Yes, the US has abysmal public transport (at least in houston, tx in my case) compared to even third world countries like Egypt. It’s downright embarrassing.

I live in Germany and while not perfect, I’m glad we have such a thing.

The problem is when a 10 minute car drive takes an hour with public transportation

For me, it’s both more expensive and takes longer, to take the train.

Ok. If you don’t? There’s still countless aspects of your life that you interact through the economy to fulfill that have the potential for change and improvement.

Still buy new clothes from Old Navy or JCPenney? Maybe think about going to your nearest GoodWill or local thrift shop(s) (and on a regular basis) to see what gems pass by now and again. College towns right after the end of the semester are ripe for this, and I would wager that you have a college town somewhat closer to you than any kind of public transit. Not saying that you have to do this for your entire wardrobe, but choosing used over new means that resources are avoided in making that new garment, such as all of the fuels needed to move resources to and from each factory along the value chain, all of the solid waste destined for landfill or incineration from the scraps of cutting-and-sewing that new garment, all of the water pollution associated with dyeing or printing your new garment, or the potential human rights violations that could pop up throughout the value chain. A lot of these can be mitigated by buying more sustainable brands that seek to minimize these things, but a cheaper alternative is to buy used too.

Still have an air conditioner? Maybe think about hooking up a smart thermostat or equivalent and enrolling in peak-load demand response initiatives so that your AC or furnace works a little less hard in exchange for the entire grid not having to provide as much power (the alternative is blackouts or brownouts where everyone turns their AC on blast but kills the grid so no one has power anymore). Doing this means that demand curves by customers don’t reach as high of historical peaks, which allows utilities to avoid using peak response assets like Combined Cycle Combustion Plants that use natural gas to operate. You in turn create a greener grid, that’s also better for the climate. And if having a warmer house isn’t enough for you, there are other ways of mitigating this, like setting up phase-changers directly to your bedroom so that it stays cool, unlike the rest of the house, or buying ice vests that you can wear on your person, or going to a public facility like a library or mall and centralizing cooling loads to there instead of decentralized cooling loads via everyone’s homes.

How old are your assets like cars, AC units, furnaces, fridges, etc.? Perhaps if it doesn’t break the bank, look into purchasing models that are more efficient, as in those cars that have better mileage and/or that are hybrids and can be plugged in to a normal outlet to charge, or fridges and AC units that use coolants better and that have better insulation to keep things cooler for longer. These choices don’t necessarily have to be accompanied by the insane bits of technology and information that bigger companies want to shove down our throats with these newer, smarter devices.

Does your local grocery store carry organic goods as opposed to conventional ones? I know that ALDI near me carry those, and I’ve had to shop there for years thanks to the low prices they offer. If you minimize your costs while still going organic, maybe consider shifting your diet away from red meat and pork towards other options like chicken, fish, or straight up whole food, plant-based ingredients like vegetables, fruit, legumes, grains, nuts, seeds, mushrooms, etc. Or, if you’ve gone that far, have you considered seeking out local farmer’s markets near you that often offer these goods both organically (or “organically” since the official label is so expensive), in season, AND locally. A good resource for finding farmer’s markets near you is https://www.localharvest.org/.

Getting back to the public transit problem you bring up:

Is there public transit near you? Do you know for sure? Most major cities like Houston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even the smaller ones like Cleveland, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, etc. do have some version of public transit, whether that’s via subway, rail, tram, or bus, so perhaps there are more options near you thank you might think. And do you use these when you have the opportunity to? All of these services are offered via companies that use metrics like ridership and rider time to gauge how they might want to invest in these services into the future. If you start engaging with more and more public transit when you can, every human adds up on their balance sheets and can impact what happens with public transit in the future. I know that in my area, the public transit corp running our interurban train is constructing a new service line South, when it traditionally only extended East & West, which will capture an even larger portion of the market and make the service even more financially lucrative over time, leading to even more expansion and coverage. But I do agree with you on the lack of other interurban solutions like Amtrak. That service is downright terrible, and we as a country (assuming you live in the US) need to start demanding better service, as well as less of a grip on the railway network in this country by the railroad tycoons.

There are changes that can be made all around us that involve the economy and a corporation on the other side. All of the above examples I listed do. There are two sides to the economy, that economists tell us: Supply and Demand. Just because we can’t control supply outside of efforts like political action doesn’t mean we can’t control demand too. Little changes that every common person makes over time one way or another add up and show up on these corporations’ balance sheets.

Hope is not lost. Stay focused on sustainability and making what changes you can make in your life right now and into the future, including political action. All of this adds up.

Choosing what to buy is a luxury most people don’t have. Companies need to be forced into changing because the market proves time and time again that it can’t regulate itself

The issue with that logic, voting with your money, which I once used as well, is that richer people get more of a vote than poor people. And as a bunch of the issues with global warming didn’t really hit rich people, we shouldn’t depend on them to fix it.

In order to make an actual impact on the environment, we’d need to all go back to living without electricity in stone houses. Everyone in the world could take the bus and it would do fuck all. Society needs to change how we produce energy and how we construct things. That’s stuff consumers cant do by changing their habits.

Here’s a great video by Kurzgesagt

Can’t buy what doesn’t exist, can’t buy a healthier option if one isn’t produced, can’t buy a more sustainable product if one isn’t produced, can’t buy a solar powered utility vehicle if one isn’t produced, can’t buy wind power if it isn’t produced, can’t buy items without single use packaging unless they’re produced.

Needs and wants may drive a market, but nothing is consumed before production.

This exactly! We need to go after the corporations with policy changes but that doesn’t mean that we, as individuals, are completely blameless or that individually actions are inconsequential. If nobody chooses to drive less or to take the bus then collectively we’re telling the major oil companies to continue with business as usual at if nothing’s wrong. The corporations are to blame but we’re all active participants!

Bro the big oil corporations spent decades at the beginning of the 20th century creating and forcing the demand and dependency on oil. Watch “How Big Oil Conquered the World” from James Corbett.

It’s not like WE chose this to be the way things are. The people who control industry, and marketing, and media and THE GOVERNMENT, all MADE us and it all this way.

Stop buying what shit? Everything? Corporations lobby for policies that save them money at the cost of our environment. Yes there are things individual people can do to help but posts like this one from CNN shift the focus from the actual problem

Yeah this is where taxing these negative externalities would help to curb the demand of wasteful products and thus lower waste produced by corporations.

We can’t expect corporations to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts, because the products would cost more and the masses would just purchase the cheaper more waste producing products. We need to level the playing field by taxing pollution and waste.

I agree with you, but don’t use ableist slurs when making arguments about social responsibility.

I especially like the part where I prefixed this with “there’s no responsibility on the part of consumers whatsoever”

Re read what he wrote. He said without including that or some form of. For example, Elon put a larger carbon footprint into the world in one week with his jet than most of us will over the course our lifetime. Does it mean we shouldn’t do our part? No. We definitely need to do and be better. It would take only a few of the biggest contributors to make a big impact while it would take thousands, if not millions, of us.

IMHO twitter OP’s take basically amounts to climate change denial.

There is the caveat of business practices which are often unknown to the consumer—think of all the times businesses have been busted and then(temporarily) boycotted for it. But, yeah, consumers consume and should be well aware of their consumption.

Demand controls supply.

Not all changes are an improvement, but all improvements are a change. That applies to both our lifestyles, especially in rich countries, and corporations, what they do and how they operate.

Animal agriculture is the most obvious example to me, it’s unjusifiable ethically let alone environmentally so no matter what people are gonna have to stop eating animals and their secretions, and most people can stop pretty easily and eat healthily (it’s extremely easy to do better than the SAD) so start now and get ahead of the curve

Go back to reddit, and type something no one will see, hipster wanna be.

The average person isn’t wrecking the environment for no reason either, and yet they always appear to be the target for “environmental sustainability” snipes presented by mainstream media as fact. There are an innumerable number of practices that large industries can practice to limit their carbon footprint, but it is never a priority.

It’s largely a problem of government that is exacerbated by the influence of the businesses themselves. It’s the governments job to enact policy change that force business to address these issues and develop more sustainable production process and product offerings, but since the government has essentially been bought out by those same businesses, nothing happens at all.

We can’t decouple business from government without policy changes that would place limitations on such influence, and we cannot enact those policies because of the influence from businesses. I don’t see a solution unless people wise up and elect a lot of people in the same election cycle not beholden to these groups, but I don’t know how that can be accomplished.

Exactly. Saudi Aramco is wrecking the environment because (among others) Dow Chemical keeps buying their oil. Dow Chemical keeps buying their oil because Sterilite keeps buying the plastic that Dow makes. Sterilite keeps buying Dow’s plastic because people keep buying Sterilite bins to store all their junk. Ultimately if there wasn’t a person consuming things at the end of the chain, the oil wouldn’t be removed from the ground in the first place.

Ultimately it all comes down to people’s lifestyles. When you buy something that’s made of plastic or transported on a container ship, you’re giving these companies money they use to wreck the environment. If instead of kiwi fruit, you buy melons from an Amish farmer who brought them to market using a horse-drawn carriage, that lifestyle choice has an impact on the environment.

Having said that, it’s true that companies use lobbying to twist laws in their favour, and use sales and marketing to drive demand for their products. It’s hard to know whether a product you’re buying is damaging to the environment because the companies that damage the environment don’t want you to know and will oppose any law that makes it clearer. It’s hard to choose to purchase a less environmentally destructive item if you don’t know it exists.

But, it’s just ridiculous bullshit to pretend that nefarious companies are out there burning coal just for fun, while cackling evilly. Everything companies do is in service to making money, and virtually the only way they make money is to sell things that people want to buy.

australian coal producers:

To be fair the big three (Ford, GM, Chrysler) made some politicians very rich suppressing light and cross country high speed passenger rail, also public transit all across the nation.

The US (through its deeply corrupted electoral system) totally bought that ticket to ride that train… so to speak.

Please, think of the oil companies and quit being selfish! /s

Flying pigs are actually carbon neutral, lets just use them

It’s not actually about the transit; it’s about the zoning. Both the reason we “need” transit in the first place and the reason it’s too expensive per rider to be viable is that our homes and businesses are spread too far apart.

If you’re not within easy walking distance of a grocery store, your town was built wrong.

Yeah where I live, there’s a bus every 2 hours that needs ~30 minutes to get to where I work. If I took that, I’d have to walk an additional 15 minutes to my actual workplace and I’d still be an hour too early.
And after work, I’d have to again walk 15 minutes to the bus stop and wait another 30 minutes for the bus home.

So between leaving my house and coming back home, there’d be ~11.5 hours. When I use my car, that’s ~9.5 hours.

I literally cannot do either of these things. Haven’t ever been able to in my life. No town I have ever lived in had public transport available. Closest train station was literally a two hour walk away.

It’s a nice thought, but there isn’t enough infrastructure to play like it’s generally available.

If it’s that bad, then let’s make a law that fixes the problem.

You can take this and just welp, plastic spoon is cheaper and all my concurrent are doing it so fuck it.

We want a greener industry? Make the fucking law reflect that otherwise, fuck off.

It doesn’t help that a sizable subset of Americans will bitch and moan at any efforts to reduce the reliance on things like disposable plastic forks, plastic straws or plastic shopping bags because it’s “woke”.

For chrissake, remember when they sold Trump branded plastic straws?

From what I understand, a lot of corporations have power over the options consumers have, the market isnt as free as this argument implies. For example, coal and fossil fuel lobbies do a lot to prevent sustainable alternatives from being adopted.

The US doesnt rely on oil and coal because thats what consumers want, or because its necessarily the cheapest, its because the people that run those corporations have the means to subvert democracy. They are not cartoon villains, but they are absolutely villains.

What you are saying is true for plastic straws and airlines, but I would guess it doesnt really apply to many of these 100 corporations

there is no emissions free way to power a plane.

