this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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That's a standard problem with ecology. I can't use a plastic straw which has negligible impact but fishing industry can dump 640,000 tonnes of plastic every year and that's fine. Let's just ignore that.
You go on holiday once a year with the efficient normal flight - bad guy. Ritch person uses private jet for no good reason - that's normal. Let's ignore those emissions and create special rules for the airlines so they don't have to worry about it too much.
Private jets pollution doubled during one year and it's probably the worst way to travel for the environment but I hope you have spent your life savings for a slightly better car to compensate that. We can't inconvenience ritch people, right?
It is this way because the rich people control everything. They won't lift a finger to change if they think they can scam 10,000,000 people into lives of utter inconvencience and guilt to "offset" their own pollution. Hint; every one of us could live in caves and recycle our everything with stillsuits and the rich's portion would just expand to fill the voids we left. This isn't a game with a high score. The hands of the many must join as one to cross the river of life.
I have a plan. Bear with me here. Requires only a cursory understanding of basic construction and late 18th century French revolutionary methods.
I'm a woodworker by trade! Would my skills be of any use in this endeavor?
A woodworker who actively dislikes the hypocritical and predatory exploitation of lower class people and who is willing to do his part to save us? Are you Jesus?
https://youtu.be/acT_PSAZ7BQ
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I didn't think the wood part is the problem. The big metal bit is a real head scratcher.
Why not have fun a make a YouTube video of a Rube Goldberg machine that ends with a recreation of Itchy and Scratchy scene.
The French Revolution was mostly a bourgeois revolution tho.
There's only two classes. Working and wealthy.
If you can't afford to live without working, them you're working class. If you could quit your job and maintain a decent lifestyle, you're not working class anymore.
I get confused. bourgeois = middle class
proletariat = working class
What is the name for the rich?
iirc bourgeois is non-aristocratic upper class. But i guess it depends heavily on the context
You could be right.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie
~~It is possible that the meaning of "middle class" has changed. So Musk is middle class, but the lawyer or pizza shop owner are not.~~
Edit: shit, I should have read farther. Bourgeois is used in multiple ideologies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
I believe the trickier part is physically getting our hands on them
It's why all carbon should be a currency distributed to all people like an UBI. Let's say sustainable amount of CO2 emissions is 8 billion ton and there are 8 billion people, so everybody gets 1 ton per year. You want to pull oil it if the ground, pay in CO2 coin and ask the buyer to pay in turn. Rich guy wants to fly a private jet, they pay the oil producer. Not enough coin, buy with dollars from someone poor that drives a bike and has excess CO2 coins.
It seems fair to me. Everybody is equal, it keeps the market intact while keeping capitalism within sustainable emissions and distributes some wealth.
Of course no rich guy or oil producer is going to accept that, at least not until some people figuratively start building the wooden platform and sharpen the blade to a razor edge.
The environment does not take markets into account and it never will. This consumption will never be sustainable. Our entire ecosystem did not evolve with capitalism or industrial needs in mind. There will be a point where we cannot extract anymore resources without every system collapsing. You can't tie all your resources up into consumer products and military industrial complexes without major drawbacks to everything else. And we will always need more in this current system, and there is never a point where more is enough. You'll never hear "okay, everyone has a smartphone, shut the factory down."
It's fun stuff, right?? I've never been able to conceive why the ultra wealthy would want to let the peasants eventually die off.
Perhaps there are currently more peasants than they require? Was Ritchie Rich just waiting until AI drones became advanced enough to serve them properly?
My limited experience with wealthy folk (prob not even the top 15%) is that they like to feel superior by comparison. Some may be intelligent. Most are educated well even if they lack any aptitude.
My best guess is that they lack wisdom or any semblance of awareness that an aristocracy is stagnant. The things that live on our planet have had to struggle and adapt to survive. At some (small and meek) level, they fuel the forces that would oppose them.
It's not actually fun stuff. I was joshing. I doubt we get to create the United Federation of Planets in the future. I would be ecstatic if that statement was proven wrong.
How to make Carbon Taxes even more worthless.
