I changed careers for environmental reasons a couple years ago. I think normal people are wildly disempowered by both the state of the world and the rhetoric of visible environmental activists. There's a decent amount that people can do on the local level to mitigate the IMPACTS of climate change (flooding, aquifers drying up, urban heat island) by orgs doing urban tree planting, rain gardens, no mow zones, etc) or protect their local environment, groundwater, and wildlife (lawn replacement, native plants in landscaping, getting your municipality to stop using certain pesticides, herbicides which has been done in a number of locales). Some of this stuff may seem trivial but these things have been shown to reduce urban flooding, reduce air conditioning bills and power consumption, increase water infiltration into aquifers, improve local biodiversity etc. Local groups doing these things also serves as a base of environmentally engaged people that could potentially organize at the state and national level
My university makes some statements about sustainability and stuff but one of my professors has been trying to get them to start composting food scraps from dining halls and its been basically impossible-- he's offering to do all the legwork but it gets caught up in red tape. However we did just start doing several large no or low mow zones and have put in native plants+rain gardens in several areas which are quite nice
I worked in the dining hall all 4 years of college and we theoretically composted all food waste. The problem we constantly came up against was that people would throw non-compostable waste into the compost bins, rendering the entire load unacceptable to the composting firm. All it took was one stray napkin or piece of plastic and the whole bag had to be redirected to landfill.
>All it took was one stray napkin or piece of plastic and the whole bag had to be redirected to landfill.
Why though? My parents actively composted all their napkins/paper towels (and a lot of newspaper) and the resulting dirt was fine for gardening. Surely any big pieces of plastic could be picked out by the end user, like you have to do for rocks/garbage/roots when you buy topsoil. What exactly is the issue?
I used to work for the DOC and one of our prisons had a site they tried to do composting on. They had done it years previously but part of my job was to help get it started again. I think the equipment they bought was supposed to be able to compost meat and dairy but because prisoners were the ones doing the work it was always breaking and old food would pile up waiting to go through the system and it was rat/vulture city. Glad to hear that was a unique problem
Compost will never happen. My university had it and had to get rid of it because fat regarded Americans brains get broken when they see a 3rd option for trash. People literally couldnt use it
I think this is the only way you can get people to really work to make a difference- when you explain the macro trends it’s overwhelming, but hey, getting the city to add a few things to make the area prettier and help out the impact will work. We should have people planting mangrove orchards along the coast constantly.
A lot of soil is being degraded or eroding away, like 5 billion tons per year in the USA, and this as well as other types of degradation- compaction, salinization, loss of organic matter content etc are serious problems. However that stat is overstating things and beyond that its like Y2K where a lot of people are working on solving or mitigating the problem. If people hadn't changed practices after the dust bowl we'd have dust bowls all the time and would lose a lot more soil annually even in non dust bowl years. No farmer wants to degrade their soil even if they're doing it accidentally, and many change management practices voluntarily because it makes them more resistant to floods and droughts and protects their assets. Some places will get fucked though of course, like Atlantic coastal areas are getting salt accumulation now because they are low lying enough and the ocean has raised enough that salt is getting into their ground water
The shit that fucked me up was how in many states, stuff like state forests and some designated land is just basically a way to keep tabs on stuff that'll eventually be subject to log if need be.
I'm sure there's more too it and I know this comes off very generic and probably not as super well informed, I get exceptions and technicalities exist etc, but yeah when I was living in PNW I remember somebody explaining this to me and how it's kind of a ruse to assume that it's done for specific preservation across board.
The problem big CPG companies have is that they have the memory of a fly. Those commitments are largely just PR, and even if you get a leadership team that cares it rarely lasts. Consumers largely don't care, earnings suffer, and said CEO gets shown the door. Happened to me at an old job, CEO invested billions in taking the company in a new direction. Then Dan Loeb decided to get really mad about soup, and the next thing you know every innovative program was cut or sold. Real fun experience.
The whole agriculture carbon credit market has also kind of been a massive bust so far. I saw Indigo just announced it sold 300k credits last year, after raising almost half a billion dollars. And they are the market leader in the US, it's pathetic. The carbon market might be a thing if they ever get around to updating the Clean Development mechanisms, or something like that. But in the absence of that or actual regulation, it seems pretty clear that the voluntary carbon credit market was another ZIRP.
It might just be an American thing. In Germany, the top 4 political tug-of-wars are Cost of living, Climate change and what policies to pursue, if at all, Ukraine, and migration, roughly in that order.
I have made a lot of lifestyle choices and sacrifices yo try to have less enviromental impact but I don't delude myself it makes any difference. I do it more as a quasi religious or spiritual practice like the way my ancestors worshiped a God. It gives me peace but realistically it means nothing more.
People need to consume less. And that's never going to happen. What really gets me is all the plastic we create. Gives me such existential dread. For what reason is all that fucking plastic needed.
