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the only chance of survival is if every person on the planet reduced their carbon emissions to zero
Meanwhile, in reality:
Billionaires emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime
Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
The idea of a personal “Carbon Footprint” was spread as an idea by BP in order to make people believe individual action/responsibility was more important than systemic change.
It worked really well.
Yup, it’s what billions if not trillions in marketing, think tanks, and lobbying will get you.
Yep
It says rail is the largest polluter by a huge margin… That’s hard to take. Whoever made that graph is an idiot, it’s hard to read and it poorly laid out.
It doesn’t matter who owns the coal mine, oil refinery, LNG terminal, gas station or gas stove.
It simply has to go fast.
Billionaires are not going to solve our problems, even if we expropriate them. Marxists¹ of all people should know this.
Most ENERGY used from fossil fuels is used for energy-inefficient transportation (you know, our millions of cars), most EMISSIONS stem from power plants (likely owned by a local state body, ie our votes).
¹(ie people who heard the term class consciousness before)
Driving sucks. You have to have a license, insurance, and in many places inspections. You can’t or shouldn’t do it on meds, alcohol, or sleep deprived. You have buy and register a car. You have to fuel and maintain a car. A few seconds of distraction can completely ruin your life and someone else’s. It only takes one person making a mistake to clog up an MTA with millions of people for hours. One in a million will make mistake. You are more likely to have police interactions than almost any other activity. You can only go where roads are. License plate readers can track your movement.
I.e. you pay out the ass to do something stressful and dangerous that opens you up to life altering liability and you can’t safely do it if you are impaired in any way. Half of people in the US are all but forced to do this daily and often impaired. Not even negligently impaired, shift workers, emergency workers, parent of new borns are all forced to do this.
Car ownership serves our employers. It used to be that employers would build street cars and local rail.
People are emotional creatures first, and sometimes exclusively. All those facts? Don’t matter. Cars are familiar.
I don’t know how to fix this. I mean, if you forced the issue and build walkability and other transit, then decades later these same emotional idiots would support that with as much fervor because it would be familiar.
It’s not the dying that’s gonna suck. It’s the decades of severe weather, crop failure, starvation, panic, economic collapse, looting, and survivalism leading up to it. Well, if you’re able to make it that long.
Person on the left is a tenured professor at UC Berkeley. They live in a multi million dollar home that they bought in an era where housing was more affordable. They bike to campus, which is about ten minutes. They got tenure a few years ago, so they’ve taken their foot off the gas a bit. Adjuncts and postdocs do most of the grunt work.
Person on the right is an office worker in some random small city. They live about 30 minutes out by car from city center, where all the jobs are. They would have loved to have lived closer, but it was all her and her husband could afford. They were both much happier two years ago when things were still remote, but corporate forced RTO. There were also layoffs, so they are working more hours than ever.
This debate isn’t actually occurring face to face. Person on the right’s CEO just emailed a link out to the entire company of a lecture Person on the left was giving at a conference he was attending in palm springs. The same CEO sent out an email “apologizing on behalf of all men” after Trump won.
Person on the left is a civil engineer. Person on the right is a voter.
If I walked or cycled to get around I’d actually die. These roads are deadly if you’re not zooming around in at least a two ton cage.
I’d rather die. What she really means is that i rather scorch the earth because i’ll be gone when it’s a real problem.
cycling? but then you’re breathing out more co2 than sitting in a gas guzzling SUV?!!?
The issue with carbon emissions from burning fuel is that they increase the carbon in the atmosphere because their origin is from sources trapped underground. Similar to a water cycle there is a carbon cycle. The carbon we exhale is produced from biological processes, not from combusting carbon which was previously trapped.
Edit to say, don’t be like me. Read the source material before you react. Or at the very least read the comment to my post.
did anyone read the link?
tldr: i’m not the one making these ridiculous claims, it was a statement made (apparently in earnest) by a loopy politician.
“You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car,” he said. However, he said he had not “done any analysis” of the difference in CO2 from a person on a bike compared to the engine of a car" 😂
Apologies.
I didn’t read the source, just thought you were being serious.
Unless you’re consuming fossil fuels as your daily lunch… the co2 you produce is netural (well excluding the emissions created during farming and logitics of getting your food to your dinner plate). But thats getting very pendatic.
