"Seems like this advice, which will provide essentially no meaningful benefits to the world, is designed to achieve an exquisite balance..."

"... keep travelling but feel more virtuous by tweaking your usual routines with tiny sacrifices, while retaining some of the guilt and shame that appears necessary to be a genuine 'woke' person."

That's the top-rated comment on "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?/And what can you do about it?" by Seth Kugel (in the NYT).

First, I highly recommend clicking through so you can see the fantastic illustration by Tim Enthoven (I see I recommended him before, here).

Now, to the text. Kugel is a travel writer. And the NYT makes money selling travel to its readers. The problem of air travel and carbon emissions is a huge conflict of interest for them, and it's painful or humorous to watch them try to writhe into a nonridiculous position.

So, O.K. How bad should we really feel? Well, first of all, no self-flagellation required for that week in Italy. It is true that your round-trip flight is probably the biggest single contributor to your carbon footprint this year (unless you moved from a studio apartment to a mansion or quit your job for the Nature Conservancy to become a coal lobbyist). But shame is the wrong emotion....

Why is shame the "wrong" emotion? And why does the text switch from "guilt" to "shame"? I thought the distinction was important! It's not even discussed. And the text goes on to suggest that the reason "shame" is "wrong" is because shaming isn't an effective way to get people to change what they are doing. It's not? Why not? Is that scientifically proven fact? You know, where you have the problem of people not wanting to believe the science about climate change, you ought to adhere closely to science, and yet you have nothing scientific about shaming (or guilt, which you unscientifically merge)!

It seems to me that shaming is often quite effective.