How bad do we let things get? Should we wait until the planet can’t sustain life anymore? Should we wait until it’s 100 degrees F in the Artic? Until wildfires blanket entire continents or the last glacier is gone? Should we wait until fascist billionaires take even more from us? Until there are Flock cameras at every mail box? Maybe we should wait until the wells run dry or the tornadoes never stop. When is it going to be enough? I’m so tired of seeing things getting worse. Every. Single. Day. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. How about you?
How do we coordinate? How do we look after each other? What is the signal? If we don’t work together then we are just continuing our slow march to destruction to the drum of the parasitic billionaires. Please, for us, for the cats, the dogs, the birds and trees. The fish and the whales, the beatles and the centipedes. Please tell me it’s worth it to you, that you’re willing to get uncomfortable, that you’re willing to fight. There are more of us than them, and we are rapidly running out of time to make that mean something.
I have said this before, and I’ll say it again, it’s not the billionaires that are the problem. It’s regular people making choices. Choosing the cheap or easy option instead of the environmentally friendly option.
The billionaires are bad, don’t get me wrong, eat them for all I care, but their total environmental footprint is small in the context of the consumption of the larger population of this planet.
We all need to take responsibility for our individual choices if we want to have any impact in the world.
That doesn’t mean a riot, it means eating less meat, taking more efficient transportation options, and getting rid of suburbs.
Improving those three things would change the world.
Edit: the number of people who don’t want to take responsibility for their own actions because it’s easier to blame others is the reason the world will burn.
Yes, improve your impact, but fuck the rest.
Billionaires themselves are definitely more of an impact than your implying:
Billionaires emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime
Also, they’re making decisions for corporations that don’t give one single shit about the world and do the most harm to everything in our lives. They are the “Greeds in Charge” GIC TM
That article is trash. It implies that the carbon emitted by the companies they own is caused by the billionaires.
Amazon’s carbon use is from the people buying shit, not from bezos himself.
You think bezos is somehow responsible for the plane emissions to fly that piece of shit plastic toy from China to your house?
Give your head a shake.
no
The world will burn until people realize that simply blaming others does not fix the issue.
all you’re doing is shifting blame. Read the other comments, their math lines up but yours doesn’t. Go cry in your cybertruck
What math? Nobody else has posted math on my comments except me.
No it isn’t. This is objectively false.
It’s not. A billionaire could have 50,000x the use of the average and it still would be tiny. There are only about 4000 billionaires in the world.
4000 x 50000 = 200 million people worth
They would have to each be using 2 million times the average to even be half of the world usage.
Objectively they are not doing that.
You’re right, it’s that darn John Everyman and his at-home data center causing all the problems! Definitely not King Elon and his dozens of city-sized data centers!
Go do the math on Datacenter energy use. How much of Global Energy use do they account for (include all datacenters even).
I’ve done that math. It’s fucking nothing at the scale of total human use. They are not the issue.
You haven’t.
It’s in my comment history. Feel free to pretend I didn’t do it, but it doesn’t change reality.
You’re not wrong but I think you miscalculate their carbon footprint when considering their political influence and operations / investments. Has to be where you’re getting down voted Like when oil lobbying gets the us gov to pull funding for renewable energy then yes the individuals that use that electricity are the end consumer but someone else’s greed made sure it didn’t come from a renewable source.
I think you miscalculate their footprint.
And even if someone forces your local electrical production to use fossil fuels there are still ways you can massively reduce your footprint both by saving money (not using it) and by replacing it with your own options by spending more (energy collectives, your own solar panels, etc.)
Even so, Electricity is not the largest share of energy use in the world, it’s only around 30%. Most of it is direct use in industry, heavily in agriculture and transportation.
As I said before, eating less meat will save a massive amount of energy use.
Buying less shit also helps.
I don’t discredit individuals actions as the primary market force that drives industry what you seem to miss is it’s not local governments I’m talking about…
Giving examples seems to miss the forest for the trees here because you’re entrenched in your opinion and it has merit. Yes industrial agriculture,methane, people don’t realize 99% of 7 billion is basically 7 billion hungry breathing farting eating what’s cheap and taking the easy way out
But consider the ai boom that is driving markets mad causing supply shortages yada yada primary point isn’t so much that it’s the worst offender on the green house gas emissions list but the fact that 99% of people didn’t fucking ask for it lol but it’s happening anyway and effecting the world that’s the kind of market / political influence we’re talking about
When you shade that influence into a fraction of every individuals footprint they influence you realize whether you argue directly or indirectly they have a much larger impact than you give them credit for
Based on the last time I did the math a few months ago, and the projections of AI datacenter builds, they’re expected to reach maybe 0.5% of total global energy use by 2030. HALF OF A PERCENT.
I don’t know how even spreading that out matters at all. It’s simply not a concern we should be focusing on until we solve things like meat production (15% of global energy use), transportation (something like 20% of global use), and more efficiency on systems like home and building heating (another 20-25%).
Sorry blame I can’t engage further I’m not arguing against anything you raise I’m only expressing the point that billionaires influence drives these (types of decisions) pick an industry they have a lobbying budget and misinformation campaign deployed like I understand that you’re talking concrete numbers regarding emissions in given industry but ignoring the movers and shakers at the big decision tables when you talk about market forces that incentivize change or business as usual… you’re right we all need to change but refusing to acknowledge the existence of billionaires is an issue because I pick a lousy example? 😬
Also half a percent of global energy use for something 99% of people didn’t push to exist is more significant than you give it credit for
A billion people in the world are vegetarians, and yet 15% of the world’s energy is going to Meat production. They didn’t ask for meat production but there it is.
You also misunderstand what “push to exist” really boils down to. AI is being used by companies because it saves them money, people are buying the products from these companies. They could choose more expensive options that do not use AI, but they are not actually doing that.
By that same logic, people aren’t responsible for the transportation and energy use for any industry, but without customers those industries would not exist and therefore their energy use wouldn’t happen.
That’s why it’s individual responsibility that is causing this disaster, and people putting their head in the sand and blaming billionaires does not help that.
How exactly does an individual do the last two? Choosing mass transit when it’s available and practical makes sense, but what if there isn’t any? Which it tied to the last one, modern sprawl is why options are a rarity logistically and cost-wise, and how do you undo that?
Either change the local policies around transportation through local government, or move somewhere more sustainable.
You choose where you live, and your participation your local politics and economy.
People say they don’t have a choice, but people move away for a better life all the time.
Some people can. Generalization like that ignores what some people are born into, and blames them when they can’t break out of it.
Everyone can change if pushed hard enough. Would you just die if a natural disaster wiped out your entire city/state and you were forced to relocate elsewhere? No, you would not. So it’s clearly possible.
We can govern the relatively few billionaires or try to govern the behavior of billions of people. I think the needs of the many should outweigh the greed of the few billionaires.
Strictly speaking, we only have to govern the billionaires if we don’t just eat them…so it’s kind of a run-off between how easy to govern they decide to be, and how they taste…
(This is solely meant to humorous, officer, your honor.)
My dog has bit a few. She indicates they all taste like chicken. Same as a rattlesnake.
Go ahead, but it won’t matter. As I said, they don’t make up the bulk of the pollution.