Removing one billionaire will do more good for the planet than anything a regular individual can do
That should not stop you from trying. You, and everyone else in this thread for that matter, just drop excuses. Either you guys finally start removing some billionaires, I'm all for that, or you start doing the little things. Ideally, just do both.
Yeah it shouldn't be an excuse. Sure the billionaires are terrible per person compared to a regular person. But they are still a minority. Most of the air traffic is regular folk traveling for work or fun. And freight being hauled by plane or trucks because of all the useless stuff people buy. Most of the cars driving every day are regular folk. By far the worst thing are cruise ships, dumping out huge amounts of pollution just for people to go on holiday.
Billionaires are terrible and should not be allowed to exist as they do today. But it isn't a reason not to do something yourself. If enough people do it, it will make an impact.
I mean, I still try to do all these things.
But I still don't really believe anything I do makes any real difference, because my individual impact is pretty much zero when compared to billionaires and corpos.
Can the students asking this remove billionaires? (Without going to prison)
No, so whats your point? They want to do something. Telling them to not do things because those things are less significant than other things that could theoretically be done is nihilistic.
- Vote for candidates who will do something about climate change
That's the one for removing billionaires.
Yeah us normal civilians can make a miniscule difference by doing these things
But let's not act like the problem isn't billionaires like musk, swift, bezos etc and mega cooperations like nestle or even Boeing. They are the real problems. We will live to see the first trillionaire, yeah trillion. No one should have that much wealth. Eat the rich yo
We need information, math, data that distinguishes between:
A) tragedy of the commons--you doing it yourself won't make a difference, but everyone doing it will, so you doing it yourself makes a difference, and
B) the change is so minuscule that even if everybody in the world did it, it still wouldn't move the needle.
Everything in B should be replaced with "clobber billionaires and coporations and governments", but nothing from A gets misplaced in B.
I think its pretty obvious what "everyone" needs to do.
- buy less garbage
- eat healthier shit
- travel to places sustainably
- quit working for billionaires
- tear down our shitty institutions and rebuild our civilization from the ground up
We all know that the corpos and governments are hellbent on apocalypse, we don't have to support them
"tragedy if the Commons" is a capitalist myth, just like consumer activism.
Suggestion #1 (voting for candidates who support pro-environment legislation) results in the sweeping systemic changes that you're looking for.
Yeah but then we get told that's the wrong pro-environmental candidate and that we should pragmatic as we watch billionaires dig graves for us
Mega corporations like nestle get their money from us normal civilians not caring about what we consumes impact on the environment.
Like if you literally disbanded nestle over night, not even splitting them up or selling things off but somehow just got rid of them and all their product's... does the negative impact on the environment go away? or do new companies grow to meet the unmet demand and all that's changed is what company is providing cheap goods at the expense of the environment?
We can't all afford to care. This is the huuuuuuuge problem with individual action. People living hand-to-mouth on an inadequate income -- that's most people -- will buy the cheapest brand and of course they will. We can't make them buy the "responsible" stuff just by shaming them. All it's going to do is force them to justify themselves with "it's all just green bullshit anyway"
Systemic change is the only way. The only way.
Nestle and Boeing produces things that you consume. Bezos is a billionaire because of all the shit that you bought from him.
If everyone refused to fly, Boeing would disappear in about 5 years and if they didn't buy shit they don't need, there wouldn't be a fast fashion industry.
You can turn it around as much as you want at the end it's the behaviour of the masses that matters.
Those things we consume also involve a lot of political pocket lining, to look the other way when they need to do bad shit.
billionaires like musk, swift, bezos etc
One of these is not like the others.
Awv sorry i hurt your swiftie feelings but she's definitely doing her part in killing the earth.
Her private jet spews more toxic emissions than you could ever dream of doing in 10 lifetimes. Take a seat child, the adults are speking .
We get it, billionaires bad, but it's in the effing tweet "what they can do as individual". All the options listed are solid.
no, they're not. how about direct action instead of consumer choices?
Your direct action is to make measured, intentional choices in your day to day life that have an impact related to climate change. Some of them are more direct than others, all of them are important for the topic. What you want is the dopamine hit of quick easy wins, which is not really attainable in this context.
Your reaction is a classic defense mechanism for people that like to make noise but not actually take any action themselves.
Because you are the majority we are probably fucked as a species.
