this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Bro the big oil corporations spent decades at the beginning of the 20th century creating and forcing the demand and dependency on oil. Watch “How Big Oil Conquered the World” from James Corbett.
It’s not like WE chose this to be the way things are. The people who control industry, and marketing, and media and THE GOVERNMENT, all MADE us and it all this way.
right but if you keep participating in broken systems you'll just perpetuate them. gotta find ways out and take them... or make them.
The past few centuries have been carefully and slowly built to disempower people like you and me, and empower the newly-minted elites. It was the period of power consolidation for capitalism, when it fully overtook feudalism and other pre-capitalist systems over the whole planet.
You and me have no choice in how people’s lives are lived. The systems of control built in steer the masses into living exactly as they live.
We might individually live marginally less negative lives, but to completely eliminate our negative impact on the world, we have to completely remove ourselves from society.
The solution is not piecemeal changes and fixes to our individual attitudes and behaviours.
We have to completely change the system. We need to dismantle it and build something better from the lessons we learned.
Recycling cardboard and shopping at thrift shops is not it.
And I’m not sure we have many other options now, other than the old burning down the banks and guillotine routine.
I travel as little as possible, I've been attempting to grow my own food in my apartment, I've rarely bought clothes and never bought furniture. A roll of paper towels lasts me months and I eat meat a couple times a week (I sprained my ankle stretching in bed before adding meat back in)
My carbon footprint is way too large, and IDK what to do about it. All I want is to buy a mountain and fill it with fruit, but it'd take a decade of destroying the world to get there
I'm a damn good programmer, and open to suggestions... This is a constant weight for me. IDK how to not make things worse
Have you assessed what makes up your carbon footprint? What gets measured gets improved
But when to not participate is to starve to death, there’s not much of a choice. There’s no public transit for me to use as an alternative to my car, I can’t afford to spend extra $ on stuff that’s healthier and less impactful on the environment.
Stop buying what shit? Everything? Corporations lobby for policies that save them money at the cost of our environment. Yes there are things individual people can do to help but posts like this one from CNN shift the focus from the actual problem
Yeah this is where taxing these negative externalities would help to curb the demand of wasteful products and thus lower waste produced by corporations.
We can't expect corporations to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts, because the products would cost more and the masses would just purchase the cheaper more waste producing products. We need to level the playing field by taxing pollution and waste.
This is the way. Carbon tax will take care of that
Carbon tax and zoning reform. A tax won't actually succeed in reducing demand if people continue to be forced to drive everywhere because their destinations are too far apart.
Very true. Especially in the US and Australia. On the other hand, increased cost for transportation would create a lot of pressure on individual transport that should lead to more demand for public transport. The effect would probably be slower than a zoning reform
I agree with you, but don't use ableist slurs when making arguments about social responsibility.
I especially like the part where I prefixed this with “there’s no responsibility on the part of consumers whatsoever”
Re read what he wrote. He said without including that or some form of. For example, Elon put a larger carbon footprint into the world in one week with his jet than most of us will over the course our lifetime. Does it mean we shouldn't do our part? No. We definitely need to do and be better. It would take only a few of the biggest contributors to make a big impact while it would take thousands, if not millions, of us.
There is the caveat of business practices which are often unknown to the consumer—think of all the times businesses have been busted and then(temporarily) boycotted for it. But, yeah, consumers consume and should be well aware of their consumption.
Demand controls supply.
IMHO twitter OP's take basically amounts to climate change denial.
Not all changes are an improvement, but all improvements are a change. That applies to both our lifestyles, especially in rich countries, and corporations, what they do and how they operate.
Animal agriculture is the most obvious example to me, it's unjusifiable ethically let alone environmentally so no matter what people are gonna have to stop eating animals and their secretions, and most people can stop pretty easily and eat healthily (it's extremely easy to do better than the SAD) so start now and get ahead of the curve
Go back to reddit, and type something no one will see, hipster wanna be.