Lots of people claiming they give a shit about CC online and yet the number one selling vehicle segment is large trucks and SUVs. And not just in the US, but in Europe and elsewhere larger, taller, thirstier SUVs and crossovers are the rage. Consumer’s buying habits aren’t really changing all that much in all manner of product segment.
I think this cultural blame on SUV/truck drivers is misguided, and I pedal a bike to work and share a car with my wife. While I try to make responsible decisions, the impact I can have on the environment is tiny in comparison to large corporations and billionaires. Largely my “sacrifice” is meaningless, past giving me exercise and making me feel good about my decisions. If every middle income or poor person in the world did their best within the system to make responsible environmental decisions we would still be headed to, and in, a climate catastrophe. Policy has to change and corporations have to be forced into making more responsible decisions. An electric car is still an incredibly inefficient use of energy. But I can’t force my city to add public transit to make not owning a car viable. Large properties and spread out infrastructure is also killing the environment, but I can’t personally force city councils across the country to scale back single family zoning in favor of multi use zoning.
The main place regular people are failing is not what they drive, but who they vote for, imo.
Corporations don’t pollute just to pollute. They aren’t just burning coal while their evil CEO is watching it burn laughing maniacally.
Corporations produce pollution while making things for us. If we want them to pollute less then enact laws which demand that, which of course will results in higher prices. Or simply stop buying stupid shit we just don’t need. Or a little bit of both.
They forgot that 72 inch TVs were a luxury when advertising and streaming companies paid to subsidize them, so we could purchase them at consumer level all for the low price of our privacy, AND our world! It’s not out of public reach if we just make it affordable for them the worst way possible!
It’s almost as if we should be spending our time working to mitigate climate change and helping build societal resilience instead of working on meaningless careers…
at this point we need to be spending all our money on SURVIVING climate change. We can work on mitigating as well, but we’re past the point of no return and still arguing if it’s even an actual thing lol.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. There’s a lot in your comment. We badly need to mitigate, but we also need to put a lot of our resources into ensuring we survive as a species. A lot of money is needed in the global south, particularly (who have, on large, barely contributed to this problem).
yeah my main problem is while we’re over here still arguing with people about climate change’s existence and the loud solution is to somehow rid ourselves overnight of fossil fuels… Meanwhile that’s all fine and dandy, but even if we stopped using fossil fuels today the damage is there and we’re already seeing critical water shortages in tons of places.
It’s time to accept that we are going to have to live through this to some degree until science hopefully finds a way to suck the carbon out of the air.
The hurricanes, the floods, the droughts… all things we need to start working on solving. Droughts being front and center. We need to desalinate. There is just no way around it. We need to get started on that effort yesterday.
It’s funny to see this comment downvoted so heavily (-14 at the time). I wonder if it’s disagreement or just “I don’t like that idea”…
The simple facts are we’ve dumped over 2 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. A bit over half has been absorbed by the oceans. We have no realistic way of removing it. And combined with other GHGs it’s driving an unstoppable global warming. We can talk about reducing emissions and renewables. But even if we stopped all emissions today, it still wouldn’t be enough to prevent the global average temperature from continuing to increase.
I think there are still lots of people holding out hope that we steer off the cliff, but meanwhile we’re still globally using as much fossil fuels as we ever have and while there are things on the horizon the CO2 in the air is not going anywhere. So we are going to have major problems to deal with in terms of human sustainability even if we went 100% green today.
Humans are smart, we need time to change entire species to a more sustainable living. Time we just don’t have. So it’s time we skip the BS and start talking about where we are going to get water, how we are going to farm, how we are going to keep the oceans from destroying our coastlines etc…
If we start now we might be able to mitigate some of the effects of climate change or at the very least make it so not everyone just immediately loses all their assets and/or dies from lack of water or starvation.
Let’s avoid mad max if we can.
I’m not saying we give up the fight on eradicating fossil fuels from our system, but I imagine the downvoters took my post that way. It’s just if you spend about 10 seconds watching CNBC or listening to our politicians you’ll find out pretty quick they don’t care about climate change all that much. Just making money… Even the politicians that do care the best they can do is try to help the “free market” move us to a sustainable future lol. Just not going to work.
We have some major water crisis going on right now in a lot of places in the US. Not just deserts. The water wars will be coming much sooner than we anticipated if we don’t start to prepare for it.
That actually does happen on Voyager. It happened to me a couple of days ago. I was 100% certain that I replied to someone’s comment, but it showed under my own comment and it sound very much out of place.
A whole new wooooorld ! Where the heat will give you a stroke, famine will rise and the rich will hide ! A world where you wish you died or never was ever born. You’ll remember the days of the past and ask yourself why we did nothing but alas it is too laaaate to change anything now. (Aladdin new song )
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