The artist is sleepy_mocha
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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"Carbon footprint" was invented by oil and gas companies to shift the blame to consumers.
Funny how every time somebody mentions "reducing consumption" people jump into comments to insist, no, reducing personal consumption is a scam, only political action matters, keep buying everything you want.
It's like people making a personal choice to reduce consumption is a threat to someone. Probably someone who manufactures the stuff we consume.
Look. Corporations aren't scared of political environmental action in the West. They've bought the politicians, they control the levers of power, they're confident they'll win the political fight. What corporations worry about is people buying less shit and reducing their profits, which will take away the money they need to buy politicians and win the political fight.
The personal is political.
I think one reason is that if you point out that doing something is wrong, you put people in the situation of questioning whether they are as much of a good person as they thought they were, which they may interpret as a personal attack on their morality.
It's the same mechanic that makes many hate on vegans. They don't want to be confronted with the idea that their lifestyle is needlessly cruel to animals.
We all live in the same world. A world where if you're not consuming, you'll fall behind. Simple fact is that often we HAVE to be consumers to do anything. There's, of course, a middle ground. Don't buy a new phone every year. Wear your clothes til they aren't wearable anymore. Drive your car til it falls apart before replacing it.
These are the kinds of things that absolutely make sense as a consumer, but until either everyone is on board and the producers have reason to slow, or until there's legislative action, any individual measures are drops in the bucket.
Fall behind whom? And by what metric?
I'll be honest "fall behind" isn't a good phrasing on my part. It's more accurate to say that you straight up can't participate in aspects of modern society without some degree of consumerism. At least not without some difficult hoop-jumping.
You mean conspicuous consumption or things like "being the loser who doesn't own a car, but actually walks to work and saves tons in gas"
I'm not entirely following, so if I'm a bit off in my reply I apologize.
That can be a part of it, yeah. More like a "you can't walk to work because it's too far, so you HAVE to either have a car or rely on some ride-sharing or, if you're lucky, public transit to get to work" kind of thing. You can get around it, with a lot of work and great personal inconvenience. Switch jobs, live closer, whatever, but the reality for most people is you HAVE to have a car. You HAVE to have a phone. Computer. Clothes. Food.
For all of those, the easiest thing most consumers can do is reduce their consumption, which I 100% advocate for. Don't drive a new car, use what you have til it dies. Buy a desktop and upgrade the aspects that fall behind piece meal, instead of buy a new laptop every couple of years. Use your current phone til you can no longer get a replacement battery or screen when it inevitably breaks. Opt for quality clothes and wear them til they're actually inadequate, instead of just out of fashion or boring.
That's all still drop in the bucket, and not all of those can even be reasonably done by everyone. The problems start at the top, and they ultimately have to be fixed at the top.
It's not a drop in the bucket. Not driving, not flying has a major impact, but sure if 1% of people hoard 50% of the ability to emit CO2 and other scarce resources, that's something else that needs to be fixed, but carbon pricing in terms of a footprint or an actual number under every price tag makes sense nevertheless.
It's ABSOLUTELY a drop in the bucket. Less than 1% of people are responsible for greater than 50% of emissions. A quick Google result leads me to a BBC article stating that just 100 fossil fuels producers are responsible for 70% of the emissions in the last 100 years. I don't feel like looking for any other sources tonight, but when I say the individual impact is a drop in the bucket, it's absolutely just a drop.
Don't let that undervalue it though. Each drop in the bucket buys us a bit longer to correct the gigantic ship that is corporations, and we'll need all the time we can get for that one. Keep doing what you can, but extend the empathy towards your fellows who are unable to do as much just yet. We all have a common enemy in this thing.
Yes, but corporations make things for the 99%. Or maybe you mean things outside mainstream society, like private jets, all sorts of military manufacture and upkeep and space vanity projects...I have a hard time understanding what it is that corporations are responsible for that their customers are not responsible for as well.
It's a bit self-feedback for sure. Corporations have an interest in producing as much as they can, as rapidly as they can, because that means they have more goods to sell, which means they can afford to sell them cheaper (funny joke I know) and thus, bring in a larger market. If no one is buying anything, sure, corporations will stop their mega production, but until it hits a certain level, they're just gonna keep going. If we could convince like, 75% of people to adopt a waste conscious attitude towards consumerism, we'd probably see production drop significantly, but I'd say before that it's going to be a less than linear result.
It's probably easier to convince enough of our representatives to do something for their constituents benefit for a change. Or work on getting a representative elected that actually gives a shit. People don't like to compromise when it impacts their way of life too dramatically, unless everyone has to make the same concessions.
