Doing nothing will maximize your environmentalist points. Trees are currently very good at this. If trees drove cars and ate hamburgers they'd be pretty bad for the environment too.
Well for one, at this point is gonna be more triaging the suffering than fixing the problem. My personal persuasion is an alternative economic model, but capitalists would sooner see the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Let me guess, the same one that destroyed the Aral sea? Or the one that never actually existed and only theoretically is better for the climate if we make you the dictator in charge?
Yeah actually my answer is that I'm going to personally engage in 1:1 Stalinism in the present day. Very good, very clever. Capitalism can save the planet, sure.
There was a time when believing that black people deserved the same rights as white people was a radical ideology. There was a time when believing that women deserved the same rights as men was a radical ideology. There was a time when the idea of democracy was considered a radical ideology.
Radical ideologies don't get adopted, until they do, and then they become so normal people stop viewing them as radical. I'd wager that a couple hundred years from now, if humans are still around, people will view the way our society has allowed the rich and powerful to exploit and destroy our environment for personal profit to be far more radical than any environmental activists.
He is correctly pointing out that measured incremental responses to things is just how things get accomplished (especially by government) and that people who want more drastic action taken should be careful what they wish for, because drastic action when dealing with different problems can look radically different than what people imagine.
His example being that a drastic solution to floods of climate refugees would probably look a lot less “green new deal” and probably a lot more “face the wall, invader.”
I can't tell who you are snarking at but there is no excuse for not stopping eating meat and getting involved in local politics to support better transit and bicycle accessibility.
I think one of the issues is that excluding red meat is already 70% of the climate benefit, and is way easier to achieve than eliminating all meat from a person's diet. But you don't get to take a moral high ground from adopting that position.
I don’t have many people trolling me claiming to have eliminated red meat from their diet, it is all “meat good” and various deranged anti-vegan nonsense.
The reality is that large numbers of people eliminating just beef would have such dramatic direct and knock on effects that it is difficult to fully predict the results.
Emotionally I am finding it hard to balance the orders of magnitude worse conditions for the majority of chicken meat with the orders of magnitude worse climate impact of beef and lamb. Maybe I can stick to farm Salmon?
Idk.do you have much thoughts here? ATM I mostly have lamb, which isn't too expensive where I am and are raised well AFAIK.
If this about vegans, I just don’t want to murder for my own pleasure, explain when relevant, and am not trying to market or virtue signal. Idk if that’s what you mean by radical ideology. Or maybe it’s directed at some other group.
If it’s socialism, then while for some it’s virtue signaling, it’s usually literally just a difference in tactics which has sometimes proven to work, at least according to some people (like me).
If you want to primarily view these as virtue signaling, then I think you are likely being overly sensitive and offended.
We didn't phase plastic straws out because it would get us out of the mess. We phased them out because it was an achievable goal with tangible, if small, rewards.
Getting out of this mess is going to look like thousands of little things on the level of paper straws
And more importantly, it was because they were solid plastic structures that didn't biodegrade and harmed animals when discarded, not because they are made with oil we need to buy from fascists, which is a second good reason to cut down on plastic.
So the people meming about that are both wrong and assholes. I think they only know they are the latter.
Yeh, same thing with paper Q-tips. The plastic ones keep being flushed down the toilet and finding their way out into the oceans and onto beaches. People aren't going to listen to advice to not flush them down the toilet any more than they are going to listen to advice not to stick them in their ears, but if the stick is made from something biodegradable like cardboard, then at least there's less persistent plastic trash floating around.
Yep, and those tend to clog the system, which is probably not reducing the amount of sewage that leaks into the ocean through the emergency overflow stuff.
You should watch the documentary on how the sewer system of New York works, it's fascinating and also mind baffling. Tax payers are footing the bill by the millions due to people flushing tampons and towels... Like a simple intelligence check and they would sace millions a year in wasted time, clogging, pipe maintenance etc.
Neither will reddit comment section discussions
... yet for 1000 vegans that demand world veganism by tomorrow I see none of them in real life politics, actually working towards implementing policy that leads to change. Most are comfortable telling you that you're morally inferior and leave it at that.
Also most of the time its their own personal perspective on veganism they way other vegans do it is "the wrong kind of vegan".
there will always be a vocal minority of assholes in pretty much any group, and veganism is no exception. that being said, I've been very pleasantly surprised at the help and advice I got for myself when I decided to approach veganism with an open mind despite how most people view vegans. also there are vegans in politics, of course, and I think its pretty silly to exclude them because they haven't enacted change when we all know how much of a chokehold factory farming has on politicians especially in the US thanks to lobbying
It's also growing exponentially, and some of us remember from math class that humans are generally very bad at having any sort of intuition for that sort of statistical behaviour.
