World News

Yes and No. Yes, it’s not only corporations and we must act ourselves.

No, it’s the rules that set the game. Corporations play within the rules. Politics is owning and can change the rules. The society and corporations will follow accordingly. If we really want to change we can. Look what happened during Covid. In retrospect, some insane rules (eg Germany kids not allowed to enter playgrounds. Kids couldn’t play to save the elderly). However, society obeyed to those rules.

It’s not us, it’s the rules that must change. In my view this should be the priority.

Blaming the public over corporations is the #1 reason why we are in this mess in the first place. For decades, the narrative has been "it's your fault and you need to change your habits". It is a pointless and useless narrative because nobody is going to actively change anything like that until they are forced to. Even when we make moderate, easy efforts to do stuff like recycling, the recycling companies bitch and moan about how they can't ship this shit off to China to let them do the work, and then throw away most of it, anyway. We PAY recycling companies to recycle this shit and they can't be bothered to figure out how to recycle it. We PAY THEM to take away materials to use in new products, not the other way around.

In every aspect of people's lives, you will find that corporations use up 90% of the resources that the general public use because corporations deal in economies-of-scale far bigger than anything a person or even a country can do. Corporations have been pushing the "blame the public" narrative to shift focus away from the decades of abuse they will continue to inflict on the planet. Corporation shit all over everything, and they will continue to do so in the name of profit. That is exactly what they are designed to do.

It takes governmental effort and regulations against the corporations to stop this sort of thing. They do it for clean water, and CFCs, and automotive design, and architecture, and many many other things. Why? Because a minority group of people who are struggling to make a living is never going to have enough power and clout as a large corporation or a government.

It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun.

I think we can agree on that corporations are aimed at cheapest way to produce most popular goods at the biggest scale they can achieve for, in the end, produce the biggest possible profit. Thats what corporations are made for: money.

In the end, rich guy gets a yacht, bunker for apocalypse and private residence with AC, private kitchen stuff and anything they want so he will be fine even if its 60C outside. If it will get unbearable, they'll move to something like Norway and will be fine.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people who live in hot countries will die and millions will be climate refugees.

All that, because producing iphone with coal electricity (simplification, albeit I feel like its close to truth) is 10$ cheaper.

Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn’t actually get us any closer to solving things.

Swapping to paper bags will not help either. There are only two options to solve the issue:

1. Government forces corpo to stop wasting our planet (because we don't have a spare one)
2. People get torches

1 is impossible because gov will never cut the feeding hand and 2 is just a matter of time until we will get couple hundred millions migrants from Aftica, India, Pakistan etc.

this is a problem that we've all created

You mean this is a problem that the boomers and gen x created. THEY are the generations that controlled the corporations whose only concern was profit. THEY are the generations that pushed consumerism with no regard to the natural world. THEY are the generations that elected the politicians that allowed this all to happen. So here come the millennials and zoomers to clean up their mess, just like everything else they fucked up for the rest of us.

They produce like double of what we need, it's not only what we need and buy, capitalism is extremely inefficient in the usage of resources, which brought us into this mess.

Have you seen how much CEOs get paid?
Corporations can switch to greener alternatives AND pay workers a living wage AND make a profit, without having the consumers pay the price.
All it takes is the willingness of politicians to force them to. Corporations raise prices because they're allowed to, and they'll take any excuse they can get to get more money out of people.
Gas prices have skyrocketed. First it was covid's fault. Then it was the war in Ukraine. All the while gas corporations have been seeing record-breaking profits. It's all just greed.

I think as someone who did "the things", and that's how I live now, it's hard to look around and see basically no perceptible difference. The incentive is slim for the individual. The bulk of the population is never going to make those changes.

Yes! If we're expecting corporations to grow a conscience and "Do the right thing^TM^" then we're doomed.

Though I do think the corporations are somewhat responsible for the narrative that everyone is powerless except for them. People pushing the "but the corporations!" while being unwilling to make any changes themselves are actually just carrying water for them. Promoting malaise and doomerism is just letting them have their way.

At any rate trying to appeal to the corporations to do the right thing is a complete waste of time. We need to make more effort ourselves. Which means making an effort to reduce our own carbon emissions as individuals. While also participating in the political process to create regulations that force the corporations to do the right thing. Because they sure as hell won't do it on their own no matter how much people whine about it on the internet.

Apparently there are still loads of people who don't understand this simple fact and think everything that is done to make the world a better place is for climate change.

I mean, they both show a callous disregard for the fragility of life on this planet, and a keen disinterest in anything but short term convenience and comfort? Oh and profit, can't forget about MONEY

See, that's your point of view. My point of view is that people who are all doom online are the problem.

I feel the need to remind people that the concept of the ecological footprint was invented by BP to direct the focus of climate fears away from large corporations and onto individuals.

WE as humans are the problem.

you can count the owners of the entities that produce the most greenhouse gases within 3 digits; it's not "everybody"

For example...

Go look at your local Walmart and it's bazillion products. They expect to sell almost everything in that store multiple times within a month. All that generates enormous waste on a scale that's literally impossible for the earth to sustain for another 100 years without total ecological collapse.

We're living in the single most polluting decade in human history, every decade, since all of us were born. Even if the entire Lemmy user base become subsistence farming monks, the factories would just keep churning out poison unphased.

I'm not saying it's bad for people to try and consume more responsibly. I'm just saying it doesn't make a difference over any meaningful time period until there's a radical change in how our global economy functions.

Environmental catastrophe will continue until we literally cannot ignore it, only then will we do anything substantial about it. Unfortunately that's just how our society works.

Why would that be orthogonal? Most plastics are created using crude oil and natural gas feedstocks - the creation of these single use plastics directly impacts climate change.

We have what, 10 years to try stop the planet to get over 1,5ºC? 20 over 2ºC?, that's pretty much the time it takes to build a new nuclear power plant from 0.

We are too late.