That’s an odd way to spell “what the insatiable greed of like seven corporations has done to us.”
Those 7 corporations. Would those be companies whose products we keep buying?
Who is consuming their products? I’m doing my damn best not too while striving for structural change, and I’d bet the other user is too. What about you? People taking your stance are usually the ones trying to make excuses to keep consuming mindlessly.
You mean the products they designed to be as cheap as possible with no care on their impact on the environment, and then brainwashed the population through marketing to make us think we actually needed them?
Yeah, if people really wanted, they could make their own phones and all they own by hand. These damn socialists!
“We can’t make our own phones, so there’s literally nothing we can do!”
Do you have a plant based diet, or try to reduce meat consumption to the best of your abilities?
Do you walk or take public transport when you could walk?
Do you avoid buying things you do not need?
If you answered “yes” to all that, then congratulations! You are part of a different 1%, and you are also just arguing for the sake of arguing.
If you answered “no”, then you’re part of the problem. You can pretend otherwise all you want, but you are one cog that keeps the system going. The system isn’t magical, other wordly, or some fundamental law of the universe. The system is people and their choices.
Billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of propaganda are just a coincidence.
And a century of research into more powerful and crushing propaganda. Just a coincidence.
Show me how to stop using oil. SHOW ME.
What I, an individual, can do. And don’t say: consume less. I need to eat to live. And don’t say: vote for politicians. We’re doing that and it isn’t fast enough. So, what can an individual do to stop this? Go on. We’re all waiting.
As an individual? Not much. As a small group of co-conspirators? Nothing that can be advocated for on a public forum, but there are a few options.
There’s very little, without systemic change. But blaming the 7 companies is too easy, as well. Imagine, if you will - what happens if the 7 companies tomorrow simply say ‘you convinced us - we will completely cease operations tomorrow’. Lots of dead people.
I’m only in my thirties. I don’t really think I had like… A huge hand in all this.
Well it can’t be the billionaires or the boomers, so it must be your fault.
This is what late stage capitalists actually believe
You’re conflating greenhouse gas emissions with particulate pollution. Particulates damage lungs and drop temperatures, but fall out of the atmosphere within a few weeks of emission into the troposphere.
CO2 accumulates, and raises temperatures.
And how many in their voting lifetime? About 25% according to that site.
Now how many were in their country? Surely a much smaller portion.
But we’re all to blame really, because we all take part in the system. The only way to escape blame is to not live. Although, to be clear, blame should not be evenly distributed here.
I dont think we are not all to blame. We are forced to be part of the system, as you mention, the only way of “escaping” the system is by not being alive. How can we be blamed for something that was imposed on us?
I find articles like this so frustrating. It feels like it is aimed at being a wake-up call to the reader, but at the same time offers no solutions, no advice and still lays the blame at the feet of the average person for not doing enough. “What we have done to ourselves” is not advocate enough I guess?
Perhaps I’m not the target audience for the article. I grew up in an environmentally conscious home we’ll before it was trendy and have been worried about climate change for as long as I can remember. It’s hard to see an article like this as anything other than an effort to drive traffic…
I’d be happy to hear what others got out of the article if it was more positive than my read of it.
Climate despair is the new climate denial, and these doomer editorials are oil industry propaganda pivoting.
If we can’t do anything about it then nothing has to change and rich people keep getting everything they want.
Dead on accurate. These oil execs know they’ll be dead before there’s any significant impact to them. They justify it as the cost of doing business and ensuring they continue to get a fat paycheck. There’s clear evidence of major corps like the tobacco industry seeding doubt and spreading misinformation when it came out how dangerous their product was. Hell even look at things like the corporate influence in the creation of the food pyramid. Really? Everyone needs a giant fat serving of carbs?? They sure do when there’s money to be made.
It’s no different with climate change. Spread misinformation, seed doubt, when that doesn’t work pivot and play on the despair as your angle. Whatever keeps the paychecks flowing and people focused on anything but the truth.
The greed of humanity will ultimately be our undoing.
I’m honestly super sick of this take. I keep seeing people say that the oil industry is responsible for doomers, and it’s as bad as climate denial.
Is it though? Of all the people I know, the only ones that take the situation at all seriously are the ones that actually truly believe we are in serious trouble. Only those people are voting primarly based on climate issues, taking part in protests, or making changes to lifestyle. The vast majority of people don’t actually believe we are in serious trouble. The vast majority of media is still feeding us the line that things are basically going to be fine with some incremental changes.
Oil companies are advocating for market solutions to the problem and continuing the status quo as long as possible. The idea they are trying to cause the greater population to actually believe they are doomed is insane. A population that actually believes they are doomed might take drastic action.
I dunno, I have the unfortunate experience of association with a lot of libertarian types. All of them believe we’re in serious danger, all of them believe it’s too late, and all of them are leaning hard into that “fuck you I got mine” mentality because it’s too late for anything else.
They do nothing to help except vote libertarian or green.
