Yes, definitely! I wonder what that is. Because I definitely engage way more with the actual content, reading full articles, actually opening articles…on Reddit, I was so angry with myself because I wouldn’t actually read the shit. Which was very unlike me. Very odd
Polydextrous
joined 2 years ago
EXACTLY. The personal carbon footprint thing was literally made up by oil industry publicists. It wasn’t part of the discussion, the blame was being laid squarely at the feet of the companies who were destroying the earth for a buck. But lo and behold, here come the publicists and the entire environmentalist movement got caught in the trap.
Hold companies responsible. Do your own thing that makes you feel better, but even if everyone in this comment section went full-on vegan, we wouldn’t put the tiniest dent in the emissions of one individual company—and not even a big company, like, a small-to-medium sized company.
Think about your grocery store. How many people that shop at that one store would have to go vegetarian before they changed their order? And how many stores would have to change their orders for the distributor to order less from the supplier? And how many different regions would need all of those people to all stop buying meat before the supplier put out less meat?
Now punish one company for what they’ve done. It’s in the news, the investors change their tactics, an entire industry could shift with one prosecution. This debate is beyond silly. It’s not individual responsibility. We didn’t cause it, it’s not on us to solve it. We couldn’t if we all tried. This entire community could go vegetarian and not even move the needle.
EXACTLY. The personal carbon footprint thing was literally made up by oil industry publicists. It wasn’t part of the discussion, the blame was being laid squarely at the feet of the companies who were destroying the earth for a buck. But lo and behold, here come the publicists and the entire environmentalist movement got caught in the trap.
Hold companies responsible. Do your own thing that makes you feel better, if everyone in this comment section went full-on vegan, we wouldn’t put a tiny dent in the emissions of one individual company—and not even a big company, like, a small-to-medium sized company.
Think about your grocery store. How many people that shop at that one store would have to go vegetarian before they changed their order? And how many stores would have to change their orders for the distributor to order less from the supplier? And how many different regions would need all of those people to all stop buying meat before the supplier put out less meat?
Now punish one company for what they’ve done. It’s in the news, the investors change their tactics, an entire industry could shift with one prosecution. This debate is beyond silly. It’s not individual responsibility. We didn’t cause it, it’s not on us to solve it. We couldn’t if we all tried. This entire community could go vegetarian and not even move the needle.
I understand what you’re saying, but the chain is long. The climate denialism runs deep. 70% of emissions since 1988 are caused by just 100 companies. And those companies aren’t just direct-to-consumer. They supply industries that supply industries. We are the last step in a very long line of handoffs between the true polluters.
Again, I understand your reasoning that if we change, they have to change to adapt, but our change is nearly insignificant when you factor in how much you’d have to change and how inaccessible that kind of change is for people. Your clothes, food, transportation, utilities, your work—literally everything we rely on to exist and survive in this capitalist world contributes to climate change. You can make all sorts of changes, provided you have the means. But not everyone does. And your going vegetarian needs about 100 other people to go vegetarian for years before you cancel our a few private jet rides.
You’re looking from the bottom up, but you can’t see past the ground floor. Not everyone has the means to change in the way you’re suggesting, and it’s just peanuts when compared with the change that would come from punishing and changing one or two companies. Thousands of people would need to go vegetarian to see the change we could achieve with much larger goals in mind. And yes, we are consumers of the companies products, but they are the ones that lobbied to make the US a car-centric country, that kept train tracks from being built—shit, that’s still happening with Elon Musk. He killed he light rail almost single-handedly because he wants people to rely on electric cars.
And that is another perfect example of this predicament. All we hear about is EV, how it’ll change the world, save the environment blah blah blah, but that’s still all marketing. to maintain the status quo while mostly greenwashing the problem of runaway capitalism. That solution serves the markets first!!
It’s smaller, personal change when we weren’t the ones that buried the environmental reports and funded climate denialism while dumping toxic sludge in rivers and escaping culpability—and this debate is still happening in places like this! Between environmentalists! Come on! How is this still happening?!
So, changing one aspect of our lives that contributes to climate change, while all of the other aspects of our consumption still do—not to mention the privilege inherent in that decision—and needing to rely on thousands of people to make that change, while we could go after the real culprits of this problem?
