[qikInNdOutReply]

The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore, since the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state, and activism was shown to be easy exhaustable compared to the endurance of lobbyism aka cooperate activism. Future frustrated voices will turn straight to violence and skip this unproducitve state of affairs.

[donkeyd]

> the social plaza belongs to cooperate and the state

I think it's too easy to just blame corporations and governments for this. They are definitely part in this, but a large part of lack of activism around climate change is also the people themselves who don't want to change. The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

For many people its easy to be activist when the problem is clear and present and the solution has little to no impact on daily life. With climate change neither are true. Except for the occasional headline of extreme weather, daily life continues, so the problem isn't obvious to everyone. Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations. It requires us to travel less, consume less, be more aware of what we consume and so on. It requires us to drive smaller cars, live in smaller and better insulated homes and become less individually oriented and pay more for our clothing. Most people don't want this, they want to continue buying cheap clothing from Primark and fly to NYC for the weekend.

I'm personally in the 'given up hope' boat. Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways. Maybe generational change is possible, but even that would have to be a coordinated effort and I don't see that happening either.

[pydry]

>Also, actually doing something about it takes effort/investment from everyone, not just government and corporations.

This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

The implicit message is that rather than the company being forced to change by fiat, "people" just need to take more personal responsibility.

The latter is a pipe dream and the former (e.g. carbon taxes) is the only way of dealing with climate change but they don't care, of course - their profits are at stake.

Hence they always prescribe more personal responsibility.

[donkeyd]

> This is pretty much the standard line corporations throw out to try and shirk responsibility. This is why they've always been so keen on recycling relative to other, more effective methods, for instance.

Yes, but this is only part of it and once again is an easy way to blame corporations. It's not just easy for them to tell people to recycle. It's also really easy for people to recycle and feel good about themselves while not doing much.

To really impact climate change, we need societal change and that has to come from everyone. People, companies, government all need to change, we can't keep pointing fingers at each other, but that's what we're all doing.

[pydry]

>is an easy way to blame corporations

It really isn't. The 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions have a massively outsized impact on the climate. They have got exceptional PR and have done a spectacular job of diffusing their responsibilities and protecting their bottom lines at the expense of the planet.

It's easy to buy into their propaganda though.

[sw104]

I'm completely in the 'given up hope boat' with you. It's clear that almost nobody is willing to truly change their lifestyle to practice what they preach.

I live in a UK city and despite having a pretty good bus network, so many people come to work along the same routes as the buses in their own personal 4x4 vehicle.

We'd require a literal environmentally friendly autocracy to pry people's cars out of their garages or to even encourage the notion of walking / cycling / taking public transport.

Not to speak about the amount of complete and utter garbage for sale everywhere, people flying around the world at a whim to see a few landmarks or to get a tan.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Regarding public transport a conductor enforcing code of conduct would be nice.

Jobs!1!!

[Paul-Craft]

> Even the most environmentally aware people around me pretty much just eat less meat, but they haven't actually changed their ways. So I don't expect the average F150 driving steak eater to suddenly start changing their ways.

What do you expect people in general to do? Granted, driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint" [0] by 50%. How much would that help?

The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1] Until we, collectively, do something about their practices, there's precious little that individuals can do to get us to net zero.

Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.

There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point, we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what we do right now.

I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should all work on reducing our consumption, because at this point, the choices that are going to provide us a better future in the next couple of decades are essentially those that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the effects of climate change will ensure that the number of people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.

So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I don't know how to deal with that at a personal level, myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?

---

[0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term intended to blame you and not the actual (mostly corporate) actors responsible for making most of the emissions.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-pe...

[klooney]

The 100 corporations thing is silly. They aren't out there polluting for the fun of it, they're making stuff for people and organizations.

If people and governments and companies stop buying gas, the pollution on Chevron's ledger for oil extraction and refining will plummet as they get stuck with smaller markets like plastic manufacturing.

Those dastardly 100 corporations are emitting to make stuff for you.

[donkeyd]

Thanks for writing this, people in general seems to completely be missing this point. Oil companies pollute to provide us with:

Fuel for our cars. Fuel for shipping all the goods we want cheaply made in Asia. Fuel for planes to business meetings that could be done online. Fuel for planes we take to mass consume alcohol in the Caribbean. Plastics for packaging all that stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the stuff we're buying. Plastics for producing the cheap clothing we wear twice and throw out.

Oil companies are just one example. And alternatives for most of this this are all more expensive, which is why most people don't want to switch to better alternatives, like:

Buy locally sourced produce. Don't buy imported avocados, bananas, coconuts. Buy locally sourced meat. Get whole chickens and eat everything. Make a stock from the leftovers. Buy organic cotton clothing. Or figure out what clothing you can get that's locally produced. Buy furniture from a local furniture craftsman. Don't replace things that aren't broken. Don't go to McDonald's, go to a local burger restaurant that doesn't import 'Irish grass fed beef'. Take a train to a vacation destination nearby.

For some of us, all of this may be obvious, but for the majority of people it isn't. And as long as we keep blaming companies and then sit back, nothing will ever change.

[Paul-Craft]

They're making stuff for people who get no input into how that stuff is made, much of which they can't just stop consuming.

[Brusco_RF]

Of course people have an input. You can buy it from someone else who makes it a different way, or not at all.