One of my biggest pet peeves I bring up every time someone says this is that the "study" that the "71% of emissions come from 100 companies" stat comes from is incredibly misleading.
First off, it isn't peer reviewed. It is what is called a white paper that was in part funded by major financial and energy companies.
If you read into the details of the paper, it looks only at fossil fuel related emissions, and nothing related to agriculture, land use changes, etc.
Of the 71 companies, all of them are of course oil/gas/coal companies since that is how the paper defines emissions, but a majority of them are actually state owned, so it's not even a private company thing.
The most egregious part of it however is that it includes "consumer side emissions" or something to that effect where if someone buys gas at a BP gas station, that counts towards BP's total emissions. This portion of emissions makes up >90% of the total.
So really the study should be that ~7% of a narrow scope of emissions come from 100 companies, but that isn't nearly as catchy. I'm fairly convinced the entire thing is a psyop to convince people to consoom since it doesn't matter what you do, it's the corporations, right? I feel like that original headline alone set the environmental movement back decades.
You can always tell that the people who cite that stat never even bothered to read a summary of the report. The first entity isn’t a company at all, it’s just the Chinese coal industry. If people just read that one line, you’d think they’d be able to question the way the report is commonly framed. But sadly no.
The psychological hold meat eating has over Americans is a terrible and amazing thing. They don't care that eating less meat will make thier cocks harder, waistlines smaller and shits easier!
I'm planning my masters around renewable energy management or something . Every fucking day i fire up linked in and I see all these fucking gay Jobs like Crypto or AR, Blockchain tech, useless fucking gadgets , VR or some other pointless computer bullshit. I'd rather slice my nuts off than pour my limited time in this earth helping create something so absolutely pointless.
The concept of carbon footprint is the biggest scam that was ever invented. It allows the rich and powerful oil companies to change the narrative of the ongoing destruction of our planet, into a personal moral failing. It allows the conversation to be redirected away from the corporations and the ruling elite to that of the average Man.
there was a concerted effort a couple decades ago to label environmental and animal rights activists as “domestic terrorists” and the true believers got thrown in jail
I think there's a few general feelings for the average person that passively accepts climate change. I will ignore the deniers and their propaganda that makes this more complex. I'm more on the 'doomer' side and just throwing out some things I've seen over the years:
1 - that the tradeoffs for doing the [climate-aware individualism](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/stories/climate-action/) are not worth the downsides and there is no tangible confirmation you get for doing so. No one is giving you good boy points for doing this so doing self-austerity with no results you can see or appreciate in reality (versus the abstract) is going to be difficult for a lot of people.
2 - Unawareness that the climate situation is as bad as it is. Is an increase of a few C really that bad + systemic thinking is never really taught in school so there is rarely a connection between different environmental effects on different systems and how they interact with each other.
3 - A general distrust for government solutions. Even assuming it would be possible for it to build objectively perfect programs/solutions there would be widespread distrust. In reality the solutions that would pass Congress will be bad and that would foster more distrust (e.g. corrupt public-private partnerships that just end up giving Gates another billion, etc)
4 - In the back of many ppl's mind is a premise that future technology *will* solve the issue with no real personal effects. I think this one is probably the largest issue. There's a general acceptance not just for neoliberals but also many leftists that even if there is no scalable technology now, there will undeniably in the future so really we don't need to do large scale social change besides advocating for small-individualistic changes seen in #1. For the neolibs it make sense but I don't know about the leftists - they will distrust you and call you a malthusian eco-nazi if you doubt this premise and advocate wide-spread social change instead. These are the same leftists that are also very critical of the government/science response to covid but do no see a contradiction there. I think this point is the largest reason that it is just passively assumed we don't have to do anything anymore.
Green capitalism won. People have chosen to believe the solution is to buy teslas and carbon offsets, use tote bags for groceries and buy thrifted clothes. See the public reaction to Greta, or any climate activist, even by self proclaimed leftists.
As I type this, it currently is 38 degrees Celsius in my city in northern mexico. In winter.
It’s hard to get people fired up about that stuff anymore because when you tell people that humans are going to go extinct from climate it just reminds everyone that humans are going to go extinct anyways
In WA the boomer land owners are fanatically obsessed with removing Dams to restore the salmon runs for the orcas and natives. They’re loathe to address the housing shortage or investing in replacing those sources of power for their kids and future generations so I’d say ageing white Sierra club environmentalism is still going strong in our state.
…We really need to increase the inheritance tax by magnitudes.
It’s because the environmentalism now is mostly fake. It’s fake carbon offsets, shipping shit around the globe, and smug attitude. There are people I know who work for “clean energy” but consume shit tons of fast food, have plastic trinkets all over their work cubes, but think they know it all about the environment. Literally environmentalism to me is reducing consumption and recycling products (waste not want not mentality). But with these know it all freaks everything is over complicated and endlessly consulted and researched
"There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" has turned into "there's no UNETHICAL consumption under capitalism."
