• Fandangalo@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The math here is the sort of thing that drives apathy for me to make small incremental changes. If the superrich can dump ~250 avg. emission years over the course of a year, why should I do anything besides lobby against this mode of transport or other large consumers? Maybe it’s a “spirit of the thing,” but changes in my life seem so negligible compared to how ruinous some individuals are acting.

    • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The “turn the water off while you’re brushing your teeth” crap on TV was a corpo psyop. Individual responsibility is a myth concocted and propagated by the very people who have actually been causing the vast majority of the damage.

    • the_artic_one@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      There are 801 billionaires in the US out of about 335,893,238 people. If everyone else were to reduce their carbon footprint by even a tenth of a percent then there would be significantly less carbon in the atmosphere than if every billionaire in the US were to reduce their carbon footprint to zero.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I can’t get 3 people to agree on lunch. No way are we goi g to all agree on carbon footprint reduction actions.

        It’s easier to stop 801 people vs 335 million.

      • Shadywack@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Or, you know, we could just…you know…do the thing that really takes care of the problem.

      • Fandangalo@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Sure, but the individual contribution vs. companies / state-owned organizations is like 70% come from 100 companies / orgs. So the individual percentage is still negligible.

        I’m not disagreeing with the math. I’m saying when you want to make changes, you start with the most meaningful funnel. If you have 2 factors contributing to a problem, factor 1 contributes 70%, factor 2 contributes 30%, going after factor 2 seems like a waste of time. 1%s contribute 1000x the amount of the average. Who should be making lifestyle changes here?

        #voidscreaming

      • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz
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        2 months ago

        This is also assuming that the 300+ million Americans have the same size carbon footprint, which is probably not true if you think about it for more than a second. I doubt the bottom 60% of earners in the country have the purchasing power to create that much waste through excess consumerism at this point.

        Most of those “Shein/Temu/Aliexpress” hauls or 10x vacations across the world in a year you see on social media are not done by middle or lower income people/families.

        This is very much a top heavy issue.