From Matthew Yglesias:
I really worry sometimes about things like The New York Times Magazine giving advice on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive. The calculations involved in figuring out the aggregate carbon impact of this or that are just far too difficult for anyone to carry out. What's more, it's generally not going to be possible for a single person through his or her own exertions to really bring about dramatic cuts, and the last thing you need is people sitting around thinking "I drive a Prius, I've done my part" and then not voting the right way or otherwise being disengaged from the political process.A blog post of mine from many years ago is the #1 result on Google for "Earth Day sucks." I no longer believe that it does- the Bush years have convinced me of that, and many other things- but I still agree with Matt. Let's do something about China's vile industrial pollution policies, which have a lot more to do with global warming than what kind of lightbulbs the 5 percent of Americans who care about that sort of thing do. Posted by Stephen Silver at April 22, 2008 03:57 PM
When did you change your mind on that?
Posted by: Jeremy at April 22, 2008 11:20 PM