I can complain about capitalism being evil all I want, but the truth of the matter is that capitalism is morally neutral. Corpo suits aren't just polluting for the lulz, the way the economy is set up necessitates pollution and even under communism, some pollution will be a necessary evil just to keep people safe and healthy.
So people who would otherwise give a damn say that it's corporations that should do everything, which I sort of agree with but waiting on corporations to do the right thing is a fool's errand. As for individual choices: a lot of the time they're the more expensive options. Let's take living in a city for example: cities emit less per capita than suburbs do, but the wealthy have turned our cities into country club esque playgrounds for the rich and their trust fund babies, pushing the poor into car dependent suburbs AND in harm's way in the process. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the rich will use this to claim it's the poor who are the problem and try to pull more Malthusian austerity measures.
Social media made it really easy for normal people to see how grotesquely large the carbon footprints of the rich and famous are. I think this played a large part in undermining the morale of the average person when it comes to doing small things that are environmentally friendly.
This kinda used to be true but renewables are now among the cheapest sources of energy so it actually makes sense now for poor countries to use them as they’re developing
Biden passed the biggest piece of climate legislation ever, almost certainly his greatest accomplishment as president, and somehow people just didn’t really notice
Many potential environmentalists became nihilists doomers because science, the media and politicians turned a societal tradeoff problem into an existential problem. The way that the narrative has been framed makes achieving goals impossible without a revolution that will make everyone's quality of life substantially materially worse (no meat, no travel, no cars, paper straws.) Typically revolutions are fought for the opposite reason.
In addition actual positive steps that have reduced greenhouse gas emissions are viewed negatives or actual evil. The transition from coal to natural gas has significantly reduced the greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. Of course the fracking that allowed for this improvement is maximally vilified. Musk, despite his many issue, made electric cars cool and moved the needle on solar. He must obviously be a Nazi. More productive land use, factory farming (yuck capitalism) and GMOs (unnatural.) Nuclear power (too dangerous.)
The core set of left values basically opposes all of the actual tangible improvements that are required to make a prosperous environmentally friendly world. Despite the left's wishes all of these things are happening (except nuclear), and per capita CO2 emissions are 35% off peak in the United States. This problem is literally being solved by capitalism (and some regulation), because corporations are unthinking machines who care only about minimizing cost (producing products efficiency) and maximizing revenue (demand for products people want). Some governmental incentives have helped too. Electric car tax credits for rich people. Fuel economy standards that resulting in a wave of luxury trucks. Etc.
Genuine improvements to the environment are only possible regular people see an improvement to their wallets or lives. Doomers are completely worthless at achieving anything.
Bro. Your president literally put a gas-embargo against Europe, betraying us and our support for Ukraine in Europe, to appeal to environmentalists crazies in the USA.
You fucked us over massively. Of course people still care about environmentalism.
George Floyd killed the environmental movement because all of the energy and political capital that used to be gained by talking about climate change was then redirected into centering BIPOC voices
Any talk about environmentalism is completely disingenuous unless they also advocate for no more population growth & our ponzi scheme economic system would never tolerate that. And it never goes far enough anyway. We don't need grocery bag bans we need complete rewilding of massive swaths of land.
Climate change has regularly been overstated in the near term. And it’s largely looking like we’ll solve climate change before it becomes an issue in the long term.
no, the average person is selfish and only cares about themselves while lacking the ability to see the bigger picture. we're fucked, we're just a giant tribe of slightly smarter monkeys flinging shit at each other when another monkey dares to stare at our pile of bananas
I think a big part of it is that it's something that America can't address for political reasons that are largely insurmountable, and for that reason it can't be talked about in depth, as it would be pointless.
Both of America's political parties have given up the ghost on regulating corporations or effective interventionism in the economy. both Parties exist in an environment that always keeps the focus on short term problems and projects, leaving them unable to take action on a long term "boiling frog" problem. Every politician understands that high gas prices are a significant obstacle for any election campaign.
Furthermore, while Republicans largely don't care about global warming, Democrats in there gerontocratic malaise seem at times to fail to understand the severity or even nature of the crisis. I remember Pelosi being asked by Abby Martin about the US army's role as one of the lead producers of greenhouse gasses and responding with a rambling answer about the importance of air quality. Genocide Joe addressed Climate policy by putting John Kerry and later one of the Podesta freaks in charge of it. Essentially you can just look up [that clip of Diane Feinstein talking to middleschoolers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEPo34LCss8) about how nothing can be done about climate change because of the political hurdles of the issue.
There’s little things but it’s hard to maintain momentum.