I’m not arguing we shouldn’t do everything we can, personally. But again, there is an inherent privilege bias in that thinking, while this type of framing lets the true motherfuckers off the hook. It keeps the heat off of them while making us argue over how best we, as individuals, can limit our minuscule contributions (relatively speaking).
##THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS NOT OUR FAULT, ITS NOT OUR FUCKING DIET’S RESPONSIBILITY TO FIX, GODDAMMIT. STOP TALKING ABOUT OUR “CARBON FOOTPRINT” (a term and concept invented by BP publicists) AND BREAK GODDAMN INDUSTRY INTO PIECES SMALL ENOUGH TO FUCKING FLUSH DOWN THE DRAIN
If every single person went vegetarian, we’d still be in deep shit. And it’s not our previous meat-eating that’s responsible. It’s the companies that have buried, obfuscated, lied, and manipulated everything and everyone for a goddamn century. And they’re still getting away with it with articles like this.
How…does that make sense to you.
“There’s way too many people in well-off areas that will survive the great famines and heatwaves killing most people by the equator. So it’s not really all that bad.”
What a stupid, stupid opinion. It’s this exact kind of idiotic nonsense take that’s dominated and helped out the culpable industries throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Get fuckin bent
It’s long past time we pull the best quote from a scientist just saying, “we fucking told you.”
Jesus. This is journalism.
It’s so rare that an article thoroughly cuts through the fat while giving historical context (not to mention brushing aside industry talking points like the fantastical nothing that they’ve always been) to deliver such an informative and punchy overview of the situation.
If journalists always wrote like this without kowtowing to industry’s magical reasoning, the world would be a much, much different place.
It’s just as dumb as believing in “partial birth” abortions which…I mean…come on. If only these people had the capacity to think about it for two seconds.
So many people, in this, the age of social media, when they subscribe to an -ism, feel the need to stake that ground and defend it from anyone who attacks it. They mistake that feeling for the need to defend anyone else that ever claimed the same -ism.
It’s the same impulse that drives the American practice of “the republicans are defending this, so I, a democrat have to attack it.” (See: CNN under trump for a great example). This obviously works both ways, the more ridiculous ones usually go the other way from dem to repub. But followers of both parties do it. Same goes for everyone on the internet, almost, communists are definitely also very high on that list, suddenly denying all sorts of massacres. It’s nuts
What are you possibly basing this claim on?
Look, I get that logic, I really do.
And do it. I’m not trying to stop anyone from going vegetarian at all. But think of how many people need to change before your not buying meat actually has an effect. Because, think about it: you don’t buy any meat, but the store you shop at doesn’t change their order. If you went full vegan today, the grocery store would still stock the exact same amount of those products.
My point isn’t that telling people to go vegetarian is wrong. Not at all, it’s a great thing.
My point is, it’s thinking way too small and it’s actively changing the tone of the conversation. And that change was literally crafted by industry publicists, drawing attention away from the true culprits. The waters are muddier.
If every article and every study that came out telling individuals how to change their lives and sacrifice in order to save the environment were, instead, about how 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions, how they had internal studies a hundred years ago about how their product was altering the environment, about how they’ve escaped change via lobbying and misinformation, the pressure wouldn’t be spread out—this conversation wouldn’t be happening. Our lifestyle changes would be exactly as important as they should be in this conversation: a nice addition. Nowhere near the focus. Instead, I see way more articles focusing on how we can all collectively change to fight the monstrous beast that is climate change. That’s telling people to fire bottle rockets at an attacking Air Force. It’s pissing in the wind. When there are white armies out there that get to write off doing shit because it’s on those people.
Again, changing your life for the good of the environment is a great thing. Doing it is admirable. But it’s also privilege-restrictive. Living an emission-reductive lifestyle is literally not possible for a lot of people. Just like being poor is expensive, being poor forces horrible carbon emission decisions on people. I haven’t crunched the numbers, (no one has) but if every privileged-enough person changed, would that be enough? Probably not. More and more people are financially restricted, and talking about eco-friendly lifestyle choices like it’s all about how much you care is incredibly unfair.
But that’s all after the fact of this being a tactic invented by the oil/gas industry to take pressure off of the few companies that literally are responsible for—and that could have a huge effect on—climate change.
This is playing marbles in a hurricane and yelling at the kid who is trying to blow the marbles out of place—is that contribution actually changing things? Sure, a little. But there is a fucking hurricane and any time spent talking about changing that kid’s behavior is time not spent talking about the hurricane.