@nottelling @CleverNameAndNumbers
“rich people keep getting everything they want”
Even rich people don’t *want* death and destruction. They want money!
relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U
(Also, archive link to top article: https://archive.is/gI427 )
My parents always act surprised when I tell them I don’t think I’d want to have children… Maybe I’m being negative, but if I had to guess this is only going to get worse and will never be fixed. I genuinely don’t believe the next generation is going to have a decent future ahead of them.
what is your opinion about this view?
Personal Opinion: This is as selfish (my child will save the world) and self centred as having a child to “save a marriage” is stupid.
Yup - the overwhelming odds say they’ll both contribute and fall victim to the problem, not solve it.
We have ~7bn people alive today, and we can’t muster the will to do what we know we is needed in order to survive. Instead, we’ll refuse to make comparatively small compromises, and sign our children’s death warrants.
See, there’s also a good chance that a random child might not be that person, and then that kid now gets to deal with all of this, despite having absolutely no input or fault in it. So, for me, it would be weighing the likely options.
A) Your child is luckily the answer to these problems
Or:
B) You’ve guaranteed that an innocent person has to deal with the effects of generations ignoring societal problems and climate change.
I can’t say that I really blame young people for not wanting to create more people who would have to struggle with that life. I don’t blame them for feeling insecure in their housing situations or for worrying about their finances, either. If they do anyways, they just get told that they should have thought about this stuff before having kids. Respectfully, fuck that noise.
WE need to make a solution. Continuing to cross our fingers that the next generation will fix things could easily kill us all. We have to actually start doing stuff ourselves. Previous generations also hoped for a future genius to solve climate problems, and look where that lands us today.
What will be do if there isn’t a magical scientific answer, and we have to actually start living differently at all levels of society? Hypothetically in that situation, we’d be screwed if we put all of our eggs in the “next generation” basket. How can we know for certain that that won’t be the case eventually? Global warming is already starting a feedback loop.
we didn’t do shit. big oil companies on the other hand…
And who exactly did oil companies sell their oil to? That’s right. We. The stuff we buy the miles we travel the lives we live collectively are what creates greenhouse gas emissions. Can’t blame an oil company for wanting to heat your home in winter or cool it in summer.
I wonder if there are any greener alternatives to oil that can be provided by the companies that currently use oil? Perhaps ones that might incur a bit of a hit to those company’s profits? And that hit to profits being the only reason those company’s havent shifted to the greener alternatives?
But no. Its my fault that i have no choice but to fill up my shitty diesel engine to get to work. Because i can definitely swap to a bicycle to make me already 40 minute at 60mph commute…
It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. We’re all out here living our lives with the hands we’ve been dealt. I’m only pushing back on the feel good take of “80 companies responsible for most emissions” or whatever the stat is. It’s a blatant attempt to deflect feeling any kind of responsibility or agency or having played a part at all. We all do what we do, and we’ll feel the consequences collectively.
And who bought the gas? Who bought the oil? Who bought the plastic made from the oil? Who bought the food grown from the fertilizer made from the oil?
If you don’t live on North Sentinel Island your entire life relies on the products of the corporations that have destroyed the environment. You are complicit. Your parents were complicit. Your children, if any, will be complicit.
Blaming corporations or capitalism or “big oil” is just a way of dodging personal responsibility. It’s an excuse for not making inconvenient personal changes in your own lifestyle. It lets you tell yourself that when big corporations consume so much there is no point in you lowering your standard of living to consume less.
The fact that corporations are worse than you does not absolve you of your responsibility for your own decisions and your own environmental sins. We all have to do better.
You have to be incredibly naive to think a systemic problem can be solved by individual lifestyle changes
Systemic problems need political fixes. Political fixes require collective action. And collective action is the sum total of individual lifestyle choices.
If you want government to act on the environment you need a critical mass of voters who put the environment first and punish politicians at the ballot box if they don’t.
If you want corporations to act on the environment you need a critical mass of consumers who refuse to buy from corps that don’t.
And you get to that critical mass by living your values and converting other people to those values.
So yeah, your asking for a paper straw doesn’t make an impact. You being part of hundreds of thousands of people all asking for paper straws tells Starbucks they better pay attention.
Big oil companies witheld critical data on impact of fossil fuels on climate change. Source
You go ahead and use paper straws all you like if it will give you a moral high ground and let you shit on people like you just tried on me. It will clear your conscience and will help you consider yourself soo much better than the rest. The fact remains - massive corporations do the most damage and will do fuck all to fix it up by, oh, I don’t know, changing their production methods, switching to renewables etc. But yeah, sure, it’s my fault.
There are plenty of alternatives to oil that dont require destroying the environment. We as the consumers cant really force them to stop using oil. Theres plenty of groups out there dedicated to stoppi g the use of oil but they are mostly ignored.
You cant say we should all stop using oil and then they will change, because we rely on oil to live our lives. The change has to be made by the corporations. Like the change to EVs that will help with carbon emmisions.
Frankly if the only reason a big company wont switch to greener alternatives to oil is a hit to their profits then i have absolutely no sympathy. They can get fucked. Greedy fuckers.
We’ve likely kicked ourselves from a path where we would see 4C of warming by 2100 with further warming thereafter to one where we see about 3C of warming by 2100 with further warming thereafter. That’s an improvement, but not what we need, with is actual stabilization under livable conditions.
