Every time I see these I see these climate change related issues (which is now multiple times a day), I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach like I’m behind on work and don’t have enough time to do it and I’ll soon be in trouble for letting things get too far behind. That feeling keeps me up, causes me stress, and is generally not a comfortable way to live. This just fucking sucks.
I hate to say it, but I keep avoiding articles about climate change for this reason. I can’t do it every time, obviously, but it just gives me such stress. We’re all so powerless while corporations destroy our planet.
Have you tried separating your recycling out? It’ll help offset the cruise ships that each put out around 250,000 cars worth of straight up pollution a year, without factoring in other impacts.
And thats just the cruise ships imagine how much cargo ships output, admitedly cargo ships actually serve a purpose. Cruise ships are idols to our decadence and hubris.
Praise our cargo ship overlords for bringing clothes that rip after the third wash and electronics that malfunction after half a year to us!
Joke aside, they are integral to the global economy, but we could cut back a lot on wasteful production and consumption, reducing the transportation needed.
Absolutely, food is one thing but cheap shitty tech is another. Frankly speaking ive never encountered a situation where the cheap shitty stuff was any better than the older expensive stuff.
But im also into weird old tech so the fact that ill use a beat up old car radio instead of a 10 buck radio from big lots is not saying much.
The solution to that, the systemic impersonal solution, is going to be ending the production of single use plastics. While there’s little you can do about recycling, you can imagine if you’ll be complaining about that.
Also if we removed single use plastics, but didn’t dramatically cut back on everything we do that uses them, then we’d create more pollution with alternative methods trying to fill the gap. A global change is unavoidable, whether it is chosen or forced upon everyone by circumstance.
Yeah… we use single use plastics because they’re basically an industrial miracle production wise. Dirt cheap, super easy to use, innumerable applications… and all the drawbacks are post-production and someone else’s problem. A tough addiction to break.
I largely tuned out of climate change news a long time ago. I still care about it. I vote for it and have donated relatively large amounts of money to environmental charities. But otherwise nothing I do makes a difference.
Don’t be too harsh on yourself, big corporations are the main cause of climate change. Unless we all collectively decide to give these companies a wake up call, I’m afraid there’s very little you can do alone
“Big companies only do what they do when the governments that they paid with bribes or “lobby” money look the other way while they fuck the planet up left and right like it’s a race to the end”
Fixed it for you. Stop excusing the rich, and trying to place the blame on the consumers, friend. It’s disgusting.
The blame is on everyone. But if consumers… you know… stopped consuming so much garbage food, electronics, packaging for their shitty food and shitty electronics, cars, gasoline, etc, maybe the large companies wouldn’t produce so much of it.
My friend. The corporations have spent BILLIONS of dollars making sure all my options are as thin as possible.
Tell me, friend. Where can I get the GOOD and HEALTHY food, the GOOD electronics? WHERE can I get these things WITHOUT spending the arm and leg that I DO NOT HAVE to spend? Enlighten me as to why you choose to blame the consumers whose options are LIMITED by the corporations….?
To quote The Goodies. “Why are you dumping oil and potatoes into the ocean?” “Well when the ocean is full of fish, potatoes and oil, I’ll throw in a match. Flash! Fry! Frizzle… Fish and Chips! Loads and Loads of Fish and Chips.”
We already massively overfish, is that really your solution? It’ll mean more intense factory farming of seafood, creating huge amounts of water based pollution.
Not all types of fish are overfished, some (like haddock) are sustainable. Just as some crops are farmed responsibly, and others (like California almonds) are not.
I see you noticed that mackerel had it’s “sustainable” status removed. Sad times. ^^’
I didn’t think Haddock had gotten back on the sustainable side either, most things can be done sustainably up to a certain volume. If the entire population turns its eye on it then demand far outstrips supply and goodbye sustainability.
You’re being downvoted, but why? Human greed also extends to consumers. We don’t have to buy a thing because it was paraded around in front of us. I hate the “consumers have no agency, they have to buy stuff!” mentality. It’s morally bankrupt and just results in more finger pointing and zero action. Stop buying crap.
