Most individual conservation acts, such as recycling or composting, don’t have a meaningful impact on climate change. Instead, they can give people the false sense that they are making a difference.
Discussion
- I mostly agree with this in that I think larger scale regulation and institutional action (e.g. a large company shifting its behavior) has a much larger impact, but I do think there is a connection between individual action that reaches the level of a trend and thus influences larger actors to change.
- I think there is a sentiment here to which I agree, particularly that applies to recycling and composting. But I think you have to be careful how you think of the impact of individual efforts. With voting, virtually no single voter has ever had an impact on the outcome of a vote. But the turnout rate of the cohort you belong to frequently does. I think that's the right way to think of the impact of individual acts: the aggregate impact of the voluntary cohort. And when those acts of conservation are a reduction in meat consumption and travel, that does seem to be significant enough to call it meaningful.
- This all seems reasonable to me. I guess I'd want to break this issue down in at least a couple of ways: (1) Which conservation acts, whether done individually/voluntarily or mandated for an entire group, actually make a meaningful difference to climate change or other important environmental concerns? (2) In general, or for a given kind of act, should the meaningful ones be mandated or is there some value in leaving it up to individuals? I'm guessing we agree that one thing to avoid is "conservation theater", wherein people do things that don't make a meaningful difference but instead allow them to kid themselves that they are doing the right thing and/or signal that to others. In the worst case that behavior could even make good conservation acts less attractive to the broader population.
- This view combines "most individual conservation acts", but whether you agree or not may depend on which particular acts are included in that set.