this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 223 points 1 year ago (9 children)

If we HAD trains and public transit, I would LOVE to take them!

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yes, the US has abysmal public transport (at least in houston, tx in my case) compared to even third world countries like Egypt. It’s downright embarrassing.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago

Yep America was torn down and remade for cars and not people.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I live in Germany and while not perfect, I'm glad we have such a thing.

The problem is when a 10 minute car drive takes an hour with public transportation

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[–] [email protected] 129 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This reply misunderstands the fundamentals of market economics. If we, the consumers, start making the global climate more of a factor in our purchasing decisions, that will directly affect what gets produced in a capitalist system. Not trying to absolve these corporations of responsibility for the problems they’ve caused, just saying that if enough people start taking the bus/train instead of driving or substituting meats for plant based foods, we can have a significant impact. Of course the best thing we can do is vote to get ignorant climate science deniers out of office.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Choosing what to buy is a luxury most people don’t have. Companies need to be forced into changing because the market proves time and time again that it can’t regulate itself

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

Chosing to eat chicken instead of beef impacts the whole chain from fertilizer to animal feed to clearing the Amazon for pasture to methane produced by cows.

You have more choice than you think, like which meat to pick or to use more eggs and cheese as replacement instead. This is just one of the obvious everyday choices. Not all fish is equal too, with sustainable aquaculture being the best choice for the world.

If the oil majors, or just one of them switch off the taps tomorrow we will just get Russian gas crisis x10 and make OPEC and friends insanely rich. We need to transition to something else, that's for sure, but blaming them for everything is super naive.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago

The issue with that logic, voting with your money, which I once used as well, is that richer people get more of a vote than poor people. And as a bunch of the issues with global warming didn't really hit rich people, we shouldn't depend on them to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

In order to make an actual impact on the environment, we'd need to all go back to living without electricity in stone houses. Everyone in the world could take the bus and it would do fuck all. Society needs to change how we produce energy and how we construct things. That's stuff consumers cant do by changing their habits.

Here's a great video by Kurzgesagt

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IIRC the study that the "X% of companies are responsible for X% emissions" is somewhat misleading. For example they use the combined output of everyone's car exhaust and attribute that to the major oil companies since they provide the gas. Not saying that large corporations and the wealthy in general contributing to climate change exponentially more than the average person, but its misleading to say that as an individual it doesn't matter if we try to use less energy.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This exactly! We need to go after the corporations with policy changes but that doesn't mean that we, as individuals, are completely blameless or that individually actions are inconsequential. If nobody chooses to drive less or to take the bus then collectively we're telling the major oil companies to continue with business as usual at if nothing's wrong. The corporations are to blame but we're all active participants!

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (10 children)

This is one of the most shittiest takes I've ever seen, trying to absolve oneselves of taking responsibility.

Yeah, there are those companies that produce the bad shit but this tweet is right. If you stop eating meat, the companies that produce meat will produce less of it and there will be a real impact.

I don't know what the fuck the OP is thinking. Like, do they think that the corporations just produce pollution for fun? No, it's because you buy that shit. If you stop buying that shit, pollution will go down. CNN was 100% right and that fucker that responded is retarded at best, but probably just braindead because what he posted doesn't make sense at all.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Bro the big oil corporations spent decades at the beginning of the 20th century creating and forcing the demand and dependency on oil. Watch “How Big Oil Conquered the World” from James Corbett.

It’s not like WE chose this to be the way things are. The people who control industry, and marketing, and media and THE GOVERNMENT, all MADE us and it all this way.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Stop buying what shit? Everything? Corporations lobby for policies that save them money at the cost of our environment. Yes there are things individual people can do to help but posts like this one from CNN shift the focus from the actual problem

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah this is where taxing these negative externalities would help to curb the demand of wasteful products and thus lower waste produced by corporations.

