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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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Okay. I just want to slam on the brakes here, just a little.... Just a little slam.
There's a LOT of personal blame going around in these comments. As if everyone who ever had burned any fossil fuels ever is somehow personally responsible for everything that's currently happening.
Here's some news, we've been burning shit for more than a millennia. People, in and of themselves, don't require so much heat and energy to create a problem. At least not individually. As a whole, small problem. Individually, microscopic problem at most.
Everyone seems to have fallen into this trap of everyone being personally responsible for the climate change. The vast majority of the issue is companies. Everyone wants to point at trucks and delivery vehicles and whatnot as major contributors when they do talk about contributions from companies, and you're still way off base. It's not even the air traffic that's the problem. It's the fucking boats. Nobody thinks about it, because nobody sees it. Either the boats are off at sea, or they're docked in some yard, away from your vision. 90% of the time, they're sailing. When they're sailing, they're operating the motors 24/7. Each ship, when operating, will consume more fuel in an hour than any one person would use in a year.
Since it's mostly unregulated international waters, who are they reporting any of that shit to? So they don't.
Yes. Climate change is real. Yes, we, personally, should be doing what we can to curb it. The fact is, if all of us did everything possible (switching to all renewable power, using EVs and all renewable powered appliances, etc) it would barely make a dent. All of the "personal responsibility" arguments are just a smokescreen from the big, very guilty corporations, to victim blame the public into turning on eachother so they can continue to destroy the environment unchecked. Based on these comments, they're succeeding.
I'm not saying to not be mad. Be mad, get angry. Just be mad at the right people here. I'm not evil because I drive my 1.5L 4cyl sedan to the grocery once a week, and have a natural gas water heater. Sure, I should change that, and I'm sure I will be changing that when I can, but I'm not the problem. The greenhouse gasses I emit over my lifetime won't offset the emissions of transport ships in a single year.
Just.... Be mad at the right people. Stop making people feel bad for being given bad options because the automotive industry actively and knowingly rejected electric vehicles due to how deep they were with the oil industry. So people had to buy internal combustion vehicles because there literally was no other option at the time. I've had my car since 2014. In 2014, the model S (the only model at the time), was $70k USD to start. I didn't have $70k USD to spend on a car (I still don't). I spent less than one-quarter of that price on my vehicle, and I was barely able to afford it over a 5 year finance. Yet, based on these comments, I should be ashamed that I can't afford a BEV? Or that I live too far from everything that I can't ride a bike or something?
Come on people. You know who is really at fault here. Let's just be angry at the right people.
Shiping represents about 10% of the 25% of global carbon emissions from transportation, so 2.5%, similar to aviation. Yes, it's a problem but it's not the boogeyman you seem to think it is.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
100% this.
The problem isn’t X. Or Y. Or W.
The problem is A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H+I+J+K+L+M+N+O+P+Q+R+S+T+U+V+W+X+Y+Z+A1+B1 … etc.
We need to change everything. Everything needs a reduction. AND we need to build massive nuclear CO2 extraction facilities that generate synthetic fuels for the places where we need energy density, seeded with carbon captured from the few places where we still release.
And we can do it. It won’t even be that expensive, certainly not as expensive as we fear, once we get going.
But we lack the will. Things need to get a lot worse before we will get our asses in gear.
What will actually happen is the rich people will get choice land in the areas still stable. The rest of us will be fighting for scraps and erecting shanty towns.
My point is less regarding the fact that it's a big boogeyman... The point I'm trying to hit on here is that everyone is focused on personal responsibility with their own CO2 emissions and entire sectors have made zero progress, and they're left completely out of the conversation.
We're not going to solve the problem with a single solution. Its simply too large of an issue for that. We also can't be entirely complacent on any factor. While consumer vehicles are a nontrivial contribution, it's the same for global shipping; while there's still a lot to do with personal vehicles before we're on the right track, it seems to me that there's been zero effort from global logistics to curb their diesel engine vessels on the open seas.
In addition to this, I'm always curious where the data for sites like the one you linked, actually comes from, not because I think it's wrong, but because I'm wondering if it's incomplete. It's easy to simply ask each country for their emissions numbers, do a bit of addition and call it a day, but does that include emissions created in international waters? I don't know. Do you?
Again, I'm not doubting the numbers, I'm just wondering if companies have tried to find loopholes to hide their emissions... And it's 100% the companies that would do it too.
