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Disaster is nearing. Mass displacement. Mass starvation. Mass death. It is all imminent. Do you understand?
(slrpnk.net)
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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The climate of the memes of the climate!
Planet is on fire!
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Great job on limiting your carbon emissions.
I think the argument of who is the "ultimate root cause" is kinda irrelevant at this stage as far as actually saving the planet goes. But when the "the vast majority of carbon emissions come from 10 companies" or whatever factoid gets brought up, usually the context is that individual contributions are meaningless. And that totally isn't true. It would be like smokers saying the tobacco industry is the ultimate root cause for their smoking addiction due to their false propaganda and advertising. Okay, that may well be true... but it's still their responsibility to quit.
Smoking is a single habit that a large percentage of people have no problem never being tempted to do.
Unsustainable practices pervade societ in a way that requires real education and lifestyle changes to avoid. It's not enough to "just stop polluting," you first need to learn how to. The fact that beef is unsustainable, that other meats are still far less sustainable than a plant-based diet, that some plant-based foods are still unsustainable. Where to get the sustainable plant-based food without them being packaged in disposable plastic -- and at prices you can afford, at the job you work at where commuting doesn't require a private vehicle. Learning that basically everything sold online from overseas is unsustainable, especially most of the stuff that advertises itself as sustainable. Learning to be content with what you have, unless it's a gas-powered dryer because wouldn't a heat pump clothes dryer be better? But really you should air dry your clothes!
Unsustainability isn't a single habit like smoking, it's entire lifestyle and thought patterns and ignorance and you have to learn about it all and change deeply ingrained habits. That's why blaming the individual is so unproductive. Governments should have responded to the danger of climate change a long time ago but chose not to, even actively accelerating it for profit. The failure lies there.
Again- this isn't about blaming the individual. I agree individuals are largely not to blame (the exception being people that know they are living an extremely unsustainable lifestyle that harms the planet and they just don't care).
My point is that, even having been dealt a bad hand, individuals still have the power to make a real difference by making environmentally conscious decisions. Therefore the narrative that corporations are to blame and therefore individual contributions don't matter is not true.