I really hate that “we” in the title and article. Solidarity! “We’re all in this together!” Except we’re not.
Study after study had proven that giant corporations and the richest-of-the-rich 1% account for the vast *majority of global emissions and negative environmental impact. Yet they’re not changing, certainly not enough. So I will use paper straws, be conscious of waste, reduce/reuse/recycle etc, but comparatively it will mean almost nothing…
I agree with the principle of what you’re saying, but you do have to consider what it is that makes them produce all the emissions and detriments to our environment. The products we’re buying. They aren’t just generating waste for the pride of it, it’s shipping and creating the products we’re buying every day. Your straws might not directly be causing a major problem, but the creation and shipment of millions of straws does.
Or instead of waiting for a bunch of singular entities to correctly want the correct straws we could just stop the straws, but somehow the simpler solution is infinitely harder than the former.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person IRL who acts like it’s not. It’s part of everyday conversation, it’s on YouTube constantly, it’s been legislated on in one of the largest bills in American history, automobilr companies are going all electric by 2040. American dairy is carbon neutral by 2050. The first active carbon sequestering plant went online.
Just because you feel like being a doomer and not helping through apathy based propaganda doesn’t mean other people all over aren’t doing their part.
Those things you mentioned are either way too late and worthless or even harmful to the environment.
We cant have this many cars and be environmentally friendly, even if they are all electric. The change we need is not the change they are selling us.
American dairy is a tiny drop in the ocean of emitted carbon and they’ll stop… in 25 years
Carbon capture is bullshit technology like solar roadways and there is no way in hell it will catch up to what we emit daily in the next century. Go to a coal powered plant and look at the mountain of coal that lasts them maybe a month. Now imagine sucking all this coal back out of the air in the same amount of time… congrats, you’ve just offset one rural power plant.
There is already no way for us to save the climate we know and keep something that even remotely resembles our current way of life. We are long way away from the point where we should’ve started braking and we keep pretending that opening the windows will slow us down enough to not hit the wall.
They do fabricate a lot of BS to deflect the attention away from the problem. Burning fuel!
Reduction via energy efficiency & switching over to electricity, via wind, solar, water (wave, tidal, hydro) & thermal is right direction of travel. So yea, electric public transport, instead of private cars, generally does the same task, with far less resources (inc. power demands)
It is not coincidence that doing whatever one can do makes one feel powerless. While I do understand little efforts are like a drop in the sea, that just means we should begin to organize with others to work on creating our own cloud. It is worthy.
To stop change, the first step the adversary will take is to discourage you to do it. Is like trash-talk in boxing. Just keep on fighting.
The issue is the extreme power imbalance. My ‘cloud’ will be a small space, surrounded by capitalism on all fronts. Like an oil field that’s not drilled, but all fields around it are drilled. It’s emptied anyway.
You cannot be ‘apart’ from capitalism as even if you are, or try to be, outside - your position is still going to be defined as an outsider to capitalism and all the hardships that entails.
And if you get a ‘cloud’ big or powerful enough - let’s look at history, what would happen?
Genocide. That’s what happens. Every time.
I believe in personal relationships. Trying to be in good relationships makes this mess endurable and, I believe, safest.
Yeah. But I mean, I don’t really care about more oppression. It has always been there. And if something is for certain I see it as having two options:
Stay still and die
Act accordingly
To say the truth, I’m motivated both by my desire to live a happy and fulfilling life and see my nieces grow. And everytime I think if this is worth it, even if it is really small, I think it is. Because I see it as not abandoning myself, nor abandoning my loved ones.
Change is possible, and if history taught us something: you can kill the revolutionary, but not the revolution.
There are still many popular movements currently working in that future you and I are looking forward. So alone, you are not. Just be open to the possibility to give a good fight. For yourself and those you hold dear. And I remember the first thing I was taught in direct action: once you learn you can do something, it becomes hella easy doing it more times.
I send you my best wishes friend, I want you to know I feel ya.
You know, every time I see the phrase “No drop of rain feels responsible for the flood” I get upset. You know why? It’s not the raindrops that cause the flood. It’s the clouds. The environment that fosters the rain.
Like, does anyone actually want to get up at 6 AM every morning and run out the door to drive an hour one-way in a machine that kills children quickly and the environment slowly, just to give up half of their waking life to a soulless entity that turns spirit and creativity into stolen labor value and burnout, all for the pleasure of continuing to do that every day for the next several decades until the stress inevitably kills you? I don’t know one fucking person who wants to be doing this shit, but as the rain is forced out of the cloud by the dropping pressure, so are we coerced into this life by the threat of starvation and exposure to the elements. Would that I could break the chain, but I am as helpless against it as the raindrop is against the pull of gravity. It’s so easy to toss pithy quotes at people while sipping from a bamboo straw, but it doesn’t stop Starbucks from selling a billion lattes a minute to people who are too tired and rushed to give two shits about the planet we’re killing in order to create that convenience we rely on so we can be forced to dedicate every last spare second of our time to the altar of capitalism. How the fuck do you fight that in any meaningful way?
Still waiting for the moment the world wakes up like the dustbowl in the 30s or the pollution in the 70s. We’re past the point where it can be denied, aren’t we? I want everyone to come together and fix it. We’ve done it before.
The majority of people do understand. Of thouse that don’t, at least in the English speaking world much of it comes down to Rupert Murdoch. He went from running a small newspaper to the 71 richest person in the entire world by taking money from fossil interests to delay and normalize denying climate change. When the people who own most of the conversation are very well paid to make sure that any threatening proposals are treated as fringe ideas, well things mpve slowly.
As the effects have gotten and harder to deny, the more he’s tried to slowly drag as much of the electorate as he can into a shared delusion so that any news source outside the bobble is so far from what they think is reality that when they actualy encounter realiry its easier for them to think it a vast consperacy than what it actually is.
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