It’s important to remember we are doing it for glorious purpose:
From what the capitalists and their non-wealthy sycophants tell me, this is the only way, and we should stop complaining as they end the world to see who can get th highest ego score.
But you don’t understand, doing literally the bare minimum would mean 150 people only have 50,000,000x the average persons net worth instead of 100,000,000x!
And I’ll never be allowed to be in their club since they all work to make sure poors stay poors someday I might be one of them, so clearly I must defend this to the death of me and all my family and their children.
Climate Safe Pensions - Stand.earth
Climate Safe Pensions
With more than $46 Trillion in assets worldwide, pension funds are one of the largest institutional investors in fossil fuels.
Given the growing financial risk facing fossil fuel companies, it is no longer a responsible investment to put our hard earned pension dollars into an industry that is wreaking havoc on our planet and frontline communities. Nearly 30% of fossil fuel industry shares are held by pension funds – with as much financial power as pension funds hold, they could be a force to reckon with in the battle to address the climate crisis.
This isn’t even a recent comic, it is old. We know about this for so long already, it is depressing.
Most economist agree with externalities and wealth distribution. But people don’t like externalities and wealth distribution has nothing to do with capitalism and is to fo with politics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_propaganda
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://truthout.org/articles/pedagogy-for-profit-education-under-capitalism/
The capitalists own major media, the capitalists influence curriculum, as they’ve captured the state governments that set them, from K-Colleges of Economics to say “free market” capitalism is the only way kiddies. It indoctrinates millions of non-wealthy Americans to advocate against their own interests. Hi.
They use their power over government not only to deregulate their own industries for profit, but to defund social supports and then use their media to shriek “see how government doesn’t work?! Privatize everything!”
You can sing the praises of capitalism if you want, but capitalism not straight jacketed/draconianly regulated is a social blight that removes all humanity from society. A society shouldn’t be in service to an economy, an economy should be a lowly tool to distribute goods and services for the benefit of society.
Actually it was my economics classes in university that highlighted how bad things are and how corporations need to be highly regulated. Even the professor who attempted to show us we couldn’t regulate corporations and thus shouldn’t try used a simulation that made it apparent corporations would strip the land and ocean of everything if they could.
It definitely depends on the university you go to, there’s ideological differences in economic schools of thought. But the observed science is very simple and repeatedly proves demand driven programs at the bottom of an economy are far more powerful than supply driven programs at the top.
I will sing the praises of capitalism because I understand it in a way most people on this site do not. It has done more to improve the standard of living and bring people out of poverty than anything.
Yes there are poltical issues in our society, especially America which isn’t the world and isn’t the only capitalist country. But that is a political issue.
People just need to think more about politics and understand how the economy works more. That’s where the issues lie.
https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/centerpiece/fall2018/transcript_jodidi11-5-2018
It’s worth the read. I promise.
I read it. I’m really not sure what I’m meant to be talking from it. I think a lot of Marxists don’t understand what capitalism is.
“Its very structure, therefore, deprives us of the ability to decide collectively exactly what and how much we want to produce, on what energic basis and through what kinds of social relations. It deprives us, too, of the capacity to determine how we want to use the social surplus we collectively produce; how we want to relate to nature and to future generations; how we want to organize the work of social reproduction and its relation to that of production. Capitalism, in sum, is fundamentally anti-democratic. Even in the best-case scenario, democracy in a capitalist society must perforce be limited and weak.”
Capitalism is entirely based on the the free hand of the market not on votes. People effectively vote with money. If people want more pears instead of apples, then more pears are planted than apples. The free hand of the market works without votes and infact is a lot lot more efficient than voting on everything or on trying to control these choices from a central government. Its fundamentally why (among other reasons) capitalism is so much more efficient than anything else.
Something that seems horribly missed by certain people that don’t understand capitalism is externalities. Most economists want these corrections made to prices. They want ways to fix the tragedy of the commons, they don’t want factories everywhere polluting they want the best use of capital, land and labour.