The only answer is conquer the corporations and eat the rich.
Consensus seems to be: Yeah climate? I shouldn't do nothing as long as there's wealthy people.
*consensus on Hexbear
edit: sorry seems to have contaminated this instance as well
I've seen it a lot here and on other social media. People happily avoiding responsibility by vaguely blaming corporations.
Why won't the guvment step in and slap my cheeseburger out of my hands??????
Not enough people seem to understand that you will have to sacrifice things for the sake of sustainability.
For example
There is no way to supply the amount of meat consumed sustainably. It doesn't matter if you cut off every billionaire's head and send all meat profits directly to industry workers. It does not change that people currently eat more meat than can be produced sustainably.
There are so many other cases where this is true. It's not just rich people and corporations. They are an entirely different symptom, solving one will not solve the other.
The sad thing is, if I die today, nothing will change. The rich will still sell and eat the world until everyone is dead.
When you're poor, you already do 3-5 and 2 is usually taking a bus or walking anywhere.
Here in the USA, the overwhelming majority of poor people eat meat; even the homeless! They just get low-quality processed meat instead.
Farming livestock is less than 6% of greenhouse emissions globally: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector . and that include dairy and wool.
If you're poor you have a lot less responsibility for the problem. Wealthy and middle class people a) almost certainly have a higher historical impact (in some cases by being part of the systemic cause), and b) have more time and security and resources with which they can push for change. And therefore have an ethical responsibility to act, IMO
Forgot the biggest one: don't have children (1)
That's not what your source says though.
It says "having one fewer child" is the recommendation that should be given, and logically so
How do I choose which one to put down? It doesn't mention that.
Well they did say children, a child is ok.
Having a child adds approximately 58.6 tonnes CO2e per year.
The maximum average CO2e per person per year to reach the Paris climate agreement goal of a 1.5 °C, is about 3-10 tonnes. We could do this with a 0.01 fertility rate for a few decades, until we're not catastrophically overpopulated anymore.
Yall can afford children!? I thought we doing late stage capable now?
- People give this world a meaning. Who cares what happens to the world if there is no one to care.
- You need children for the next generation to exist. I believe this one is obvious.
- You need people to solve problems. Our generation may have fucked up. But at least give a next generation a chance. I mean do not multiply like rabbits. But maintaining population is important.
- You can raise your children, so they will make the change or vote for the people who will make the change.
- Climate change is not the only problem. And there are a lot of things to consider when you decide on having kids. Even on individual level I believe it is very beautiful thing to give another human being a chance to experience life. Especially if you do not see the world/life only as bad. But the question "Is it morally good to bring the children to this (broken/beautiful) world" is mostly philosophical and IMO boils down to optimistic vs. pessimistic view on the world.
All of these are individual actions. I'd add organizing with other folks trying to make a difference. Direct action or political advocacy can have a much more significant effect than an individual acting alone.
Back in the 90s I worked out the arithmetic and concluded that legalizing agricultural hemp (not marijuana but fiber) and reducing American beef consumption by 10%, would save the South American rainforests.
I forget the numbers now, but at the time almost all timber logging in the rainforests was to make paper. I remember buying some really nice plywood called "teppa" that came from I think Argentina, which became unavailable because all the logs were being pulped. Anyway, if the market for beef dropped 10%, forcing the beef industry to cut production, the drop in cattle feed consumption would reduce the demand for corn (a main component). If the land were used for hemp fiber instead it would produce enough paper to completely replace our paper imports from S.A.
This practical exercise probably taught me more economics than my college Econ 101 class.
Your professor in econ 101 would probably ask where the profit is though.
Should be obvious to a prof that the beef and cattle feed producers would lose some business, the hemp farmers would get it instead, and the money spent on paper would stay in the country. Seems pretty simple.
Keep handy a list of the rich bastards responsible for the overwhelming majority of the problem, just in case.
What we can do is press for more regulation.
Eat the rich.
Number 3 should be number 2 in the list. Cars are terrible but meat industry is much worse.
This source (1) places completely plant based diet as having 1/3rd the reduction in emmissions of car-free life in US context.
The EPA has transportation at almost 30% of the total contributors to CO2 with ag at only 10% so you're definitely right. Thanks.
