If only we had recycled harder
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Humans self describe as intelligent. That always stuck with me.
Humans are so naturally stupid that they almost make AI seem intelligent.
Certainly that goes a long way to explain why so many think LLMs are actually intelligent.
This always gets me. They are producing stuff that we the people buy. They aren't out there just for the fun of things. Inb4 Lemmy's famous misreadings, yes it is an issue, yes we need regulation (which we will have to start again from scratch, hopefully in 4 years), yes we need renewables. But this simplistic "it's just 100 companies" is misleading AF.
Those 100 companies have made it so it's incredibly difficult not to buy from them.
Groceries? There's like 10 companies that own all of the food supply. Good luck figuring out which one's have child labor, and a horrendous environmental impact. They've very purposely masked that image.
Oh wow, everything is recyclable! No, those companies just slapped that logo on all of their products so we can ignorantly wish-cycle their garbage. Most of it ends up in the landfill.
Don't want a car? Our cities are very deliberately designed to require cars. There is a very strong private agenda against good public transportation.
Then there's the pollution. These companies pollute so much more than we know. Whether that's dumping forever chemicals into our water, or taking private jets everywhere. It's not like the label on your T-shirt tells you that.
Finally find a good company? They'll buy it up, lobby against it, or coerce them out of business. Just look how many companies Luxottica has destroyed.
There's layer after layer of obfuscation to hide what these companies are doing. It's not just a matter of picking Product A over Product B. We rarely have much choice, or the information to make better choices.
I'll GLADLY buy the alternative that doesn't do those things. When it exists. One day.
I think the idea was "reduce consumption". As a society we buy tons of stuff, way more than 50 or 100 years ago.
When planned obsolescence isn't the cornerstone of the modern market, we might have the choice to consume less. Currently you cannot buy any product that hasn't been intentionally designed to create as much waste as possible. That is on the companies, since they are legally people.
Corporate death penalty needs to be levied against the largest corporations before they kill us all with their greed. We don't need them. They need us.
I agree with you on planned obsolescence, but I think there's more to the story. The quantity of things/conveniences in our lives is greater than at any point in history. We have two younger kids and the quantity of... junk they have is astounding. As parents, we've sought out lower quality/throw away/gimmicky toys for things like goodie bags at birthday parties. Sticky hands, silicone squeeze toys, etc. To some extent, the internet is contributing to this since shipping and handling aren't free and buying a single fidget spinner for $5 doesn't sound like a good deal when you can get a bag of them for $8.
There are also plenty of instances of people replacing perfectly functional items because the newer version became available. People buy them for status or for a perceived increase in convince/quality. This is true for compute/tech, but has been extending into things like smart home (replacing a functional light-bulb, switch, doorbell, thermostat etc for a IoT device). I get that some people are into these things, but it seems disingenuous to say that the only thing driving this is planned obsolescence.
We have to move toward less carbon intensive means of production, but we also need to figure out how to change the endless stream of "better/faster/newer" that people feel compelled to purchase.
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Have you somehow missed just how car-centric just about everything is? I mean, most public space out there is taken by roads and public transport is generally insufficient.
Granted, there are much better countries in this than others.
Ditto on other things imposed on people such as planed obsolence: Can you still buy a fridge that will last you a lifetime? Does your 15 year old original iPhone still work well? How many of the electronics out there are not repairable?
Then there's all the pressure to make people consume, using techniques from Psychology (you can go read all about how the nephew of Freud introduced into Marketing techniques from Psychology back in the 50s). Absolutelly, people should be stronger and wiser than that, but most are not and just claiming that "it's people's fault" when others take adavantage of natural human weaknesses is just victim blaming.
Absolutelly, Consumerism is a big part of the problem and it's a lot down to individuals to do less of it, but lets not deceive ourselves that the environment we're all in not only promotes it massivelly and relentlessly, but plenty of decisions which were taken for us by others mean individuals often don't even have a choice not to buy new junk or ride a personal-polution-device, and in Capitalism those decisions were taken mainly by large Companies directly or by the politicians they bought.
As you said, plenty of countries are better in terms of public transportation, but most people still insist on driving cars even in places with good public transportation coverage.
And the biggest counter to the "it's not a personal issue, it's companies who don't give options" is diet: eating meat is far worse for the environment as well as more expensive than a plant based diet; but people hate the idea of eating less meat and they love to mock vegans.
Meat eating is actually a very cultural thing.
In India, for example, there is an area where most people are vegetarian and have been so for centuries.
My point about how people are psychologically pushed to consume also applies here.
Further, excessive meat eating (and the average meat consumption in most Western countries is at those levels) is actually bad for one's health and life expectancy, so even from a pure individual selfishness point of view people aren't doing what's best for themselves, which would indicate there's more to it than merelly individuals being selfish.
That said, I agree that people should eat less meat, it's just the expectation that they're informed enough (at various levels) to do it that I find unrealistic.
It's another of those things which in order to change needs to be pushed as education to all of society, while what we really have is massive economic interests pushing in the very opposite direction.
The average person spends most of their time at work where they don't control how environmentally friendly they are.
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This meme is not true and missleading. I know it fits the narrative of "companies bad". But it's not based on fact.
It's based on an article by the guardian.
Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says
The article is based on the Carbon Major Report.
It describes itself like this:
Carbon Majors is a database of historical production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers. This data is used to quantify the direct operational emissions and emissions from the combustion of marketed products that can be attributed to these entities.
