nah, sorry, we’re on Reddit, so capitalism is to blame for everything and we individuals cannot do sh1t.
I mean, how stupid do you have to be to shift the blame for pollution from cars on car manufacturers and oil companies. But, no, no. It’s corporations polluting and I as an individual cannot do anything about it.
Those same manufacturers don’t give a flying fuck if you drive. They’ll still make fuel for airplanes, ships, industrial machinery, etc., and will still continue to blatantly ignore regulations in pursuit of profit.
If you’re gonna gargle corpo dick like bulldog on a firehose, at least be honest with yourself, son.
Well, keep driving your car while blaming big corpo for the climate change. Surely you’re not the problem. Everyone else does the same cuz they’re not the problem either. And oopsie, somehow the planet is in fire. Quick, hang some car manufacturer CEO on the tree, that will solve the problem.
Capitalism IS to blame for everything and we individuals CANNOT do sh1t.
Firstly, capitalists have convinced everyone they need to buy a lot of stuff.
Secondly, humans are selfish and in a capitalistic system it’s difficult to achieve your goals without money. Imagine you’re a young person, say late 20s or early 30s, who makes some money, but isn’t rich by any means. Are YOU going to pay twice or thrice as much for everything you consume just so it’d be carbon neutral? No, because you’re probably saving up for something, whether it’s a home (because, y’know, capitalism - you need to pay out the ass for a place to live), retirement (because with the aging population in most western countries, the national pension schemes can’t be trusted long term), or that foreign vacation you feel you deserve after 10 years of hard work.
Say you DO cut your carbon footprint by 90% or even 100%. I have bad news for you. 98-99% of the rest of people didn’t, because they want to go on with their lives instead of worrying about the future, so your changes are meaningless. What’s more, BP execs will smile at you for believing the whole carbon footprint thing they spread. Now you’re living like you’re in a 3rd world country, but everyone else around you keeps up their expensive polluting lifestyles, making your sacrifice meaningless. You can’t have a negative amount of cars, but someone else CAN have 5.
The only thing that can change anything is political change - tax the companies to oblivion for CO2 production. Watch them scramble to reduce their CO2 footprint in any goods and services where it’s possible, and stop offering goods and services that can’t be optimized. The individual carbon footprint was invented precisely to prevent this - make climate activists blame other civilians (who for the most part won’t stop consuming, thus having no negative effect on oil company profits) instead of politicians (who could actually effect some change). Yes, a carbon tax would affect end users and particularly poor people. But that’s the only way forward, and government programs can help those who are affected the worst.
Individuals can NOT bear the full responsibility for something that affects all of us. It simply doesn’t work, because humans don’t work that way. There has to be government level effort. It’s also why libertarianism doesn’t work. “The free market will regulate itself, you can vote with your wallet”. Well, if 99% of people don’t care about being poisoned by their food, or their video games being overmonetized, or the planet dying… Guess what, the free market doesn’t regulate itself, and no amount of awareness is going to make a dent in it.
So sure, make changes to your lifestyle. Tell your friends and family about the low-hanging fruit in their lives to reduce consumption, educate them. Spend tens of thousands on solar panels if you can afford it. These are all good things to do! But don’t blame the individual for the failings of society. We’re all playing the hand we’re dealt, and unless you’re born a millionaire, that hand is “shit is expensive, shit that pollutes less is even more expensive, I’mma do what I have to”.
PS: Ya know what is the worst part? Capitalists want worker drones back in offices so that people would consume more and office space values wouldn’t drop. 2020 was the ONE time in history we managed to curb our emissions, but that doesn’t jive well with capitalism, so working from home is now considered “immoral” by billionaires.
Around 1/3 of GDP is from state owned businesses. They definitely have a strong market economy there but my point was that capitalism causes greenhouse gas emissions like the guy I replied to stated is not true.
I have no idea what an anarchist communist is but I think this conversation got way off track. A communist country’s defining feature is that the public has (ostensibly) ownership of property which is typically through the state.
If you live on a literal commune somewhere of course the reality will be different.
The original conversation was regarding who produces pollution, a capitalist or communist nation, with my point being that it doesn’t matter what the form of government is.
The original definition of capitalism used to be an economy where 90% of businesses and property are privately owned. And while I admit that the meaning of words tend to change over time I think that the meaning of capitalism was deliberately changed so that the Soviet Union doesn’t sound as insane as it was to future generations. L
Decided to do some research after your questions. Turns out the word was used/coined by the French as a derogatory word for money lenders was co opted by the British later as a derogatory word for anyone involved in manufacturing and other base enterprises. And then some economists in the 80s and 90s tried to redefine it and even wrote that dedinition into some Social Studies and Economy textbooks that I remember reading throughout my life in school.
Original definition according to who? Best I can tell from reading the literature, the definition in the public sphere was changed to this definition in the 20th century. Papers wrote of state capitalism in the 1880s. By the 1890s in Germany, the idea had already arisen that perhaps state socialism isn’t possible as it will always become state capitalism.
It’s strange, but I distinctly remember three different school books giving that exact definition. Yet, when I looked up the etymology for the word it said that it started out as a disparaging French word for money lender and was picked up by the British to describe anyone who made money in enterprise.
I have electric though. Worst case is the pollutants gone into the mining of the lithium and manufacturing of the vehicle. But how much of that can be controlled for mining and manufacturing?
It’s so strange to see all the comments here defending CNN of all things.
Imagine a game where you can buy sustainable, ethically sourced resources for $5 and unethically sourced resources for $3. The manual tells you it’s nice of you to buy ethically sourced but there’s no governmentally enforced consequences. Which ones are you going to buy as a consumer?
Now worse, which ones are you going to buy as a downstream corp CEO? Your shareholders demand maximum profit and you are required to give them maximum profit. Justifying that you’re “doing your part” for the environment gets you thrown out as CEO.
At the end of this game, it’s cheaper, and necessary, to buy the shit that kills us all.
People unironically saying we’re all to blame. No shit, the system is designed so we are all complicit. It takes authoritative intervention to prevent corps from using and selling unethical and unsustainable products. You could also tax it for things like carbon emissions
Exactly, corporation and individual behavior is predominantly emergent of the system. Theres some blame that can be passed on to the consumer or the corporation but only so much, it’s not my fault I can’t afford an electric car. It’s not my fault installing solar panels on my house won’t recoup the cost by the time I leave/sell.
If you want people to eat less meat you need to make it worth people’s while to eat less meat. You don’t need to outlaw meat, you just need to make it less attractive from a financial perspective.
If you want people to use less gas you don’t need to outlaw gas cars you need to make it less attractive.
You could write individual incentives and disincentives but a carbon tax is simple and hits at the crux of the problem. Remove beef, oil, gas, solar, wind, hydro subsidies and implement a carbon tax. Boom, meat alternatives are now cost comparable. Green energy is now handily cheaper than oil and gas. Theres also a sizable amount of conservatives who are for a carbon tax since it’s a “free market” solution instead of picking winners and losers.
Yep. Taxing is the logical solution that fits within capitalism, and yet corporations are so vested in the machine they realize it’s cheaper to spend money to lobby and advertise against it.
It’s a busted system that needed correcting decades ago, and here we are.
I heard with some things it’s actually becoming cheaper to be green, as a result of engineering innovations leading to improved efficiency. Hopefully that trend continues.
Especially when some geniuses finally work out viable nuclear fusion. Real Engineering had a video on a US company working on some next-level fusion reactors, that seem really close to being actually ready.
Edit: of course, at the end of the day, the big oil companies won’t go out quietly. So in addition to all that wholesome stuff, maybe we should partake in some classic literature, such as How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
The fact that clean energy is cheaper without subsidies makes the whole corrupt apparatus even more apparent. Oil and gas beg congress to end subsidies for cleaner solutions because they’re having to compete which is a bad woke thing.
Just look at how long it took coal to die. And now we have “cleaner” nat gas which turns out causes more acute warming than CO2. And rather than convert to a sustainable solution they double down and green wash.
Removing pipelines would just let them raise prices and get richer but honestly if it curbs consumption it’s a net positive.
I mean, did coal die though? Germany basically runs on coal since they shut all their nuclear power plants down (AAAAAAAAAAAAAA FUCKING WHYYYYYYYYY), and the US still has a fair few places that use it as well. I don’t know what the situation is like in developing countries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some were reliant on coal.
Yeah sorry I really meant just look at how long it took for coal to START to die.
Nuclear is such a no-brainer I can’t really understand why we don’t have more development. I assume its lobbying and initial investment costs but I don’t know for sure.
What happened is nuclear reactor failures at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima caused a huge public backlash, resulting in an actual mass anti-nuclear movement. Like I mean protests, political parties, the whole deal.
There was a huge popular push to decomission existing nuclear reactors, and in Germany the relevant political party became hugely successful and basically closed all their nuclear plants.
This is a big part of why the green energy movement, while enthusiastically endorsing solar/wind/hydro/geothermal/etc, doesn’t really support nuclear.
Aside from all that stuff, the economics of nuclear fission reactors are just much more long-term than those other kinds of energy generation. Nuclear reactors take a lot of time and resources to build. Both in and of themselves, and to make sure everything is properly up to safety standards. That initial investment will of course be recouped as the power plant keeps running, but it takes years and years. Of course, this is mainly a “downside” because of our definitely very rational economic system, which is obsessed with quarterly profits and is apparently allergic to these kinds of longterm investments.
There is work being done on developing smaller scale fission reactors with fewer up-front costs, but public sentiment still seems to be against it. Research into nuclear fusion seems to be going pretty great (the stuff Helion’s been working on looks promising), so if that comes through maybe we won’t have to fight a tide of stupid public sentiment to get proper, stable renewable energy.
Maybe they aren’t forcing us to buy shit directly, but a lot of the things they sell, particularly oil and gas are things we depend on because that’s how society is built.
A lot of these completely blameless companies you are defending hire lobbyists to make it harder for individuals who are trying hard to make a difference to have any real effect on government policy. This ensures said companies can keep operating in the way they currently are to maximise profits.
Yes, we could all be doing more, but it’s hard when huge multinational corporations are not only not working together with us to help, but spending billions of dollars to oppose legislation that could help because it would hurt their bottom line.
71% of corporations is the new climate denial were at the bargaining stage now: “well the drastic sacrifice were going to have to make doesnt matter because corporations need to do something before I even attempt to start living in line with earths resources”
It is a cyclical thing both consumers and producers are responsible in different ways in most cases the use of plastic in packaging is producers fault for example but eating animal products is a choice for 99% of people on the planet and going vegan is the single biggest way to reduce your carbon footprint (see joseph poore 2018)
To what extent are we victims, and to what extent are we part of the system? This isn’t a simple thing to answer, and there’s not a single answer.
Corporations have too much power, but people fell into consumerism and fanboyism, defending their practices.
People talk about reducing electronic trash, but will buy the next shiny device at launch, before the last one stops working, will say that it’s a “needed improvement” when someone criticizes things like phones removing audio jacks, and look at people using older stuff as if they’re crazy. People talk about damaging production chains, but won’t prioritize local small ones. There are so many examples, but this is enough to get the idea.
Corporations absolutely control the power what are you even talking about? The only time they listen to us is when it benefits them directly. Look at Reddit and Twitter right now, you would think the large user backlash would improve things but it doesn’t. We don’t live in a market controlled by you and I, the market it controlled by VC funding and what looks good on an earnings sheet.
People hated the headphone jack getting removed but that didn’t change anything. I very much did try to keep buying phones with headphone jacks and expandable storage but companies stopped offering them. Sure there are options available but they all have bigger issues for my use case than lacking I/O.
The EU is requiring user replaceable batteries in phones by 2027, lets take a guess as to who apposes it… is it A) the consumers or B) the phone companies? I’ll give you a minute.
