Consumerism—and the Chemicals in All of Our Stuff—Is Thwarting the Transition From Fossil Fuels.
Climate change mitigation strategies that don’t address overconsumption and reduce dependence on fossil fuel-derived chemicals will exacerbate health harms and biodiversity loss, scientists warn.
Jfc, where the fuck does the author thinks consumerism comes from? Who do they think it serves? Why is it so fucking hard for some people to say "capitalism is the root cause of the destruction of the planet"??!!
It's exhausting..
What's exhausting is dealing with a mass of "consumers" who like and defend capitalism and its promised lifestyle.
Public acceptability of climate-motivated rationing:
Recent reports from climate scientists stress the urgency to implement more ambitious and stringent climate policies to stay below the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement target. These policies should simultaneously aim to ensure distributional justice throughout the process. A neglected yet potentially effective policy instrument in this context is rationing. However, the political feasibility of rationing, like any climate policy instrument, hinges to a large extent on the general public being sufficiently motivated to accept it. This study reports the first cross-country analysis of the public acceptability of rationing as a climate policy instrument by surveying 8654 individuals across five countries—Brazil, Germany, India, South Africa, and the US—on five continents. By comparing the public acceptability of rationing fossil fuels and high climate-impact foods with consumption taxes on these goods, the results reveal that the acceptability of fossil fuel rationing is on par with that of taxation, while food taxation is preferred over rationing across the countries. Respondents in low-and middle-income countries and those expressing a greater concern for climate change express the most favourable attitudes to rationing. As political leaders keep struggling to formulate effective and fair climate policies, these findings encourage a serious political and scientific dialogue about rationing as a means to address climate change and other sustainability-related challenges.
[...] the large proportion of respondents in Germany and the US expressing strong dismissive attitudes towards both types of rationing suggests that the instrument, if proposed, could face significant opposition in high-income countries where individuals in general are less accustomed to resource scarcity. While perceived resource scarcity has been demonstrated to promote pro-environmental behaviour (Berthold et al., 2022), the association between perceived resource scarcity and climate policy acceptability—and the strength of it—require further investigation.
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Carbon inequality in 2030: Per capita consumption emissions and the 1.5⁰C goal - Oxfam Policy & Practice - See Figure 3:
