The Carbon Footprint Sham – A 'successful, deceptive' PR campaign
in.mashable.com
in.mashable.com
I was worried it would follow the same trajectory as the "Big corporations told us they would recycle our plastic, then they didn't" argument which bizarrely never ends with "so let's force them to do so" and more often seems to encourage burying plastics in landfills, which is exactly the thing the companies wanted. Since they sell the input for the new plastic production.
I would add that I think one angle they use is to connect fossil fuel emissions to things you like, presenting the false choice of "thing you like" vs "cutting carbon" when in fact most things could have significantly less carbon if we wanted them to. But obviously fossil fuel suppliers don't really want that as the easiest wins in almost all cases are to simply not burn fossil fuels.
There's so much low hanging fruit that we are missing out on at the moment that if someone is talking about making sacrifices, they're probably scamming you.
That sounds like a very convenient way for us to keep complaining about the problem without ever having to do anything about it. Civilization as we know it is built on this stuff, meaning if we want any significant change in the short term we're going to have to make sacrifices. If you're unwilling to let go of out of season food shipped from half way around the world or disposable plastic trash bags or whatever, will you ever vote for someone who might ban those things? If you're unwilling to pay extra for items manufactured using green techniques, will you vote for the person who pushes regulation toward that end?
Frankly, statements like that are why I'm incredibly pessimistic about ever turning our environmental abuses around.
If solving climate change were pain-free we'd have done it already. I find it very concerning that there are so many people like you who seem to think it isn't worth doing anything that inconveniences them.
Liquifying or turning it into syngas seems counter intuitive as we’re releasing a long chain carbon store back into atmospheric co2
There's no benefit to storing carbon if you immediately turn round and extract fossil fuels to replace the carbon you just buried.
Even when we start making plastic at large scales from captured carbon, it's still not a good idea to bury that if you then need to go and make more of it.
Landfills are just generally not the best option and you'll probably find support for them traces back directly to fossil fuel interests since they very neatly line up with their incentive structure compared with the alternatives.
I think that's exactly wrong, if it's really made from captured carbon. At that point, it would make sense to make plastic with the sole intent of burying it.
We should mandate an international standard size container for food and beverages, so that eg. glass bottles can be reused by multiple brands, just with a different paper logo glued on.
And it's not just plastics. Imagine all of the newsprint that was put into landfills before the Internet and recycling came along. That's quite a few tons of carbon!
I don’t think saying that individuals, and populations, are blameless and it’s all BP and their ilk.
BP would stop drilling if people stopped buying.
Similarly, I think drug dealers are filling a demand problem and blaming them solely is not accurate.
Meanwhile I happily walk everywhere and don’t drive a car (for over two decades). I don’t sermonize people at all though. It is a simple amount of personal usage.
We have to lower carbon footprint per person. And start with the biggest offenders first.
Examples of peak hypocrisy: https://pagesix.com/2019/07/30/a-listers-flock-to-google-sum...
Neither you nor the article you link to provide any clear path for what you think these people should do instead.
There is the implication that they shouldn't fly anywhere. So are you and pagesix "cancelling" flying? Or are you only cancelling flying for your political enemies? If they chose not to fly, would you mock them for that instead, yes of course.
And these people who are apparently your political enemies because they want to do something about climate change. So basically, you're on team fossil fuels destroying the planet but you get to feel good about yourself because you're non-specifically angry at someone else for reasons that don't really add up.
Can you be more specific, is there anything there but a distraction? If you want to strike out at rich people then a progressive carbon tax seems a really basic thing to call for.
Fly commercial instead of private plane or yacht.
I don’t think we have to switch meetings to zoom just to cut carbon emissions, but flying in a private plane has way higher carbon emissions than just taking commercial air, even first class. Private jets are 10-100x more polluting (per passenger) than commercial air. [0]
This isn’t a huge dent in climate change but it represents the kind of personal decisions we all must make. So it’s hard to try to convince me to bike or walk for short trips rather than take a car if you’re not doing the same.
Also note that the alternative isn’t do nothing and burn the planet down.
Commercial air isn’t exclusive to exclusive Google camps in Italy where the rich plan to fight climate change. We can do both, reduce personal emissions and plan large policy changes.
Unless you’re the head of state, there’s no reason to sail a yacht or fly private jets to discuss climate change. I think it’s like eating cake and caviar while planning famine relief.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/private...
I still don't understand how that's anything but detrimental to the goal that we are supposed to care about.
It only makes sense to me if you want the people to starve, or want to pretend the starvation isn't happening. What other goal does calling the famine relief organisers hypocrites achieve?
Like how much caviar could one organizer be eating that you think, if only I stop this person who is talking about famine that other people are pretending isn't happening, from eating that caviar, and get them to eat steak instead (but not a fancy steak) then we'd have this famine under control. But if they don't, well I guess we'll just have to let other, totally unconnected people die. Is this really a moral position to take? We do agree that the famine is a real thing that's happening, don't we?