And oh boy would you look at that, it’s the manufacturers who are fighting against it. So if the manufacturers are fighting regulators over this, do you think the free will of the market could achieve it more efficiently?
Plenty of good used cars sitting around but some people just can’t live with a car a few years old. Meanwhile I pride myself on driving things that would likely be in the junkyard if I wasnt
At some point in the past 20-30 years I started recycling. My town had just installed these new separate trash bins, I was just tryna “do my part” and be able to say I didn’t contribute to the shit environment we will have in the future. Nowadays, I neither recycle, nor feel guilty about it. The illusion that I was doing anything productive with my time fell apart the time I saw the garbage guys pick up all the trash containers and dump them in the same truck. I asked them “hey, does the trash site have some way to sort the garbage?” thinking that maybe I was missing something. They said “nah” and moved on.
Nowadays I still watch the same trucks pick up the same trash cans in the exact same fucking way. In the meantime I’ve learned the company belongs to someone close to the mayor, so there’s not even a chance this kinda shit will be reprimanded, ever.
You can build the best fucking bridge you want, if there’s a corporation on the other side of the river, you’ll find yourself swimming anyway.
So no, buddy. Blaming corpos for the results of their actions isn’t just “the new climate denial”. Some of us have been cynical for a while now, and this is just another area where we don’t trust some shithead politician’s empty slogans.
Also, there’s no need to discredit all parties that disagree with you by aligning them with an obviously insane crowd, is there? Especially since that shit goes both ways - your post is also the type of post that a corporate shill would write. Should I label you as a corpo whitewasher, just cause your opinion is different than mine?
At some point in the past 20-30 years I started recycling. My town had just installed these new separate trash bins, I was just tryna “do my part” and be able to say I didn’t contribute to the shit environment we will have in the future. Nowadays, I neither recycle, nor feel guilty about it. The illusion that I was doing anything productive with my time fell apart the time I saw the garbage guys pick up all the trash containers and dump them in the same truck. I asked them “hey, does the trash site have some way to sort the garbage?” thinking that maybe I was missing something. They said “nah” and moved on.
Nowadays I still watch the same trucks pick up the same trash cans in the exact same fucking way. In the meantime I’ve learned the company belongs to someone close to the mayor, so there’s not even a chance this kinda shit will be reprimanded, ever.
Not to diminish from your well written post, but there’s also an external reason for this, and of course, it has to do with capitalism and profits.
Basically, there was a time when China was taking trash material that’s recyclable and doing the recycling. That’s when all the recycling craze happened here.
But then, China changed that, and they were no longer accepting recycling material.
But now here in the US we have the full infrastructure for accepting recyclable material, but nowhere to send the material to, to get recycled at a large and cheap quantity.
So no political personal will want to tell you they’re not doing it anymore because of costs, because China won’t do it cheaply anymore, so you get scenarios like what you described.
Banning wood and coal fired pizza in the city is going to single handedly refreeze the polar ice caps and produce no less than 72% more sea ice YOY than we currently see.
They are restricting particulate emissions not Co2 emissions. It’s not a climate change thing it’s an air quality thing. The pizzareias need to filter out the particulate, not get rid of their pizza ovens.
Even if they were banning coal/wood fired pizza ovens it wouldn’t effect pizza. Pizza ovens get up to 900f and the pizza cooks in 90 seconds. There is no time for any smoke flavor to penitrate the pizza. A natural gas or electric oven is going to yield the same result so long as they hit that 900f temp.
I just had to reply to this one again at the audacity of claim #3 when we’re discussing wood fired NY Pizza vs a fucking electric oven, of which, our power plants are natural gas.
CNN gave a legitimate set of things people can do to make a difference. It was NOT journalistic malpractice to do so. I think CNN is a ‘both sides’ garbage network, but they are pointing out here correctly that we can ALL pitch in regardless of what shitty corporations do or do not do.
True but the emissions saved if everyone copied in with the proposed actions dwarf in comparison with the emissions saved if those 100 corporations did the same.