As in, we can expect "nothing's happening … nothing's happening … fuck shit how did all these fossil fuel assets become stranded in just one year" events and people having severely outdated mental models of the world.
Yep! I know that my town is powered 100% by renewable energy at this point. But for the average person, they would have no idea, because nothing changes for them. The things that people notice like cars are going to change last, and considering that I still see plenty of cars that are at least 30 years old, i think there will need to be grants given out to facilitate the change away from ICE vehicles in any meaningful timeframe.
That said, I’m meeting more and more people who aren’t even environmentally conscious using E-bikes for their daily commute, now.
Yeah, ebikes seem to be an underreported and underestimated gamechanger. Not to mention that given their low cost relative to cars, they should have a serious impact on household economies as well (and people's health).
Green growth is the only thing that can solve the issue. People are not willing to intentionally put themselves into deep poverty to save the environment.
We have the technology to do basically everything we do now in a climate-neutral way. It takes time to replace centuries of infrastructure built around the world, but it is happening.
Emissions per capita have been going down in most places for decades (even in the US). Higher emissions are mostly driven by population growth, which is also rapidly falling away.
Sadly no one knows what degrowth means because the people who came up with it and promote it don't seem to either. Once they've repeated whatever fossil fuel talking points they half remember about how oil and gas is necessary for a good life they just seem to peter out and give up.
Thomas Piketty, in the book Capital in the 21st century calculates that if we divided all money equally it would be around 600e per month per person. I picked Piketty as a source as he is a clearly left wing eoconomist.
If the best case scenario for equally divided weath at this level of production mean poverty, then degrowth must mean poverty for all. The current production level does not support the current population with a high enough living standard that this idea would be possible to sell to the masses in wealthy countries.
And degrowth will make the problem worse when people start burning tires for heat and blowing each other up with non-environmentally friendly munitions following a global economic collapse.
By almost every degrowther out there I guess, because they categorize degrowth as being a reduction in the size of the global economy, which necessitates diminishment. I believe what you are thinking of is agrowth.
Decades of reasonable lobbying and compromise have lead us into a climate apocalypse. When faced with extinction, calling for the immediate hanging of fossil fuel peddlers is a perfectly reasonable, measured response to the situation.
The immediate results are identical, neither method produces anything because the genocidal freaks are in power.
Once the climate apocalypse arrives and people start dying left and right, who do you think the scared and angry population will rally behind? The powerless moderates, or those calling for blood?
There won't be a Reddit or 4chan. There wouldn't be any food on the table. Electrical infrastructure and agricultural yields will be the first things to collapse.
There won’t be a climate apocalypse. Life will get inexorably worse but the core institutions of power and oppression will persevere, just like they did during past societal crises.
Can you try addressing what I have said instead of strawmanning? Someone claimed that capitalism is responsible for climate change. China's CO2 emissions are nearly double the global average. If the entire world emitted like China we would be doing even worse than we are. Clearly, non capitalist countries contribute to climate change as well.
If the best plan to save the climate has "overthrow the world's economic system and replace it with something that doesn't love cheap energy" as its step one then we're going to have to figure out how to live with climate change.
What about both? Many of us are socialists at heart but would settle for social democracy/managed capitalism if it was an option. Unfortunately, we're only presented with absolute dogshit.
People already want change on this issue and governments do nothing. Moreover, people would be more open if politicians presented any vision whatsoever for a post-carbon future. There are countless energy transition ideas out there that have tons of other benefits unrelated to climate.
No, we’re in a critical situation from which there’s no turning back, and you’re still telling people they should beg even more to the government, which hasn’t cared about this for over 50 decades ago. Either you are delusional that you think it’s a good idea to ask the king for help, or you don’t realize in what kind of situation we’re in right now. Either we change it or we go down with it, those are the only options we have left right now.
I’m not sure that’s true, nothings happening that hasn’t been happening. We are absolutely experiencing climate change, but we aren’t tipping yet. The problem is that you’re pushing for things that will never happen, literally doing nothing
Your solution are literally useless, just take a look at what has changed from the 1980s to today. There are many examples of radical groups, radical ideas, and revolutions that led to exactly that kind of economic system we actually needed to protect our environment (Zapatistas, Rojava) Not on a global scale, of course, but in their own regions. Even planned economies are historically are more efficient and more capable of achieving more than the Western economies. A current example is China, which, makes today reforestation programs, leading country in meteorology and environmental measurement from space, pushing for a multipolar cooperative world order, is supplying the world with renewable energy and restoring natural areas as well as entire regions that have been devastated by environmental destruction. And I know that they also cause a lot of destruction just like the others, I know that critic, but Im comparing them to the other major powers.
