Eat the rich.
Organize with Sunrise Movement or other similar groups. The US government is a oligarchy, our representatives don’t represent it. The only way we will get any kind of change is through organizing and forcing them to listen to us.
What we can do is press for more regulation.
When you’re poor, you already do 3-5 and 2 is usually taking a bus or walking anywhere.
Here in the USA, the overwhelming majority of poor people eat meat; even the homeless! They just get low-quality processed meat instead.
All of these are individual actions. I’d add organizing with other folks trying to make a difference. Direct action or political advocacy can have a much more significant effect than an individual acting alone.
The political advocacy would (in the best case) still end up with a ban on these actions that disproportionately impact the climate so why not just start getting used to tofu already?
Not enough people seem to understand that you will have to sacrifice things for the sake of sustainability.
For example
There is no way to supply the amount of meat consumed sustainably. It doesn’t matter if you cut off every billionaire’s head and send all meat profits directly to industry workers. It does not change that people currently eat more meat than can be produced sustainably.
There are so many other cases where this is true. It’s not just rich people and corporations. They are an entirely different symptom, solving one will not solve the other.
Keep handy a list of the rich bastards responsible for the overwhelming majority of the problem, just in case.
We need to stop shipping things across the world for economic reasons. We need to produce and buy locally. The truth is, the global economy has to crash and rebuild itself if we want an eco friendly future. Worldwide shipping needs to go away. Commercial aviation needs to go away. These are things no one wants to hear but would do the most good. Sacrifice is key. We may need to live modestly for a generation in order for energy production to advance to the point where we no longer have to. Our modern growth is a result too hastly adopting dirty technologies.
I was under the impression that cargo ships were actually pretty efficient due to their absolutely massive capacity. Compared to things like airplanes, I mean.
They are efficient (cargo vs fuel consumption). They also go through my regular car’s full gas tank in about 30 seconds. Less ships means less fuel burned. If we produce locally, transportation is not needed.
Still just 2% of global CO2 emissions
While animal agriculture is responsible for 20% and eating plants directly instead of feeding them to animals first would use 75% less land which means we could grow forests at here that store carbon.
The original commenter here just conveniently ignored that though.
all of agriculture is only about 20%. animal agriculture is a subset of that. don’t lie
Every peer reviewed study on it says between 14.5 and 19.6% is animal agriculture.
not according to the fao
Do they carry as much as your car? lol
I agree to some extent, but I don’t necessarily think that we have to or even can live modestly for a generation. We “just” need to do things the right way. Right now we are not even offered the option to.
Global shipping can help ensure that the production happens where it is most efficient. The large quantities being shipped also minimizes the emissions per product for the distance travelled, so global shipping isn’t all bad. The most environmentally expensive trip is the one from the store to the home. It would be nice though if global shipping happened on renewable energy or wind. It might be slower, but it’s already slow, so what’s the difference. The local distribution also needs to addressed. Everything is being transported in trucks domestically. It would be better to use trains or even ships for a lot of the trucked stuff.
Things that can be produced locally should be available locally, and not shipped around the globe only due to pricing. The worst example that I know of is how American breed chicken is being frozen and send to China so cheap labour can do do the chopping and then shipped back for the American market. That’s just disgusting and not at all efficient. That kind of economic incentives must be shut down politically.
Commercial aviation needs to be stopped, starting with the short flights. Trains are perfectly capable of achieving the same travel time and on renewable energy. As of right now it’s not really an option to go fast cross USA or Europe by train, but this is primarily because we do allow those trips to be done way too cheap by plane and in cars. More expensive flights and cheaper direct trains could enable us to still go on the annual holiday without bad consciousness. And for the love of god, don’t waste any more money on expanding car infrastructure. It’s a bottomless pit that also destroys the opportunities for better options.
Back in the 90s I worked out the arithmetic and concluded that legalizing agricultural hemp (not marijuana but fiber) and reducing American beef consumption by 10%, would save the South American rainforests.
