Individual action on climate is big deal again

In the wake of the IRA, national advocacy is less needed

Fresh Bad Takes on Nikki Haley and the relative threat of wokeness and pandemics.

If you’d asked me five or 10 years ago, I would have said that the media was a little too hung up on individual action to mitigate climate change. There were all kinds of articles about, like, assessing the carbon footprint of your dog’s chew toys or how to find low-emissions socks. And this extended to quasi-personal local policy interventions like the move to get coffee shops to stop giving out plastic straws with iced coffee. All these personal choices did matter in some sense, but actually figuring out the carbon math on all these individual consumption choices was borderline impossible and the relevant scales were just way too tiny.

Smart people united, I think, to push a clear message that what we needed instead was collective social pressure for big-picture policy change.

Their efforts succeeded, scoring some small-scale wins from the Biden administration and then a large win with the Inflation Re…