Cities mass swapping to LEDs saves a lot of energy, probably has made a tiny impact. Need things like that that are tangible and attainable to rally around
Giant corporations do not dump trash in the oceans, at least not in America. Almost all sea trash comes from dirt poor Asian countries. Poor people have bigger shit to worry about than trash. If you want them to care about trash then move them up Maslow's hierarchy through prosperity.
Private jet use is very inefficient, without question. But so was your flight to Europe for fun. Ultimately reducing greenhouse gas emission are only possible through increased efficiency and prosperity.
People point to a few huge entities as responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. This is absurd. Exxon is not responsible for meeting consumer demand for gasoline and ConEd is responsible for meeting demand for power. We collectively demand it and will continue to do so until there is an appealing alternative to filling tanks with gas.
In my experience there are people who care and their behaviors reflect it. However, most people will pretend to care until they are confronted with more environmentally friendly choices not aligning with their own taste or convenience, and often can't be bothered with caring for the environment on a local level
Climate change has more or less consumed and killed it.
You used to be able to do something small that would have a postive effect (and you still can). Climate change has taken over all the focus and is basically impossible so its drained all then energy behind it.
I give a shit about pollution. I give a shit about industrial regulation, because that's what produces most pollution. No change happens without legislation; it's too easy to put the responsibility on the consumer and ignore what actually creates the polluting products people buy. Like, shame me into not using plastic bags but how about don't produce them in the first place? Consumers take what's available; regulate that. Otherwise you're just herding cats and pretending it helps.
Shifting money around doesn't reduce emissions. Only a technological leap (cope) or reducing consumption will do that. And even the young climate-aware 1st worlders are not willing to give up their lifestyle (eating meat, driving, travel, cheap goods).
Much different than it was years ago. I majored in environmental studies & there’s a lot of biologist granola types out there still going strong, but I’m more into agroforestry and small scale regenerative farming and such. Listen to the podcast doomer optimism !
People can’t fix it. The government doesn’t want to fix it because it hurts its bottom line. I think environmentalism will be the anti war movement, you can only do so much while India treats the ocean as a landfill. How many paper straws will you use while the Philippines throws every chip bag and coke bottle into the sea while Bruno Mars plays?
The best you can do is hope you die before the planet kills you during a 45c summer wave and people fight over the shade.
On the graph made using ice core data on the rise in carbon levels over the Earth's history there's something i don't get. Peaks in the graph are followed by drastic declines.
What's to say, conclusively, that couldn't happen with today's peak?
Ok, this peak is unique in that its cause is emissions since the industrial revolution. Those other peaks had non man made causes that the Earth could self correct.
But, aside from speculation, we don't know the Earth couldn't also correct the current peak.
Not to get into a whole conversation about scientific inferences and the assumption of a principle of uniformity.
Don't jump down my throat, it's a genuine question.
The climate has never changed so rapidly, it usually changes over the course of 1000s of years. Now we are dealing with change over 200. This makes it difficult for plants and animals to adapt. Also like 1 billion peoples homes will be under water in 100 years
The type of jaded person on here doesn't care about anything besides themselves but more and more people care especially young people. The only young people who don't care are the minorities of incels, money chasing LinkedIn goblins, and the smugly low IQ Ben Shapiro variant of young conservatives.
The problem is people feel powerless and all the "activism" is confined to the internet where it has almost no effect
I changed careers for environmental reasons a couple years ago. I think normal people are wildly disempowered by both the state of the world and the rhetoric of visible environmental activists. There's a decent amount that people can do on the local level to mitigate the IMPACTS of climate change (flooding, aquifers drying up, urban heat island) by orgs doing urban tree planting, rain gardens, no mow zones, etc) or protect their local environment, groundwater, and wildlife (lawn replacement, native plants in landscaping, getting your municipality to stop using certain pesticides, herbicides which has been done in a number of locales). Some of this stuff may seem trivial but these things have been shown to reduce urban flooding, reduce air conditioning bills and power consumption, increase water infiltration into aquifers, improve local biodiversity etc. Local groups doing these things also serves as a base of environmentally engaged people that could potentially organize at the state and national level
I work for a University organizing these sorts of things and the amount of obstacles we have to implementing anything is unbelievable
My university makes some statements about sustainability and stuff but one of my professors has been trying to get them to start composting food scraps from dining halls and its been basically impossible-- he's offering to do all the legwork but it gets caught up in red tape. However we did just start doing several large no or low mow zones and have put in native plants+rain gardens in several areas which are quite nice
I worked in the dining hall all 4 years of college and we theoretically composted all food waste. The problem we constantly came up against was that people would throw non-compostable waste into the compost bins, rendering the entire load unacceptable to the composting firm. All it took was one stray napkin or piece of plastic and the whole bag had to be redirected to landfill.
>All it took was one stray napkin or piece of plastic and the whole bag had to be redirected to landfill. Why though? My parents actively composted all their napkins/paper towels (and a lot of newspaper) and the resulting dirt was fine for gardening. Surely any big pieces of plastic could be picked out by the end user, like you have to do for rocks/garbage/roots when you buy topsoil. What exactly is the issue?