I forget the numbers now, but at the time almost all timber logging in the rainforests was to make paper. I remember buying some really nice plywood called “teppa” that came from I think Argentina, which became unavailable because all the logs were being pulped. Anyway, if the market for beef dropped 10%, forcing the beef industry to cut production, the drop in cattle feed consumption would reduce the demand for corn (a main component). If the land were used for hemp fiber instead it would produce enough paper to completely replace our paper imports from S.A.
This practical exercise probably taught me more economics than my college Econ 101 class.
Your professor in econ 101 would probably ask where the profit is though.
Should be obvious to a prof that the beef and cattle feed producers would lose some business, the hemp farmers would get it instead, and the money spent on paper would stay in the country. Seems pretty simple.
We get it, billionaires bad, but it’s in the effing tweet “what they can do as individual”. All the options listed are solid.
no, they’re not. how about direct action instead of consumer choices?
I don’t see how these options & direct action ae exclusive?
I didn’t say they are. but these options are not effective.
If you have better advice, feel free to share it, but “direct action” sounds Linda vague when you just throw it like you did.
it’s intentionally vague. build an affinity group and assess your capabilities.
My dude, being “intentionally vague” is just admitting you’ve got nothing to offer. In fact, your “suggestion” is even less likely to have any effect than implementing the suggested tips from the OP.
Quit barking.
Your direct action is to make measured, intentional choices in your day to day life that have an impact related to climate change. Some of them are more direct than others, all of them are important for the topic. What you want is the dopamine hit of quick easy wins, which is not really attainable in this context.
Your reaction is a classic defense mechanism for people that like to make noise but not actually take any action themselves.
Because you are the majority we are probably fucked as a species.
you have no idea what I do, but I guarantee that you can stop purchasing everything on that list, you could die and never purchase any of it again, and the powerful interests responsible for the destruction of the environment will continue to grow.
Removed by mod
if everyone who disagree with you is a bot, you must live in a lonely world.
We haven’t really disagreed on anything yet. I was just making sure. I also answered your question and you chose to ignore that part.
I don’t care for your dehumanization
you don’t seem to know what direct means.
Surely its common sense.
and yet they did not actually suggest any direct actions
No, I meant what can I do without inconveniencing myself.
That’s a major problem today - “what can I do?” means “where should I post about this?”. If it can be done with two thumbs on a phone, today’s activists are all over it.
Thoughts and prairs
Noice! My local mega church sells those.
Unfortunately, they are having some supply issues with the thoughts. They go back to long before the pandemic, but the pandemic made it all significantly worse.
- ??? Do, instead of hoping that someone else will do for you
- Limit car use to a minimum
- Ok
- Stop flying
- Learn DIY and repair
- Regulation
- Need more public transport / Regulation
- Ok
- Naw
- Regulation
Removing one billionaire will do more good for the planet than anything a regular individual can do
That should not stop you from trying. You, and everyone else in this thread for that matter, just drop excuses. Either you guys finally start removing some billionaires, I’m all for that, or you start doing the little things. Ideally, just do both.
I mean, I still try to do all these things.
But I still don’t really believe anything I do makes any real difference, because my individual impact is pretty much zero when compared to billionaires and corpos.
Yeah it shouldn’t be an excuse. Sure the billionaires are terrible per person compared to a regular person. But they are still a minority. Most of the air traffic is regular folk traveling for work or fun. And freight being hauled by plane or trucks because of all the useless stuff people buy. Most of the cars driving every day are regular folk. By far the worst thing are cruise ships, dumping out huge amounts of pollution just for people to go on holiday.
Billionaires are terrible and should not be allowed to exist as they do today. But it isn’t a reason not to do something yourself. If enough people do it, it will make an impact.
Can the students asking this remove billionaires? (Without going to prison)
No, so whats your point? They want to do something. Telling them to not do things because those things are less significant than other things that could theoretically be done is nihilistic.
If a building is burning, and all you have is a thimble of water, whats the point?
someone else might also have a thimble! then you two can feel smug together.
smug? where in my comment am I being smug
i didn’t think you were, I’m lampooning people who think their thimble is meaningful.
Not really. You have to remove the companies that made them a billionaire or they’ll just be replaced.
