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Legitimate_Proof OP t1_ja3y36s wrote

I thought that if I had said "stop driving novelty-sized vanity trucks because it's selfish and wasteful," or "stop driving and flying so much" we'd get into the normal fights about climate change: personal action vs corporations and the government, and VT's impact vs China's, etc.

I wanted to add a perspective to those conversations in the future, and to people complaining about the cost of energy, that it's objectively cheap. People only compare it to what the price used to be, which may not be a meaningful comparison, and to the price of other fuels. That is what this post is doing, by saying we pay much less than manual labor. That allows us to do too much. So the main point was that sense of scale. Even our everyday lives are out of scale. Out of scale with what the earth can provide. To me that inspires climate action.

But I did think the post was too long and probably making too many different points. Without the context that I think that what humans did for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, without ruining the world, should be a point of comparison. Not that we should return to that lifestyle but it gives us the scale that keeps things in balance.

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