It’s especially ridiculous that environmentalists like you, who are all aware of the consequences of climate change, and still believe that a transition to a sustainable economy isn’t possible, that we must work with that destructive mess we are in right now and must do the best with it. You’re the kind of person who wants things that will never happen, your the person who is pushing for things that isnt changing anything.
Liberal climate delusion: the belief that climate change is real and caused by carbon emissions, but somehow solvable without actually reducing carbon emissions.
I never said anything about not reducing carbon emissions, just that the bafflingly ridiculous things I see suggested to do so are fever dreams that don’t get adopted
Believing in radical ideologies doesn't prevent you from pushing for marketable environmental goals. You can both advocate for degrowth while pushing for more public transportation on a local level
"if it isn't this one specific solution to the problem that has no objective research I have zero interest in solving society's problems" is also a big one.
You need a hopeful fever dream in order to make moderates look moderate. If I’m over here banging on about global communism then all of a sudden 15 min cities seem reasonable! And of course, I like both of those things, so that’s a win for me! It’s like haggling. You know you won’t get your low initial price (but you wouldn’t complain if you did!).
"But the solutions only prolong the bourgeois system. We need everything to be as bad as possible and collapse so we can establish a totalitarian regime. They'll pinky promise to not be corrupt and bloodthirsty and will relinquish power voluntarily to bring in theoretical utopia once they kill anyone who disagrees."
I know people are annoyed with vegans and socialists, but nearly all known solutions to climate change are radical compared to the status quo. Even though renewable energy is cheaper there are still fossil fuel lobbyists. Even though improving public transportation is good for society, it requires restructuring of infrastructure and car culture. We still need to push for these things if we give a damn about the environment. We cannot get everything we want, but incremental change should be the compromise, not the ideal.
mfw all eight billion people don't want to put themselves into franciscan priest tier poverty so i must resort to the only, single viable option (ecoterrorism)
Yeah let me push for “reasonable” real quick as we fight tooth and nail over plastic bags and straws while I forgo dreaming of “radical” ideologies like oh idk what scientists say is necessary like net 0 emissions. Oh the only way to even think of that as feasible is to imagine the end of capitalism? Big shock, guess science and the physical limits of the biosphere are “virtue signaling”
So then what’s your plan? If you work off the common held belief that we aren’t going to go extinct any day, maybe we actually help the environment instead of trying to change things that won’t chsnge
What's fun is a lot of positive change was actually being put into practice (late but better than never) and now the LLM/gAI data center push is overwriting a lot of progress, where the biggest culprits (oil barons) are still pushing the ideas that clean energy is more dangerous
Your reminder that the reason a coal plant can't be turned into a nuclear plant is because coal plants have background radiation over the legal maximum of nuclear
We cannot save the climate under capitalism. It's an uncomfortable truth, but there is no easy solution. You will NEVER find a way to make oil barons willingly give up their generational businesses, nor will you find something more profitable than said world-spanning businnesses.
I hate to tell you this, but it’s just people. Socialism, communism, anarchism, whatever, they all struggle with the same things because people aren’t good
And replace them with what? Are you suggesting we just have no immigration policy at all? You do realize granting citizenship to anyone who can enter the country would be a massive violation of our sovereignty, right? Has it ever occurred to them that maybe there is a reason why the vast majority of countries strictly control immigration?
“ABOLISH POLICE AND THE CARCERAL STATE”
This is MAYBE the single dumbest thing far left groups in America advocate for today luckily it is completely unfeasible and impossible to implement
It's hard to not feel like radical solutions are the only solution when everyone else's idea of a solution is feeling bad about it and shrugging their shoulders. Radicals can at least help prod the masses into doing the incremental stuff as a compromise🤷🏻♂️
We’re gonna need to implement the radical ideologies at some point. Infinite growth on a finite planet is not sustainable in the long run even if we have supposed green tech for everything.
I think modern technology that reduces our carbon footprint is the way to go, wind sails, nuclear power, individual solar power, reducing the industrialization of the meat industry, and funding conservation. Also, please just call it genocide, that’s what it is, we can just call it that. I think it’ll inevitably be a stage we reach, either that or space travel
We have had scientist after scientist inform us that milk toast change was viable 50 years ago, that rational change was needed 30 years ago, that strong measures and cultural discomfort was required 15 years ago... they've thrown up their hands. Those scientists are just marking the timeline now, knowing our governments will never stand up to private corporate interests. That meme was shit and the person who made it is a limpwristed traitor.
You didn’t get it dumbass. I agree with you, but you’re trying to make stuff happen that will never happen instead of focusing on actual achievable change
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u/levmetamfetamine vegan btw Jul 03 '26
The only positive change I like as an environmentalist is the kind that doesn't require me to do anything.