Drug trade has shown: even if you remove the company, as long as demand is there, another supplier/company will pop up.
Sort of. There have been major shortages before and sometimes you can’t do anything about a lack of supply. Buying drugs is still a localized thing apart from the darknet.
I dont think that you can reduce something like that to simple supply and demand though since it creates mental and physical dependencies in a lot of cases.
I think this is why the OP mentioned buy less stuff and travel less, these two directly reduce the demand for environmentally harmful goods and services, reducing the ecological impact of the companies which issue the shares that make the billionaires in question billionaires.
It’s kinda disappointing to see a post about good actionable advice to do the best you can to reduce climate change and the first reply on Lemmy is non actionable (and more controversially; to my mind irrelevant) advice to assassinate billionaires.
What’s non actionable about it? Its just a different perspective is all.
So remove the demand by instituting a properly managed state industry that provides the service in a sustainable way
At a minimum (and something achievable in the very short term), regulations and the enforcement to go with it.
prove it
Prove that wealth doesn’t just poof out of existence when the owner dies?
prove that another billionaire would take their place. this is a serious hypothesis that we can test, but the conclusion is not foregone.
Someone inherits their wealth. You realize this, right?
please run the experiment with a sufficient sample size and let me know the results.
No.
- Vote for candidates who will do something about climate change
That’s the one for removing billionaires.
Yeah us normal civilians can make a miniscule difference by doing these things
But let’s not act like the problem isn’t billionaires like musk, swift, bezos etc and mega cooperations like nestle or even Boeing. They are the real problems. We will live to see the first trillionaire, yeah trillion. No one should have that much wealth. Eat the rich yo
Nestle and Boeing produces things that you consume. Bezos is a billionaire because of all the shit that you bought from him.
If everyone refused to fly, Boeing would disappear in about 5 years and if they didn’t buy shit they don’t need, there wouldn’t be a fast fashion industry.
You can turn it around as much as you want at the end it’s the behaviour of the masses that matters.
Those things we consume also involve a lot of political pocket lining, to look the other way when they need to do bad shit.
We need information, math, data that distinguishes between:
A) tragedy of the commons–you doing it yourself won’t make a difference, but everyone doing it will, so you doing it yourself makes a difference, and
B) the change is so minuscule that even if everybody in the world did it, it still wouldn’t move the needle.
Everything in B should be replaced with “clobber billionaires and coporations and governments”, but nothing from A gets misplaced in B.
I think its pretty obvious what “everyone” needs to do.
- buy less garbage
- eat healthier shit
- travel to places sustainably
- quit working for billionaires
- tear down our shitty institutions and rebuild our civilization from the ground up
We all know that the corpos and governments are hellbent on apocalypse, we don’t have to support them
“tragedy if the Commons” is a capitalist myth, just like consumer activism.
Suggestion #1 (voting for candidates who support pro-environment legislation) results in the sweeping systemic changes that you’re looking for.
Yeah but then we get told that’s the wrong pro-environmental candidate and that we should pragmatic as we watch billionaires dig graves for us
Mega corporations like nestle get their money from us normal civilians not caring about what we consumes impact on the environment.
Like if you literally disbanded nestle over night, not even splitting them up or selling things off but somehow just got rid of them and all their product’s… does the negative impact on the environment go away? or do new companies grow to meet the unmet demand and all that’s changed is what company is providing cheap goods at the expense of the environment?
We can’t all afford to care. This is the huuuuuuuge problem with individual action. People living hand-to-mouth on an inadequate income – that’s most people – will buy the cheapest brand and of course they will. We can’t make them buy the “responsible” stuff just by shaming them. All it’s going to do is force them to justify themselves with “it’s all just green bullshit anyway”
Systemic change is the only way. The only way.
billionaires like musk, swift, bezos etc
One of these is not like the others.
Awv sorry i hurt your swiftie feelings but she’s definitely doing her part in killing the earth.
Her private jet spews more toxic emissions than you could ever dream of doing in 10 lifetimes. Take a seat child, the adults are speking .
