People Will Not Give Up Their Lifestyle for Their Country or Their Planet

Until they have no choice.

Photo by Sudan Ouyang on Unsplash

The annual COP climate meetings and Black Friday have nothing to do with one another, and they have everything to do with each other.

Let’s start with COP 30 in Brazil

To no one’s surprise for the 30th time in a row the final text from the meeting that all countries could sign on to did not mention the phasing out of fossil fuels. The COP agreement did include an agreement to at least triple finance for adaptation by 2035. The $300 billion+ in climate finance that should flow to developing countries by 2035, $120 billion or so should go toward adapting and building resilience to climate change impacts.

COP30 agreed to triple adaptation finance by 2035.

A New Just Transition Mechanism was adopted to help countries support workers and communities as economies shift from fossil fuels to clean energy. (details)

90+ countries backed ending deforestation, but no formal agreement was reached.

In the end, Belém just confirmed what we already knew, a consensus-based, incremental process is not fit for purpose - when the purpose is stopping a business as usual that is destroying our future.

One good thing that came out of the meetings was that the Netherlands and Colombia finally threw up their hands and said, “enough of this shit!:

The Governments of Colombia and the Netherlands announced that they will co-host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in April 2026. The conference is supposed to advance international cooperation on transitioning away from fossil fuel extraction — reinforcing the objectives of the Paris Agreement and aligning with the recent Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which confirmed that States have a legal obligation to protect the climate, including by addressing fossil fuel production, licensing and subsidies.

We will see if this leads to anything, but they can’t do any worse than the current COP structure. Maybe if we are lucky these meetings will replace COP - which is scheduled for Antalya Turkey next year.

Black Friday is upon us

Black Friday online spending in the US is estimated to be $11.7B this year, and all holiday spending is projected to be around $1 Trillion in America. To put that in perspective, according to the Pete Peterson Foundation, in 2023 Programs in the US to support children totaled $694 billion. All programs that support children added together is about ⅔ of what we spend on Christmas.

It gets worse..

In 2019, a study found that consumers threw away 80% of items purchased on Black Friday after a few uses. Most of these items are destined for landfills, incinerated, or go to low-quality recycling centers.

Of course, if you asked your average American if we should spend money on keeping children healthy and safe or more Christmas gifts we will likely just throw away, they will likely say the children. They know that is the right answer.

But just saying “children’s programs” is pretty amorphous. We could probably convince them that some of those aren’t needed and are wasteful. We don’t really know what they are and finding the answers and determining what level of money should go to children’s programs is hard. Probably best not to think about it.

And Christmas is fun. We like it. Spending money on Christmas is part of our lifestyle, and we shouldn’t have to compromise our lifestyle so that the government can waste more money, right?

And this COP 30 business. They want us to drive less and eat less meat so that poor countries can take our money and just waste it. Why should I lower my standard of living for someone in a far away country that is just going to waste the money we give them.

I’ve heard about climate change, but the science is complicated. They want to tax me more to give money to poor countries when they aren’t sure about the science.

Lifestyle Trumps Existence

The sad conclusion is that people will not give up the lifestyle they have become comfortable with for the greater good. They will deny that the greater good is even good or even real. That this is acceptable to enough people, so we don’t really do anything about climate change and spend three dollars on disposable gifts for every two we do on children is sad, but it is also the reality of our culture. That won’t change tomorrow.

But it will change.

So, the project here is to hasten that change.

How do we do that?

I have some ideas. What are yours?