Make it so the poorest homeless Junkie can make $5 to sell his "Carbon". Drive the price of Carbon down to nothing because rich people can always make you more desperate.
How about we don't involve the system that is actively destroying the planet - into the system meant to save it.
It's not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That's the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an "externality" when the things you're doing have side effects that you don't have to account for, such as pollution.
The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there's no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it's the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.
Nature, nurture, heaven and home
Sum of all, and by them, driven
pre edit: this is just a pointless rant. Your time is precious. Consider skipping it
Please don't take my statement as arguing against your point (I like where you are coming from).
I don't even need sources, I rarely believe metrics in the first place because it is so difficult to conceive and even harder to conduct studies at this scale. This isn't even a possibility in my mind, but:
If everyone that wasn't in the global top 10% of wealth went full Fremen, would the problem truly continue to exist? I doubt it because much of the much industry owned by our increasingly indulgent hoarders wouldn't be necessary. There wouldn't be regular folks to make or buy the product. We'd be hiding under the sand in a cave while drinking our own pee.
I'm not knocking it - I haven't tried it. All at once, anyways.
The gluttonous upper crust would still be jetting to the poles and burning tires for light, but I feel like that would be a much smaller burden on our planet's ability to support life as we've known it than industry on a massive global scale.
I don't know what my point is exactly. I don't think I believe we'll find a workable solution without a cataclysm. Let's go with: selfish assholes are gonna earn their title every time. Regular folks shouldn't be told that their combined efforts won't put a dent in the problem. The ultra rich process nature into poison in order to gain more wealth and power over their peasants. Weakening public education and access to healthcare helps them sell their low quality, single use poisonous trinkets. Having a bunch of money isn't useful if there aren't a lot of folks that have little or even less money. Power, money, knowledge - resource - however you want to frame it.
But then the rich could just overpopulate and use their least favorite offspring as peasants...
Ugh. I should just delete this comment as I don't know what my central statement is. I am certainly not disagreeing. Maybe its that we shouldnt accept futility even though our efforts may truly be futile. To encourage integrity and contentment among our masses. It's very possible for the inhabitants to overcome our downward trend - but if we end up failing, there is still no reason we should accept defeat and be the poor, uneducated, meager servants they see us as.
Fuck the powers that don't respect every life equally. Even if resistance isn't effective, I'd rather suffer than accept a darker future. (I won't have kids. Easy for me to say)
Ugh. Sorry if anyone reads this. I just needed to vent I guess. Thanks for being interested and making the post and conversation. Be well all
I appreciated your rant. I don't really know what I'm talking about, so take this all with a grain of salt.
What you're sort of describing sounds like a boycott of our capitalist system. In theory, if we all could be self-sustainable and didn't need to participate in the current system just to survive, then I think it would collapse. How could it not? The billionaires are billionaires because we give up our time and labor for currency which we then reinvest in a system which transfers most of that currency to a select few at the top. If we all stopped participating where would the billionaires get their billions, and what would they even spend it on, if not our labor or products produced by our labor?
I can only speak for where I live but this kind of organizational boycott of the system isn't really likely to happen anytime soon. It's too difficult to organize that number of people into non-participation especially when there are not really any alternatives. It's not even easy to get people to give up listening to a certain artist's music if they've done a terrible thing. People are living shitty or difficult lives and need their creature comforts just to mentally get by. I don't blame them. There would have to be a viable, functioning alternative already in place which could absorb the needs of a massive number of people. It would take cooperation and compassion, and I guess I just don't see that in the cards.
Even if we did, how long would it last until the power hungry manipulated their way into building another version of the same system?
What do you have to offer but the water of your bodies? You're right. If everyone walked away. If you couldn't sell people a t-shirt with a cat's asshole and a stupid slogan on it, there wouldn't be an industry because there'd be no customers. But thats the issue, where we came from fucking sucked. Children died as often as they lived in every community. But what difference does it make? Its hard to tell. My kids sleep peacefully while Palestinian and Yemeni children are viciously murdered by world powers. So I agree with you. Fuck this. Leave your cities. Have an affair with the Earth and praise Shai-hulud. Would I rather cut my teeth experiencing the reality of life, or extend that percieved comfort to give 4000 people control over billions? Its a hard question. We don't truly know the hardships we would experience. I mean Fremen call their homes a seitch, a meeting place in a time of danger, they are accustomed to war and being hunted. I don't want that for my kids and everyone else that still breathes with compassion for others. Though, the current option seems to be surrending to the disgusting forces at the helm, to which my heart says it'd rather die, and it is in a way.