Big corporations…that we keep rewarding with our money, incentivizing them to not change what they’re doing. Human consumption is the largest driver of climate change.
Is there anything reasonable that we (those who have interest in living “like before” and won’t die of age within 30 years) can achieve? I feel like many things are very out of reach, and the population is just too heterogeneous to agree on something. Older folks where I live just do not give a fuck, and elected someone whose major interest is in removing rights from people they actively hate. At least one big city where I live has been without water nor electricity for several hours (days?) because the heat has messed out the infrastructure, and I feel like even in my country barely anybody is talking about it… It’s just very discouraging, I want to shift my perspective, but it’s not easy.
Yes, there are things you can and should be doing.
People blaming ‘corporations’ while not doing anything themselves are a huge part of the problem. Out of the 100 largest corporations contributing the most CO2, almost all of them are fuel and energy based.
So, number one - drives less, or don’t drive at all. This might change where or how you live.
Number 2, buy 100% green power or install your own PV.
These 2 things alone can be contributing up to 50% of your own greenhouse emissions. This isn’t ‘corporations’, it’s us buying power and driving around.
After that everyday consumption is huge. So don’t buy shit to just throw it away. Only buy what’s necessary. Spend more on fewer things, and things that will last.
And finally, do these things because you care. If enough people make some changes. It starts to seem normal. Then others do it too. And vote.
The number of smart, tech savvy people here who think some boats and random companies are the source of impending catastrophe are sadly mistaken. The actual information on what’s causing and contributing is well researched and easy to find. You’ll be able to find an online calculator for your country which will give an averaged breakdown of your own emissions. You can use that to keep drilling into what actions will have the biggest impacts.
Everyone needs to make changes to the way we live. Some need to go first for others to follow.
And the worst part is, average citizens like yourself aren’t a massive burden on the environment. It’s people like Elon Musk flying personal jets across the world for dinner, who are actively contributing to the death of the planet.
Sorry but this is not true at all. Your regular average citizen demands products whose production, transportation, and disposal is responsible for massive amounts of emissions.
If you buy cheap Chinese shit off Amazon, or Big Macs, a new phone every year, you’re part of the problem.
This is a kindergarten level understanding. Do you think evil megacorps overfish the ocean because they just feel like it? Or deforest millions of acres to graze cattle just because why the fuck not?
No, they do it to provide for the demands of an always so hungry population in the most efficient way possible at the highest benefit possible.
It’s not a big secret
I don’t know what people expect. Shut down everything? 3 days and we have about 95% of the population die, tops 3 months, even less if people go bananas
Feel free to skip step 6, there are no question marks. Every time someone blames consumers for the state of our planet, an oil magnate smiles while overlooking his fleet of luxury cars made out of silver.
The jets are bad but what is worse are the handle full of billionaires and csuite execs who have the money and power to decide company policies and bribe politicians and governments: lobbying, independent expenditures, gala dinners, super pacs, incentives, revolving doors, private fundraising, paid speeches; to look the other way so they can pollute however much they want.
Nothing is Ethical under Capitalism.
Social Democracy is better but still exports the suffering to the global south.
Workers of the world must unite to over come the absolute insanity of the capital class.
Unfortunately, everyone participates and it adds up. If you want to compare such personal consumption like jets, then the rich account for about 15% of the global emissions.
The share of total global emissions associated with the consumption of the
richest 1% is set to continue to grow, from 13% in 1990, to 15% in 2015 and 16%
in 2030.