So what is easier to do? Change the lifestyles and circumstances of billions of people in every country in the world within half a decade or so the same with large companies?
But the efforts done are more akin to everyday people infighting about stuff that would amount to 5% saved on the expense of pushing against the real culprits. The planet’s resources are limited but so is people’s attention span. Better focus the efforts proportionally on emitting sectors.
That’s a lie that got spread by the same companies that tried to convince us that cigarettes ain’t bad for you and fat is the problem instead of sugar regarding obesity.
Climate change isn’t a linear process, it has so called tipping points and if those are reached shit happens. Consumer behaviour on that level doesn’t matter, it’s literally means we reach the tipping points a week later or something.
This misinformation is made for only one purpose: To spread the blame. So the ones truly responsible can later say that we all failed together instead of being held responsible. The reality is that wether we successful combat climate change or not is up to probably a couple hundred people in leading positions in the world.
If you want to see wether we make progress or not just take a look at the oil and coal production, every drop and rock of that eventually ends up in the atmosphere.
If billions of people who are not owners of corporations each does a little, and forces the greedy billionaire corporations to comply by way of boycott, this CAN be done. Vote against people who explicitly DO NOT want to hold billionaires accountable. The notion that every person cannot make a difference and should give up IS A LIE pushed by the capitalist RW/Kremlin and fossil fuel mafia.
You don’t understand the problem. The problem isn’t what you eat, how long you shower or which products you buy. The problem is we are converting fossile fuels that have been removed from the carbon cycle into CO2 and releasing it into the atmosphere where it’s going to be part of the carbon cycle again while increasing the total size of available carbon.
Now you may say “But if everyone does xy we release x% less carbon into the atmosphere!”, which is naive at best. A lower demand for fossile fuels does:
a) not correlate with a reduced production of fossile fuels(as production quotas are set mainly with the relevant countries income needs in mind and many producers are afraid of lower future demand and are thus trying to sell their product now before it becomes worthless), lower prices might even mean higher production if the state needs a fixed amount of income.
b) reduces the price, which in turn increases the demand again. To put it plainly, if all the people go together and restrict their use of carbon products as much as possible we might slash the oil price to a fraction of what it is right now which in turn would make it extremely attractive for third world countries to use fossile fuels to meet their energy demands.
What’s the point if countries in the west use 10% less oil, the price goes down and people in Africa and Asia use 30% more oil because it’s more affordable now? The only thing that would truly help is a world wide oil and coal production quota that over time gets reduced to zero. As long as we keep burning oil and coal, at an increasing rate I might add, individual contributions are meaningless because we don’t truly affect the oil production, we affect the oil price, making it cheaper and everyone should understand that cheaper oil prices are not a good thing for the climate.
Strange how people can be so oblivious as to the role they play in the consumption of energy and materials…
I’ve recently started to believe that the only way climate change is going to end is if a very, very large percentage of the human population dies off very quickly… like… 70-80% or more. One billion people still seems like too many.
The reason airlines make x% of CO2 emissions is because people want to fly, they’re an airline, and there is no emissions free way to power a plane.
The reason the plastic company makes x billions of plastic sporks every year is because I want a spoon to eat my Taco Bell Nachos in my car. They’re not making all the plastic pollution because they just hate the Earth.
They’re not cartoon villains like in Captain Planet that pollute just to make pollution.
It’s almost as if regulations are needed because humans are incapable of doing the right thing to protect themselves. Fairly common thing I might add but you’d require a slightly larger government to do it and we can’t have that either.
Which is how this ends up being a chicken-egg problem.
Are people driving plastic usage or is capitalism driving policies that drive people to use more plastic?
And if so, why is industry writing policy instead of the public, or agents that are supposed to work for the public’s interest?
None of this ends until enough “regular people” coordinate to take power back from industry so that we operate like an actual democracy again. If you want to preserve an environment on Earth fit for human habitation, you have to get loud about… Campaign finance reform : P. And then realized that as boring as that sounds, that that will be when things actually would get violent and scary bc real power would be threatened.