There are lots of folks working on maritime (and aviation) decarbonization, it's not being ignored. It's just harder than decarbonozing other sectors because they can't just electrify like you and I can do with our cars and homes. The solution is likely to be synthetic fuels of some sort, ammonia, hydrogen, biodiesel, etc. We're seeing sails come back, there have been innovation hull designs, etc. You could even call tarrifs a partial solution here because building locally reduces shipping needs. It's just not as cheap/easy as installing solar panels/wind/batteries though. We need policy to drive change here, which puts it on a different level than the personal responsibility measures. I absolutely agree we need to do all of the above though.
As to the source, I don't know but it's cited in government records everywhere. They have a good handle of how much fuel is produced everywhere, we know exactly what ships exist and where they go in real time globally, we know how efficient they are, so it doesn't seem nebulous enough to me to have any real doubt in. NASA can probably track all their emissions from space too.
These are good points. I always thought hydrogen fuel cells had a good application in vessels like this, but I don't have any power over what's decided there.
Thank you for the engagement. I think for the most part we just agreed that problems exist.
Getting rid of dirty boat fuel is likely the reason why we see this sudden rise in temperature: https://lemmy.world/comment/10570999
These kinds of posts are designed to provoke anxiety and waste thousands of people's time, ironically contributing to energy wastage. I don't see how you can engage with posts like these and think you hate capitalism, you're worshipping the act of consuming negativity and giving someone money from your doomerism lol. It's almost like forum autists cannot into self awareness or something
I agree with your sentiment but if everyone is just pointing fingers we're going to keep steamrolling ahead. We need to put the pressure on politicians by actually giving a fuck.
I'm fucking tired of people like my parents making tiny sacrifices and then patting themselves on the back for "doing their part for the climate". Meanwhile they own 6 fucking cars. I'm fucking tired of how most people ridicule climate activists and act all frustrated that 500 strangers had their commute lengthened.
I agree that "taking personal responsibility" is mostly bullshit and isn't going to fix climate change, but I still think everyone should do everything in their power to curb their impact. Not for the minute gains that they'll make but as a form of activism in itself.
I agree. I said as much, but it's good to say it again. It may not be your fault. You may not be the worst offender. That doesn't mean you should do whatever the hell you want.
everyone should be doing everything they can to slow or stop the constant march that we're seeing towards higher and higher global temperatures.
My main focus is that the entire narrative that I've ever seen is basically making people mad at their countrymen, neighbors, whomever, for driving the gas guzzling F350 trucks and rolling coal on hippie EV owners and crap.... And yes, that's one problem. That's not the only problem, but it's the only one that seems to be discussed.
We can't relax on the push towards better options for everyone, but we also need to apply pressure where it needs to be, so that the very environmentally unfriendly practices of businesses also get the attention they need to be fixed.
My little sedan gets so little use because I refuse to drive several hours a day for work, so I found a job where I can work from home. It's easily one of the most substantive contributions that I can make towards the goal... Drive less. I don't have the funds to buy an EV right now, so if I can follow that first rule of "the three R's" ... Aka reduce, then that will be for the best.
But that leads me to another problem. People seem to think that recycling is as good as reduce/reuse, and bluntly, it's not. Recycle is last on the list because it's what you should be doing when reducing and reusing isn't possible. But I digress.
There's a lot of problems. I just want people to put pressure on global logistics companies that are running large diesel ships 24/7 so that we can get useless knickknacks from China, non-stop.
When is the last time politicians really did something good? please remind me with facts!
Thank YOU!
I am tired of this bullshit and all the bots/trolls/ai supporting it and passing on propaganda for the same people that created the issue in the first place.
So I fully agree with you!
"You know who is really at fault here. Let's just be angry at the right people."
Yep, and everyone is attacking me specifically citing boats, and yeah, boats contribute, and they're an example of things that people don't think about, but they're hardly the only problem.
Even if we isolate ourselves to just consumer vehicles, if you look at what vehicles produce the most greenhouse gasses and which are driven the most, all of that is generally done by and for the benefit of companies. Whether it's Joe driving 2+ hours to get to the office because his boss won't allow him to work from home for no practical reason, or simply vintage car collections owned by millionaires or billionaires, which are true to their roots and are super inefficient... Or overpowered SUV/limo/busses (like tour busses) driving all the time to get from one place to another for a small group of people who would probably fit into much smaller and more efficient vehicles. But no, all these yuppies are blaming Jack, who works from home, and drives like twice a month because he hasn't dropped $100k on an EV that he'll never use, to replace his Toyota Corolla from 2010, which still works perfectly. Yeah, Jack is the problem (/s).
