I'm happy to explain why I bike to work. I'm happy to explain why our lawn is not irrigated or manicured like our neighbors, and why we planted those native wildflowers in our flowerbeds. I'm happy to explain why we eat less meat than his grandparents or friends, why we buy organic produce at the farmer's market. I'm happy to explain why we spent that time working on insulating the attic, or why we planted those trees.

I'm less happy to explain why we own two ICE vehicles (even if the one doesn't see many miles), or why we take a plane on 1,000 vacations, or why we run the air conditioner in summer. Why we choose to live on a multi-acre lot on a cul-de-sac far from public transport, why we buy produce in single-use plastics when the farmer's market is closed. Why, in spite of all these choices, our lifestyle costs more than $50,000 per year with commensurate energy usage, when the global average necessary to avoid global warming is far less than that.

I'm happy to explain how the project I recently did at work is saving a local foundry upwards of 50 kWh, every hour, for some 16 hours per day 6 days per week; that industrial-scale energy savings eclipses all the efforts I've put into our home. I'm less happy to explain how I kind of defaulted into this job that only incidentally occasionally helps out with reasonably important problems, rather than explicitly aiming to be involved in solutions to what a reasonable, rational person would conclude are the most important problems facing our world today. (There's an LG Chem EV battery plant going in 45 minutes away, should I spend an additional 1.5 hour commute per day away from my son and sacrifice my comfy family-oriented job, to contribute to an important industry?)

Said 6yo just spent the weekend 'helping' me install some off-grid solar at the homestead my wife's cousin and her husband just bought in northern Michigan. She just retired from the military at just over 30 years old after saving money fanatically, and is farming a few acres. They have a carbon impact that's a fraction of my own, which is a fraction of my parents'. She's a great example. But that may still not be enough, and it's not particularly realistic to take 9 million plus down-state residents and have them all move north to a couple dozen wooded acres; her plan only works because there's a city of 40,000 people with a Menards, Meijer, and Farm and Fleet half an hour away.

I think that all the small choices I make, even if they come from good motives, are disingenuous greenwashing if you reasonably forecast required emissions and hypothetical global development/equality. Our current capitalist, globalist system only works if there are growing populations of billions in poverty, working for the American dream, and industrial externalities being ignored. GDP and carbon emissions are tightly correlated, and achieving carbon neutrality or going carbon negative requires rejecting our financial targets. I fear that rejecting that option will paint us in a similar light as we view non-participants or opponents of the civil rights movement that our parents and grandparents represent - choices that were a product of our times, but which were wrong then and are wrong now.