By the time you can see visible effects -- given the lead time involved -- it's pretty much too late to turn things around. And people simply aren't going to take drastic life-changing action when they can't see any demonstrable problem. Apart from anything else, there have been too many prophecies of doom that never came to anything. ("Yes, but it's scientific this time" doesn't work.)
The people who were doing energy-saving and recycling and veganism and living without cars twenty years ago weren't, by and large, doing it because they were afraid about the imminent end of the world. They were doing it for more emotionally complex reasons of belief and self-identity, and they were the ones who didn't see it as a sacrifice but as an affirmation.
I learned to live with reasonable comfort in an unheated house (thus saving vast amounts of energy) because my parents didn't even have central heating until several years into their marriage, and they still regarded it as normal to have thick nightclothes and plenty of blankets in winter, warm the inside of the sheets rather than the whole bedroom, and jump out of bed and get dressed very quickly in the morning, rather than sleeping in T-shirts and then expecting to wake up to a house warm enough for them to be able to sit around and breakfast in them too.
So I grew up regarding that as normal rather than as hardship, and people who couldn't do it as being weak and self-indulgent by implication... which is a bit like growing up in a religious sect and taking it for granted that the rest of the world is damned. It's much easier to flatter people into action than frighten them into action.
I learned to prepare food from scratch and buy fresh produce in season because my parents took it for granted, because their parents took it for granted, because there was a time when there wasn't any alternative. A lot of people got 'liberated' from that sort of old-fashioned ethos by the discovery that they lived in a civilization where it wasn't actually necessary, and indeed where the converse was actively marketed. It just so happened that modern life never really hit my family, so I picked up basic skills that weren't in fashion, not because my parents were idealists but because they were intensely conservative ("with a small C", as my mother, a lifelong left-wing supporter, would always add!)
They weren't doing it to save the world. They were doing it as a sort of hangover from the Blitz spirit, I suppose; the result of years of indoctrination that Waste was Wrong on a moral level rather than an environmental one. You switched off lights in order 'not to waste the electricity' rather than in order to reduce acid rain created by generating it.
no subject
The people who were doing energy-saving and recycling and veganism and living without cars twenty years ago weren't, by and large, doing it because they were afraid about the imminent end of the world. They were doing it for more emotionally complex reasons of belief and self-identity, and they were the ones who didn't see it as a sacrifice but as an affirmation.
I learned to live with reasonable comfort in an unheated house (thus saving vast amounts of energy) because my parents didn't even have central heating until several years into their marriage, and they still regarded it as normal to have thick nightclothes and plenty of blankets in winter, warm the inside of the sheets rather than the whole bedroom, and jump out of bed and get dressed very quickly in the morning, rather than sleeping in T-shirts and then expecting to wake up to a house warm enough for them to be able to sit around and breakfast in them too.
So I grew up regarding that as normal rather than as hardship, and people who couldn't do it as being weak and self-indulgent by implication... which is a bit like growing up in a religious sect and taking it for granted that the rest of the world is damned. It's much easier to flatter people into action than frighten them into action.
I learned to prepare food from scratch and buy fresh produce in season because my parents took it for granted, because their parents took it for granted, because there was a time when there wasn't any alternative. A lot of people got 'liberated' from that sort of old-fashioned ethos by the discovery that they lived in a civilization where it wasn't actually necessary, and indeed where the converse was actively marketed. It just so happened that modern life never really hit my family, so I picked up basic skills that weren't in fashion, not because my parents were idealists but because they were intensely conservative ("with a small C", as my mother, a lifelong left-wing supporter, would always add!)
They weren't doing it to save the world. They were doing it as a sort of hangover from the Blitz spirit, I suppose; the result of years of indoctrination that Waste was Wrong on a moral level rather than an environmental one. You switched off lights in order 'not to waste the electricity' rather than in order to reduce acid rain created by generating it.