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[–] 225 points 3 years ago (55 children)

This is fine, we just need to switch from plastic bugs and make caps attached to bottles and everything will be alright! Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)

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  • [–] 106 points 3 years ago (33 children)

    I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It's not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it's fun. They're doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.

    No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. "Just make corporations pay" to fix things, whether that's a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean "increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities".

    That doesn't necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we've all created, and we're all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn't actually get us any closer to solving things.

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  • [–] 97 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    Yes and No. Yes, it’s not only corporations and we must act ourselves.

    No, it’s the rules that set the game. Corporations play within the rules. Politics is owning and can change the rules. The society and corporations will follow accordingly. If we really want to change we can. Look what happened during Covid. In retrospect, some insane rules (eg Germany kids not allowed to enter playgrounds. Kids couldn’t play to save the elderly). However, society obeyed to those rules.

    It’s not us, it’s the rules that must change. In my view this should be the priority.

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  • [–] 56 points 3 years ago*

    Blaming the public over corporations is the #1 reason why we are in this mess in the first place. For decades, the narrative has been "it's your fault and you need to change your habits". It is a pointless and useless narrative because nobody is going to actively change anything like that until they are forced to. Even when we make moderate, easy efforts to do stuff like recycling, the recycling companies bitch and moan about how they can't ship this shit off to China to let them do the work, and then throw away most of it, anyway. We PAY recycling companies to recycle this shit and they can't be bothered to figure out how to recycle it. We PAY THEM to take away materials to use in new products, not the other way around.

    In every aspect of people's lives, you will find that corporations use up 90% of the resources that the general public use because corporations deal in economies-of-scale far bigger than anything a person or even a country can do. Corporations have been pushing the "blame the public" narrative to shift focus away from the decades of abuse they will continue to inflict on the planet. Corporation shit all over everything, and they will continue to do so in the name of profit. That is exactly what they are designed to do.

    It takes governmental effort and regulations against the corporations to stop this sort of thing. They do it for clean water, and CFCs, and automotive design, and architecture, and many many other things. Why? Because a minority group of people who are struggling to make a living is never going to have enough power and clout as a large corporation or a government.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun.

    I think we can agree on that corporations are aimed at cheapest way to produce most popular goods at the biggest scale they can achieve for, in the end, produce the biggest possible profit. Thats what corporations are made for: money.

    In the end, rich guy gets a yacht, bunker for apocalypse and private residence with AC, private kitchen stuff and anything they want so he will be fine even if its 60C outside. If it will get unbearable, they'll move to something like Norway and will be fine.

    At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people who live in hot countries will die and millions will be climate refugees.

    All that, because producing iphone with coal electricity (simplification, albeit I feel like its close to truth) is 10$ cheaper.

    Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn’t actually get us any closer to solving things.

    Swapping to paper bags will not help either. There are only two options to solve the issue:

    1. Government forces corpo to stop wasting our planet (because we don't have a spare one)
    2. People get torches

    1 is impossible because gov will never cut the feeding hand and 2 is just a matter of time until we will get couple hundred millions migrants from Aftica, India, Pakistan etc.

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    [+] 146 points 3 years ago (19 children)
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    [–] 125 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    If only somebody warned us 50 or 100 years ago. Oh wait, they did.

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    [–] 118 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (17 children)

    New normal, folks. So begins the era of climate migration.

    A reminder that this is why we should never tolerate selfishness. We're now largely screwed because we, as a species, valued our individual comfort over expert research.

    We knew what we needed to do - but no, profits. Such a dumb way to die.

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    [–] 112 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    Honestly I will never forgive people who STILL continue to deny climate change is happening and refuse to legilslate on it.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 years ago

    At this point Don't Look Up is a documentary. I honestly cannot imagine what it's like to he a climate scientist who actively studies this, only to have some fox news watching crazy uncle parroting cherry-picked data, thinking they somehow know better than global scientific consensus. I imagine some at this point may be going, "fuck it. Let it burn." And honestly, I can't blame them.

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    [–] 97 points 3 years ago (30 children)

    We fucked around, now we're going to start finding out.

