this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories
Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).
Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they're polluting on my behalf.
Yeah, saying "it's the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me" is like saying "I don't contribute to climate change because I don't cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It's the restaurant that's destroying the environment!"
They could also, I didn't know ... clean up their production processes and use alternative materials that aren't as harmful. Exxon isn't a good example of this, but there's plenty of mega corps which can do this. But they won't because our laws are structured in such a way that they are not Incentivized to do so.
And those CEOs flying their private jets for an hour are more harmful than me driving my car all year.
Vote with your pocketbook. Buy products that are produced sustainably- or if that isn't an option, buy less.
Corporations aren't stupid - they are very good at making money. If company X could produce a product that 10% more expensive than their competitors but sold twice as well because it was more environmentally friendly, they would absolutely do so.
But that's just it. The plane doesn't burn less fuel because you didn't buy a ticket. Hell, I've been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).
They're polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There's no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone's life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.
You're gonna need to come up with a better example, when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air. Companies usually want to be as cost effective as possible, meaning they will do the least amount of work needed to still get their customers money.
One big problem that regulation can tackle is that corporations seek to externalize as much of their costs as they can, which means the corporation won't have to pay for the externalized cost, so they can sell their good/service cheaper, so consumption of the product increases, leading to an outsized environmental/societal cost compared to the cost of the product.
Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them
That's a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line. If there was a true societal shift and people flew less, airlines wouldn't keep flying empty planes around for the fun of it. Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding. The narrative of "we are powerless to stop climate change because corporations are evil" is lazy. Corporations aren't evil they are just amoral-they answer to market demand, whatever that is.
It's an illustration of a market incentive that doesn't reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can't stay profitable in the black.
The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That's what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn't drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.
I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It's stressful, it's expensive, it's obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.
If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.
There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.
These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.
At least from the perspective of "evil" as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.
The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.
Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.
I mean, screw their economic calculus, if people stop flying they will go out of business. If people fly less, there will be fewer (and smaller) planes in the air. It's not that complicated. I get that in practice most people can't stop flying entirely but I'm exasperated by the leftist view that consumers are powerless because the global elites are using mind control to force us to fly to the Bahamas on holiday.
There is no "floor" to air travel, the same way there was no "floor" to passenger rail travel. Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry, but market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry. Corporations can resist change but that doesn't mean they are always successful.
They won't. That's the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.
The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting "Don't use planes!" doesn't address logistical alternatives.
There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.
They didn't. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they've turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.
Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.
They're eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you're an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it's Not Your Problem.
A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can't arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told "Just stop using the system" are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.
Plenty of industries have gone bankrupt over the years. They are not always bailed out, or at least not bailed out successfully. Some examples in the US: the textile industry, the furniture industry, and the slave trade. Coal is headed in the same direction because market forces (the cost of coal and pressure from environmentalists and by extension everyday consumers) are working against it.
Yes, there is no alternative to planes... some of the time. Everybody has a flight they have to catch every once in a while. But some people fly twenty times a year for pleasure, some people maybe only once a year. If you have a wedding or funeral invitation on the other side of the U.S., yeah you pretty much have to take a plane. But if you're planning a vacation or travel to a couple states over, you absolutely do have the choice to just not fly.
Covid did not indicate a floor to air travel. As I already said, it was a situation where airlines had the choice between saving money in the short term (by stopping flights) or breaking their contracts with airports and losing money in the long term once traffic resumed. If the drop-off in travel had simply been due to permanent reduced demand for flying in general—due to, for example, people taking fewer long-distance flights for vacations due to increased concern over carbon emissions—they would have simply given up on those routes and reduced the number of flights permanently.
I was not talking about freight rail, I was talking about passenger rail. Lots of passenger rail companies went bankrupt - no consolidation, just your company went out of business because nobody wanted to take the train. I do know some sketchy shit went on to drive the nail into the coffin and lead to Amtrak but the long decline before that was due to the market forces of people having cars and wanting to use them.