Everyone is so hung up on pointing fingers at eachother and their neighbors for continuing to drive combustion vehicles. I paid around $15k for my vehicle, 10 years ago, and I've moved into a fully work from home position. It sits in my driveway 8 out of every 10 days, at least. The days I do drive it, I'm usually on the road for less than an hour. Yet the comments here would have me think that I need to go buy an EV. Why? My car works perfectly. I would literally be wasting more resources by throwing out my perfectly working car, to buy a new driveway filler... The heck?
I feel you! We are in the same (man powered) boat 🙂
Boats are actually one of the most efficient and scalable methods of transport. Sure they produce a lot of emissions, but it's still very small in the context of global emissions (2.5%) and are an invaluable asset. There are many other things you should go after before shipping.
This is lunacy. You're saying "let's stop blaming the wrong people and have a calm rational discussion"
Religious idiots refuse to believe in global warming, scientists are lighting themselves on fire to warn people and no one cares because of religion (which is the only reason people doubt this), and it's too late and we're going to all die.
Calmly coming up with sensible solutions to be angry at the right people is ridiculous. Companies are also still just people. There is a reason why people allow global warming, don't believe the environment could be destroyed, and vote for corrupt idiots who tell them fantasies: the reason is religion. People are corrupt and stupid and believe religion and until all of the religious fantasy pushers are destroyed, this trajectory will continue.
The only problem is there is no stopping this trajectory. We are all in a large house, we've lit in on fire, the entire structure is ablaze, and you're saying "let's talk about who is really to blame..."
Instead, we should philosophically make peace with our own doom, however that's done. Everyone religious is to blame and should feel bad. The religious all enabled ignoring the problem by encouraging illogical stupid thinking.
I don't blame religious people specifically. I would agree that a lot of the problematic people are religious, but I don't think they're a problem because of their religion specifically.
It's conspiracy theorizing nutbars who believe in crap like the earth being flat. Not specifically or exclusively flat-earth types, they're just a really good example of the climate/science denying fuckheads I'm referring to. That's one big group of problematic people. The other big group is capitalists, which are frequently conservative/right/religious types. Capitalists only give a shit about one thing, and it's disgusting. Money. If whatever is happening is not making them money, then they could not possibly give any fewer shits about it. This is the root problem in corporations. The fucking corpos who would never bother to care about anything that helps anyone, unless they can profit from it. There's very little profit in saving the environment.
Unless they're legally obligated to do something differently, and unless that difference will benefit them monetarily, they don't do it. Hell, if it wasn't for federally mandated occupational health and safety, they would still be sending folks into tunnels carrying nitroglycerin to blast open the next section (and other extremely dangerous and frequently fatal tasks). But because of shit like OSHA, they can't so much as order you to climb a ladder if they haven't met a minimum standard of safety.
Again, angry at the right people here.
Now, IMO, the conspiracy people need medication and therapy, and the capitalists need to be given a long walk off a short pier, while being told there's money at the end of the walk. Some people we would just be better without. To be clear, I'm more civilized than to take any physical action against them, but that doesn't stop me from wanting someone to do it. They're environmental criminals, every last one. The problem with their crimes is that everyone will suffer for them.
My main focus with my statements is that people shouldn't waste time arguing with their neighbors and countrymen (those who have no authority over anything outside of their personal lives), and focus their efforts on enacting systematic change. The former is kind of a waste of time, and who gives a shit if Walter believes that corpos can do nothing wrong, driving around in his F350... If we change the system and ban ICE vehicles, Walter's next vehicle will be an EV, whether he likes it or not.
It is absolutely the religious people who have caused the destruction of the global ecosystem and will lead to its collapse.
If you ask 100 atheists if environmental catastrophe is upon us, nearly all will say yes.
It is only the delusion that magical sky god and his special friends jesus and mohamud and budah look over the planet and are testing our morality that allows dipshits to believe the earth can't be destroyed by sufficiently altering the chemical composition of its atmosphere and by generating sufficient waste byproducts.
These people ARE the problem.
Religion allows the political problems to exist because philosophically people view existence and reality in a distorted fairy tale manner.
What I'm trying to say is that they're not like this because they're religious. It's very very likely they're religious because they're like this.
I'm not convinced on the cause and effect here. I've met plenty of people who are science deniers, or at least those that vastly misunderstand science, and/or believe in this ridiculous nonsense that are not religious. Those people exist.
My strong opinion here is that people aren't this dumb because they're religious. They're religious because they're this dumb. The implication that religion is the root of the problem precludes the possibility that someone is a flat-earth/climate-denier/science-denier, without first believing in religion.... So every last one of those people must be religious.