We need to stop shipping things across the world for economic reasons. We need to produce and buy locally. The truth is, the global economy has to crash and rebuild itself if we want an eco friendly future. Worldwide shipping needs to go away. Commercial aviation needs to go away. These are things no one wants to hear but would do the most good. Sacrifice is key. We may need to live modestly for a generation in order for energy production to advance to the point where we no longer have to. Our modern growth is a result too hastly adopting dirty technologies.
I was under the impression that cargo ships were actually pretty efficient due to their absolutely massive capacity. Compared to things like airplanes, I mean.
I agree to some extent, but I don't necessarily think that we have to or even can live modestly for a generation. We "just" need to do things the right way. Right now we are not even offered the option to.
Global shipping can help ensure that the production happens where it is most efficient. The large quantities being shipped also minimizes the emissions per product for the distance travelled, so global shipping isn't all bad. The most environmentally expensive trip is the one from the store to the home. It would be nice though if global shipping happened on renewable energy or wind. It might be slower, but it's already slow, so what's the difference. The local distribution also needs to addressed. Everything is being transported in trucks domestically. It would be better to use trains or even ships for a lot of the trucked stuff.
Things that can be produced locally should be available locally, and not shipped around the globe only due to pricing. The worst example that I know of is how American breed chicken is being frozen and send to China so cheap labour can do do the chopping and then shipped back for the American market. That's just disgusting and not at all efficient. That kind of economic incentives must be shut down politically.
Commercial aviation needs to be stopped, starting with the short flights. Trains are perfectly capable of achieving the same travel time and on renewable energy. As of right now it's not really an option to go fast cross USA or Europe by train, but this is primarily because we do allow those trips to be done way too cheap by plane and in cars. More expensive flights and cheaper direct trains could enable us to still go on the annual holiday without bad consciousness. And for the love of god, don't waste any more money on expanding car infrastructure. It's a bottomless pit that also destroys the opportunities for better options.
Organize with Sunrise Movement or other similar groups. The US government is a oligarchy, our representatives don't represent it. The only way we will get any kind of change is through organizing and forcing them to listen to us.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
- ??? Do, instead of hoping that someone else will do for you
- Limit car use to a minimum
- Ok
- Stop flying
- Learn DIY and repair
- Regulation
- Need more public transport / Regulation
- Ok
- Naw
- Regulation
And they go "oh well, sorry climate."
I'm a radical extremist.
So I'll be putting on a totally radical extreme sports expo for charity to climate change stuff.
The plane one is debatable. Because I believe they're scheduled to fly anyways if you're on it or not.
They wouldn't be if people stopped taking them but we're seeing the reverse trend, there's more demand for air travel than ever.
Without taking the fact that they don't have the equivalent of catalytic converters into consideration, planes are shit for the environment. Their impact is disproportionate compared to their actual emissions because it's done at altitude and from a fuel consumption per passenger distance perspective they're not good either and they're worse the shorter the distance they travel because they burn a shit ton of fuel for the takeoff. You can take a Chevy Suburban with three of your friends and travel the same distance and you'll pollute less. Only you and your friend? In a Honda Civic you're burning less gas per passenger than if you travel in a plane that's full of passengers!
I wish we had nice trains to travel on. Would be much better
Unpopular, but honest, opinion:
I don't care. I have put no offspring into this world, my responsibility ends with me. I don't care for the future of this horrible species that we are.
I drive multiple cars and a boat for fun and waste tons of fuel, i fly as often as we like to, i buy whatever i want and throw away whatever i want, my server-room alone uses more power than most families of 5 do...
At least we mostly eat vegetarian so there's that 😁
Your opinion is basically ‘I’m a selfish cunt’.
I mean, yeah, their attitude is shitty.
But at the same time, even their lavish, wasteful lifestyle is peanuts compared to the true perpetrators. This isn’t on us to solve. Because it’s not us that caused it. It’s the goddamn fossil fuel companies and every capitalist that sold out any part of the environment for profit. And then dropped tons of that wealth to create a culture war, casting doubt on whether or not fuckin climate change is real.
And these are the fruits of their labors. Not some middle class family who happens to be wasteful and selfish themselves.
Yes, absolutely. I am. Just like you, but I admit it. You type this "insult" on a phone or computer, made to never rot or be recycled and built by slave-labour. So if you don't walk/bike to work, your workplace is 100% ethically pure and you don't own a car or use anything other than the cleanest energy at home: Yeah sure, hypocrite. Whatever makes you happy :)