You can run it on biofuels. This is how Gates excuses his private jet, conveniently ignoring the possibility of combining biofuel AND comercial flights.

You’re absolutely right. They aren’t cartoon villains. They’re just rational agents acting according to very real incentives.

But where do these incentives come from? They depend on how we choose to organize our economy, what guiding principles our society follows in how to distribute resources, and harvest them from the environment.

They come from our economic system. Our economic system is capitalism. And one of the many, many problems with capitalism — it can’t fucking slow down. In the eternal chase for greater and greater quarterly profits, there is no room for questions such as “is this growth sustainable?” or “I know there’s demand for this, but should we really be doing it?”.

Pointing fingers and blaming people is, indeed, a waste of energy. Instead, it may be better to ask: “How do we incentivise people to change their behaviour? What about our system needs to change? And how quickly can we dismantle the oil companies?”

This is classic dog wags the tail and vice-versa. Is it the demand causing these corporations to make the product or are they creating the demand through plentiful supply and marketing?

If these entities were to make something with lower emissions and marketed that as a better alternative will nobody buy that something? I highly doubt it…

I’m glad someone else understands this. Everytime I see the statistic about corporate emissions, I can’t help but think about how it’s so misleading. Exxon et al keep polluting because we keep collectively buying their product.

That doesn’t absolve them from their efforts to discredit climate change research, but to suggest they are just some evil entity polluting at will is just ridiculous.

I agree with this entirely. Of course there are corporations responsible for way more than myself. But using it as a means to justify myself doing nothing to reduce my own consumption is just backwards and stupid. It’s comparing a bad thing to another really bad thing but they’re both still bad things. Should they stop doing what they’re doing to contribute to this, yes. Should I also? Also yes lol. Plus like your comment said. These companies are driven by our own demand. It’s our fault for supporting and relying on the way things are for sure.

TL;DR:

Consumer choices can influence industries, but it is impractical to solely rely on this to drive ecological change due to factors such as lack of awareness, inconvenience, habits, price and limited to no alternatives. Government subsidies for ecologically detrimental industries and the lack of subsidies for ecologically beneficial industries worsen the effect. Improved legislation is necessary to address these issues by enforcing ecologically beneficial industry practises and guide consumers.

Verbose:

I agree with you partly. Yes, consumer choices do affect which companies get money and which don’t. But I would say that consumers are not completely responsible for the practises of a company. If a company chooses to power their production based on fossil energy carriers there’s not much a consumer can do about it. Sure, they can stop buying from them. But for that a lot of things must happen. First of all they must know about it. And if it’s not printed fat on the packaging or news are screaming about it, there is a high probability that they will never know about it. They could ask the companies themselves. And even if companies would be transparent and honest about their response, there’s only a small fraction of people who would do this. That’s because it’s inconvenient. As ugly as it sounds, people hate inconveniences. A lot of people don’t want to spend their precious free time with writing or calling the hundreds of companies, whose products they use, to ask about their production practises. Finally, if consumers eventually learn about the ecological impact of their products, they still need to collect a significant amount of mental energy in order to make the conscious decision of not buying them and possibly looking out for alternatives. That’s difficult, because people easily get used to stuff and it’s psychologically hard to change habits. And they’d need to do this for every single product they use. Even worse, in a critical amount of cases there aren’t even alternatives available to consumers. If you continue buying the wrong products (in an eco sense), because you don’t have access to an (affordable) alternative, that will send the wrong signals. The market won’t see an increased demand for ecologically friendly products in these (significant amount of) cases, but quite the contrary. I don’t say that it’s impossible, clearly humans seem to have the capacity of intelligence and can be educated to do better, but I claim it’s impractical for the everyday life of the masses. Especially, we don’t have the time to wait until the majority of people is able to change their consumption behaviour. That’s why we need laws, such that law makers do the hard work of paving the way for ecologically beneficial industry practises, so the Jon or Jane Doe going to the grocery store after a long day of work doesn’t have to worry about which products to buy.