By turning it around as I have, you can have people who are climate/science deniers, separate from their religion.
The side effect of this is that it places personal responsibility on those that would deny science (it's to tiring to type out all the denials these people have so I'm summarizing to just science from here on out). It's their own idiocy that causes them to deny science. That idiocy may also lead them to religion, but they're an idiot first. They weren't conditioned to be an idiot through indoctrination. By pinning everything on religious types, it implies they're indoctrinated by religion to deny science, which, that kind of indoctrination exists, but IMO, it's not the primary reason why people become science deniers.
They have a foundation of (or lack thereof) knowledge which may or may not lead them to religion, science (or the denial of it), or belief in any number of things that are wildly untrue.
IMO, these kinds of people are the kind that don't want to ask the hard questions, or strain their brain trying to make moral or ethical choices for themselves. They desire a voice, whether divine or otherwise, to essentially tell them what to think. They want the answers to the questions, without doing any work to derive what those answers might be, or put in the effort to figure out which of their derived potential answers may be correct. They lack the ability, motivation, or desire, to put in any mental effort with regards to the big issues.
Religion gives them a warm, soft, comforting blanket of answers to questions they couldn't even be bothered to think of. So many people who lack the intellectual capacity for critical thought, flock to it in droves. Same with most of the pseudo science bullshit conspiracy theories. Same with just about every consumer crap you can think of. A good example of this in consumerism is with Apple. I don't want to throw shade at Apple users, there's plenty of very smart people using apple products, but their marketing for the masses was on point. "It just works". And for the most part, they've dummy-proofed the shit out of everything they make. So much so that a lot of the remotely advanced, or customization options of most of what they do, is hidden behind layers of bullshit dialogs, or squirreled away in some obscure settings menu most people don't even know exists. They've used the same design language for years in their UI across all platforms, so anyone who learns it once, can use it across all platforms and devices. Yes, they've made improvements, mostly adding to the experience in a way that's mostly transparent to the overall design language.
Apple treats their primary customer base like toddlers. Giving them more of the same but better (somehow). There's a simple set of rules to follow that have been the same, at least in concept, since the 80's. 40 years of regurgitation of the same design, over, and over, again. Standardization to the point of being nauseating.
All of this shit from Apple is design to appeal to the lowest common denominator. If you know enough, you can get pretty advanced with it, but if you're intellectually stunted, you don't need to learn anything new to keep up with the latest and greatest products.
This is the kind of person that we're talking about. They want answers given to them without effort. They want to have others think for them. So when climate deniers make the case that they don't need to do anything differently, and all this science/climate doomerism is just FUD, they climb aboard, because doing the bad thing that they already know how to do, and change nothing, and being given permission to act like a complete fuckwad to the environment by some dickhead looking to make money, is a good enough reason for them to change nothing. Vehicles require gasoline. The furnace runs on fossil fuels, not any of this fancy heat pump bullshit (actually really great technology, but they think it's BS). Plastics make their lives easier and are easily recycled (ha. No), etc.... they want to maintain the status quo, and not think about all the horrible damage they've quite clearly and obviously caused.
There are many stupid people who realize they are stupid and look to the intelligent for answers.
Stupidity is not a flaw in and of itself.
The problem is religion enables people to easily have these moronic beliefs that make no sense and still fit in and be normal, and puts them in a position in which they are obliged to defend this stupidity as non-stupid to show loyalty to the sky god.
And although we can agree that Apple is terrible in every way, and that all Apple users have similar intellectual abilities to that of a flat-earther praising the sky god, that doesn't negate that religion is the cause of all problems in society and if all the religious proselytizers and preachers were put on a large boat that headed to Antarctica that mysterious "sank" just before making landfall, literally every problem in the world would be solved.
Bots are a large contributer, for sure but that doesn't mean we should give the unbridled car use a free pass.
Also, shit will be hitting loads of fans real soon, no matter who's to blame. As far as I can see we've passed "too late" about a decade ago and though humanity won't go extinct, do expect many many other species to go extinct. Expect loads of environmental disasters like draughts and extreme hurricanes, expect failed crops and food shortages, expect not enough water. Expect everything to become much more expensive, expect more wars about the abundant resources now finally really becoming scarce.
It could have been so easy to stop all of these, but rich people, who are the final real problem here, don't give a shit. They're too dumb and self centric to care. I wonder what the world will do when shit really hits the fan. By then I'm sure those in charge will find ways to blame the Arab/Jews/blacks/gays/poor/immigrants/the usual shit