[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.

[Brusco_RF]

Is there a shortage of Nestle competitors ? The fact that people still buy Nestle tells you how much the masses actually care about Nestle's behavior, in dollar terms. ie, less than the savings that Nestle presents.

Using legislation "with teeth" to force something that the masses don't want is autocracy, not democracy.

[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).