Why not both?

Funny how every time somebody mentions “reducing consumption” people jump into comments to insist, no, reducing personal consumption is a scam, only political action matters, keep buying everything you want.

I think one reason is that if you point out that doing something is wrong, you put people in the situation of questioning whether they are as much of a good person as they thought they were, which they may interpret as a personal attack on their morality.

It's the same mechanic that makes many hate on vegans. They don't want to be confronted with the idea that their lifestyle is needlessly cruel to animals.

We all live in the same world. A world where if you're not consuming, you'll fall behind. Simple fact is that often we HAVE to be consumers to do anything. There's, of course, a middle ground. Don't buy a new phone every year. Wear your clothes til they aren't wearable anymore. Drive your car til it falls apart before replacing it.

These are the kinds of things that absolutely make sense as a consumer, but until either everyone is on board and the producers have reason to slow, or until there's legislative action, any individual measures are drops in the bucket.

Well example:

You want to buy food. Now you want to think about your carbon footprint.

You either buy 1$ food with 1T co2

Or buy 10$ food with 0,5T co2 or 100$ with 0,3T co2. The amount of food stays the same.

What do you think people will buy? At max 10 times the price, most won't even do that because it is too expensive.

Also most food products are by the same company so you can't even hurt a specific bad co2 company.

And if regulations are made by the government we can see immediatly improvements.

Yes you can try to reduce your personal carbon footprint, but more important you should vote for a party that will change sth.

In the US it is neither the republics or the democrats.

Because I’m not wasting my precious little time on this miserable rock chasing personal changes that won’t make a damn difference in the grand scheme of things. I don’t consume in excess, but I also don’t give a single fuck about my “carbon footprint”.

I disagree, even though I'm someone who deliberately lives modestly and car-free, trying to eat as little meat as I can.

I'd like to draw a parallel from what you're saying to gaming - there's been a lot of bad video games released by these big studios like Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, EA and others, and many people don't like that, they naturally want quality instead of whatever buggy/uninspired games/slop are being fed to them. A very popular slogan I've seen on sites like Reddit is to vote with your wallet, which is something that your comment is suggesting, and yes, it does sound good on paper but it literally doesn't work due to reddit's limited reach, people actually not holding up to their convictions and just the fact that many people don't really care. If those very well known game studios keep putting out slop every year, people will still buy them.

Now back to carbon footprint and emissions, and same points apply here - even though there's a lot of people who are aware of the climate crisis, not many are willing to/have the conviction to reduce their emissions, same with "buying their shit". Even if you go green personally, you don't cancel out someone who doesn't care about their emissions who owns a monster truck or whatever.

And going to the "only political action matters", that's what needs to happen - an organized, radical attempt to at least alleviate climate change. You can't just leave this to the 'free market' of capitalism, crossing fingers and saying prayers for people to stop buying products as it's just impossible, capitalism isn't effective at reacting to current and especially future disasters. Look at covid for instance, governments didn't have time to wait for months so free market could react to covid and provide face masks, disinfectants and other things, so they just intervened and spent their money for that, invalidating the free market.

Sorry for the long post, though if there's anything I'd agree with you it's that slacktivists that refuse to follow what they preach/changing their lifestyle are just cringe virtue signalers, at least for the most part.

fair enough

There has to be a mod rule against reading things in the most bad faith way.

If an overt call to carve up and eat billionaires is needed, I am most happy to supply my own personal philosophy, that I am vegan except if I get to eat the rich (literally).