If you want to include the rich’s capital, which you should, because that has to change:
the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total. Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions growth, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total. While per-capita emissions of the global top 1% increased since 1990, emissions from low- and middle-income groups within rich countries declined. Contrary to the situation in 1990, 63% of the global inequality in individual emissions is now due to a gap between low and high emitters within countries rather than between countries. Finally, the bulk of total emissions from the global top 1% of the world population comes from their investments rather than from their consumption.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00955-z
But if you imagine that the petite bourgeois lifestyle of McMansion in suburbia, cars and driving around everywhere, eating boatloads of primary calories, and the rest of the consumption isn’t contributing, you should read more. Here’s a start: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3691-the-imperial-mode-of-living
Really? The feeling I get when I read articles like this is a resigned feeling of “No shit, we’ve only been hearing warnings of this for the past 30 years. People are fucking stupid”
There used to be plausible deniability. “Maybe it won’t really be that bad, even though we should be acting in case it is.”
Now it’s more of a “I wonder where the various lines are and how many we’ve already crossed, which one will be next, and how soon we’ll notice it.”
Have you noticed the number of insects is way down this year? Maybe I’m wrong. They do still gather in the lights (which might be another part of the fucking problem…) but there just doesn’t seem to be as many as there used to be this year.
The irony is that if we did act as if it would be that bad, it wouldn’t be that bad because we would have mitigated the worst of it, and it’d become a laughing-stock for non-critical thinkers.
See also: Y2K…or more recently, comparing COVID death rates for vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations.
You can only do so much. Life was set up this way for us by countless generations before us. You can reduce your energy requirements, reduce/reuse/recycle, but it will only help so much at the individual level. Never stop trying. Never stop trying to convince your friends and family to reduce their footprint. I bug my SO every time they put something recyclable in the trash or they buy something we don’t need.
But the world is burning because of greed and we can’t individually put an end to that. Live your life, do what you can, share love. It’s the best we can do right now.
I’ve just started to cut off feelings about it entirely - I can’t handle seeing this stuff everyday. I’m just resigned that it’s too late and live your life while you can.
I like to look on the bright side, in that climate change will either wipe humans off the map or send us back to the Stone Age so we no longer have any real impact.
Both scenarios will heal the planet, animals will re-populate, and homeostasis will again be restored. Checks and balances. We’ll just be another animal that that got out of control, which nature corrected, like it’s done thousands of times over with every animal that’s ever been out of control.
A healthy world. I like that outcome, with or without us.
I don’t think you realize how much even stone age humans fucked up the planet. Half of Australia’s forests were burned down and most of America’s megafauna was hunted to extinction and the people who did it had little more than stone tools.
Still, I suspect it’ll shift the balance of power away from us for long enough to allow nature to take back some control. As a species we’ve lost our way and we won’t stop until the planet is dead or it wipes us out. That’s the bottom line.
This could be the only planet within a million light years with complex, conscious life and we’re systematically destroying it for conveniences like single serve ketchup.
Hope in space industry being developed by the so hated corporations from the internet? Spear headed by capitalism? In a thread about climate change? On this site? You surely jest
This could be the only planet in the universe with any kind of life, but humans have never been good at working together in large groups, we just can’t really deal with more than a few hundred people at most.
Now I wonder if some future intelligent race could ever come across us through archaeological digs, and we become that “highly advanced race that died out” that’s so common in fiction.
This is the reason I finally pulled the plug on Reddit. Too much r/climate and others like that in my feed.
Now let’s see how long will Lemmy last. Ultimately I’ll just let myself die while playing Baldurs Gate 3 during a random heatwave in bliss ignorance of what’s going on in the ocean or Florida or Italy or wherever.
Every time I see these I see these climate change related issues (which is now multiple times a day), I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach like I’m behind on work and don’t have enough time to do it and I’ll soon be in trouble for letting things get too far behind. That feeling keeps me up, causes me stress, and is generally not a comfortable way to live. This just fucking sucks.
I hate to say it, but I keep avoiding articles about climate change for this reason. I can’t do it every time, obviously, but it just gives me such stress. We’re all so powerless while corporations destroy our planet.
Have you tried separating your recycling out? It’ll help offset the cruise ships that each put out around 250,000 cars worth of straight up pollution a year, without factoring in other impacts.
I make sure to not litter.
Well thank fuck for that… I was worried for a moment there.
And thats just the cruise ships imagine how much cargo ships output, admitedly cargo ships actually serve a purpose. Cruise ships are idols to our decadence and hubris.