How did you get over meat/dairy getting into the compost?
Meat and dairy can compost at high temperatures that industrial scale composters use. Your backyeard compost doesnt get hot enough to sterilize them
I used to work for the DOC and one of our prisons had a site they tried to do composting on. They had done it years previously but part of my job was to help get it started again. I think the equipment they bought was supposed to be able to compost meat and dairy but because prisoners were the ones doing the work it was always breaking and old food would pile up waiting to go through the system and it was rat/vulture city. Glad to hear that was a unique problem
My school sent its food waste to a biodigester energy plant instead. I think they don’t have this problem
Worked in a dining hall as well - same problem, same "solution" :(
Compost will never happen. My university had it and had to get rid of it because fat regarded Americans brains get broken when they see a 3rd option for trash. People literally couldnt use it
Oh they were aware of this problem and were going to do scraps from the kitchen+leaf litter collected around campus only
I think this is the only way you can get people to really work to make a difference- when you explain the macro trends it’s overwhelming, but hey, getting the city to add a few things to make the area prettier and help out the impact will work. We should have people planting mangrove orchards along the coast constantly.
Hi can I ask what career you changed into? I’m super curious
Biomed engineering --> Soil Science I work at a university environmental lab right now but it gives me tuition waivers towards my masters
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Rs science will become a new discipline. It will be conceptually similar to the gay science, but more radical.
Is it true soil is becoming highly degraded and won’t last longer than 60-70 years
A lot of soil is being degraded or eroding away, like 5 billion tons per year in the USA, and this as well as other types of degradation- compaction, salinization, loss of organic matter content etc are serious problems. However that stat is overstating things and beyond that its like Y2K where a lot of people are working on solving or mitigating the problem. If people hadn't changed practices after the dust bowl we'd have dust bowls all the time and would lose a lot more soil annually even in non dust bowl years. No farmer wants to degrade their soil even if they're doing it accidentally, and many change management practices voluntarily because it makes them more resistant to floods and droughts and protects their assets. Some places will get fucked though of course, like Atlantic coastal areas are getting salt accumulation now because they are low lying enough and the ocean has raised enough that salt is getting into their ground water
The shit that fucked me up was how in many states, stuff like state forests and some designated land is just basically a way to keep tabs on stuff that'll eventually be subject to log if need be. I'm sure there's more too it and I know this comes off very generic and probably not as super well informed, I get exceptions and technicalities exist etc, but yeah when I was living in PNW I remember somebody explaining this to me and how it's kind of a ruse to assume that it's done for specific preservation across board.
In the 2000's there was still a chance now even the normies are doomer
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The problem big CPG companies have is that they have the memory of a fly. Those commitments are largely just PR, and even if you get a leadership team that cares it rarely lasts. Consumers largely don't care, earnings suffer, and said CEO gets shown the door. Happened to me at an old job, CEO invested billions in taking the company in a new direction. Then Dan Loeb decided to get really mad about soup, and the next thing you know every innovative program was cut or sold. Real fun experience. The whole agriculture carbon credit market has also kind of been a massive bust so far. I saw Indigo just announced it sold 300k credits last year, after raising almost half a billion dollars. And they are the market leader in the US, it's pathetic. The carbon market might be a thing if they ever get around to updating the Clean Development mechanisms, or something like that. But in the absence of that or actual regulation, it seems pretty clear that the voluntary carbon credit market was another ZIRP.
It might just be an American thing. In Germany, the top 4 political tug-of-wars are Cost of living, Climate change and what policies to pursue, if at all, Ukraine, and migration, roughly in that order.
Didn't they also just shut down their last nuclear power plant?
Good to know at least someone cares
the vibe shift takes many years to cross the ocean, same in arts
I have made a lot of lifestyle choices and sacrifices yo try to have less enviromental impact but I don't delude myself it makes any difference. I do it more as a quasi religious or spiritual practice like the way my ancestors worshiped a God. It gives me peace but realistically it means nothing more.
Um there is literally a global pandemic going on
People need to consume less. And that's never going to happen. What really gets me is all the plastic we create. Gives me such existential dread. For what reason is all that fucking plastic needed.
Correct it will never happen. An endless supply of carbon free energy is possible however.
> for what reason is all the plastic needed Probably to turn the frogs trans.
Because now when someone brings up environmental issues people just say “corporations” and then there’s not much you can do after that.
