100% convinced our decedents will look back in this age and laugh 2 things : domestic recycling as an attempt to save the the planet , and the fact that we did nothing unless there was a profit in it.
Also I don’t know about you, but my countries recycling relied on sending it all to China to burn.
dustsv hands yep my work here is done
Recycling is a lie to keep making plastic, nothing more
Ancestors?
It will probably be an alien species who will find a dead planet and wonder how and why so much toxic material was spread around the planet … and also wonder why there is an orbiting space station filled with gold, paper money and the greyed out decaying bodies of a humanoid species.
Humanity will survive the climate apocalypse. Life is incredible at adaptation. But our present society won’t survive and our descendents will curse us for sitting idle while their future was sacrificed for the sale of lethargy.
I remember reading a fun fact: A single day (it might have even been an hour but let’s err on the side of caution) of the bigger cruise ship engine use pumps out the same amount of pollution as all of the cars in Europe do combined for a while year.
Why on fuck do we bother with the small stuff when the big ones have such a huge weight on the problem.
One cruise ship has carbon emissions roughly equivalent to 12,000 cars. Maybe if you’re specifically looking at sulphur oxide pollution, since modern cars emit so little of it. But there’s a lot of other stuff coming out of tailpipes, sulphur oxide is just a single pollutant.
yeah anytime i see anyone talking about some little change they made in their lives to be more eco friendly it makes me incredibly, deeply sad. especially if it’s at more expense or more effort for them – they’re trying their best but it’s literally completely pointless
Many of us do it for sport tbh. A healthier way to gamify life sorta. I’ve been vegan since 2015/16 and it does increase the difficulty setting somewhat, but also it’s unlocked a million fun mini games for me along the way and provided much needed community.
Reducing your meat consumption is likely the most effective way of lowering your personal climate ‘footprint’.
You don’t even have to go fully vegan. Use 20%, 30% or 50% less meat and you’re already doing a lot.
Also look up climate impact of different types of food (and where it comes from), and use that to prioritize. Chicken, fish and pork are up to 10 times less impactful than beef.
Labeling this as “cope” is just straight slander against vegetarianism. Most people who are vegetarian don’t expect “it’s going to change the world” so there’s no “coping” to be had with the fact that it’s not.
Vegetarianism choices can be based in health, ethics, not wanting to support mega corps, dislike of the taste, environmental impact, among other things. “it’s going to save us from climate change in light of everything else going on in the world” is a tiny clueless subset of just ONE of those rationales.
Vegeterianism isn’t “hopeless” or “cope” unless you’re delusional enough to believe that everyone doing so would instantly solve our problems. Sure, some people think if everyone did it, it would make a difference, but very few think it’d fix all our problems.
It’s absolutely not helpless to change your habits. All our consumption is based on collective habits, and changing them will have an effect.
Exactly. It’s only pointless as long as other people think it’s pointless. If everyone made changes we could see a noticable impact happen.
Billionaires need to change too, they do more than their fair share of polluting, but it doesn’t mean we are all off the hook. We should hold them accountable and also each of us strive to be better.
What if that small change In made was assasinating billionaires (sorry, PragerU, people with means) in my spare time instead of just playing Hitman?
Does one person saying that they voted for change in the government make you incredibly, deeply sad? Just one vote in millions after all. Little things can collectively add up to something big.
It drives me crazy, this performative enviornmentalist bullshit. I have to pay 10c (on top of 300% food cost increase don’t forget) for a plastic bag at the grocery when i forget my canvas ones. In these bags i must pay for i can place fruit individually wrapped in plastic.
Every time something gets worse, we must be the ones to pay. This whole environment-saving-by-paper-straw phenomenon is so insipid that I would rather believe that it’s actually a deliberate corporate strategy. At least that would make sense. If they keep us thinking that something is being done, they don’t have to change a thing, and if it’s “all of our jobs” (read: not theirs), to save the world, we’ll never take them to task for their (greater) part of the waste.
It is actually a deliberate corp strategy. Plastic straws were never a real concern, save for that ONE turtle. Plastic straw make such a negligible amount of plastic waste that stop using it will have virtually zero measurable impact in amount of plastic waste we create. All it ever was intended for was to make us feel like something was being done while doing absolutely nothing.
That’s not to say all plastic reduction initiatives are pointless. But the straws definitely belong in the least environmentally impactful category.
All it ever was intended for was to make us feel like something was being done while doing absolutely nothing.
It certainly does help a little bit. But it’s of course still not a coincidence that companies are pushing for it instead of more effective measures… It’s not just cheap but it also pushes people to believe that measures to save the environment are all useless and annoying, and makes them less likely to want more to happen.
It’s the “thoughts and prayers” of environmentalism. I’m convinced the net effect is negative after you factor in the way it distracts people from anything that might actually help.