I dream of bloody knives and car bombs.
Praise our cargo ship overlords for bringing clothes that rip after the third wash and electronics that malfunction after half a year to us!
Joke aside, they are integral to the global economy, but we could cut back a lot on wasteful production and consumption, reducing the transportation needed.
Absolutely, food is one thing but cheap shitty tech is another. Frankly speaking ive never encountered a situation where the cheap shitty stuff was any better than the older expensive stuff.
But im also into weird old tech so the fact that ill use a beat up old car radio instead of a 10 buck radio from big lots is not saying much.
The solution to that, the systemic impersonal solution, is going to be ending the production of single use plastics. While there’s little you can do about recycling, you can imagine if you’ll be complaining about that.
Also if we removed single use plastics, but didn’t dramatically cut back on everything we do that uses them, then we’d create more pollution with alternative methods trying to fill the gap. A global change is unavoidable, whether it is chosen or forced upon everyone by circumstance.
This is part of the issue that a lot of people don’t get.
Plastics are, largely, petrochemicals. We have plastics because we have oil.
Use glass because it’s more recyclable? Glass is heavier and more fragile, meaning more cost to ship and more breakage in transit.
Yeah… we use single use plastics because they’re basically an industrial miracle production wise. Dirt cheap, super easy to use, innumerable applications… and all the drawbacks are post-production and someone else’s problem. A tough addiction to break.
Meaning more local production and collection.
That is incompatible with global trade.
I largely tuned out of climate change news a long time ago. I still care about it. I vote for it and have donated relatively large amounts of money to environmental charities. But otherwise nothing I do makes a difference.
Don’t be too harsh on yourself, big corporations are the main cause of climate change. Unless we all collectively decide to give these companies a wake up call, I’m afraid there’s very little you can do alone
Big companies only do what they do when they are paid to do it by consumers.
“Big companies only do what they do when the governments that they paid with bribes or “lobby” money look the other way while they fuck the planet up left and right like it’s a race to the end”
Fixed it for you. Stop excusing the rich, and trying to place the blame on the consumers, friend. It’s disgusting.
The blame is on everyone. But if consumers… you know… stopped consuming so much garbage food, electronics, packaging for their shitty food and shitty electronics, cars, gasoline, etc, maybe the large companies wouldn’t produce so much of it.
Such a bad argument again.
My friend. The corporations have spent BILLIONS of dollars making sure all my options are as thin as possible.
Tell me, friend. Where can I get the GOOD and HEALTHY food, the GOOD electronics? WHERE can I get these things WITHOUT spending the arm and leg that I DO NOT HAVE to spend? Enlighten me as to why you choose to blame the consumers whose options are LIMITED by the corporations….?
deleted by creator
Or switch to a seafood-based diet, which has a much smaller CO2 footprint than land-based agriculture.
“just eat seafood”. Brought to you by the comment thread on the article about the fact that the oceans are half way to literally fucking boiling.
Yes, precooked meals are an additional advantage.
Well, I can’t give you gold obviously, so here’s my first comment ever. That comment was fucking gold!
To quote The Goodies. “Why are you dumping oil and potatoes into the ocean?” “Well when the ocean is full of fish, potatoes and oil, I’ll throw in a match. Flash! Fry! Frizzle… Fish and Chips! Loads and Loads of Fish and Chips.”
(This is from memory, will be somewhat paraphrased. Also see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0591041/)
We already massively overfish, is that really your solution? It’ll mean more intense factory farming of seafood, creating huge amounts of water based pollution.
Not all types of fish are overfished, some (like haddock) are sustainable. Just as some crops are farmed responsibly, and others (like California almonds) are not.
I see you noticed that mackerel had it’s “sustainable” status removed. Sad times. ^^’
I didn’t think Haddock had gotten back on the sustainable side either, most things can be done sustainably up to a certain volume. If the entire population turns its eye on it then demand far outstrips supply and goodbye sustainability.