We can't expect corporations to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts, because the products would cost more and the masses would just purchase the cheaper more waste producing products. We need to level the playing field by taxing pollution and waste.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

I agree with you, but don't use ableist slurs when making arguments about social responsibility.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (5 children)

They’re not just wrecking the environment for no reason, they make products people consume

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (9 children)

The average person isn’t wrecking the environment for no reason either, and yet they always appear to be the target for “environmental sustainability” snipes presented by mainstream media as fact. There are an innumerable number of practices that large industries can practice to limit their carbon footprint, but it is never a priority.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

I like the whole "save water" bullshit. like in california. Or anywhere else being fed by lake mead. Like, "You need to take shorter showers! conserve water". the ten minute shower they're berating consumers for... is literally nothing compared to the water straight up wasted for California's agriculture. (and by wasted, I mean water lost before it even gets to the plants.)

Most of Lake Mead and the Colorado River aren't used by people. it's used by corporations that don't give two shits because nobody gives a damn about them wasting water- can't harm the jobs, now.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Private companies aren’t going to do the right thing just for the sake of it, because any moral sacrifice on their part will give ground to other companies that won’t do the right thing. It has to be fixed through regulation, ushered in through representatives elected by average people.

But most average people don’t care. They want lower taxes and cheaper gas.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ok CNN. I'll follow your lead and start using public transportation.

That just involves me leaving my house at 4am and driving 9 minutes to the local bus stop, then take a bus ride for 37 min, transfer from there to another bus for another 19 min ride, transfer to another bus and ride for an hour, then either call an Uber for a 3 min ride or I can walk for 30 minutes to reach my workplace.

Or... I can just drive and reach my workplace in 40min.

I would love to use public transportation, and when I lived in Japan that's all I ever used, which I much preferred to a car.

America first needs to get serious about establishing actual reliable and accessible transportation in order for more people to use it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

To be fair the big three (Ford, GM, Chrysler) made some politicians very rich suppressing light and cross country high speed passenger rail, also public transit all across the nation.

The US (through its deeply corrupted electoral system) totally bought that ticket to ride that train... so to speak.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Swap your car or plane ride for a bus or train

Kinda hard to do when there's nowhere near enough investment in public transit

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's not actually about the transit; it's about the zoning. Both the reason we "need" transit in the first place and the reason it's too expensive per rider to be viable is that our homes and businesses are spread too far apart.

If you're not within easy walking distance of a grocery store, your town was built wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (10 children)

This is such a fucking stupid argument to make.

The reason airlines make x% of CO2 emissions is because people want to fly, they're an airline, and there is no emissions free way to power a plane.

The reason the plastic company makes x billions of plastic sporks every year is because I want a spoon to eat my Taco Bell Nachos in my car. They're not making all the plastic pollution because they just hate the Earth.

They're not cartoon villains like in Captain Planet that pollute just to make pollution.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If it's that bad, then let's make a law that fixes the problem.

You can take this and just welp, plastic spoon is cheaper and all my concurrent are doing it so fuck it.

We want a greener industry? Make the fucking law reflect that otherwise, fuck off.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

It's almost as if regulations are needed because humans are incapable of doing the right thing to protect themselves. Fairly common thing I might add but you'd require a slightly larger government to do it and we can't have that either.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't help that a sizable subset of Americans will bitch and moan at any efforts to reduce the reliance on things like disposable plastic forks, plastic straws or plastic shopping bags because it's "woke".

For chrissake, remember when they sold Trump branded plastic straws?

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

Corporations create the heat and cooling, build the cars and airplanes, and raise the meat for... wait for it... consumers. These things go hand in hand. Asking people to make changes to their lifestyles that will help the environment IS demanding the corporations to stop producing so much pollution. No one wants to take the blame.

When the world is on fire, no one will care, but the idea that corporations are somehow a separate entity from the consumers/individuals that line their pockets with profits is equally irresponsible. It does come down to daily choice, because the corporations follow demand. But no one wants to suffer the inconvenience of changing their lifestyle, so we blame the corporations that we then buy gas, electricity, meat, and cars from. It's blindingly dumb from either direction.

