I have corporations running ads telling me to save the earth and do my part. Mother fuckers, I do my part and your CEO destroys all my work in one day. I'm kinda getting sick of the blame being put on my poor ass who can barely afford to survive.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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So, I assume you’re vegan? The ecology of this planet will collapse unless most of humanity stops consuming animal products. That or magic.
I am. And for every animal I don't eat, a billionaire throws a meat party and goes hunting for exotic animals. Again, why are you blaming me? Even if I ate meat every meal I wouldn't come close in a year to doing as much damage as a billionaire does in a day. So again, stop telling me about it and go after them.
The number of animals killed annually for human consumption is somewhere north of 50 billion. That’s 50 thousand million.
I want the billionaires dead as much as the next guy, but what you’re saying is not the mathematical reality, and while changing economic systems will lead to justice and fairness, it won’t even begin to solve our ecological problems. It might even worsen them, since our goal would be, presumably, to end poverty and increase standards of living.
Or is that not the plan?
I didn't create the meat industry as it exists. Corporations did. I don't eat an animal unless it's local, sustainable fish. Even the poor people eating meat aren't to blame. We didn't create this system
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Human caused environmental devastation didn't start in the 1600s, capitalism did. I don't think humans are a virus, but I don't think that abolishing capitalism is the only critical step in preventing environmental catastrophe.
We've been here 200,000 years, we've been farming for the last 12,000 of those. Environmental destruction is, reletively, a very very new phenomenon.
That's an a-historical point of view. There have been several environmental catastrophes, including some causing massive climactic shifts introduced by prehistoric humans, some of them are documented in 1491, by Charles Mann. Poor farming practices, including some that have been practiced for thousands of years, are a huge factor in desertification. I completely agree that the rate and scale of environmental catastrophe is new, but the risk of it and tendency towards it is not. While I think capitalism is ABSOLUTELY the single greatest barrier to addressing the catastrophe, the scale and speed of that catastrophe could be just as easily tied to population growth as the emergence of capitalism.
Not to mention how all megafauna got extinct wherever modern humans showed up
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Did capitalism destroy this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
The Aral Sea is considered an example of ecosystem collapse.[42] The ecosystems of the Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into it have been nearly destroyed, largely because of the salinity being dramatically higher than ocean water.[5] The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals from weapons testing, industrial projects, and runoff of pesticides and fertilizer. Because of the shrinking water source and worsening water and soil quality, pesticides were increasingly used from the 1960s to raise cotton yield, which further polluted the water with toxins (e.g. HCH, TCCD, DDT).[43] Industrial pollution also resulted in PCB and heavy-metal contamination
This was the result of this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plan_for_the_Transformation_of_Nature
Exploiting nature and fucking things up is not limited to capitalism.
Plus, animal consumption is among the top three causes of ecological destruction on this planet. Do people think burgers only exist under capitalism? That palm oil and pig meat are an obsession of the super rich? It’s not a matter of efficiency (farming is already absurdly efficient). It’s just math. Like everyone will give up chicken nuggets to save the planet or something? Good luck with that. People are obdurate and gross.
Getting rid of capitalism is a step in the right direction, sure, but unless folks are willing to give up meat, cars, airplanes, and who knows what other amenities, we are still just as fucked.
These can exist at the same time. It is not binary.
The extinction of animals because of human action predates agriculture. This comic is the middle of the bell curve meme.
Both can be true.
Capitalism didn't create itself... She's just looking at the root of the problem instead of its effects.
Yeah, I just can't stop pooping out capitalism. It's literally a natural thing that I do. /S
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Israel keeps massacring Gazans and yet the carbon emissions of the region aren't falling. I don't understand. I was told it was an overpopulation problem. What else could it be?
ITT: The environmental consequences of precapitalistic modes of production confuse lemmies to defend a nonsense statement in a totally different paradigm.
So China must be a paragon of eco-friendly, right? Right? Like, you wouldn't place all your bets in a pseudo-imaginary concept that has never been able to materialize and when it does it only seems to favor fascist behavior, right? Right? It must also mean that there aren't capitalist nations the means and innovation for protection of the environment, right? Right? You totally aren't setting yourself up for a scale you will define completely subjectively to suit your point, right? Right?
So China must be a paragon of eco-friendly, right?
If every country was doing as well as China right now, the world would be a much better place. But the Chinese advantage is largely in its cutting edge industrial capacity. A bit unfair to hold Vietnam or Cuba to the standards of a tech giant.
It must also mean that there aren’t capitalist nations the means and innovation for protection of the environment, right? Right?
Economic central planning that forecasts the consequences of ecological degradation on a 5, 10, and 50 year time horizon will lead administrators to policies that individual businesses fixated on quarterly profits and annual executive compensation packages don't want to embrace.
Past that, a big part of what the Chinese environmentalist project has been about is experimentation. They've done manual reforesting along the Gobi Desert. They've done nuclear energy R&D. They've done carbon capture projects. They've invested enormous sums in their space program.
Most of the western R&D and infrastructure development has been limited by what the O&G industry is willing to directly invest in (carbon capture, converting from coal to nat gas with supplementary wind/solar, carbon credits and other forms of green financialization) all of which are designed to immediately enrich their bottom lines. That's not even considering the deliberate efforts to maximize fossil fuel usage (the Texas ERCOT grid refusing to buy cheap renewable/nuclear power from outside the state, various states threatening to prohibit/tax electric vehicles and renewable energy power systems).
To conclude capitalist rent seeking isn't guiding any of these policies is deeply irrational.
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I wish my hair looked like that
I don't know, my human body feels like some kind of ailment. Let me ascend into spiritual existence.
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