save the planet 🌎
save the planet 🌎
183 comments
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They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change, so we’re busting our ass off to reduce and they don’t even pretend to care. In truth we could do more for the environment with guillotines than paper straws
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They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change
They tricked us into believing metric fucktons of single use plastics would keep us safe and healthy.
But we never had any direct control over climate policy, because we never had any direct control over the capital itself.
All we could do was blame ourselves.
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Did they?
I can't recall anyone ever being anything but nonplussed and skeptical about paper straws. From what I can tell, it was a product of a think tank that pushed into the news, which then caused businesses to treat that as though it were public demand and pushed it out to everyone, and most people shrugged, used the obviously inferior product (because it was free and the alternatives require attention), and then people got on with their day.
On the wider scale this was pitched as 'the only thing you can personally do to combat climate change' - but I suspect it is the literal strawman of a figurative progressive position, purposely pushing a manufactured defective solution as a means to distract and suppress more substantive change and organization thereof.
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I'm so confused but you guys, how is reducing the amount of single use plastics in the environment a bad thing?
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Oh totally. billionaires carbon footprint is many orders of magnitude larger than multiple lifetimes and generations of us normies. Abolish billionaires. Redistribute that wealth. The environmental future we want - NOW.
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And yet, there aren't very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let's just pretend that all 3000 of the world's billionaires lived in the USA. They'd still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they're greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
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While this scum is allowed allocate all of the world's resources; every drop of water you conserve goes to their data centers and pleasure fleets.
There is no conservation until they're gone. It simply cannot be done.
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Companies 3 years ago: helping the environment is part of our core values
The same companies one day later: start to heavily use and train AI
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helping the environment is part of our core values
By the way, back to commuting to/from the office, people!
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That was always just green washing bullshit.
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you are being generous. They are more like
"Under enlightened Trump's benevolent leadership we have realized that environmental concerns, inclusivity, modern medicine and preventing political misinformation are all woke scams. Therefore effective immediately we are ditching all our efforts in these directions."
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Amazon bought an entire arena and named it "climate pledge arena". You can't make this shit up
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While this scum is allowed allocate all of the world’s resources; every drop of water you conserve goes to their data centers and pleasure fleets.
Does it? If everyone in America reduced the amount of water they used would data centres and yachts use it all up? Do you believe this?
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He didn’t mean water literally (yet, as we are running out of non-salt water…)
But we have (and likely will) if it were to come to rationing their pools would be prioritized our bath or even drinking water
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Yes. Oh my god they have said they want this. They didn't have to say, but they have.
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Yes, because the price of water would drop due to lower demand from the public, and so they could steal even more for data centers.
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Eco-friendly straws don't have to be mushy paper.
There are several other "vegetable plastics" that last long enough to serve as a fully functional straw, but months later degrade naturally. The reason you don't see them being used is because McDonald's doesn't want to spend an extra $0.10 on every order, because that would totally bankrupt the billionaire company you know.
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I still propose that we just stop with the single use straws and if people want straws for their drinks that badly they can bring their own reusable one, and if it isn't takeout the restaurant can provide a reusable one.
Like seriously why does everything need a straw?
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The best I've found is sugarcane straws. They cost 15cad for a 100 pack compared to 10dollars for 100 plastic straws, which is small enough to not matter to me.
I know for a fact they dissolve as I throw them into my own compost, and also they dissolve to nothing if added to hot water (side note, you should never drink hot drinks out of straws).
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Yep, sugarcane polymers are amazing. They can be made to dissolve quickly or last a little longer, depending on your needs. Technically they could be used as full packaging for chips and bread and similar foods.
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There is a hollow grass based solution used in asia which requires zero processing beyond cutting, drying and packaging. But I’ll keep the paper straws if the billionaires have to travel in paper planes and boats.
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I carry metal straws for this reason. I also bring my own cup, and most places I visit let me use both.
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In the last week I had the opportunity to use metal straws and bamboo straws. Much better than paper straws.
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Metal straws are nice
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Just don't trip
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Yeah, but I'm terrible about carrying them with me
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Start a cocaine or ketamine habit and you will always remember to have it on hand.
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Do they have to be 3 feet long novelty straws?
