A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/1097575
This is a false choice between huge lifestyle changes for everyday people and regulating the polluters. Regulating the polluters is going to cause huge lifestyle changes for everyday people.
The idea that any of us get to go on as usual is the main roadblock to meaningful climate action.
Well can't we just ban Shell from selling oil, and then get in our F150s to drive to the airport?
I'm cool with that. I also don't think it would necessarily be huge in terms of inconvenience for the average person because alternatives would pop up before long. For example, if air travel became prohibitively expensive we might actually see an expanse of passenger rail for domestic travel. It's ridiculous that it's still cheaper/more convenient to take a 45 min flight (plus the time the whole airport experience takes) vs a couple hours (or less with high speed rail) train ride. Certain plastics might also become too expensive so we might see the return to more sustainable packaging. A lot of the oil and byproduct consumption from the average person comes down to lack of choice ratger than people choosing products made from oil ober alternatives.
No, we are past that point. A gradual reduction in CO2 levels is not enough any more. If you want to save billions of lives we need to cut CO2 production hard and right now. Since that is never going to happen you happy go lucky scenario becomes impossible. In any realistic climate scenario humanity is already fucked, it's only matter of how much exactly.
To the people who are saying "Yeah but you're the one who buys the oil!!!!!" Please stop. Please think about any of the context surrounding those supposedly individualist decisions. Please think about what the most practical solutions are for fixing the problem. You can do that and be helpful or you can be smug and look down on others.
Sure, you buy and drive the car, but you didn't:
Framing the issue in terms of individual decisions lets the people who have most actively stood in the way of progress off the hook and ironically shirks any real responsibility to fix the issue. You think by saying that it's us doing it that you take responsibility for your actions and therefore because YOU got a hybrid car or some shit, you did your part and everyone else needs to do the same and it's not your responsibility anymore. Needing to put in the political struggle to take on the corporate interests destroying the planet takes effort that deviates from your normal life. You have to actually talk to people, work with them, and take part in collective action. And your responsibility isn't over until the problem is solved.
Also, sort of related: I always take issue with how dealing with issues like climate change is framed in terms of making sacrifices. Like sure, are we going to be able to do as much excessive consumption as we do now? No. But there are so many climate policies that would also just make life better for people in the short/medium term. We would be happier, healthier, and safer in a world where we got rid of our dependence on cars and replaced it with walkable cities and good mass transit. But instead of talking about how good it could be, instead the message ends up being "You're a bad person for diving a car. You need to give up using your car and go either walk to your job which is too far away and across a bunch of busy streets or cram yourself onto the underfunded public transportation that is crowded, slow, unreliable, and falling apart." No wonder people get so defensive. We don't want them to have to use the bad infrastructure. We want it to be so good that it's the best option by far. Pitch that future instead of lecturing people.
TL;DR: I WANT TRAINS! GIVE TRAINS!
>>"Spoiler alert: it's not you"
>>proceeds to display a chart of companies who sell a fuel we all use
I hope big oil is paying you well for propagating their "personal carbon-footprint"-narrative.
What do do you say? They don't even pay you? ... Then why are you doing it?
Because I don't trust anybody who tells me things I wanna hear like "you bear no responsibility; it's somebody else's fault".
Oil companies couldn't sell if nobody was buying. The idea that the world can be fixed and I won't need to sacrifice a thing is a little too good to be true. Sure, maybe others will need to make more changes than me, and I'm certainly not gonna let them off the hook, but I'm not gonna let myself off the hook either, and anyone who tells me I can is selling me something.
Well i don't create the system. Given the chance i would rather not be a part of it.
"we all use"
Speak for yourself. I refuse to pay them a cent, and have taken every step I can to distance myself from them.
Most of the factories that manufacture the stuff you use are driven by fossil fuels. The food you eat is most likely grown using fertilizer that was made using natural gas. Unless you live in the forest and eat nuts and berries, you use fossil fuels.
The factories may use fossil fuels, but I do not.
The fossil fuel companies are responsible for their own actions, as are the companies and people who still choose to use fossil fuels.
The people who have made an active choice to avoid fossil fuels (or the people without a choice) are not at fault. Blaming them instead of the people who can make a difference helps no-one.
Ah yes companies that famously refine oil only to pour it into a hole and light it on fire for their own amusement, one else uses it at all.
If it's just these companies that would be affected let's just close them down. I'm sure it would make no difference whatsoever.