As you can see, they speak about "entities", not companies. Who are said entities?
75 Investor-owned Companies, 36 State-owned Companies, 11 Nation States, 82 Oil Producing Entities, 81 Gas Entities, 49 Coal Entities, 6 Cement Entities
As one might realize, only 75 are Companies. Most of them are either States, or producers of Oil, Gas, Coal and Cement.
The 71 % is not at all about global emissions. This is wrong.
72% of Global Fossil Fuel & Cement CO2 Emissions
So it's 100 entities that are responsible for 72 % of the world's fossil and cement Co2 emission.
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/05dfb9e1-ace2-4072-9fc5-7ed6f6eddfb2.png
Looking at them you can see how the top emitter are very much not companies. Also, it's historical Co2, a fact made prominent by the former Soviet union beeing the top emitter.
Let's look at some more findings:
The Carbon Majors database finds that most state- and investor-owned companies have expanded their production operations since the Paris Agreement. 58 out of the 100 companies were linked to higher emissions in the seven years after the Paris Agreement than in the same period before. This increase is most pronounced in Asia, where 13 out of 15 (87%) assessed companies are connected to higher emissions in 2016–2022 than in 2009–2015, and in the Middle East, where this number is 7 out of 10 companies (70%). In Europe, 13 of 23 companies (57%), in South America, 3 of 5 (60%) companies, and in Australia, 3 out of 4 (75%) companies were linked to increased emissions, as were 3 of 6 (50%) African companies. North America is the only region where a minority of companies, 16 of 37 (43%), were linked to rising emissions.
Here the report mixes state and private companies. The rise is most prominent in countries with state owned companies. Privote companies, as seen in Europe and North America, haven't increased that much.
So, all in all: The idea that 100 companies are responsible for the destruction of earth is plain wrong.
I know the ideas that companies are responsible and to blaim for the current state of affairs fits our world view (it fits mine!!), but please don't run into the trap of believing everything you read just because it does.
Wow, talk about a failure of journalism from a decent source
I mean it's the guardian. It hardly qualifies as 'journalism'
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We technically do. The day we don't need to buy their crap is the day we are free from our chains.
Don't let your dreams be dreams and just do it
If only it was that simple. We still have to eat, drink, clothe ourselves, get around...
I mean, we were not born into the universe having stuff
Uh, sure, I suppose not. But you won't last long after birth without some amount of stuff. Even if you go feral in the woods, you'll need to eat. You need some way to keep warm. You can try to consume thoughtfully but you can't just stop consuming.
We give them the ammo, they pull the trigger. We basically just choose the type of ammo. Buying from Nestle? That's a .50 BMG. Beyond Burgers? .22 LR
I can't find the quote but don't expect poor people to want to stay poor. They will do whatever it takes to rise out of poverty. This privileged and naive attitude of 'don't do that it's bad' won't work.
This may sound naive, but I think that most people are good and would favour sound environmental policy if they could count on getting food, shelter, and healthcare without destroying the planet. It is no coincidence that republicans are pro-business and anti-healthcare. Oligarchs want people to remain so desperate that they can never act on their conscience.
This but sort of unironically.
Those 100 companies dig up coal, oil and gas. It's us that apparently can't break ourselves from it.
It's all very well us going out and going "oh, you little poor brown people that don't know any better: you shouldn't be using this stuff, it's killing the planet" when we've spent 150 years enriching ourselves off the back of it, and can't even stop using it ourselves. The USA's main export and import is still oil.
We're completely fucked, and it's very convenient blaming China when we've moved all our manufacturing there, but we were all responsible and we did precisely fuck all when it mattered. If a political party promised to stop using it all, they wouldn't get in. We wouldn't vote for them because we know we rely on it and costs of everything would go up in the short term.
I'm all for getting rid of fossil fuels, but I'm acutely aware that it's just so I can breathe slightly cleaner air while the planet boils. Globally we're still fucked.
Well clearly it's the fault of everyone noticing the problems because like 100 years ago no one noticed the problems and so clearly they weren't happening because no one noticed and if they were happening someone would have noticed so if people just hadn't noticed they never would have happened and then no one would have noticed them which of course then means they double wouldn't have happened
It's just common sense if you think about it from that perspective
Rugged individualism strikes again.
The problem is GDP measurements leave out all the inconvenient but equally important stuff like sustainability, environmental concerns etc. Green GDP is the way to go but it's still a relatively new concept that needs to be spread out and adopted far and wide, but alas, only when the last fish has been caught and all the rivers poisoned will we realize we cannot eat money.
The problem isn't methodology. There are plenty of ways to predict, detect and measure pollution, its origins, and ways to prevent it. The problem is systemic: capitalism simply doesn't account for pollution, and the ruling class which it generates actually fights against regulations. The result is what we see. To solve climate change, we need systemic change
Yes. I would go even further, and say that pollution is the necessary result of capitalism. Capitalism is the mistaken belief that exponential growth can continue forever in a finite ecosystem. My country targets 2-3% growth annually - this implies a doubling of the economy every 30 years or so. It has already been almost 2 doubling periods since human consumption began to exceed the Earth's sustainable capacity. Even the fucking shithead most responsible, Jeff Bezos, acknowledges the problem. Does anyone really think going to space is just a 'hobby' for that sick fuck?
With their unlimited funds that somehow keep replenishing themselves. MAGIC!
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