*edited to correct conversion in title
This is fine, we just need to switch from plastic bugs and make caps attached to bottles and everything will be alright! Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)
I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun. They’re doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. “Just make corporations pay” to fix things, whether that’s a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean “increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities”.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we’ve all created, and we’re all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn’t actually get us any closer to solving things.
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.
If only somebody warned us 50 or 100 years ago. Oh wait, they did.
More like over 200 years ago. There was a french female scientist that discovered the greenhouse effect before John Tyndall but I forgot her name and I’m at work rn, can’t search for it.
Yeah they were predicting an ice age. And technically we’re still in an ice age, so the planet has to get warmer to reach it’s natural balance point. But it could also get cooler, because we’re in an interglacial period. If we don’t want continental glaciation maybe we should be thankful that the planet’s warming and not cooling.
That’s a myth perpetuated by oil companies to discredit climate science. There was a single paper about it that was widely rejected as a crackpot theory by the larger scientific community. The consensus then was the same as it is now.
New normal, folks. So begins the era of climate migration.
A reminder that this is why we should never tolerate selfishness. We’re now largely screwed because we, as a species, valued our individual comfort over expert research.
We knew what we needed to do - but no, profits. Such a dumb way to die.
Climate and Healthcare migration. I can’t afford to retire here in the states. It’s coming.
Detroit ftw.
This has been the mildest summer in my 5 years living in the area, I’m loving it
Tornado watches are becoming more frequent tho
Same here in montreal, my grass has never been this green in the middle of july. Kinda weird that we had all those forest fires when the summer’s been pretty damn mild for now
Mild in Montreal, maybe, but check out the Canadian Drought Monitor as the rest of Canada is in drought. Like, the entire rest of Canada. https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agricultural-production/weather/canadian-drought-monitor/current-drought-conditions
Over here in the west it’s never been so dry. Pastures are brown, hay and crops aren’t just stunted but are dying before maturity. Trees are yellowing and dropping leaves. Plague of grasshoppers eating everything that was still green. Every day is hot and the air is full of smoke, it feels like the end of the world over here.
That isn’t “just” climate change though, it’s also urbanisation and the way you guys over there use ground water. It’s a combination of a lot of things, climate change is only one puzzle piece in the whole scheme of things.
Also, the drought thing is easily combatable with desalination, which has a few other benefits. The main caveat is, it’s expensive. But, it’s a lot cheaper than having to deal with various other things due to the droughts.
Guessing you’ve never been to Western Canada. We only have a couple major cities, and we don’t use that much groundwater both as it tends to be saline and because we have plenty of surface water to use due to snowmelt runoff. Also we don’t have anything to desalinate, unless we’re talking about that low-quality groundwater, which is a very expensive proposition as you say to get any significant volume.
We’re not concerned about water for drinking, city usage etc. Most cities are on major rivers that are running near normally. Hydro dams have tons of storage to run until next winter’s snow. On my farm I have dugouts that capture runoff, they are full. I have shallow wells on GUDI aquifers where the water is near the top of the casing! I’m irrigating my garden and my orchard like mad out of my yard dugout and that usage isn’t even noticeable compared to evaporation losses.
We’re concerned that our crops are dying, our livestock are starving (sold mine already) and almost none of our land is irrigated. In BC the trees are dying and burning for lack of rain and there is no way to irrigate them of course. This part of the country has long relied on a steady cycle of June and July thunderstorms for moisture - but the thunderstorms have dried up.
It just won’t rain, that’s all.
And yet we’re still forces to work
In North Carolina, we had a “winter that wasn’t” and now we have a summer of “surface of the sun” heat. Triple digit heat index every day last week. Good luck getting the locals to admit that climate change is real though. At this point I think some of them are actually starting to see the truth, but it just pisses them off and they dig in to denial even harder, because if there’s one thing they can’t do it’s admit they were wrong.
We fucked around, now we’re going to start finding out.
Captain Planet tried to tell us
He’s a hero
If only we took pollution down to zero…
So did Al Gore.
“we”
Yes, we. While some are of the impression, that climate change is only because of a select few, it’s because every single one of us consumers is to blame as well.
We have the option to buy climate friendly stuff, lots of times it’s just more expensive or maybe a little bit inconvenient. Also, why does one need the next new iPhone after owning the last one for just over a year? Why do we have to eat Avocados in some cases a few times a day, that are shipped around the world and need heaps of water to grow? Same as Bananas or Strawberries in Winter…the list is very long. Same as plastic free vegetables - “the cucumber has a brown spot? Nope, not getting that, I demand it’s spotless!” So companies wrap them in plastic.