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    [–] 88 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Don't worry guys, everything is fine. We just need to [redacted] and this will all go back to normal in no time.

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    [+] 76 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (19 children)
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    [–] 72 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    The EU needs to wake up and go hard on companies and industries. No mercy, no half-assing, just legislate the absolute shit out of them for once so that maybe our children can survive and live in not so terrible conditions, because not so terrible is the best we can hope for at this point.

    The rest of the world too obviously, but the EU seems the most likely to do so.

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    [+] 64 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (15 children)
  • [–] 66 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    I was having a conversationg with some red necks a few years ago. They were all talking about winter's not the same here anymore, above freezing half the winter, not as much snow, summer is weird is goes right through October now and we don't really get an autumn anymore.

    "Weather's not like it used to be," one of thems said, and I said, "yep the climate is changing." They stared at me with their mouths open.

    These retards are literally watching it happen with their own eyes and they still won't believe it. It's insane.

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    [–] 61 points 3 years ago (20 children)

    and people say global warming/climate change is not real

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    [–] 57 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    "... It's not normal"

    It wasn't normal.

    Nowadays it is.

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    [–] 54 points 3 years ago (44 children)

    Let's be honest, this will end up with only the ultra-rich surviving in the last few strips of livable surface of the planet - and them elated to have finally "culled the undeserving" as they have been hoping for for millennia.

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    [+] 52 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)
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    [–] 51 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    I'm Italian myself. The issue with this heat is that it's humid too, I live in the riviera and we've had constant 35-37°C weather with high humidity for a week now

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    [–] 51 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Yet, social medias are filled with people saying that they saw this every day when they were younger and the millenials are just weak and should stop complaining.

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    [–] 49 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    I was working outside this week (Southern US) and it was an absolutely miserable week. After a half an hour I was drenched in sweat, and it was rolling off my hard hat, getting in my eyes, and I was forced to pace myself and work much slower than I would otherwise be able to do because the heat was that intense.

    I was able to drink some of my coconut water reserve because it has the things plants crave.

    It's definitely the worst summer heat I've felt since ever.

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  • [–] 35 points 3 years ago

    For the longest time, measures against climate change were decried for potentially impacting "the economy". Well now we're going to see the impact to "the economy" with climate change getting worse. I assume it'll be a bigger impact than if we had invested in more sustainability earlier. Slower work pace outside just being a small taste of the impact.

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    [–] 49 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Meanwhile big polluters like Shell and others help pumping emissions and try to keep carbon based economy for short term profit 🙄

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    [–] 48 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    whatever could we have done to stop this!!!

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    [–] 45 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Where I stay these temperatures can be quite normal in summer. I'm now just worried that a hot summer's day here will now go from 45 to 55. I've felt 50 before. It's not fun. But besides that, I think of the implications for the agricultural sector. Good luck my European friends. I'll report back in our summer.

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    [–] 44 points 3 years ago (19 children)

    Everything is fine, the earth simply won't be habitable for humans. The Earth will spin on without us when we inevitably allow industry to destroy humanity by making earth uninhabitable by human life.

    It's what we deserve for being so stupid as to see this happening and doing nothing about it to stop it or slow it down. There's plenty of climate change advocates which are almost always drowned out by the chorus of companies and climate deniers who believe propaganda over science.

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    [–] 41 points 3 years ago (14 children)

    I think climate change is happening far sooner than scientists could have predicted. We focus on increased global average temperatures but I think that we are going to have insanely hot summers sooner. We're fucked.

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    [–] 41 points 3 years ago* (17 children)

    Simple way to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit in your head:

    1. Take the Celsius value and double it

    40 * 2 = 80

    1. Subtract 10%

    80 - 8 = 72

    1. Add 32

    72 + 32 = 104

    40 C = 104 F

    This is still hot but a far cry from 118F

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    [–] 39 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    40c is 104f. The article mentions possibly peaking at 48c, which is 118f. In case anyone thought something was a little off

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    [–] 27 points 3 years ago (4 children)
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    [–] 26 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    Get ready for this headline every year.

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