I have a friend who will never idle his car with the AC on. His justification: 10 minutes of discomfort isn't worth the emissions output. He knows it's a minuscule drop in the surface tension of a drop in the bucket of carbon output but he will never ever do it, no matter how hot it is. And he'll subject his passengers to discomfort in service of his principles.
At the same time he flys from LA to Europe 5+ times a year.
It's hard to truly live ethically in such a deeply unethical world.
GPs coping mechanism is to remember that they can’t make a meaningful difference. Your friends coping mechanism is to do little things so they get the feeling of taking action.
Both are actually the same thing; methods for emotionally dealing with the existential crisis on whose direction they cannot exert enough pressure to be observable.
Great observation. Also true that these little fruitless acts of opt-out and opt-in aren't just limited to climate but also politics and living under capitalism. We are all just trying to make sense of complex systems that are outside of our control. In many ways the most healthy (for ones own mind) approach to all of this is to just give in to everything, or as some have called it: take the grill-pill.
At the same time he flys from LA to Europe 5+ times a year.
It's hard to truly live ethically in such a deeply unethical world.