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Comment by tinfoilhatter | Hacker News Reader

57 companies are responsible for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. I'm very tired of people trying to tell others that not eating meat or driving a vehicle with an internal combustion engine is the key to solving the problem, because it's not and never has been.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/just-57-...

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This is extremely reductive. Noting that oil, gas, and cement companies are responsible for pollution is ignoring that oil, gas, and cement are inputs to everything we consume and the infrastructure used to transport goods. Exxon Mobil isn’t extracting oil and burning it for no reason, it gets refined into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc. Cement is used in concrete which is what infrastructure is made of, along with steel. Everyone uses infrastructure, either directly or indirectly. Everything you buy was transported on a truck, and possibly a plane or a ship. The supply chains for the components of products you consume, and so on. It’s impossible to avoid if you want to maintain the current global population. We could stop using oil and cement, but there would be mass starvation and our current infrastructure would degrade and crumble over time.

Right - so how is me not eating meat or not driving an ICE vehicle going to help change the situation? The people with the capital to actually change things seem to be more interested in mongering fear while continuing to profit off of their ecosystem-destroying industries, than trying to come up with effective solutions to the problem.

It's not. Not eating meat or driving a hybrid car doesn't help to save the environment, it helps YOU feel better.

The gigatonnes of CO2 linked to a small number of fossil fuel producers are also linked to a very large number of people putting it in their ICE vehicles. People not driving ICE vehicles is clearly going to change that quite a lot...

The list you linked explicitly excludes emissions from agriculture, you are talking about %70 of what they measured, not overall emissions. If everyone stopped eating meat, it would reduce overall global emissions by a third which is hugely significant.

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