People get to vote on the limit of business. They can choose to have green spaces around cities and there is absoultely nothing a business can do about it. All the wealth made from capitalism that wouldn’t exist without it is taxed by the government and the government can use that money to better effect. Lots of countries and cities have green spaces and high environmental protection. Capitalist want the government to pay for education and the government wants to pay for education because it gets more money back from taxes.
If I have missed something please let me know. But I’m getting tired of people on this site no understanding basic economics so I’m not sure how long this conversation will continue.
I know this isn’t politics or nation state news, but it is deeply troubling for all of us who live on planet Earth. Six standard deviations is mind boggling.
Mods, please remove this if you feel it isn’t news worthy. I know it breaks rule 1, but wanted to share.
I don’t have a car and I’m separating my trash but it doesn’t seem to do anything
I’m sorry I forget the source, but I once read something from a scientist that in your entire life, if you reuse/recycle/protect the environment,etc for your own single entire life, you will have starved off climate change for 1 whole second. Mind boggling to know your entire existence comes down to that litter of a difference. The point of what I remember reading was not that individuals are the problem, but that corporations and big industries were the worst offenders doing little to help change.
I mean if every single person on earth did this, it would equate to about 253 years. (8 billion seconds is about 253.68 years) combine that with other efforts could really make a difference. Granted this is a hypothetical number and there are far more factors at play, it’s obviously not as simple as each person doing this = 1 second saved, but just throwing out there that there are a lot of people on earth…
It is still worth it to recycle, reduce, don’t be wasteful, eat less meat, all those things.
The idea that doing little things yourself adds up to much bigger and more cumulative impacts is lost on most people. Instead they tend to fixate on the idea that if no one else is (visibly-to-them) making sacrifices, and my own personal effort is so small, why should I bother?
I like your optimism, but this is a sinking ship… I support not having a car and recicling though
Oh no that was sarcasm.
You won’t change shit doing those things, you need to go arrest a CEO or something to start making some changes.
You’ve taken some right steps, but there’s still s long way to go. Various industries, companies and individuals do what makes economic sense to them. Governments decide what makes sense and what doesn’t, but you can influence that by voting.
For example, many industries have used coal and gas, because it made economic sense at the time. Now that emissions trading is in place, using polluting energy sources is less and less appealing. The same sort of shift should take place in other areas as well, and politics is the way to get there. Climate change isn’t a technological problem as much as it’s a political one.
The company I work for uses gigantic barrels of oil to lubricate our AC motors. We’re one company in North America out of thousands. There isn’t anything you can do.
These are rookie numbers, now make it to 10 sigmas. But seriously, the biggest problem is that global warming is happening very slowly (in human years) and we are kind of normalising it and concentrating on more pressing topics.
I guess our kids or grand kids will read in their history books about our ignorance and scratch their heads wondering how stupid we might have been to allow all this to happen. And they will be absolutely right of course.
We are more concerned about our well being and our consumerism while wanting bigger cars, bigger toys, share prices etc. instead of trying to lead a sustainable life.
We’re fifty years into this. You might be new. Nothing changes except the right-wing’s hypocrisy and idiocy. Nothing. Changes.
Indeed. It’s depressing growing up, and the only thing that changes is the severity of the prognosis. We still travel around the world because we’re bored. Hours long roundtrip flights are sold at 20-30 USD, probably because of tourism subsidies. Not to mention the many business trips just to “meet in person”.
We have all this technology to work from home, to reduce our footprint. But, we don’t give a fuck. And this is just travel. Capitalism needs to be curtailed to factor in the long term destruction of the planet, or we’ll head there as fast as profit margins allows.
A world that lets this happen is a world that won’t have history books in the future, or accurate ones at least
I often wonder where we’ll be in 2000 years.
Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.
Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.
Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.
Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself
Definitely not that. Any technology that would allow us to colonize other planets would be much easier to use on Earth no matter how bad it gets.
Are today’s history books accurate? History has been used for ages to fuel the country’s propaganda and are rarely if ever critical to some shameful moments of one’s history.
There are some exceptions but they are rather rare I would say.
Global sea temperature affects things like hurricane strength. Buckle up.