If there’s demand, companies will fulfill that demand, if there’s no demand, companies stop doing that shit, because it doesn’t make any money. Every single one of us is responsible in some way or another, even if the percentage is very miniscule.
I just wanted to say, this is a very good comment.
When people say it’s not “we” and it’s just a few people, or just companies, it always seems to me that they are - consciously or subconsciously - just making excuses for not having to actually do anything and hoping someone else will solve the problem for them. They want the problem to be solved, while not having to do anything or change their lifestyle.
There are some very obvious and clear examples of this; here’s two of them:
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Studies have shown most people are in favour of carbon taxes. But with carbon taxes, companies would just shift the extra cost onto the consumers by increasing prices. One thing affected by carbon tax, would be the price of gas itself. And when prices (especially gas prices) increase, that usually results in a lot of anger and protests. So why would any democratically elected politician ever implement a carbon tax? If they did, they would be voted out, and the next one to come in would just undo it.
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Another obvious example, is meat. We know one of the major protagonists in CO2 emissions is animal farming. Red meat especially is responsible for a huge source of those emissions. And yet most people don’t even wanna think about eating less meat, and they will still crack jokes about vegans and look at them sideways. And as for regulations regarding meat, the example from before still applies.
As you seem to be implying, what really needs to happen is a whole cultural shift. Trying to shift blame onto to a few people and hope they get the guillotine, won’t change anything as long as people keep demanding all the same things because then someone else will come in to fulfil that demand. Whether we like it or not, we have to accept that it’s the sum of all our actions that will determine the future, and our actions can influence other people’s actions; therefore, one way or another, we are all responsible.
Sorry for typing some much at you since you’re basically making the same point already, but I just felt like adding on.
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I honestly get dizzy by just looking at those numbers…😵💫
Everything is fine, the earth simply won’t be habitable for humans. The Earth will spin on without us when we inevitably allow industry to destroy humanity by making earth uninhabitable by human life.
It’s what we deserve for being so stupid as to see this happening and doing nothing about it to stop it or slow it down. There’s plenty of climate change advocates which are almost always drowned out by the chorus of companies and climate deniers who believe propaganda over science.
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Never said they did.
What people deserve, and what’s going to happen to them are not mutually inclusive.
I’m also going to state that IMO, it’s not just a few corrupt men. There’s lots of them… Lots and lots of them… Not the majority by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly more than a few
Doomers gonna doomer
We will take a large chunk of the planets life with us. I don’t think we can destroy it all however, the planet will get to intelligent life eventually.
Well, there’s certainly no intelligent life on it now, so…
No. That’s simplistic and wrong. Huge swaths of the planet will remain nicely habitable. But large swaths won’t, and disease increase and economic failures will make things very terrible.
But this “all gonna die” stuff is dumb and wrong. Sorry.
Once we have nations fighting for water resources (tied directly to food production) it wouldn’t take long before the entire population is at risk
Ontario’s great lakes have been threatened with receding volume, pollution, and mass algae blooms that show how fragile even that massive resource is
Ground water across the globe has been mass polluted and drained to nothing in large areas.
We are a lot more vulnerable than it seems
It won’t matter if a small area is still habitable. The resolution of 7 billion people trying to fit into a space that fits a fraction of the population will end the species.
It took less than 1% of the population of Europe moving around to nearly break the EU. Watch what happens when it’s 10 to 20% of everyone everywhere.
Will end the current age of civilization? Most definitely.
Will it end organized societies as we know them? Probably?
Will the human beings go extinct? Probably not. Its not crazy to think that we’d face a bottleneck of only a few hundred million humans or less. But there are people all across the economic and geographic spectrum who are prepping. The rich will survive at their polar fortresses. The poorer will survive underground, or at high altitudes.
You make it sound like humans are the only ones affected by climate change. Sea turtles, elephants, polar bears, pandas, there’s a fuck load of animals we’re directly killing off. Everything is most certainly not fine, even if you don’t give a single shit about innocent human lives.
How many insects do you remember seeing around stadium lights as a kid? Look now. We will not last another two generations
‘It’s not normal’
It is now.
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I mean, not as if 40C was unheard of in the Mediterranean?..
Climate change is real, but not sure how useful is thinking about it without carefully measuring your options.
When you pay more for a green alternative to something very much not green, you may be causing lots of bad things indirectly.
I mean, if a thing itself is 100% green energy\resource\process, then money you pay for it are maybe 20% green and 80% pretty much brown. So if it costs twice and you pay for that, you may be creating a demand for dirtier production just to soothe your conscience about global warming.