I have zero formal education in this topic btw. Any numbers were pulled straight out of my ass, so please don't quote me lol
I think we're only gonna get out of this feedback loop if something drastic happens to knock most of the world's oil exports (war, some miracle UN tax on pumping oil out of the ground) or if prices start to adequately reflect carbon prices i.e. a CO2-standard that reflects the way fuels drive society and how you can't simply hide the price of your lifestyle through subsidies or diluting the future cost of pumping free energy out of the ground on everyone else.
Societies can't do it on their own without an individual blanket incentive (for all social classes) to save on CO2 emission (i.e. something like a currency). Or I guess there is maybe straight-out climate fascism, there is also that solution to this tragedy of commons, but I'd like to try to avoid that.
Most likely. That's all stuff at the top. Stuff that's going to be changed through political action,not any individual action. I was considering as well - corporations also have all of the leverage. They have resources SO VAST that the relative burden of tackling this problem is much smaller for them than it is for us. One company growing a backbone and acting for public good than for pocketbook good would have more impact than a million individuals completely destroying their way of living, and with far less self-harm.
But corporations don't have any incentive to do anything that hurts the profits they extract from the 99% (mostly indexed to energy prices, everyone is selling energy directly or indirectly) and politicians at best just do what people vote for (better standard of living, which mostly depends on cheaper energy prices).
Correct. And individuals alone are mostly useless. So the solution is to form collectives, get all the consumer class, or most of them, aligned, and then we have bargaining power.
It may work if fossil consumers like China, Japan, parts of Africa and South America, India and Europe work together to sustainably penalize and eventually get off fossil fuel dependence, but the fossil fuel exporter cartel will fight this :/
It's going to be a fight regardless. Anything worth doing always is. Can't shy from it just because they won't go peacefully.
It's not shying from it, many just don't see a way forward that doesn't involve a significant risk of massive suffering like starvation, war, authoritarianism if one or two things don't go exactly as the utopians would expect (like most revolutions).
This is not a utopian project, this is a "controlled landing" of a large spaceship from a 200-year old addiction to fossil-fueled growth: you need everyone on board and an awareness of the risks by everyone and possibility of relapses, calm and a notion of what is at stake, but there is still a chance that we'll fuck up, given our history :/
No one expects utopia. That's a bit of a false dichotomy. But it doesn't have to be utopia to be better than we have it now. I totally get not wanting to risk things, but that's the only way to move forward. You (broadly, not individual you) can either step up, grab the controls, and then at least if you crash, you had agency. We're flying into the mountain as is, gotta try something.
Well example:
You want to buy food. Now you want to think about your carbon footprint.
You either buy 1$ food with 1T co2
Or buy 10$ food with 0,5T co2 or 100$ with 0,3T co2. The amount of food stays the same.
What do you think people will buy? At max 10 times the price, most won't even do that because it is too expensive.
Also most food products are by the same company so you can't even hurt a specific bad co2 company.
And if regulations are made by the government we can see immediatly improvements.
Yes you can try to reduce your personal carbon footprint, but more important you should vote for a party that will change sth.
In the US it is neither the republics or the democrats.
Because I’m not wasting my precious little time on this miserable rock chasing personal changes that won’t make a damn difference in the grand scheme of things. I don’t consume in excess, but I also don’t give a single fuck about my “carbon footprint”.
I disagree, even though I'm someone who deliberately lives modestly and car-free, trying to eat as little meat as I can.
I'd like to draw a parallel from what you're saying to gaming - there's been a lot of bad video games released by these big studios like Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, EA and others, and many people don't like that, they naturally want quality instead of whatever buggy/uninspired games/slop are being fed to them. A very popular slogan I've seen on sites like Reddit is to vote with your wallet, which is something that your comment is suggesting, and yes, it does sound good on paper but it literally doesn't work due to reddit's limited reach, people actually not holding up to their convictions and just the fact that many people don't really care. If those very well known game studios keep putting out slop every year, people will still buy them.
Now back to carbon footprint and emissions, and same points apply here - even though there's a lot of people who are aware of the climate crisis, not many are willing to/have the conviction to reduce their emissions, same with "buying their shit". Even if you go green personally, you don't cancel out someone who doesn't care about their emissions who owns a monster truck or whatever.
And going to the "only political action matters", that's what needs to happen - an organized, radical attempt to at least alleviate climate change. You can't just leave this to the 'free market' of capitalism, crossing fingers and saying prayers for people to stop buying products as it's just impossible, capitalism isn't effective at reacting to current and especially future disasters. Look at covid for instance, governments didn't have time to wait for months so free market could react to covid and provide face masks, disinfectants and other things, so they just intervened and spent their money for that, invalidating the free market.
Sorry for the long post, though if there's anything I'd agree with you it's that slacktivists that refuse to follow what they preach/changing their lifestyle are just cringe virtue signalers, at least for the most part.
Who do companies sell shit to? Where do they get their profits from? Why do they even exist?