31–39 of 39 posts
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To add a little perspective, before Covid some 40%ish number of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah, some people are very much struggling to survive. They don't have it to spare.
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Couldn’t agree more.It’s like asking individuals not to eat meat to stop climate change… What about stopping companies fracking, mining coal, selling combustion engines first ?
Why not both :)
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Yeah, some people are very much struggling to survive. They don't have it to spare.
Half or more of the above figure have an iPhone / Samsung smartphone with an unlimited data plan. It’s complicated and not as simple as nothing to spare. Plenty that could spare, including software devs making 100k+ a year, don’t care.
I believe a lot of our societal gridlock is currently rooted in the deficiencies of our built environment. I am trying to focus on how we make progress on that.
A lot of people are currently in a situation where they need a high paying job to cover "basic expenses" and it's killing them. We need to find a way out of that if we really want to solve the climate stuff.
This is good. This particular change has to be top down. The ability to put pressure on government and industry should be grass roots, not behavioral changes themselves.
Bingo. Fuck this gaslighting. The vast majority of pollution in general, and CO2 in particular, comes from industry, not individuals. Tossing trash everywhere and running gas through your bus-like SUV like a maniac is an asshole move, and your neighbors don't appreciate it, but it doesn't move the needle much on actual environmental issues. Big companies and big foreign nations are where the CO2 is coming from. They…
Military (which I'd argue is in fact Industry) up until recently, actually; but somehow that gets swept under the rug. Moreover, when Industry loses a significant case in which they are forced to pay for their blatant environmental misconduct they can intimidate, and retaliate against the counselors [0] in some grotesque way to put a chilling effect on those who want to do the same.
I intermittent fast eat meat only 3 times a week and try to maintain a 5;1 plant to animal protein ratio, lowered my carbon footprint in many ways for 16 years now (from farming in large scale regenerative farms to living in towns where I don't need a car) and have been reducing my consumption more and more as I get older--it does nothing for me and I'm pretty utilitarian about my purchase and will prefer to buy used over new. In many ways I'm pretty sure my actions have made me (individually) carbon negative.
But, as you mentioned, the conclusion you realize after living this way is that Industry can essentially null all of the actions I've taken in a day of operation as it's activity in terms of GHG emission, pollution or wide-scale contamination of the environment. This is why I think Ecocide [1] should be enforced to all including corps as well as Governments and individuals (directors of investor's funds) and Hedgefunds who have benefited from these events. Anything short of this is political theater and will ensure that business as normal is maintained--COP26, Bilderburg et al are examples of how State and Cooperate power exempt themselves from all the things they decry are responsible for these impacts at scale.
With that said, I place greater confidence in the ingenuity of Humans to create solutions to these problems. Incentivizing this is what we should be doing instead of continuing to bail out failed business models from megacorps via infinite QE.
1: https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org...
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It's an interesting idea, but the rich and powerful run the world and basically don't pay taxes. You don't need environmental dress-up, you just need the rich to pay their taxes. Wow, the world is pumping 40 gigatons per year excess CO2, which (at 100$/ton, god I hope we find a cheap way to remove carbon) is 4 trillion per year. There are historically about 2 teratons of excess carbon in the air. Christ that's 200 tr…
> 4 trillion per year. For comparison, the Gross World Product[0] of 2019 was estimated to be 88 trillion, so a 5% global tax devoted to carbon removal would be sufficient. Countries could even be given a quota, and they would get a rebate for every ton they came in under that quota, such that they would pay net zero tax if they were net zero on carbon emissions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
It is somewhat realistic (though difficult) to have most countries agree that they will tax polluters under a comparable rules & rates. It's not realistic to expect that they will use that tax revenue on someone else's citizens instead of their own.
Also, 5% of gross product is a LOT. For a comparison, that is more than the global spending on education. I have a hard time believing that countries will choose to spend on carbon capture more than what they currently (or ever) invested in developing their citizens' skills.
I'm not surprised. Trying to rely on people to voluntarily change their behaviour while leaving companies to seemingly do whatever they want without consequences is a terrible idea. Why should people sacrifice their lifestyle while large corporations continue to make cheap, disposable goods and waste resources anyway? What's the incentive to consume less and change our lifestyles if leaders/celebrities/billionaires j…
Couldn’t agree more.It’s like asking individuals not to eat meat to stop climate change… What about stopping companies fracking, mining coal, selling combustion engines first ?
There's no way I'm changing my lifestyle so a bunch of PH.Ds and tenured Profs can retire on the Costa del Sol.
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Couldn’t agree more.It’s like asking individuals not to eat meat to stop climate change… What about stopping companies fracking, mining coal, selling combustion engines first ?
Why not both :)