Finally, yes I agree that there is no true "alternative" to airlines, nor is there a true "alternative" to consuming electricity. But, you can still choose to reduce your consumption of those things.
Okay then, join a general strike and we all stop polluting via mega-corps at the same time and demand a change: The General Strike
Both things are important. And most importantly, vote with your wallet when thinking about what corporations do.
Sure. Vote with your wallet.
But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.
This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn't actually reducing your carbon footprint because you're not actually the one emitting the carbon.
This isn't like saying "I'm going to burn less fuel by driving less" it's like saying "I'm going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus".
They aren't producing that meat for the fun of it, despite so much going to waste. Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it long term.
They're overproducing because they're heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.
Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.
Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you'd see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.
But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there's no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you're impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.
No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.
Plus it’s not just a supermarket. It’s all the little mediocre burger shops that prop up around it and other restaurants like it.
Take some responsibility. Do what’s right even if it won’t work globally.
If you think something is wrong and is fucking up the planet don’t just throw your hands up and go “meh it’s gonna be at the grocery store anyway might as well eat meat 5x a day hehe yum, guilt free.”
if it won't work, why would anyone do it?
Because eating meat 5x a day at artificially low prices is the wrong thing to do and is a reflection of a poor culture
Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn't dominated by animal farming.
When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.
Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.
Whatever helps you sleep at night lol
Well that person is literally helping you sleep at night by reducing the planets GHG emissions. You're welcome I guess?
Sorry, how? By encouraging people to not care and saying that eventually a hero politician in a small country will be the change they wish to see in the world?
Nah, I think their biggest con is making people believe this exact discourse right here, don't change their habits and keeping giving them money.
They are psychos that can care less about being blamed for this or that when they can simply keep bribing governments and never facing any consequences.
But they have real fear that people start being more conscious about their own consuming and stop giving them money.
Exactly. This right here. Blame the politicians that deregulate the industry and let these corporations destroy the environment so they can post an extra .5% profit.
They're using the money they got from their customers to lobby politicians to keep doing business as usual. They have so much power because people vote with their dollar, for them, and not for sustainable alternatives.
Blaming politicians while continuing to fund these industries won't lead to anything.
It's just corruption. The politicians could fix it ... but money.
That gets difficult when billion dollar industries are involved, especially multiple. Some politicians will oppose the corruption, but the corporations will just fund the campaign of other politicians that are willing to act in their interest.
Transparency and a vigilant civil society with consequences for scandals can mitigate that somewhat, to varying degrees. But ultimately there's corruption in every government at every level of governance. Capital interests always find a way, unfortunately.
They said voting is more important than this
Yep, it’s definitely nobody’s fault people eat so much meat that the Amazon is deforested primarily for cattle and for soy (which is for cattle). Nobody feel bad or take responsibility because Exxon is greedy. Lmao gottem.
cattle only eat some 7% of the global soy crop.
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Global-soy-production-to-end-use-768x554.png
That's one way to not comprehend what I said, I guess.
I think it’s pretty clear you said individuals shouldn’t feel responsible for any of this
You've made it extra clear you're still failing to comprehend all the words I said together. It's unclear if that's on purpose or you're just slow.
God what an insufferable person and shit communicator
I bet you think that about everyone who doesn't let you twist their words 😘
By the same logic, couldn't you say that eating red meat doesn't matter because ~8 agriculture companies produce 75% of the livestock-related pollution?
You can never make animal production green. The amount of clear-cutting needed for beef as an example would blow your mind. Then you factor in the ground, air, and water pollution from these factory farms, and you've just fucked up into entire regions, just to sustain a food source that isn't even needed.
There are places already without trees where meat can be grown...
You'd be permanently destroying that land, and any waterways in the area, so is that really a solution?
And if the land isn't already fertile, you need to set up alternative land to grow the food for those cows... then import the water...
This is not sustainable, and should be discouraged.