What’s worse is we haven’t replaced plastic straws with a good alternative. Paper straws fucking blow and I’m not going to carry around and wash a silicon straw with me at all times.
Can we use Lemmy to figure out what should be done, push for that change, and bring plastic straws back?
Fund a grassroots media campaign advocating to make corporations pay to fix the environment and for price control laws to stop them passing on costs to the consumer.
At some point, people are going to have to accept their legal systems have been completely broken by regulatory capture and that they’re going to have to go to war to implement new governments that actually will do what the people want them to do. That’s the real talk that needs to happen
Nothing beats collection of beer/cola can’s pull tabs for recycling competition at schools. That forces children to ask parents to buy more of the six packs so that they could have the tabs.
You’re treating it like a hypothetical but that is in fact exactly what’s going on.
Corporations and the politicians they own are hyperfocused on (relativee to centralised) inefficient end user recycling and regular people taking responsibility for the environment and climate change to distract from the fact that maybe 95%+ of it are the fault of corporations, not their customers.
Even consumer waste is many times worse than it would be if companies didn’t for example use all that plastic and design electronics to become obsolete if functional at all in as little as a single year just to squeeze as much money out while spending as little as possible.
I would rather believe that it’s actually a deliberate corporate strategy.
as is almost all suffering under capitalism - it is indeed a feature, not a bug
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-our-own-destruction
Apple: We’re changing everyone’s charging schedules to make electricity 0.00001% greener.
Also Apple: Titanium, so pretty. Even though it’s dirtier to mine.
Not only the billionaires, even the millionaires, and all the people taking the plane more than once a year. It is an ecological crime the pollution of air transport.
fun fact. modern planes consume ~3-4l per 100 passengers per km or 3-4l per passenger per 100km.
efficient ICE cars consume ~6l per passenger per 100km.
add to that, that there’s basically no good alternative to fast very long distance or cross-continent transport
Edit #2: ICE is a type of train in germany. I mistook “ICE cars” as meaning trains and was wondering how flying is supposed to be more efficient than trains. Hence my confusion.
OG comment (invalid, see Edit #2): Where are these numbers coming from?
I cannot find any source for the 3-4l/passenger/km claim. I cannot find any source for the claim that planes are more efficient. Nothing comes even near this claim.
https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/rail-and-waterborne-transport
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566
Can you please provide a source?
Edit #1: I just want to add that my old combustion car (VW Up! / Seat Mii / Skoda Citigo) burned around 4.2l/100km. So I according to you, if I had another person with me, I’d beat both planes and trains with what stands uncontested as the most inefficient form of transport?
Since I just had this whole back and forth with someone else a few days ago, I have these handy. I’m not the parent, but he’s right. An individual car can be more fuel efficient with 3+ passengers but the average car trip is only 1.3 passengers. The most popular use of a car is commuting and that stands at 1.2 passengers per trip.
“A new report from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute shows that flying has become 74% more efficient per passenger since 1970 while driving gained only 17% efficiency per passenger. In fact, the average plane trip has been more fuel efficient than the average car trip since as far back as 2000, according to their calculations.”
http://websites.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2014-2_Abstract_English.pdf
“The main findings are that to make driving less energy intensive than flying, the fuel economy of the entire fleet of light-duty vehicles would have to improve from the current 21.5 mpg to at least 33.8 mpg, or vehicle load would have to increase from the current 1.38 persons to at least 2.3 persons.”
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/
The alternative is stop traveling such huge distances all the time.
Other than public transportation and filling up the cars with people, instead of having one vehicle per person.
Distances that require a flight are far too common here in the US at least, it’s kind of unavoidable
efficient ICE cars consume ~6l per passenger per 100km.
More like 6L per 100km, whatever the number of passengers, I suppose. So it’s usually still less than planes.
And there are better alternatives like trains or buses, which can be actually efficient for long distance travels (high speed trains, night travel. Works well from city centre to city centre)
There is also the additional issue of contrails which are a massive factor of greenhouse effect
Is that planes that are packed to the gills or private planes that actually have space that people aren’t crammed into?
Also, 3-4/6 liters of what? ICE cars and modern planes aren’t burning the same fuel, so I’m not sure what this is intending to portray by directly comparing how much of each (in liters) that they burn (serious question, no snark)
Yeah gotta agree with you. I have to fly a good amount, both families live over 2000 miles away, it’s unavoidable. But I change what I can in society, I am switching to an EV, I pay extra on my electricity to pay for green sources, and I overall try to lower my carbon footprint.
As soon as they come out with an alternative fuel airline I’ll be flying on that as much as possible, but until there are alternatives I’m stuck flying.
Oh yeah let’s go full authoritarian, that’s what leftism does best after all
What’s magical about that once-a-year limit? I find that quite a lot already.