Well, doesn’t sound it helps CO2 when you live in a landlocked country like I do.
Does your country have rivers or lakes? Seafood isn’t always found in a sea.
Seafood is literally always found in sea.
Seafood commonly includes freshwater species such as catfish, trout, and some salmon.
You’re being downvoted, but why? Human greed also extends to consumers. We don’t have to buy a thing because it was paraded around in front of us. I hate the “consumers have no agency, they have to buy stuff!” mentality. It’s morally bankrupt and just results in more finger pointing and zero action. Stop buying crap.
Corporations can’t do these things with the public being complicit.
We don’t hold politicians accountable and we just consume consume consume like crazy.
Big corporations…that we keep rewarding with our money, incentivizing them to not change what they’re doing. Human consumption is the largest driver of climate change.
https://youtu.be/1zsZ__BMr_Q
Is there anything reasonable that we (those who have interest in living “like before” and won’t die of age within 30 years) can achieve? I feel like many things are very out of reach, and the population is just too heterogeneous to agree on something. Older folks where I live just do not give a fuck, and elected someone whose major interest is in removing rights from people they actively hate. At least one big city where I live has been without water nor electricity for several hours (days?) because the heat has messed out the infrastructure, and I feel like even in my country barely anybody is talking about it… It’s just very discouraging, I want to shift my perspective, but it’s not easy.
Yes, there are things you can and should be doing.
People blaming ‘corporations’ while not doing anything themselves are a huge part of the problem. Out of the 100 largest corporations contributing the most CO2, almost all of them are fuel and energy based.
So, number one - drives less, or don’t drive at all. This might change where or how you live.
Number 2, buy 100% green power or install your own PV.
These 2 things alone can be contributing up to 50% of your own greenhouse emissions. This isn’t ‘corporations’, it’s us buying power and driving around.
After that everyday consumption is huge. So don’t buy shit to just throw it away. Only buy what’s necessary. Spend more on fewer things, and things that will last.
And finally, do these things because you care. If enough people make some changes. It starts to seem normal. Then others do it too. And vote.
The number of smart, tech savvy people here who think some boats and random companies are the source of impending catastrophe are sadly mistaken. The actual information on what’s causing and contributing is well researched and easy to find. You’ll be able to find an online calculator for your country which will give an averaged breakdown of your own emissions. You can use that to keep drilling into what actions will have the biggest impacts.
Everyone needs to make changes to the way we live. Some need to go first for others to follow.
And the worst part is, average citizens like yourself aren’t a massive burden on the environment. It’s people like Elon Musk flying personal jets across the world for dinner, who are actively contributing to the death of the planet.
Sorry but this is not true at all. Your regular average citizen demands products whose production, transportation, and disposal is responsible for massive amounts of emissions.
If you buy cheap Chinese shit off Amazon, or Big Macs, a new phone every year, you’re part of the problem.
This is a kindergarten level understanding. Do you think evil megacorps overfish the ocean because they just feel like it? Or deforest millions of acres to graze cattle just because why the fuck not?
No, they do it to provide for the demands of an always so hungry population in the most efficient way possible at the highest benefit possible.
It’s not a big secret
I don’t know what people expect. Shut down everything? 3 days and we have about 95% of the population die, tops 3 months, even less if people go bananas
Lol fish and beef are far from the most efficient way to feed people. In fact they are close to the worst.
“Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories”
Bro but have you thought on bananas tho
Feel free to skip step 6, there are no question marks. Every time someone blames consumers for the state of our planet, an oil magnate smiles while overlooking his fleet of luxury cars made out of silver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
The jets are bad but what is worse are the handle full of billionaires and csuite execs who have the money and power to decide company policies and bribe politicians and governments: lobbying, independent expenditures, gala dinners, super pacs, incentives, revolving doors, private fundraising, paid speeches; to look the other way so they can pollute however much they want.
Nothing is Ethical under Capitalism.
Social Democracy is better but still exports the suffering to the global south.
Workers of the world must unite to over come the absolute insanity of the capital class.