I am not optimistic we’ll even get that far. Our population probably will take some very severe hits in our lifetime though. I’ll cut down on meat where I can, but I am mostly just enjoying the good times we have left.
It doesn’t help that a sizable subset of Americans will bitch and moan at any efforts to reduce the reliance on things like disposable plastic forks, plastic straws or plastic shopping bags because it’s “woke”.
Tbh the best way to avoid that is to use marketing instead of force, make carrying a reusable spork cool, market it differently to people (like for the woke say it’s green and one company that makes a certain spork is employee owned by gay people, for the trumpets say it’s good for their prepping or because the microplastics are estrogenating the children or some shit and also this other spork brand are god fearin’ christians unlike GaySporks, etc), until they become common like nalgene bottles were and then you can either just phase out the disposables or then pass your law with more support, or just let them be as emergency rations for if you lost your spork on the way to taco bell today or whatever and you need another.
Edit: shit, you could even have fast food and fast food+ style places rebrand a spork with their logo and sell them instead of giving away free disposables. Capitalism is the problem and it won’t go away? Exploit it against itself and make it work for the enviornment. To some degree it’s not only doable but probably easier than force through law.
You get a lot less support with “plastic straws are now illegal, go buy a metal one and some pipe cleaners to carry now” than if you figure out how to make the straws popular with everyone first.
You can run it on biofuels. This is how Gates excuses his private jet, conveniently ignoring the possibility of combining biofuel AND comercial flights.
Biofuel does emit around the same carbon output to the atmosphere (compared to storing it). Producing the amount necessary to replace most of petrol requires a ton of crop land, and alternatives means of production are not available quite yet, if ever.
From what I understand, a lot of corporations have power over the options consumers have, the market isnt as free as this argument implies. For example, coal and fossil fuel lobbies do a lot to prevent sustainable alternatives from being adopted.
The US doesnt rely on oil and coal because thats what consumers want, or because its necessarily the cheapest, its because the people that run those corporations have the means to subvert democracy. They are not cartoon villains, but they are absolutely villains.
What you are saying is true for plastic straws and airlines, but I would guess it doesnt really apply to many of these 100 corporations
You’re absolutely right. They aren’t cartoon villains. They’re just rational agents acting according to very real incentives.
But where do these incentives come from? They depend on how we choose to organize our economy, what guiding principles our society follows in how to distribute resources, and harvest them from the environment.
They come from our economic system. Our economic system is capitalism. And one of the many, many problems with capitalism — it can’t fucking slow down. In the eternal chase for greater and greater quarterly profits, there is no room for questions such as “is this growth sustainable?” or “I know there’s demand for this, but should we really be doing it?”.
Pointing fingers and blaming people is, indeed, a waste of energy. Instead, it may be better to ask: “How do we incentivise people to change their behaviour? What about our system needs to change? And how quickly can we dismantle the oil companies?”
We can’t incentivize people to change their behavior because no one is going to deliberately lower their quality of life.
What politician is going to win on a platform of…
Let’s make air travel so expensive that normal people can no longer regularly fly!
Vote for me I’m going to double your electricity bill!
You know that big SUV you love that is entirely impractical but you just like it because of how big it is… If you vote for me I’ll make gas $7 a gallon so that you can’t afford to have a giant SUV anymore.
You know how you like to eat your Taco Bell nachos in your car with a plastic spork… If you vote for me I’ll replace the plastic spork with a cornstarch spork that starts to melt when you use it.
The only thing that is going to save us is technology. Like air travel being fueled by biofuels, electricity costs kept somewhat normal by building new nuclear generation, giant SUVs being powered by batteries charged by nuclear/renewable energy, actually recycling the plastic spork.
Okay great, if I live anywhere besides NYC, where’s my damn train for transport? Oh right its nonexistent. I’d love to take a train but the people that run this shithole say its too expensive and continue to pave more roads! Wow I love living here where my government continues to listen to big oil and destroy the planet in the process!!
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