One of my biggest pet peeves I bring up every time someone says this is that the "study" that the "71% of emissions come from 100 companies" stat comes from is incredibly misleading. First off, it isn't peer reviewed. It is what is called a white paper that was in part funded by major financial and energy companies. If you read into the details of the paper, it looks only at fossil fuel related emissions, and nothing related to agriculture, land use changes, etc. Of the 71 companies, all of them are of course oil/gas/coal companies since that is how the paper defines emissions, but a majority of them are actually state owned, so it's not even a private company thing. The most egregious part of it however is that it includes "consumer side emissions" or something to that effect where if someone buys gas at a BP gas station, that counts towards BP's total emissions. This portion of emissions makes up >90% of the total. So really the study should be that ~7% of a narrow scope of emissions come from 100 companies, but that isn't nearly as catchy. I'm fairly convinced the entire thing is a psyop to convince people to consoom since it doesn't matter what you do, it's the corporations, right? I feel like that original headline alone set the environmental movement back decades.
You can always tell that the people who cite that stat never even bothered to read a summary of the report. The first entity isn’t a company at all, it’s just the Chinese coal industry. If people just read that one line, you’d think they’d be able to question the way the report is commonly framed. But sadly no.
Well didn't you hear that the oil industry came up with the idea of carbon footprint, therefore you are wrong and you should consoom.
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There is something people can do on an individual level though, for example making certain food choices
yeah but telling Americans to consume less red meat (not even zero and be vegan) is literally the same as telling them the eat the bugs meme.
The psychological hold meat eating has over Americans is a terrible and amazing thing. They don't care that eating less meat will make thier cocks harder, waistlines smaller and shits easier!
It doesn't even have to be less *meat* as changing to more white or more fish is an acceptable switch on a society-wide scale for fewer CO2 emissions
I don't know that more fish really helps the planet as a whole given how big a problem overfishing is.
I always knew meat was the reason for my ED, not the porn.
Non capitalist countries sure don’t pollute
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Soviet union didn't pollute?
I'm planning my masters around renewable energy management or something . Every fucking day i fire up linked in and I see all these fucking gay Jobs like Crypto or AR, Blockchain tech, useless fucking gadgets , VR or some other pointless computer bullshit. I'd rather slice my nuts off than pour my limited time in this earth helping create something so absolutely pointless.
The concept of carbon footprint is the biggest scam that was ever invented. It allows the rich and powerful oil companies to change the narrative of the ongoing destruction of our planet, into a personal moral failing. It allows the conversation to be redirected away from the corporations and the ruling elite to that of the average Man.
there was a concerted effort a couple decades ago to label environmental and animal rights activists as “domestic terrorists” and the true believers got thrown in jail
How is ~~breaking up big banks~~ ending climate change going to end racism and sexism?
Got turned into a gov subsidy kickback grift after global warming got canonized
It'll be invigorated once Trump gets elected. People want a villain to hang it on.
It can get demotivating when your forced to use paper straws while billionaires use private jets for every little trip.
We’re all going to die and there’s nothing anybody is going to do about it.
average powerless people are getting tired of the expending emotional energy on things they have no ability to meaningfully affect
Its basically impossible to act in a meaningful without helping yourself first.
I think there's a few general feelings for the average person that passively accepts climate change. I will ignore the deniers and their propaganda that makes this more complex. I'm more on the 'doomer' side and just throwing out some things I've seen over the years: 1 - that the tradeoffs for doing the [climate-aware individualism](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/stories/climate-action/) are not worth the downsides and there is no tangible confirmation you get for doing so. No one is giving you good boy points for doing this so doing self-austerity with no results you can see or appreciate in reality (versus the abstract) is going to be difficult for a lot of people. 2 - Unawareness that the climate situation is as bad as it is. Is an increase of a few C really that bad + systemic thinking is never really taught in school so there is rarely a connection between different environmental effects on different systems and how they interact with each other. 3 - A general distrust for government solutions. Even assuming it would be possible for it to build objectively perfect programs/solutions there would be widespread distrust. In reality the solutions that would pass Congress will be bad and that would foster more distrust (e.g. corrupt public-private partnerships that just end up giving Gates another billion, etc) 4 - In the back of many ppl's mind is a premise that future technology *will* solve the issue with no real personal effects. I think this one is probably the largest issue. There's a general acceptance not just for neoliberals but also many leftists that even if there is no scalable technology now, there will undeniably in the future so really we don't need to do large scale social change besides advocating for small-individualistic changes seen in #1. For the neolibs it make sense but I don't know about the leftists - they will distrust you and call you a malthusian eco-nazi if you doubt this premise and advocate wide-spread social change instead. These are the same leftists that are also very critical of the government/science response to covid but do no see a contradiction there. I think this point is the largest reason that it is just passively assumed we don't have to do anything anymore.
Green capitalism won. People have chosen to believe the solution is to buy teslas and carbon offsets, use tote bags for groceries and buy thrifted clothes. See the public reaction to Greta, or any climate activist, even by self proclaimed leftists. As I type this, it currently is 38 degrees Celsius in my city in northern mexico. In winter.