And how are we supposed to do that? ~Strawberry
Unfortunately, everyone participates and it adds up. If you want to compare such personal consumption like jets, then the rich account for about 15% of the global emissions.
Here’s a chart:
from this report: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-15c-goal-621305/
If you want to include the rich’s capital, which you should, because that has to change:
But if you imagine that the petite bourgeois lifestyle of McMansion in suburbia, cars and driving around everywhere, eating boatloads of primary calories, and the rest of the consumption isn’t contributing, you should read more. Here’s a start: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3691-the-imperial-mode-of-living
Really? The feeling I get when I read articles like this is a resigned feeling of “No shit, we’ve only been hearing warnings of this for the past 30 years. People are fucking stupid”
There used to be plausible deniability. “Maybe it won’t really be that bad, even though we should be acting in case it is.”
Now it’s more of a “I wonder where the various lines are and how many we’ve already crossed, which one will be next, and how soon we’ll notice it.”
Have you noticed the number of insects is way down this year? Maybe I’m wrong. They do still gather in the lights (which might be another part of the fucking problem…) but there just doesn’t seem to be as many as there used to be this year.
The irony is that if we did act as if it would be that bad, it wouldn’t be that bad because we would have mitigated the worst of it, and it’d become a laughing-stock for non-critical thinkers.
See also: Y2K…or more recently, comparing COVID death rates for vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations.
You can only do so much. Life was set up this way for us by countless generations before us. You can reduce your energy requirements, reduce/reuse/recycle, but it will only help so much at the individual level. Never stop trying. Never stop trying to convince your friends and family to reduce their footprint. I bug my SO every time they put something recyclable in the trash or they buy something we don’t need.
But the world is burning because of greed and we can’t individually put an end to that. Live your life, do what you can, share love. It’s the best we can do right now.
I’ve just started to cut off feelings about it entirely - I can’t handle seeing this stuff everyday. I’m just resigned that it’s too late and live your life while you can.
The key is to learn to deal with your death anxiety.
That’s a lot easier said than done
Magic mushrooms can help.
I like to look on the bright side, in that climate change will either wipe humans off the map or send us back to the Stone Age so we no longer have any real impact.
Both scenarios will heal the planet, animals will re-populate, and homeostasis will again be restored. Checks and balances. We’ll just be another animal that that got out of control, which nature corrected, like it’s done thousands of times over with every animal that’s ever been out of control.
A healthy world. I like that outcome, with or without us.
I don’t think you realize how much even stone age humans fucked up the planet. Half of Australia’s forests were burned down and most of America’s megafauna was hunted to extinction and the people who did it had little more than stone tools.
Yeah, I read Sapiens too.
Still, I suspect it’ll shift the balance of power away from us for long enough to allow nature to take back some control. As a species we’ve lost our way and we won’t stop until the planet is dead or it wipes us out. That’s the bottom line.
This could be the only planet within a million light years with complex, conscious life and we’re systematically destroying it for conveniences like single serve ketchup.
It’s amazing how positive solutions never come to the minds of anyone who talks about this.
Human expansion into space is a likely outcome too. Haven’t you considered that?
Hope in space industry being developed by the so hated corporations from the internet? Spear headed by capitalism? In a thread about climate change? On this site? You surely jest
Unironically it’s probably our only hope to save ourselves and nature itself, or what will be left of it if predictions pan out.
I know. People here have a hard on for hating corporations so big, it blinds them to the obvious truths
This could be the only planet in the universe with any kind of life, but humans have never been good at working together in large groups, we just can’t really deal with more than a few hundred people at most.
Now I wonder if some future intelligent race could ever come across us through archaeological digs, and we become that “highly advanced race that died out” that’s so common in fiction.
This is the reason I finally pulled the plug on Reddit. Too much r/climate and others like that in my feed.
Now let’s see how long will Lemmy last. Ultimately I’ll just let myself die while playing Baldurs Gate 3 during a random heatwave in bliss ignorance of what’s going on in the ocean or Florida or Italy or wherever.