Besides, in a lot of countries fossil based energy carriers are still cheaper than environmemtally friendy alternatives, sadly. If companies start to completely switch to green energy, this would increase the price. Increasing the price can lead to less consumers buying the products. Either because they can’t afford it or because they want or need to save money. This again would turn the circle of environmental destruction once more, since the cheaper alternatives, which consumers are looking out for, are usually less beneficial or even detrimental to the environment.

Also let’s not forget that also a lot of countries subsidise industries which are major contributors to greenhouse gases, e.g., the meat industry. Meanwhile there is a lack of sufficient subsidies for ecologically better industry segments. I live in a world where an organically grown cucumber is much more expensive than a pack of meat. That can’t be right.

We need good laws and can’t rely on the behaviour of consumers alone. There’s no way around it.

People demand goods and services. They very often do not care how those get to them. If they did, most corporations would go out of existence for using child and slave labor.

Your average person is not the one fighting against climate change regulation. It is the corporations throwing billions at government officials to not regulate them.

If sociopathy can be transmitted by prion disease, that’ll be a quick way to find out.

💀

It’s too fatty.

nah, sorry, we’re on Reddit, so capitalism is to blame for everything and we individuals cannot do sh1t.

I mean, how stupid do you have to be to shift the blame for pollution from cars on car manufacturers and oil companies. But, no, no. It’s corporations polluting and I as an individual cannot do anything about it.

Are you dumb on purpose?

I have electric though. Worst case is the pollutants gone into the mining of the lithium and manufacturing of the vehicle. But how much of that can be controlled for mining and manufacturing?

And on the other side of the coin military training areas in Germany are studied as potential nature reserves because just some limited amount of sane oversight goes a long way…

“The Baumholder military training area is therefore of special importance for nature conservation and landscape management. 722 ferns and flowering plants have been identified so far. Of these, 27 species are on the Red List of the Federal Republic of Germany and 34 species are on the Red List of Rhineland-Palatinate. In the animal kingdom, the abundance of insects and amphibians is striking. For bird life, the open and semi-open cultivated landscapes are particularly important, as can be seen, for example, in the occurrence of red-backed shrikes and Great Grey Shrikes. The larger animals such as the lynx, wildcat or black stork, which have found a retreat here, are of public interest.”

The statement is flawed because it takes the personal responsibility out of those corporate profits. Oil production burns a lot of fuel but it’s profitable because I keep buying it. Cargo ships make a lot of emissions but it’s profitable because I keep buying foreign goods. Cow farms produce tons of methane but they’re so huge because I keep eating beef.

Corporations do not exist without the customer. Massive buyout conglomerations greatly misrepresent true pollution per industry production units. If I said ExxonMobil is the dirtiest company in the world, does that mean they’re polluting worse than BP? No, not by itself. You have to look at tons of oil produced between the two and figure out a pollution per ton figure. Would it make sense to say Amazon is a very clean business because part of their business uses unconditioned warehouses? Not really, you’d probably want to separate out their trucking and delivery divisions from their storage and then compare it to UPS and FedEx via gallons per ton delivered. I’ve even seen people argue their single-item order from Amazon isn’t wasteful because “the truck is coming by anyway”. No! The truck is not an autonomous sushi conveyor belt swinging by. It’s a business asset being routed to customers.

I’m not saying these corporations are good or clean. I’m not saying they don’t cheat, lie, hide, and bribe governments to ignore their hazards. I’m just saying you can’t take a 100% hands off view of the issue, either. I drive a cleaner car and drive less so Exxon makes less. I wait for my ordering needs to build up a little to improve efficiency of the delivery. I buy more local and national so I don’t demand a cargo ship to carry my trinkets. Obviously it’s not perfect and I have a very, very minor impact, but that’s the whole point of being in a society. A community works together for the common good.

Is that methodology also how the CDP works? I am looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_contributors_to_climate_change#All_cause_1+3_cumulative_emissions_[8] in particular, and the figures aren’t looking ridiculously better still.

Or is that the difference between the Scope 1+3 tables and the All cause table in this page?

edit: Snopes has in fact written a fact check that corroborates the methodology used by CDP is potentially flawed for this exact reason. So it will not be accurate - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/corporations-greenhouse-gas/.