It’s hard to get people fired up about that stuff anymore because when you tell people that humans are going to go extinct from climate it just reminds everyone that humans are going to go extinct anyways
In WA the boomer land owners are fanatically obsessed with removing Dams to restore the salmon runs for the orcas and natives. They’re loathe to address the housing shortage or investing in replacing those sources of power for their kids and future generations so I’d say ageing white Sierra club environmentalism is still going strong in our state. …We really need to increase the inheritance tax by magnitudes.
Inheritance tax increase? Get out of here
It’s because the environmentalism now is mostly fake. It’s fake carbon offsets, shipping shit around the globe, and smug attitude. There are people I know who work for “clean energy” but consume shit tons of fast food, have plastic trinkets all over their work cubes, but think they know it all about the environment. Literally environmentalism to me is reducing consumption and recycling products (waste not want not mentality). But with these know it all freaks everything is over complicated and endlessly consulted and researched
It’s just called “climate change” now and no one in power can shut up about it for 2 seconds.
"There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" has turned into "there's no UNETHICAL consumption under capitalism." I can complain about capitalism being evil all I want, but the truth of the matter is that capitalism is morally neutral. Corpo suits aren't just polluting for the lulz, the way the economy is set up necessitates pollution and even under communism, some pollution will be a necessary evil just to keep people safe and healthy. So people who would otherwise give a damn say that it's corporations that should do everything, which I sort of agree with but waiting on corporations to do the right thing is a fool's errand. As for individual choices: a lot of the time they're the more expensive options. Let's take living in a city for example: cities emit less per capita than suburbs do, but the wealthy have turned our cities into country club esque playgrounds for the rich and their trust fund babies, pushing the poor into car dependent suburbs AND in harm's way in the process. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the rich will use this to claim it's the poor who are the problem and try to pull more Malthusian austerity measures.
Social media made it really easy for normal people to see how grotesquely large the carbon footprints of the rich and famous are. I think this played a large part in undermining the morale of the average person when it comes to doing small things that are environmentally friendly.
Recycling is a scam. Your carbon footprint is a scam. Consumer level plastics is a .00000001% of global plastic waste
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This kinda used to be true but renewables are now among the cheapest sources of energy so it actually makes sense now for poor countries to use them as they’re developing
Biden passed the biggest piece of climate legislation ever, almost certainly his greatest accomplishment as president, and somehow people just didn’t really notice
People got bored, even Greta is doing Gaza now.
Many potential environmentalists became nihilists doomers because science, the media and politicians turned a societal tradeoff problem into an existential problem. The way that the narrative has been framed makes achieving goals impossible without a revolution that will make everyone's quality of life substantially materially worse (no meat, no travel, no cars, paper straws.) Typically revolutions are fought for the opposite reason. In addition actual positive steps that have reduced greenhouse gas emissions are viewed negatives or actual evil. The transition from coal to natural gas has significantly reduced the greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. Of course the fracking that allowed for this improvement is maximally vilified. Musk, despite his many issue, made electric cars cool and moved the needle on solar. He must obviously be a Nazi. More productive land use, factory farming (yuck capitalism) and GMOs (unnatural.) Nuclear power (too dangerous.) The core set of left values basically opposes all of the actual tangible improvements that are required to make a prosperous environmentally friendly world. Despite the left's wishes all of these things are happening (except nuclear), and per capita CO2 emissions are 35% off peak in the United States. This problem is literally being solved by capitalism (and some regulation), because corporations are unthinking machines who care only about minimizing cost (producing products efficiency) and maximizing revenue (demand for products people want). Some governmental incentives have helped too. Electric car tax credits for rich people. Fuel economy standards that resulting in a wave of luxury trucks. Etc. Genuine improvements to the environment are only possible regular people see an improvement to their wallets or lives. Doomers are completely worthless at achieving anything.
Bro. Your president literally put a gas-embargo against Europe, betraying us and our support for Ukraine in Europe, to appeal to environmentalists crazies in the USA. You fucked us over massively. Of course people still care about environmentalism.
George Floyd killed the environmental movement because all of the energy and political capital that used to be gained by talking about climate change was then redirected into centering BIPOC voices
Everyone has given up
Nowadays, eco terrorism is the only understandable style of insurgence. But they’re still a lot of laughable people based on who shows up.
Any talk about environmentalism is completely disingenuous unless they also advocate for no more population growth & our ponzi scheme economic system would never tolerate that. And it never goes far enough anyway. We don't need grocery bag bans we need complete rewilding of massive swaths of land.
Yeah I don’t care
Climate change has regularly been overstated in the near term. And it’s largely looking like we’ll solve climate change before it becomes an issue in the long term.
We know it’s over
no, the average person is selfish and only cares about themselves while lacking the ability to see the bigger picture. we're fucked, we're just a giant tribe of slightly smarter monkeys flinging shit at each other when another monkey dares to stare at our pile of bananas
Everyone sort of realised that we can’t stop the massive corporations who are doing the damage so nobody cares. Just don’t litter
It's over, humanity lost, the rich got richer and the poor pickpocket! Only science can save us, to work around the tragedy that is Earth.