Anyway, clothes shouldn't be mass produced, lets learn how to make them again. Theres plenty of industries we could get by without if we were allowed to live as a community of people instead of strangers in nearby boxes. I thought I'd answer your rant with a rant of my own because I love our advancements but I hate the intentional suffering of our world. Suffering does not bring merit, suffering is not necessary for growth. All this suffering apologia makes me sick. We are better than this. Mankind is betfer than this. And more people can feel it on the inside now than ever before, we just don't know what to do, or what happens after.
I wish this was an option
Yeah let's not do anything because something else is worse.
In just the U.S. alone, one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One study published earlier this year estimated as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches. In the U.K., at least 4.4 billion straws are estimated to be thrown away annually.
Imagine all of those straws in a single pile. 3000 tons of straws.
Now imagine a pile 200 times larger. That's what the fishing industry is doing.
We're moving sand piles while they're building pyramids.
The fishing industry is a fucking eldritch abomination. It puts everything else to shame. Fun fact, we kill roughly a hundred billion land animals for food every year across the world. But if you want an estimate on how many animals we kill total, you can just ignore that entirely because the answer is around 1 to 3 trillion fish, depending on how you estimate it.
That means an average U.S. citizen uses 1,46 straws a day. What the fuck are you guys doing? Compare that to the U.K. where it's 0,18 by your own numbers.
We use them as single shot spit ball launchers. It’s common to settle disputes lining up like a napoleonic army and blasting at each other. We need gun violence, but don’t always want someone to die.
I'm going to guess fast food is a large portion of that here in the US. Idk how other countries serve fast food, but here every "meal" comes with a drink, and that drink not only has a plastic straw but also a plastic lid the straw goes into.
After opening the plastic container with my pancakes in it, I open three individually plastic wrapped teaspoons of butter and one plastic tub of high fructose corn syrup to pour onto them. I begin eating with my plastic knife and fork, before getting thirsty and reaching for my plastic cup with a plastic lid. I throw the plastic straw that they gave me away, and pull out my trusty stainless steel straw. I am saving the environment one breakfast at a time.
Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. You're wasting time and money and not solving any problem in the process.
You also have a nice distraction while the actual source of the problem is getting worse.
UK has banned plastic straws in 2020 and guess what. Nothing has changed. We're still drowning in plastic. UK doesn't dump plastic waste in the ocean so the straws you see on the beaches aren't from here anyway. Never were. No problem was solved
Private jets is a very small part of airplane pollution and four people travelling in a Chevy Suburban with a big V8 actually use less fuel per km per passenger than the big passenger airplanes use per km per passenger. That's not even taking non CO2 pollution into consideration.
People in general rely on airplanes way too much, may it be for personal travel or to get shit shipped to them ASAP, it's not just a rich people issue.
That's part of why we need viable rail travel in the US.
What are we going to do, build high speed rail!? A technology so advanced that China alone has enough track in active operation to traverse the US over 13 times as of three years ago? I dunno, seems like a gamble
I want to laugh but it hurts.
Screw that oldass great wall, this is the best thing that flows in a complex system throughout China (behind the Yangtse River).
AI disagrees but yeah. We need more trains
Private planes emit significantly more CO2 than passenger planes per passenger. Here's why:
Studies estimate that private jets emit 5 to 14 times more CO2 per passenger compared to commercial airlines [Transport & Environment].
Private planes emit significantly more CO2 than passenger planes per passenger.Read my message again, I never said they don't. They still represent an insignificant proportion of air traffic emissions.
But there are so many more poors. If we all do our very best we can come close to breaking even with the damage done by the rich and mega corporations and help alleviate them of any guilt they might otherwise experience.