Yeah, no.
I’ve been doing my part for decades, but as long as my decades of work can be undone by a single asshole with his private jet, or a corporation that decides they want to save a penny, I’m done with it.
You can’t keep asking individuals to solve all the problems that is being perpetuated by a tiny sliver of people. Fuck that sliver, and we’ll talk
Politicians need to grow a spine and create laws to force companies CEOs should be jailed if they pollute for some savings Private jets need to be outlawed Mega yacht must be outlawed Cities must be made human centric, push cars out as much as possible.
These are things that will make a difference, not me separating the plastics for recycling that will go to the dump anyways
Your part isn’t being undone by a private jet, you prevented your own emissions to compound with the jet’s, the factory’s, and the deforestation’s emissions.
It is abundantly clear that few meaningful laws will ever be enacted, as most governments are corporate captured. That effectively just leaves collective individual actions on the table, which are still very beneficial in giving us more time for society to organize against the powers that be. Every 0.1% of a degree we can mitigate helps the survival rate of populations most effected.
Tossing aside our collective action because our ineffectual governments continue to be ineffectual is giving up one of our most actionable tools, short of revolution.
I think it can be hard to stick with it because no one wants to feel like they’re depriving themselves while others continue, but at large scale, it really does help massively for each of us to use less energy for heating/cooling where possible, eat less meat (red meat especially. Impossible Meat is an incredible plant-based alternative), drive as little as possible (e-bikes and public transport are excellent alternatives if your area is conducive to them).
I agree, and had any of their media, literature, etc. communicated what you said I wouldn’t have felt the need to make a comment.
The line between victim blaming and legitimate advice is often very thin especially when it comes to “things impacting others that are the direct cause of specific fuckwits”.
You mostly did a great job of acknowledging that reality, kept expectations reasonable and acknowledged that the proposed action is not a solution by itself. You didn’t misdirect from actual solutions. You didn’t obfuscate cause and effect. You didn’t minimize the problem, etc.
This site does the opposite, along with a little sprinkle of tribalism, for fun. With that the key part of my comment was:
While still ignoring the systemic issues and collaborating with those responsible?
They’re essentially doing the effective altruism thing of “get emails to show to investors to get money to do an activism” while ignoring the inherent biases and harms that come with that tactic/approach. Their messaging and perspective is nearly identical to that of the “carbon footprint” astroturf with the biggest difference i can see being that theirs is born of ignorance not malice.
Yes it is those assholes want you to sacrifice well they don’t do shit. They have always said it’s your problem you make the sacrifices well the fucking assholes are polluting like crazy cause they need more money.
We have some known factors we can work with here:
- Climate change is happening, and it will have devastating effects.
- The richest people/corporations polluting the most don’t care if you sacrifice or not, they often don’t care about climate change at all, or acknowledge that it exists.
- The biggest polluters will not stop polluting unless the profit incentive for them is removed, or they are forceably stopped.
- Reducing emissions by any means possible is crucial in the time window that we have.
- There are methods that regular people can do in their personal lives to help reduce the total emissions being emitted, but require some sacrifice.
With these known factors, does it make sense to collectively not try to reduce our own emissions just because the biggest emitters won’t start first? I would think if the goal is lower emissions to reduce the horrific and deadly effects happening globally, than we should do what we can to minimize them.
It would be amazing if all the big polluters lowered their emissions along with us, but we know that won’t happen, so if we wait to lower our own emissions until they do, it will never be done and could very well reach a point of no return.
To survive as a species, we will ultimately have to deal with capitalism and those big polluters by more forceful means, which in itself will require collective, mass effort on a global scale.
We don’t know when that mass global effort will take place. It could be in 3 years, or a decade, or even two. In the meantime, the climate continues to get worse. The best thing we can do is give us a little bit more time by collectively reducing our emissions, which requires far less effort and sacrifice than it will to fully solve the problem.
If someone from a more affected poor country who lost family members to climate change (wildfire, drought, famine, etc) asked why someone decided to wait so long before joining in to lower their emissions, do you think they would find “I didn’t want to sacrifice until the billionaires did” a compelling response?
We simply do not have the luxury of time to wait until things are fair. It is unfair, but any and all action is direly needed now. I would plead with you to help regardless of how fair it may be, if only to give us a little more time to get our collective shit together so that our species may live long enough for things to become more fair in the future.
This site wants my email if I want to learn anything, which I don’t trust. And this:
1 VOTE
Can have an impact greater than your carbon footprint based on the climate policies your elected official enactssmells like carbon offsets but through voting instead of donating money.
I don’t know if these are actual red flags or just unfortunate framing, because they’re not getting an email address from me.
Nah. Its about actually showing up because a quite large fraction of US environmentalists haven’t been doing even that
because a quite large fraction of US environmentalists haven’t been doing even that
Do you have a source for that? If it’s behind the email wall of the website I can’t see it.
Is this literally just a website to get environmentalists to vote? If so then teasing people with secret knowledge to reduce your carbon impact if you just give them your email when it’s actually an election ad campaign is misleading.
Some basic data is here
And no, ‘go vote’ is not the only answer, but it needs to be one answer
I hate that webpage. Completely annoying and confusing and I got lost twice before finally dropping it.
Somebody has a link to a summarizing report or a brochure in normal textform, if there is any?It would appear that asking the corporations and investors nicely didn’t work out, which was Drawdown’s initial plan. So now they’re desperately pivoting to mass individual action? While still ignoring the systemic issues and collaborating with those responsible?
We’re just going to be repeating the “carbon footprint” thing again ad nauseum aren’t we?
TLDR, more standing around asking billionaires to stop.