Godammit. I've boycotted Exxon and BP, for their negligence that led to spills, for a long time. I knew shell probably wasn't much better but I've preferred them anyhow. Turns out I was helping the worst offender. Awesome.
It in fact doesn't matter much which one you buy from, they all sell the same product and the product they sell is the problem.
Yes, it's impossible to effect change as a single person so government action is needed... But the necessary consequence of that is that we also stop consuming as much fuel.
Shell also dodge paying fair taxes. https://www.ftm.eu/articles/shell-shifted-billions-in-profits-to-tax-havens-leaked-files-reveal
Please, dodging taxes is the least of Shell's atrocities.
Who buys and burns most of the fuel they create and why?
"there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" has to me always been a clear call to reduce your consumption within a capitalist system. yes, it is these shit heads who shackle us. but when we reduce our dependence on them we begin the breaking of our bonds to a system that kills thousands every year
I always hate that most people are happy to blame corporations, forgetting we are consuming that's why corporations are creating.
yeah, it is like blaming china for a pollution, when that pollution is externality of cheap shit we buy from them. it is our pollution in the end.
that isn't an argument for blaming the end consumer, because that problem is not going to be solved from the bottom, but it is also childish to pretend like we, the consumers, are not complicit.
You say this like buying only from sustainable companies is something everyone can just decide to do, and there haven't been decades of lobbying and propaganda against policy that would make it possible at a collective level.
We ought to seize all the top companies.
They're just holding companies. They don't make anything. They don't produce anything. They just bleed off a kick, like a mob boss, and use those gains to amass political power.
Seize them all and use the assets (and annual profits) to fund American society.
Y'know we could have had spaceships each since the 1930s, right?
Or even just running our cars on seed oils, like hempseed oil, or plant derived ethanol.
Or even just running our cars on water.
... If they'd stop killing inventors and stop abusing the patent system to secretize emancipatory technologies.
I believe they crush technologies, but most of the things you mentioned aren't true. There were no spaceships possible in the 1930s. Why crush that technology when they could have conquered the world with it? It's not possible to run cars on water. The thermodynamics just doesn't make sense. We have cars that run on biofuel, but mass-converting vehicles to that would drive up costs of food. Ethanol for fuel already does that by using farmland that could grow food.
Bingo. I used to work for Shell. This is exactly what they do. And whenever I tell people I get told I'm a conspiracy theorist.
Spoiler alert: if we weren't 8 billion and fertilized our crops with fossil fuels, then we wouldn't need that much fossil energy...
Yes, it's you. It's me. It's your 5 kids. The oil didn't pump itself out of the ground and set itself on fire for fun.
It's your plane trip, it's your military, it's your proxy wars.
Put a garnishing order on their past 50 years of profits. All proceeds go to infrastructure investments for the developing world in climate mitigation and food security.
I thought it is me, because I'm Not recycling hard enough. Puh, got lucky here /s
At some point, you realize that ordinary people are not responsible for any of these big "problems" (some doesn't even exist).
Corporations and governments are responsible for all problems we have. They create them with their laws and their greed for power.
But they love telling people to donate money to the problems they cause, or to make us feel guilty for things we have nothing to do with. We should always be in a state of fear and guilt, because that makes us easy to control.
I'm not sure about the data sources for this image but from some quick research it looks like this includes scope 3 (end user emissions) for shell and chevron by not the others. The data realistically looks a bit more like this:
🇸🇦 Saudi Aramco: ~2.0 Billion metric tons (Estimated; excludes Scope 3 from official tracking) 🇬🇧 Shell: ~1.1 Billion metric tons 🇺🇸 ExxonMobil: ~813 Million metric tons 🇺🇸 Chevron: ~600 to 780 Million metric tons (Varies by accounting method) 🇬🇧 BP: ~400 Million metric tons
Context: For all these companies, Scope 3 makes up 85% to 95% of their total climate impact. This is why state-owned giants like Aramco and US majors like Exxon/Chevron focus their climate targets almost entirely on their own drilling operations (Scope 1 & 2) while excluding the footprint of the products they sell.
In any case this is pretty bad and we are probably gonners.
Congress. For not taxing carbon emissions according to the damage they cause.
(And other countries' legislatures, but as an American voter, I first need to hold my own legislature responsible.)
And God said "LET CORPORATIONS DESTROY THE PLANET AND ERADICATE ALL LIFE".
Guess this is the modern alternative to the flood.
every big oil company have alot of controversies wtf