Agreed. My old naive self used to think there was some benefit to making the "average person" aware of the issue at large so they would care about it and potentially agitate for a fix (if enough people cared about it), but then I realized it was a total headfake to distract from the real issue.
Water conservation is my favorite example. Yeah, let's all worry about not washing our cars when meanwhile agriculture and industry uses orders of magnitude more water and often has 0 incentives to reduce use.
> Corporations are extensions of the desires of the average person
The agriculture sector is not just wasting water for the fun of it. They're producing food for us, the consumers of food. Some of the food is more efficient with respect to water-use than other food. So you've got basically two, non-mutually-exclusive options:
1. Inform / expect individuals to make better choices (e.g., eat less beef, drink less milk, etc.), so that our aggregate demand for these products decreases, and the supply (production) follows.
2. Government intervention to, e.g., tax inefficient foods and/or subsidize efficient ones to nudge consumers in the right direction. Given our politics in the US, I don't see this as happening anytime soon. I remember the shrieks of "THEY'RE COMING FOR OUR ICE CREAM!!!" as a rallying cry against The Green New Deal a few years ago.
There is no "us" and "them" for responsibility of these things. It's everyday people, in aggregate, causing every environmental and social ill. It's complicated, but pretending it's entirely that guy's fault (damn agriculture!) is to shirk your tiny sliver of personal responsibility. You can choose to do better. Or you can wait for government to make you do better. But the end result will be much the same.
"Vote with your wallet" rarely ever works. "Nudging" consumers won't work either. You're never going to convince an entire population to voluntarily stop eating almonds because their production wastes water. If we learned anything from COVID it should be that you're never going to be able to convince millions of people to take any kind of specific, cooperative, collective action on anything--even if their lives are at stake.
Instead of sitting back and hoping that millions will do some inconvenient action, why not instead focus on regulating the few dozens of entities actually causing the problem?
Totally. My point is: one can both take individual action and advocate for regulation. They're not mutually exclusive options. I feel like "nothing will happen until it's regulated" is often used as an excuse for inaction. I know tons of people who think climate change is a huge problem, but drive cars that get under 20mpg, who eat steak dinners multiple times per week, etc. Their stance is basically "I'll put in 0 effort to do better until the government makes everyone do better". And many politicans' takes are: "why should the U.S. put in any effort until everyone (usually relatively poor countries like China, India, etc.) starts improving?"
I have little confidence that significant-enough regulation is possible. We need people to do better while also advocating for the government to take actual, meaningful steps.
To address a few of your points specifically:
> "Nudging" consumers won't work either. You're never going to convince an entire population to voluntarily stop eating almonds because their production wastes water.
Yes. It can. See: cigarette use for example. Taxation works. If almonds are heavily taxed, and cost, e.g., 2x what they do today, you can reasonably expect almond consumption to drop.
> regulating the few dozens of entities actually causing the problem
Again, the "entities actually causing the problem" rounds down to "all of us". Exxon-Mobile isn't just creating CO2 emissions for fun. We're buying gasoline from them because,collectively, a bunch of us want to live in suburbs, drive big comfortable SUV's, etc. Sure, Exxon-Mobile is very interested in maintaining the status-quo, and it's a shame they have the power/cash to do so. But collective individuals as U.S. voters and consumers refuse to change their habits, and generally vote against politicians willing to do anything that'd inflict any inconvenience / change on their lives. Every time gas prices go up even slightly, people lose their minds.
I feel like nearly every sentence in your comment grossly misses the point. Of course I expect agriculture to use more water, and it's a good thing that we all have more than enough to eat. The issue is there are often no regulations put in place to incentivize agriculture to use water efficiently and economically. I mean, please point out to me "the average person" in California that desires to grow alfalfa so it can be shipped overseas to China and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile we're pretending making people ask for water at restaurants makes any difference at all when it comes to water savings.
> There is no "us" and "them" for responsibility of these things.
Baloney. Warren Buffet was right when he said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." I'd have no problem supporting water restrictions locally if it wasn't just a total distraction, a "going through the motions" if you will, while the biggest users of water do nothing.
I agree with the "class warfare" quote. But aren't "the rich" pretty much the ones pushing these anti-regulatory sentiments?
I agree, these regulations you're pointing out aren't sufficient. But I maintain, I think the finger-pointing crap is a distraction. Nobody's going to do anything when they can point their finger at the bigger-offender, and feel vindicated in their own inaction. And since numbers are so easily fudgable, everyone feels this way (see: leading U.S. politicians blaming Africa for climate change [1], about as ridiculous a claim as is imaginable)
When we try solve a problem by saying people should do something, we are solving it as a society. Which means we should solve it a societal level, not by making it responsibility of one part of society to do individually.
In this case, it can’t be just city dwellers responsibility but farmers too. What individual resp in this case means that it is easier to persuade individual residents than individual farmers. Or that they don’t care about problem and dumping responsibility for it where nothing will happen.
An aside but another good reason to not wash your car is leeching harmful stuff in the environment, car washes have to purify the waste water where I'm from at least
Car washes have to purify the water because they are washing dozens of cars a day every day and generating orders of magnitude more runoff waste than you or I could ever from car washing.
if all "you or I" wash at home then that's the actual "orders of magnitude more runoff waste" compared to if everybody did it at the car wash. Car washes have to purify the water since it's actually possible to do it there since all the washes happen at the same place
Car washes probably induce demand for washes. After all the fact you are paying $7 to wash in 10 mins is because the good old driveway method is too inconvenient. Once again the dose makes the poison. Whats my runoff relative to the rest of the area? Small. Whats the runoff of a concentrated source like a car wash? Massive relative to what is running off in the rest of the area. Dramatically shifting the contents of that runoff in terms of what they are.
Water conservation is my favorite example. Yeah, let's all worry about not washing our cars when meanwhile agriculture and industry uses orders of magnitude more water and often has 0 incentives to reduce use.