I’ll defer to the following point by the original Twitter OP though, which I still think is valid: “The point I was trying to make is that any media coverage that reduces the issue to personal choices is incomplete, and [structural] issues should always be central to climate reporting,” Johnson told us. “Individuals’ choices are not unimportant. They just shouldn’t be the focus of climate coverage.”

tl;dr: Yes, personal responsibility and reducing one’s carbon footprint is also very important, but there is chronic under-reporting on the other end of the equation.

still better than the opposite, where you’re just trying to buy food but everything comes in some shitty packaging made of hydrocarbons and it will be counted as your individual contribution to the waste problem. regulation works (that’s why they oppose it so hard) and it works a lot better than “voting with your wallet” which is what we would be supposed to do if it was up to us – where certain people have a hell of a lot more votes than we do

That’s interesting I wasn’t aware of this. Would you by chance have a source for this data? I’d be interested to see the true numbers.

It’s meat wiring. I don’t know what it is actually called, but that’s what I call it.

I used to be a meat eater- nary a meal was made that didn’t have meat as a main and the rest of the meal built around that.I would say that I didn’t understand vegetarians- we need meat, we evolved to eat it. Then meat started getting expensive. Then meat started losing its quality. Then meat (especially chicken) started having a rubber texture to it and was like $15 a pound and I had enough and went pescatarian/vegetarian. It was hard at first, but we really couldn’t afford meat anymore so we made it work.

After a while I noticed that the smell of meat is absolutely nauseating. The idea of meat is sickening and I am dropping eating fish now in favour of full on vegetarianism.

As I went through a meat “detox” phase ( I know it’s not a detox but I don’t know how else to put it) my brain changed how it felt about meat while I wasn’t even paying attention. I was focusing on finding new, enjoyable veggie meals and my brain was working away purging all the want for meats.

Either they’ve convinced themselves they can’t eat less/no meat, or they simply do not care to.

I had good friends to ply me with cheese and avocado. I still like meat but can eat it less frequently and with smaller portions.

But one of my dark secrets is patience. In the 70s, mom tried to quit red meat cold-turkey and didn’t last one menstrual cycle, and I learned it’s consistent among most women, that they are one period away from running down an elk in the woods in bloodlust.

So I’m only ever a week at most before someone nearby goes STEAK! TODAY! and we’re feasting once again on the fresh, sautéd flesh of dead animals.

I have high hopes for cultured meat (lab-grown chicken is on the verge of hitting the restaurant supply market) which will serve the cruelty factor. Nutrition balancing is a whole 'nother matter.

Exactly, corporation and individual behavior is predominantly emergent of the system. Theres some blame that can be passed on to the consumer or the corporation but only so much, it’s not my fault I can’t afford an electric car. It’s not my fault installing solar panels on my house won’t recoup the cost by the time I leave/sell.

If you want people to eat less meat you need to make it worth people’s while to eat less meat. You don’t need to outlaw meat, you just need to make it less attractive from a financial perspective.

If you want people to use less gas you don’t need to outlaw gas cars you need to make it less attractive.

You could write individual incentives and disincentives but a carbon tax is simple and hits at the crux of the problem. Remove beef, oil, gas, solar, wind, hydro subsidies and implement a carbon tax. Boom, meat alternatives are now cost comparable. Green energy is now handily cheaper than oil and gas. Theres also a sizable amount of conservatives who are for a carbon tax since it’s a “free market” solution instead of picking winners and losers.

I heard with some things it’s actually becoming cheaper to be green, as a result of engineering innovations leading to improved efficiency. Hopefully that trend continues.

Especially when some geniuses finally work out viable nuclear fusion. Real Engineering had a video on a US company working on some next-level fusion reactors, that seem really close to being actually ready.

Edit: of course, at the end of the day, the big oil companies won’t go out quietly. So in addition to all that wholesome stuff, maybe we should partake in some classic literature, such as How to Blow Up a Pipeline.