Removing one billionaire will do more good for the planet than anything a regular individual can do
That should not stop you from trying. You, and everyone else in this thread for that matter, just drop excuses. Either you guys finally start removing some billionaires, I'm all for that, or you start doing the little things. Ideally, just do both.
Yeah it shouldn't be an excuse. Sure the billionaires are terrible per person compared to a regular person. But they are still a minority. Most of the air traffic is regular folk traveling for work or fun. And freight being hauled by plane or trucks because of all the useless stuff people buy. Most of the cars driving every day are regular folk. By far the worst thing are cruise ships, dumping out huge amounts of pollution just for people to go on holiday.
Billionaires are terrible and should not be allowed to exist as they do today. But it isn't a reason not to do something yourself. If enough people do it, it will make an impact.
Can the students asking this remove billionaires? (Without going to prison)
No, so whats your point? They want to do something. Telling them to not do things because those things are less significant than other things that could theoretically be done is nihilistic.
Not really. You have to remove the companies that made them a billionaire or they'll just be replaced.
Drug trade has shown: even if you remove the company, as long as demand is there, another supplier/company will pop up.
I think this is why the OP mentioned buy less stuff and travel less, these two directly reduce the demand for environmentally harmful goods and services, reducing the ecological impact of the companies which issue the shares that make the billionaires in question billionaires.
It's kinda disappointing to see a post about good actionable advice to do the best you can to reduce climate change and the first reply on Lemmy is non actionable (and more controversially; to my mind irrelevant) advice to assassinate billionaires.
That's the one for removing billionaires.
Yeah us normal civilians can make a miniscule difference by doing these things
But let's not act like the problem isn't billionaires like musk, swift, bezos etc and mega cooperations like nestle or even Boeing. They are the real problems. We will live to see the first trillionaire, yeah trillion. No one should have that much wealth. Eat the rich yo
We need information, math, data that distinguishes between:
A) tragedy of the commons--you doing it yourself won't make a difference, but everyone doing it will, so you doing it yourself makes a difference, and
B) the change is so minuscule that even if everybody in the world did it, it still wouldn't move the needle.
Everything in B should be replaced with "clobber billionaires and coporations and governments", but nothing from A gets misplaced in B.
Suggestion #1 (voting for candidates who support pro-environment legislation) results in the sweeping systemic changes that you're looking for.
Mega corporations like nestle get their money from us normal civilians not caring about what we consumes impact on the environment.
Like if you literally disbanded nestle over night, not even splitting them up or selling things off but somehow just got rid of them and all their product's... does the negative impact on the environment go away? or do new companies grow to meet the unmet demand and all that's changed is what company is providing cheap goods at the expense of the environment?
We get it, billionaires bad, but it's in the effing tweet "what they can do as individual". All the options listed are solid.
The only answer is conquer the corporations and eat the rich.
Consensus seems to be: Yeah climate? I shouldn't do nothing as long as there's wealthy people.
*consensus on Hexbear
edit: sorry seems to have contaminated this instance as well
I've seen it a lot here and on other social media. People happily avoiding responsibility by vaguely blaming corporations.
Why won't the guvment step in and slap my cheeseburger out of my hands??????
No, I meant what can I do without inconveniencing myself.
That's a major problem today - "what can I do?" means "where should I post about this?". If it can be done with two thumbs on a phone, today's activists are all over it.
The sad thing is, if I die today, nothing will change. The rich will still sell and eat the world until everyone is dead.
Not enough people seem to understand that you will have to sacrifice things for the sake of sustainability.
For example
There is no way to supply the amount of meat consumed sustainably. It doesn't matter if you cut off every billionaire's head and send all meat profits directly to industry workers. It does not change that people currently eat more meat than can be produced sustainably.
There are so many other cases where this is true. It's not just rich people and corporations. They are an entirely different symptom, solving one will not solve the other.
When you're poor, you already do 3-5 and 2 is usually taking a bus or walking anywhere.
Here in the USA, the overwhelming majority of poor people eat meat; even the homeless! They just get low-quality processed meat instead.
Forgot the biggest one: don't have children (1)
That's not what your source says though.
It says "having one fewer child" is the recommendation that should be given, and logically so
How do I choose which one to put down? It doesn't mention that.
All of these are individual actions. I'd add organizing with other folks trying to make a difference. Direct action or political advocacy can have a much more significant effect than an individual acting alone.
The political advocacy would (in the best case) still end up with a ban on these actions that disproportionately impact the climate so why not just start getting used to tofu already?
Back in the 90s I worked out the arithmetic and concluded that legalizing agricultural hemp (not marijuana but fiber) and reducing American beef consumption by 10%, would save the South American rainforests.
I forget the numbers now, but at the time almost all timber logging in the rainforests was to make paper. I remember buying some really nice plywood called "teppa" that came from I think Argentina, which became unavailable because all the logs were being pulped. Anyway, if the market for beef dropped 10%, forcing the beef industry to cut production, the drop in cattle feed consumption would reduce the demand for corn (a main component). If the land were used for hemp fiber instead it would produce enough paper to completely replace our paper imports from S.A.
This practical exercise probably taught me more economics than my college Econ 101 class.
Keep handy a list of the rich bastards responsible for the overwhelming majority of the problem, just in case.
What we can do is press for more regulation.
Eat the rich.
Number 3 should be number 2 in the list. Cars are terrible but meat industry is much worse.
This source (1) places completely plant based diet as having 1/3rd the reduction in emmissions of car-free life in US context.
The EPA has transportation at almost 30% of the total contributors to CO2 with ag at only 10% so you're definitely right. Thanks.
We need to stop shipping things across the world for economic reasons. We need to produce and buy locally. The truth is, the global economy has to crash and rebuild itself if we want an eco friendly future. Worldwide shipping needs to go away. Commercial aviation needs to go away. These are things no one wants to hear but would do the most good. Sacrifice is key. We may need to live modestly for a generation in order for energy production to advance to the point where we no longer have to. Our modern growth is a result too hastly adopting dirty technologies.
I was under the impression that cargo ships were actually pretty efficient due to their absolutely massive capacity. Compared to things like airplanes, I mean.
They are efficient (cargo vs fuel consumption). They also go through my regular car's full gas tank in about 30 seconds. Less ships means less fuel burned. If we produce locally, transportation is not needed.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
^https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf^
Organize with Sunrise Movement or other similar groups. The US government is a oligarchy, our representatives don't represent it. The only way we will get any kind of change is through organizing and forcing them to listen to us.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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