Asklemmy

43945 readers

794 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

138

Do EV's actually do anything beneficial for the planet? (lemmy.today)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

210 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've seen a lot of posts here on Lemmy, specifically in the "fuck cars" communities as to how Electric Vehicles do pretty much nothing for the Climate, but I continue to see Climate activists everywhere try pushing so, so hard for Electric Vehicles.

Are they actually beneficial to the planet other than limiting exhaust, or is that it? or maybe exhaust is a way bigger problem?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

When Taylor Swift’s JET ALONE produces more carbon annually than 1000 individuals driving their car daily, it doesn’t matter one iota what kind of vehicle the average joe drives.

Amazingly, you're missing your own point. If it's not about individuals, well, even Taylor Swifts jet by itself is a rounding error when considered in the context of global emissions.

But more importantly, it seems like you are contradicting yourself in a pretty fundamental way. You are perfectly comfortable taking Taylor Swift's emissions and holding her responsible for those due to her belonging to a class, namely folding her into membership of "corporations/billionaires". So Taylor, insofar as she represents the collective actions of that class, gets moral responsibility.

But individual consumers are also contributing significant emissions when conceived of as a class, which is a way of conceptualizing individual actions that, by your own Taylor Swift example, you are perfectly comfortable doing.

It doesn't mean it's the only thing we should strive to change, but it definitely is one of them, because the global collective emissions of people using internal combustion engines is in fact a significant input into CO2 levels, and we can reason about these things at those scales if we choose to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I pointed out in another post that yes, please, do what you can as an individual. That means, when your car reaches its natural end, then yeah, go for an EV. The point I'm aiming for though is that if each and every person switched to EVs overnight, it's not going to have the impact we need it to to arrest the carbon emissions problems we have.

We have megacorps that don't have a reason to limit their production. We have countries seemingly actively working to make shit worse. EVs aren't a magic bullet, they're not something that we need to be quite so aggressively pursuing when there are other very real things that we can do to make an actual impact.