That’s simplifying life to a neanderthal level.
That’s simplifying life to a neanderthal level
Is exactly what’s wrong with your argument. Your logic smells kinda…brown.
I think my logic is still sufficient, and your comment is still insufficient.
You see, “neanderthal” is a metaphor, it doesn’t mean an actual neanderthal-level person can argue with me.
In my case I’m using it as a hyperbolic simile to indicate that your “shouldn’t use green stuff because some might use brown stuff to make it” argument is simplistic to the point of being primitive and regressive.
It relies on a false assumption that progress can’t be achieved because anything that’s good for the planet is created by processes much worse than what’s currently destroying the planet.
Oh, I’ll write it even simpler.
What matters is how much brown stuff you spend total. So if you directly spend less brown stuff, replacing it with green stuff, but indirectly more brown stuff, then you are making things worse. Because the goal is a good total of carbon emissions or whatever else for the whole planet, not just for your own western country where the dirtier parts may not be done.
Your argument is clear. There’s an opportunity cost to Green.
What you’re missing is the momentum of green. A single solar panel in a sea of coal power plants is certainly dirtier than coal in the short term. For the exact reasons you outlined.
But you have 2 flaws in your logic.
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we aren’t in that situation right now and I’d like to understand why you think we are. As we become more green then green things result in less brown, so there’s a snowball effect you’re ignoring here. Furthermore that snowball effect has already begun!
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Renewable energy, like panels, result in brown during manufacturing and installation. Once they’re up they generate power for, on average, 25 years. The electricity-per-co2-ton is better than coal over 25 years.
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I’m Italian myself. The issue with this heat is that it’s humid too, I live in the riviera and we’ve had constant 35-37°C weather with high humidity for a week now
Yesterday here in Germany it was 36°C with high humidity. This single day was enough.
What RH% were you reaching? In the UK we have been spared the high heat (for now, it will probably come later) but we had 70%+ and it’s not nice that high as everything feels damp.
I just spent a week in Sorrento (South West Italy), we could not handle the outdoor weather of 35-38C + 70-80% humidity for more than an hour tops.
Honestly I will never forgive people who STILL continue to deny climate change is happening and refuse to legilslate on it.
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“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” - Jean-Claude Juncker.
Career politicians will never fix anything. They’re only interested in not rocking the boat and keeping themselves in office.
And the steps we would need to take to fix it would surely not be popular among the masses, even as they sit dying of heatstroke and starvation. People want magic pills that fix problems, and no such thing exists for this.
kinda late even if they did now 😔
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You need to see this through the eyes of a psychopath, because those are the ones we’ve put in charge; from their perspective, mass deaths on a global scale mean more resources for them.
Look at the bunkers they’re building… they’re relishing the notion of genocidal control
Mass death will also slow down global climate change.
Keep in mind that the “them” that gets more resources includes most of the western world, traditionally.
No, it’s not. If we started large scale changes now, we would have to endure years of terrible condition with the slight hope that things will improve afterward. Saying “it’s too late” equals to saying we’ll have to endure years of terrible condition while expecting even worse afterward. It’s still a bad posture, no matter how you spin it.
Totally correct. We live now, act now. The future remains not determined, but damn right paths and options are rapidly closing.
Probably something like an inhabitable band will form over continents; the US southwest and south gulf, for instance.
All humans won’t die. That’s silly. But very many can, and the rest, degraded.
The US will be lucky if much survives, as will Europe; once the Gulf Stream breaks down both regions will freeze
The world, especially US china EU, has such vertically entangled petro consumption, infrastructure, and maybe worst of all as far as making changes go, growth corporations feeding off it/us, well probably have rapid, vs slower and assimilable, collapse.
Hell today’s “homeless problem” will be a trivial joke relative to millions of people fleeing situations literally in-tolerable for countless reasons, probably soon enough – if this took place over 25 years it would be painful enough. If we get rapid migrations it’ll be war.
Don’t worry guys, everything is fine. We just need to [redacted] and this will all go back to normal in no time.
Hello my name is [redacted] I work for [redacted], all we need to do is [redacted].
Where I stay these temperatures can be quite normal in summer. I’m now just worried that a hot summer’s day here will now go from 45 to 55. I’ve felt 50 before. It’s not fun. But besides that, I think of the implications for the agricultural sector. Good luck my European friends. I’ll report back in our summer.
It’s the lack of sure conditioning in Europe that makes it especially brutal.
Sure, there are hotter climates but they are usually more prepared with AC. Certainly not always, I know.
