cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11479731
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
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I'm a big fan of protecting our environment but this fails because it's a straw man.
Everyone knows that the things we get far more than "nothing" from our rampant pollution. We get fast transportation, abundant food, and vast material wealth.
If we were really giving up "nothing" it would be an easy choice. Very few people would be willing to pollute just for the sake of polluting. Even if we only got a little bit of benefit from pollution there would still be incentive to pollute.
Instead we get a ton of benefit out of pollution and we'd have to give them up if we wanted to stop polluting.
The more honest take is that polluting activities have a tradeoff. If we keep polluting at our current rate, we'll eventually push the ecosystem to a state where it can't sustain us. We need to be willing to make some hard sacrifices to prevent that and we need to identify those sacrifices, rather than pretending they don't exist.
I think you should look up definitions of for nothing.
The phrase in this context means "for no reason".
And, yes, the author of the comic could have been a bit clearer and could have written "for no reason". I personally find that "for nothing" sounds more provocative and fits in the exclamation better.
No, the producers of fossil fuels get a ton of benefits in the form of money. You get health issues, climate change and desinformation (paid by a fraction of those big amounts of money) telling you how the clean and more efficient alternative isn't working and so you will have to suffer if you chose the alternative.
Also the polution's drawbacks from global climate change to your personal health problems aren't real... or they are real but not as severe as people claim... well actually they are severe but we can totally fix those easier than transitioning away from burning the planet... okay maybe we can't fix it but totally demolishing our economy by not killing the planet would be much more expensive... and so on, ad infinitum ad nauseam.
When you look around your room do you not see a plethora of goods made by polluting industries?
Do you travel exclusively by foot?
Do you eat only foods that can be brought to your area without refrigerated trucks?
Other's have certainly reaped the lions share of the profits from pollution but we reaped huge benefits from it. None of us are willing to give up the computers or network infrastructure we're using to have this conversation so it's safe to say that those computers and the network infrastructure are benefits that we value.
No, but yeah some trees died for furniture. 🙄
No, also by bike and public transport. Which partly is still running on fossil fuels (although still vastly more efficient per person) because brain rot (or money) tells people in the relevant positions that greener alternatives don't work or are inefficient.
Even for people actually dependent on cars it's not real facts that keeps them chained to rediculously oversized cars running on inefficient combustion engines. That exclusively based on propaganda, paid by the people that want to keep selling fossil fuels.
Mostly actual... but that isn't even the point. I talked specifically about the big chunk of pollution that is burning fossil fuels. Are you trying to tell me that you can't transport those electric (on the last mile), by (also electrified) train and that you can't run the refrigerators on green electricity somehow?
Which was very much not my point. What I was talking about is people's unwillingness to use greener and also more efficient alternatives for a lot of things. Not based on facts. Not based on the unwillingless to go without them completely. But 100% based on loud, constant, paid screaming that those alternatives don't work and are more expensive and really, really don't solve any real problems other that stopping the massive burning of fossils (but shhh... don't talk about that small detail).
I really don't understand your focus on computers and networks that actually have a lot of pros, too, when people not willing to give up their city-tanks or three dozen throw away plastic bags a week (although there are alternatives in no way worse) and often also voting for idiots clinging to fossil fuel power plants and car infrastructure above anything else are also a big problem. Ones we could actually easily solve yet don't because paid narratives are running the show.
How about food then? About 50% of the food on earth relies on the Haber Bosch process.
Are we willing to give up half our food?
You're absolutely correct that there are many environmentally beneficial choices we can make with minimal impact on our welfare. It's a lie to pretend that any significant amount of it can be done at no cost. We just need to be willing to pay that cost.
You are ignoring so much just to make a myopic point.
Such as...
I think you misunderstood the meaning of nothing. I think the idea is not that you have to give up nothing to create a better world.
I think it means that all those measures to fight against global warming would create a better world even if it turns out that global warming was really just a big hoax and the fight against it was for 'nothing'.
Rather than argue semantics I'd rather rephrase the same statement using different words in the hopes that that removes confusion.
The comic essentially argues that we can fight climate change at no cost. That's nonsense. The cost is there and it's quite steep. The better argument is that even the high cost is worth it because the cost of not fighting climate change are much higher.
Thats literally the opposite of the point of the comic.
Thank you for saying this, same kind of strawman thinking along the lines of governmental privacy violations not mattering if you have nothing to hide.
Quite a lotta opinions people have on this comment chain, lemme throw mine in too while the gettin' is good! Also Tl;Dr: We can fix it, but think of the shareholders!
I've come to interpret a lot of these modern problems and solutions as questions of capital. To sound like a broken record, having as highly capitalist of an economic system as we do creates a lot of these incentives, so much so that I feel the question itself isn't necessarily a question of climate policy, but rather a question of our relationship between company and government. Partially because we have a cyclical system of: company lobbies for good law -> good law nets company more money -> repeat, but in the direction of environmental policy.
The EPA exists for a reason, the FDA exists for a reason, basically all three letter burecracies exist for a reason, It's to preserve something that is found to be important. Increasingly though, companies are exerting larger and larger power on government, and that's serving to pursue their interests, which in many cases means reductions or cuts to these agencies that can get in their way of profits.
I'm curious why you see my comment as a defense of shareholders?
The beneficiaries of faster transportation, abundant food, and vast material wealth are the consumers. The shareholders only benefit indirectly in that they can take their money and consume goods and services that others have produced.
That's a tradeoff that happens no matter what economic system we choose. I'm also not even suggesting that we pull back on addressing climate change; I'm saying that this is an ineffective way to advocate for it.
Youre presupposing that were losing something by cleaning up the environment. As if we cant invest in a cleaner environment the same way we spent money of the other things that made the pollution. Its absolutely possible to have all these things.
The point is that we are ALREADY paying more for living in a polluted world than a clean one. Pollution causes so many widespread health problems that we'd make that money back on healthcare costs alone.
Thats what makes this environment discussion so nonsensical. We dont even have to address climate change to get a return on our investment in cleaning up the world.
I didn't, I just wanted to throw my thoughts out lol. Seemed like everyone was piling on with some opinion or thought, so I chimed in.