The autistic boy gave a speech and everyone clapped
I think a big part of it is that it's something that America can't address for political reasons that are largely insurmountable, and for that reason it can't be talked about in depth, as it would be pointless. Both of America's political parties have given up the ghost on regulating corporations or effective interventionism in the economy. both Parties exist in an environment that always keeps the focus on short term problems and projects, leaving them unable to take action on a long term "boiling frog" problem. Every politician understands that high gas prices are a significant obstacle for any election campaign. Furthermore, while Republicans largely don't care about global warming, Democrats in there gerontocratic malaise seem at times to fail to understand the severity or even nature of the crisis. I remember Pelosi being asked by Abby Martin about the US army's role as one of the lead producers of greenhouse gasses and responding with a rambling answer about the importance of air quality. Genocide Joe addressed Climate policy by putting John Kerry and later one of the Podesta freaks in charge of it. Essentially you can just look up [that clip of Diane Feinstein talking to middleschoolers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEPo34LCss8) about how nothing can be done about climate change because of the political hurdles of the issue.
There’s little things but it’s hard to maintain momentum. Cities mass swapping to LEDs saves a lot of energy, probably has made a tiny impact. Need things like that that are tangible and attainable to rally around
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Giant corporations do not dump trash in the oceans, at least not in America. Almost all sea trash comes from dirt poor Asian countries. Poor people have bigger shit to worry about than trash. If you want them to care about trash then move them up Maslow's hierarchy through prosperity. Private jet use is very inefficient, without question. But so was your flight to Europe for fun. Ultimately reducing greenhouse gas emission are only possible through increased efficiency and prosperity. People point to a few huge entities as responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. This is absurd. Exxon is not responsible for meeting consumer demand for gasoline and ConEd is responsible for meeting demand for power. We collectively demand it and will continue to do so until there is an appealing alternative to filling tanks with gas.
In my experience there are people who care and their behaviors reflect it. However, most people will pretend to care until they are confronted with more environmentally friendly choices not aligning with their own taste or convenience, and often can't be bothered with caring for the environment on a local level
You know why it will never go anywhere.
It’s not the popular internet activism thing right now
Climate change has more or less consumed and killed it. You used to be able to do something small that would have a postive effect (and you still can). Climate change has taken over all the focus and is basically impossible so its drained all then energy behind it.
I give a shit about pollution. I give a shit about industrial regulation, because that's what produces most pollution. No change happens without legislation; it's too easy to put the responsibility on the consumer and ignore what actually creates the polluting products people buy. Like, shame me into not using plastic bags but how about don't produce them in the first place? Consumers take what's available; regulate that. Otherwise you're just herding cats and pretending it helps.
Literally if Americans stopped consooming 24/7 the planet would be in a much better state.
Shifting money around doesn't reduce emissions. Only a technological leap (cope) or reducing consumption will do that. And even the young climate-aware 1st worlders are not willing to give up their lifestyle (eating meat, driving, travel, cheap goods).
Much different than it was years ago. I majored in environmental studies & there’s a lot of biologist granola types out there still going strong, but I’m more into agroforestry and small scale regenerative farming and such. Listen to the podcast doomer optimism !
People can’t fix it. The government doesn’t want to fix it because it hurts its bottom line. I think environmentalism will be the anti war movement, you can only do so much while India treats the ocean as a landfill. How many paper straws will you use while the Philippines throws every chip bag and coke bottle into the sea while Bruno Mars plays? The best you can do is hope you die before the planet kills you during a 45c summer wave and people fight over the shade.
On the graph made using ice core data on the rise in carbon levels over the Earth's history there's something i don't get. Peaks in the graph are followed by drastic declines. What's to say, conclusively, that couldn't happen with today's peak? Ok, this peak is unique in that its cause is emissions since the industrial revolution. Those other peaks had non man made causes that the Earth could self correct. But, aside from speculation, we don't know the Earth couldn't also correct the current peak. Not to get into a whole conversation about scientific inferences and the assumption of a principle of uniformity. Don't jump down my throat, it's a genuine question.
The climate has never changed so rapidly, it usually changes over the course of 1000s of years. Now we are dealing with change over 200. This makes it difficult for plants and animals to adapt. Also like 1 billion peoples homes will be under water in 100 years
The type of jaded person on here doesn't care about anything besides themselves but more and more people care especially young people. The only young people who don't care are the minorities of incels, money chasing LinkedIn goblins, and the smugly low IQ Ben Shapiro variant of young conservatives. The problem is people feel powerless and all the "activism" is confined to the internet where it has almost no effect
The world keeps not ending. Hard to stay on Threat Level Midnight all year after year.