[tstrimple]

The fact that Nestle still exists should be proof enough for anyone that it literally doesn't matter how horrible a large corporation is. There is no activism route to correcting these companies behavior. Only legislation with teeth will work. That we'll all collectively decide to stop doing business with bad companies is nothing but a libertarian fantasy.

[Paul-Craft]

Let's leave aside "not at all," because that's often not a viable option. Let's also remember, we're talking about reaching net zero emissions. For instance, where do I buy carbon neutral food?

You can't materialize those alternatives if they don't exist. And, when we're talking about making things in more sustainable ways by emitting less carbon, because carbon externalities aren't accounted for, the sustainable way is more expensive than the dirty way. So, capitalist corporations being the profit maximizing machines that they are, inevitably choose the dirty way.

Then there are the energy inputs to account for.

See also this comment by another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630362

[Draiken]

But there are many ways to make all of this stuff. Many times there are better ways and less harmful ways, but those are basically always less profitable.

This is capitalism and the one and only objective is profit. It's never going to be working towards having a sustainable world, getting better stuff, getting less useless stuff, etc.

We don't need half the stupid stuff that's being sold to us and we keep buying it because that's how the system is setup.

So yes, they aren't polluting for the fun of it. They are doing so for the profit of a few.

[klooney]

This is a common but equally silly complaint- people were denuding their islands of trees and hunting animals to extinction long before anything approximating capitalism. Socialism's externality record isn't amazing either.

Disagreeing on what things are important is just the human condition.

[Draiken]

Sure, but we evolved and now we know better.

Except with the current state of affairs, we know it's the wrong thing to do but still keep doing it in favor of profits.

It makes no sense to compare how things were ages ago (even quite recently, in fact) to where we are now. This kind of dismissal is low effort and deflects the real issue because nobody wants to admit just how bad it is.

For a very recent example, it became public Exxon knew the harm they would be doing to the planet through fossil fuels and they couldn't care less. Gotta increase that shareholder value.

[Aunche]

>The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations

Read the source carefully. This is not what the BBC or the original paper [1] said. This is a meme that came from tabloids and Reddit. What it does say is that top 100 fossil fuel producers, produce fossil fuels that cause 70% of greenhouse gasses. Obviously, you aren't going to dig for and refine oil in your backyard, so a corporate entity is going to do it for you. Despite the anti-capitalist slant of this meme, the largest producers are all state-owned: "China Coal" (which isn't even a single entity), Gazprom, Aramco, etc. The implication that global warming is the fault of these "corporations" is especially nonsensical because it implies that all fossil fuel producers should conspire to limit their production. Basically, this is describing OPEC on steroids and would make even John Rockefeller blush.

[1] https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-...

[wizofaus]

Fossil fuel corporations will have to "conspire" to reduce production though, unless they can conspire to come up with some way of extracting said fuels and allowing them to be used without the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The massive amount of capital investment that currently goes into producing fossil fuels needs to start being directed towards producing energy in a manner compatible with maintaining a habitable planet, and it's hard to see that happening until we collectively agree that it's not reasonable to profit from fossil fuel extraction and combustion. And yes, the governments of countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are absolutely critical to that effort - until there's a real sense such governments are prepared to prepared to make radical changes in how their economies function then there's little the rest of us can do to alter the trajectory of global emissions. On that basis as an individual I'm happy to make lifestyle changes that may happen to also reduce my overall ecological footprint but at least bring some other benefit (driving less being the obvious one - even if it somehow caused more carbon emissions, the upsides of spending less time sitting in traffic are way too numerable to dismiss).

[dexterdog]

> The Netherlands is a great example where, in recent elections, nearly half of votes went to political parties that want to reduce response to climate change and other environmental issues.

But is that an anti-environment stance or an anti-big-green stance? I can understand people being sick of the mishandling of the crisis that is being funded with their money.

[qikInNdOutReply]

I label the rightwing anti-migration parties as actually "anti"-climatechange-sideffects.

They are just more willing to invest ton of money in fighting symptoms, as the anti-neighbour tribal mindset is so hardwired.

Shame its never enough to really get to the roots of the problem. Would be fascinating to see the tea party turn on Big Oil because they caused this mess.

[Aunche]

>The whole activism thing doesent do a lot anymore

This is because activism today has completely become synonymous with raising awareness. While raising awareness is important, it's also the easiest part of activism, since the rise of the internet, so it's what people gravitate towards the most. That's how we end up with so much doomposting and doomscrolling on social media.

Individual action served as the foundation of Civil Rights movement, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts. It may be difficult to reason why walking a hour to work every day in the hot, Alabama sun rather than taking this bus will expand their rights, but history taught us that it was important. Meanwhile, there isn't a similar coordinated effort to carpool and seek alternative means of commuting today. What was also important were donations that funded legal challenges to discriminating businesses and municipal governments. Again, you don't see grass-roots organization funding lawsuits against corporations that are illegally polluting. Most important of all is ironically lobbying. Without the lobbying efforts of the NAACP, the Civil Rights protection may not have made it through, and if they had, they would have been substantially weaker. Again, this isn't something that is ever suggested by climate activists, despite their awareness of its importance. As Haidt implies, unlike doomscrolling, these types of activism are actually empowering.