Chong Kee Tan
2 min readDec 29, 2021

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The problem with your argument is that if you continue to drive everyday then the oil companies have every incentive to keep drilling. Similarly if you rely on big ag for food then big ag has every incentive to keep poisoning the soil, killing the insects and bees, to produce toxic "food" that eventually makes you reliant on the products of giant pharmaceutical companies.

Demanding system change while fighting to keep all the convenience that the system provides is a self defeating posture. This posture has no leverage against the system it purports to fight since it is the system's most loyal consumers. The only thing you can do is to make lots of noise and be rewarded with lots of feel good green washing. Some of that green washing might even slightly reduce the carbon footprint, but not enough to address climate collapse.

The Earth can absorb between 2.4 - 5 gigatons of carbon per year. Divided by total global population, that's 825 pounds per person. The per capita carbon footprint of Americans is 15.5 tons and that of Nicaragua is 0.8 tons. That means an equitable way to live sustainably is at the level of Nicaragua. At that level a lot of the conveniences that Americans take for granted as essential fall away. Or to put it another way, the only way for Americans to live "sustainably" at even half its current carbon footprint is for poor countries to be exploited and be without things like clean water and basic healthcare. And no green washing is going to reduce per capita carbon footprint by half.

Sure organic farming without using fossil fuel is bloody hard. I've been doing it for 5 years now and can confirm that it's back breaking work. It is winter now and I have enough rye, corn, squash, and potatoes put away, and enough cold hardy vegetables growing under snow as well as in the greenhouse, not to mention in many canned Mason jars to keep me happy till next summer. Not quite what failure looks like. I was an academic and software engineer with limitedfarmingexperience. Farming is very hard work but not impossible and anyone can learn how to do it. That's how a very large proportion of humanity lives, right now. That was how most Americans lived only 100 years ago. And that was how all of humanity lived before the industrial revolution. Until humanity figures out how to do technology in an ecological sensible way (biomimicry etc seems promising) returning to earlier low tech way of life is the responsible stop gap choice.

Living like this seems impossible because the comforts and conveniences of business as usual with green washing on the sides are too alluring. The cost of that comfort is climate collapse.

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Chong Kee Tan
Chong Kee Tan

Written by Chong Kee Tan

Founder, Labishire Homestead Commons

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