massive consumption has caused.
Some examples of other environmental impacts that 'reduce, reuse and recycle' helps with: the impact of mining and oilfield operations on the natural environment; heavy metals and other toxins in waterways from mining and badly managed landfills; microplastics in the ocean; acid rain from Nox/Sox emissions; many other forms of air pollution from the mining industry.
Technically it's more generally atmospheric 'green-house gases', of which CO2 is the one we produce massive amounts of.
Methane and Nitrous Oxide also play a massive role. We produce less of those mostly through gas leaks and shipping/diesel fuel but they are a lot worse than CO2 if we think of it in terms of per kilo impact.
My argument against minimally effective action is that it can make people feel like they did something significant, and therefore discourage further change. Those plastic straws effective function in our society isn't that it removes plastic waste, it just absolves us of responsibility by letting us say we tried
Okay, but what makes you think that interventions like "forcing manufacturers to make electronics have replaceable batteries" are easier to implement than other interventions like "invest in renewable energy projects"? Taking the approach of jumping at every possible intervention that is vaguely relevant (eg. today it's batteries in electronics because of this thread, tomorrow it's banning single use plastics because of some thread about recycling being a lie) seems worse because there won't ever be enough political will/support to get any single project implemented.
> That’s exactly what the industry is aiming for, learned helplessness.
I am wholely in agreement with you but there are some pretty big percentage wise holes that we need to plug.
Namely:
1. Getting ride of coal and Natural Gas power generation (which means replacing with renewables +storage, or fission, none of which are easily deployable)
2. Stopping methane leaks in Oil&Gas pipelines and active/decomissioned wells.
No, "starting small" and other consumer side activism are tools actively pushed by oil companies in order to make you believe you are making a difference; so that we don't pursue actual hard hitting legislation that regulate the oil industry.
Carnival Cruise's line of ships (which contain about 50 ships) contribute the same amount of emissions as all the cars in Europe. We could make the hard descision to regulate cruise ships away or maybe everyone in Europe could stop driving altogther
Except that software is usually few devs, lots of users. Here we are all contributors to the climate. So even if we all pick something different from our neighbor, changes can be made. Typical broken reasoning arising from comparing the way world works to software development.
I wonder how much CO2 impact the CI revolution in open source really has. While I see how this is convenient, I sometimes wonder if we really need to spin up a 30min build for every PR/commit. I have never heard the community reflect on the impact it has with all the convenient cloud computing. Just spin up a ton of hosts to do your thing, yes? If you can pay for it, its OK? I guess owners of fossil-fuel consuming vehicles think the same. So, where are the environmental activists in the open source area pointing fingers at CI usage?
