We do need action on all levels of society, and we need to be treating this as a crisis.
On a local level (in the UK) there are a lot more community and Council groups being setup to try and find solutions I would absolutely recommend attending those.
Other than that, ensure your pension is invested in green and eco investments and try to fly less (maybe even drive less).
These sound like good initiatives. I’m not sure it’ll be enough, though. The planes for regardless. And public transport is still getting worse – often, driving isn’t a choice.
Due to shrinkflation, too, for example, the contents of products have reduced by 10–50% over the last year but the packaging is more or less the same size. So the carbon footprint of consumables is higher than it was, and when it was less it was still higher than it needed to be. The manufacturers simply do not gaf and will undermine any local or individual efforts unless pressure is put on them.
We need to focus our attention, collectively, on the production side of the equation if we want to save the planet in time.
Couldn’t agree more! Buy in bulk where and when you can (not always an option due to expense). Environmental cost of products and packaging should 100% be part of the manufacturer an brands responsibility.
I think it’s going to have to come from governmental level, forcing certain packaging materials out and taxing other ones heavily. I would recommend writing letters to your local representatives.
Pension, lol. I don’t know how old you are, but I wouldn’t count on pension in very few decades.
We would need to do much more than flying less, driving less and invest money. We would need to change the entirety of our lifestyles. And by now we probably need to have luck as well.
Pensions are a very large overall current investment pot, so if we can shift that money into green ventures that would be advantageous.
But I agree we need to do a lot more, but outside of voting and contacting your representatives we need to get everyday people to make largest scale changes as soon as possible. But it does need to be more top down, governmental driven.
Lifestylism is not something that will magically save the planet, there are actors bigger than us and who control more power over the planet then the entire population located on it.
Also flying less and driving less, you can only do that if the infrastructure is built for it. In Europe? Yeah duh, look at Italy it killed domestic flight thanks to trains. But the US? Forget it! Amtrak fucking sucks, and you still have to drive from your suburb to the train station because viable public transport does not, and will not exist there. It’s been gutted completely by General Motors who essentialy are defacto the US government. (EDIT: The previous statement is to say that the US does not respond to the needs of it’s citizens but to those of capital)
The true enemies of the world are the shareholders willing to kill it for profit, and they have names and adressess. (Side note; do not commit to adventurism)
Time to transcend capitalism, then. It’s that or the apocalypse.
Perpetual growth mindset is absolutely a problem, maybe the root cause of this problem.
It definitely is the root cause of this problem. There’s no maybe. The faster the political center accepts this fact, the more of a hope we have of surviving this shit show.
Not sure how you get that political acceptance, without its taking way too long.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any hope of this happening.
I’m just absolutely sure that we’re not getting out of this mess unless the average centrist voter in the west stops being protective of capitalism as a knee jerk reaction.
Unchecked capitalism is the cause of all this. As long as we put money first, there’s no mitigating this. To go from a money first to a people first mindset, the average person needs to understand and accept the root cause, and reconcile with the fact that they are a large part of the problem not through their carbon footprint or waste management skills but through their political stances and voting habits.
Christ. We need massive, global action. We need people in the west to commit to drastically lowering their carbon footprints, ideally by finding alternatives to gas powered cars and cars in general, and we need immediate action on geo-engineering. Atmospheric cloud dust, carbon capture, everything. We can’t debate the ethics and morals forever. We just desperately need to start acting.
Yes, the time for debate and discussion are over. We just need people doing things and trying things on mass scale. I would highly recommend writing to your local representatives and ensuring they know it’s an issue people do care about. We need change from the bottom up and top down.
We need people in the west to commit to drastically lowering their carbon footprints
Aaaaaand you’ve succumbed to corporate propaganda. Carbon footprint is a term coined by BP marketing to shift blame to individuals instead of corporations so nothing would be done about it.
We need the GOVERNMENTS of the world to start drastically reducing corporate carbon footprints. Which will then force peoples’ footprints down when the cheap high-carbon goods and services are no longer available.
A huge portion of American carbon usage is personal transportation. The government can do many things to lower its carbon footprint but your life will look significantly different. Local governments are largely responsible for determining what citizens’ primary means of transportation is and that’s where people actually do have a lot of influence.
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