Spiderman points at Spiderman.

Note that the IPCC acknowledges that no one is paying the true cost of energy or food. You could decapitate all corporate executives, and, if we truly wanted to pay the environmental costs of heating, cooling, and food, all prices would go up. If you think things are hard now, give it a decade. Prices for everyone for everything will go up. You could kill all the rich people on the planet, and it wouldn't change that fact, and it wouldn't suddenly make the environment sound. It truly does come down to fundamental lifestyle changes that none of us want to enact.

You cannot eat money.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (55 children)

The 100 corporations include oil companies you rely on to put gas in your car, so it's not like they are the one polluting directly.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

And my favorite tidbit not included here is how much pollution the US military causes. We know it's off the charts BUT they're allowed to operate with zero oversight and accountability regarding the bugfuck amount of pollution and wrecked ecosystems that military exercises have caused. We don't even know for sure how bad they are but you just look at how much fuel an single idling M1 tank uses and it's insane

A tank will need approximately 300 gallons every eight hours; this will vary depending on mission, terrain, and weather. A single tank takes 10 minutes to refuel. Refueling and rearming of a tank platoon--four tanks--is approximately 30 minutes under ideal conditions. 0.6 miles per gallon.

It's pretty accepted that the US military is the worst polluter on earth, but this never gets brought up

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (7 children)

That statistic is flawed it counts downstream combustion of coal oil and gas for energy purposes (this is 90% of the total company emissions in the metric) which means you can buy a fossil fuel car fill it with petrol and burn it and that will be counted as corporate emissions

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

It's so strange to see all the comments here defending CNN of all things.

Imagine a game where you can buy sustainable, ethically sourced resources for $5 and unethically sourced resources for $3. The manual tells you it's nice of you to buy ethically sourced but there's no governmentally enforced consequences. Which ones are you going to buy as a consumer?

Now worse, which ones are you going to buy as a downstream corp CEO? Your shareholders demand maximum profit and you are required to give them maximum profit. Justifying that you're "doing your part" for the environment gets you thrown out as CEO.

At the end of this game, it's cheaper, and necessary, to buy the shit that kills us all.

People unironically saying we're all to blame. No shit, the system is designed so we are all complicit. It takes authoritative intervention to prevent corps from using and selling unethical and unsustainable products. You could also tax it for things like carbon emissions

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Every time you suggest to meat eaters to eat less meat, they become violent.

Even if you suggest them cutting their 14 meat meals per week down to maybe 12 meat meals (skip one day), they flip their shit.

So ya, good luck suggesting to anyone to eat 30% less.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do all that and a single cruise ship will undo it in about 3 second

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Swap your car or plane ride for a bus or train

Ok one sec lemme just book a train across the Atlantic ocean rq...

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (5 children)

That and all the rich that take a private jet instead of walking for 15 minutes

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (48 children)

Also disgusting that people think that paying for an innocent animal to die is somehow capitalisms fault

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (10 children)

71% of corporations is the new climate denial were at the bargaining stage now: "well the drastic sacrifice were going to have to make doesnt matter because corporations need to do something before I even attempt to start living in line with earths resources"

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What an absolutely tonedeaf argument from CNN.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's both really.

Finger pointing at corporations while doing nothing may not be as bad as corps finger pointing at us while doing nothing. But it's still bad.

Everyone needs to make an effort on this.

Hoping corporations will somehow grow a conscience isn't accomplishing anything.

Imagine if nearly everyone was using public transit instead of voting out politicians because gas prices got a little too high. That might make the corps think there was more money in green energy than drilling up more oil.

Corporations are not going to fix the problem out of the goodness of their hearts no matter how much people whine about it. It's only going to happen when voters (and consumers) demand it.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Those things still help though, and we have no control over what big ass corporations do

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You have a bit of control. Vote for people who will curb those emissions.

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