The wealthy, who disproportionately wreck the environment across the whole globe, refuse to be less destructive.
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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Why is the blame placed solely on wealthy individuals? While they do bear a share of the responsibility, it's also important to consider the role of everyday citizens. The choices made by voters, such as supporting climate change deniers or prioritizing short-term economic growth over long-term environmental sustainability, play a greater role in shaping policies. It's unreasonable to blame the system when the existing checks and balances refuse to act.
Because the wealthy have completely corrupted the checks and balances, control the media networks and manipulate the voting populace through propaganda?
Yes, but if you as an individual allow yourself to be misled and manipulated, is it entirely the manipulator's fault? They should not lie to you of course, but the failure to question a new piece of information before you let it influence your opinions and view of the world is entirely on you.
The most logical conclusion is that we as a species have failed. A better society than the one we've built would not tolerate this kind of manipulation. Corrupt politicians are a symptom, not the cause.
I'm not at all what you'd call a religious person, but consider the Nine Satanic Sins: the worst sin you can commit is that of stupidity. Imagine a world where everybody lived by this!
Yeah, it's the manipulators fault. Ideally we would all have time and energy to consider every input on our lives for spin and slant, but most of us don't. And even if most people didn't have to work two jobs to own a car and have a home, it's still the manipulators fault for using their status for personal gain at the expense of others.
I do agree that a society built better would not encourage the manipulations we see today, but we haven't failed because people are dumb. Perhaps we are struggling because our current society was built by bigoted white men who wanted to expand control, power, and wealth. Maybe we could do better by allowing for time to mingle with our neighbors and learn from one another.
Nobody is stupid for being manipulated. That line of thinking only encourages people to double down when they realize they are wrong, to avoid being seen as stupid.
Nobody is stupid for being manipulated. That line of thinking only encourages people to double down when they realize they are wrong, to avoid being seen as stupid.
I think that's a big part of the problem. Nobody is 100% right all of the time. There's no self-improvement without the ability to say "okay, this is how I could have done X better, I'll try this next time."
The opposite of "dumb" is not "all-knowing". It's the desire and ability to gain new knowledge, and to apply that knowledge to known and new situations.
Taking everything you hear or read at face value and shifting the blame for the consequences on those who've provided you with wrong information effectively means you expect the world to treat you like a helpless idiot unable to think for yourself. That can't possibly be what you're aiming for.
Taking it one step further, would you be to blame if you passed a piece of misinformation on to your buddy or family, you yourself believing it to be correct? You couldn't be to blame, because fact-checking was the job of whomever gave it to you. Only they've got it from somebody else, ... where will the blame game end? Would you introduce a two-class society divided into people whose job it is to check their facts, and those who are to take everything at face value?
It's also impossible to gain new knowledge without questioning what's currently believed to be correct information. Only a few decades ago, it was common 'knowledge' that a good husband needs to show his wife where her place is once in a while. Go back a bit further and people 'knew' how to recognise a witch by her birthmarks. A bit further back Ignaz Semmelweis was committed to the madhouse because he tried to establish a rule that doctors should wash their hands and instruments between an autopsy and a surgery.
The powerful people of that time didn't mislead you. They gave you what they believed was correct information.
The only thing that works in the long term is when personal responsibility is both possible and expected from every person. And that's what many people fear.
I respectfully disagree. The powerful people (which have considerable overlap with the wealthy people in a Venn diagram) can set the narrative and potentially influence new policies, but their power comes mainly from those who follow them.
Pretty much everybody in the market for a new car could choose to buy one with a smaller engine - precious few people actually need a pickup or SUV with a V6 or even V8.
Long-haul or intercontinental flights are mainly luxury items - even more so in a post-Covid world where pretty much any business can be done much more efficiently by video chat.
Many, many things are thrown away that still work or could easily be fixed, but the replacement has this fancy new feature and really doesn't cost that much more, all things considered.
etc.
These are all things that most common people could decide to do differently at no additional cost to them, but very few choose to do.
The same goes for new laws. If you* really care about the environment, you could just work on your environmental footprint out of your own free will instead of waiting for a law or regulation that forces you to. It's not like e.g. conserving energy is illegal until a new law makes it mandatory.
ETA: * 'you' in general, not the person I'm replying to specifically.
I also respectfully disagree with your argument. If someone were to walk into a known minefield and be killed by a mine, I would not consider that person deserving of their fate but would ask why they thought it was appropriate to walk into a known minefield and what may have influenced them to think that way. When we are considering people, including ourselves, we have to consider that we are dealing with limited information and biases. You are correct that the average person is probably making decisions that ultimately support the most destructive organizations on the planet, but why are they doing that? Do the people who financially support the companies most responsible for climate change have any real understanding of the consequences of their decisions, or is it more likely that they are influenced by the culture they live in and the information they are most commonly exposed to? If the latter case is more likely, who is responsible for creating that informational environment? I do not believe that anyone is a rational actor 100% of the time, so to me the blame lies with those organizations propagating information which is profitable to themselves in the short term and destructive to our species in the long term. Us humans aren't consciously making that decision by weighing all the variables; it is happening because the system we exist in which benefits our most powerful individuals primary rewards quarterly profit rather than the ultimate survival of humans.
I feel that you are both right and there's something in between. I don't think really anyone can plead ignorance to environmental damage at this point. There's nobody alive who doesn't know that cigarettes are bad for you, at this point, but still, all smokers choose to take that first puff, and people have differing amounts of fervor about stopping, if they do at all.
Still, you have a point that nobody is a rational actor all the time. And even rational actors are subject to the tragedy of the commons. And some, rich or not, are just not interested in morals or the long term good.
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As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
Rockstrom was among the authors of the 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper, which warned of a domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas and dying forests could tilt the planet into a state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile.
The new Brazilian scientific module Criosfera 2, a solar and wind-powered laboratory that collects meteorological information, measured the lowest extent of sea ice in the region both for summer and winter.
In early July, a Chilean team on King George Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, registered an unprecedented event of rainfall in the middle of the austral winter when only snowfalls are expected.
Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in US history, which happened in August.
Raul Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen and the University of Santiago, said the effects of this year’s heat were being felt across South America in the form of unprecedented water stress in Uruguay, record-breaking fires in Chile, the most severe drought in the Amazon basin in 50 years, prolonged power shortages in Ecuador caused by the lack of hydropower, and increased shipping costs along the Panama canal due to low water levels.
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Don't get too lost in the dystopian side of things. It's easy to do, and yes, all indications are that we are in dire, dire straights.
Yes, we've been told we're at a turning point, many times over the last decade. A turning point from stability to anthropocentric doom. I choose to see it as a wake-up call. Scientists pointing out challenges is a sign we're paying attention, and the growing awareness among voters, even some I'm surprised at for their reasoning to care now, shows a shift in priorities. It's a chance to use this as momentum to push for effective policies and individual action, even if my (our) generation won't benefit and will likely suffer. We can make it better for who comes after, though, and it's worth a shot.