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Wheat stalk straws are surprisingly good. Don't need to wash them like metal and silicone ones.
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I love my metal straws. Great for smoothies and milkshakes. They don't collapse!
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Metal straws are annoying to clean. You can’t just put them in the dishwasher, but have to use more water washing by hand and need to buy a specific tool just for that.
But why are we using straws at all? Just say no
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Be the change you want to see in the world.
throws a Molotov at the next flying cruiser
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Bruh if you so much as spit on said cruiser you'll be wanted by the police for terrorism, despite the definition of terrorism being to threaten harm to civilians....
Before I submit, I want to clarify that I have read the UK Government's definition of terrorism, and as it's a stupid ass definition, I elected to ignore it.
"..as the use or threat of.. ..serious damage to property.. ..designed to influence the government.. ..for the purpose of advancing [an].. ..ideological cause."
As we know, damaging property belonging to anyone else, regardless of how many people will be saved, is against the legal law and punishable. HOWEVER, going back to their own law...
"..as the use or threat of.. ..serious violence against a person [OR] endangering a person's life (other than that of the person committing the action) [OR] creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.. ..which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism regardless of whether or not the action is designed to.. ..intimidate the public.. ..for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.. ..Action includes action outside the United Kingdom."
By their own law, any organisation intending to assist in the wilful and unprovoked violence against people, with explosives or firearms, is by their definition a terrorist. This defines the UK government and many companies as terrorists, coconspirators of Israel.
The disclaimer "other than that of the person committing the action" absolves anyone of the definition if they are doing so to stop the attacker. This defines Palestine Action as innocent as they were acting to stop the attacking arms company.But the only reason these interpretations are not the case in reality is because the government a) choose which laws to uphold and when, and b) defend their decision by lying that the Palestinian people were the instigators of their own eradication by the various countries of the world.
Sorry, I know this is just a meme
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BORTLES!
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Ah Blane we meet again
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Blaine is a pain and that is the truth.
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Always remember that coke and pepsi do not use recycled plastic in their coke or pepsi packaging, yet they are outwardly huge proponents of recycling the waste they create
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I despise how sprite changed to clear bottles claiming environmental reasons, when that reason was that they wanted to be less indentifiable in trash heaps and microplastic samples.
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They're not doing it out of spite, most plastics can't be recycled, not the way aluminum can (ha).
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Me switching to European cans of cola :3
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Do they not elsewhere? Is it just Australia?
We want our packaging to have more than one life. In Australia, all our bottles and cans can be recycled and all our soft drink and water bottles under 1L are made from 100% recycled plastic*.
*Excl. cap and label
https://www.coca-cola.com/au/en/offerings/thank-you-for-recycling
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That's why the billionaires have decided to hoard all the wealth among a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. They're trying to save the planet! When 10 people have everything and the rest are all dead - boom, planet saved.
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It’s not like ”they” held a meeting to decide they were going to get everything for themselves. Rather they’re embracing this inevitable ”feature” of the ongoing collapse of market economics.
Increasing the concentration of financial capital in the hands of a few people changes the value of that capital. For normal people, the dollar value is measured in the cost of food and living space. Billionaires, who despite evidence to the contrary, are human beings, don’t need or demand more of those real resources – say potatoes or tenancy in small rental apartments – than anyone else. In fact, they can in many cases make do with less! They prefer to subside on lobster, filet mignon or whatever fad diet their longevity coach prescribes, and live in lavish palaces and/or bunkers.
Billionaires, and even down to the measly top 10 percent of earners, are the ultimate hedge when things go sideways in the real economy. They allow governments to keep printing money by diverting a tidy sum of it from potatoes and apartment leases to the lobster, filet mignon, yacht and private jet economy – and more importantly, their investment portfolios.
My point being, that malevolence isn’t the main driver here, but a widespread failure of people to acknowledge that the fantasy of limitless growth inevitably must be realized within the confines of the fantasy world of the financial economy by insulating it from the real economy. Because in the latter we eventually have to accept that we have reached the highest amount of potatoes and apartments possible. This failure is on everyone, not just billionaires.
At this point, though, I guess ”they” (Peter Thiel et al) have pretty much decided to help this collapse along with the help of every major government. So I guess you’re right.
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I get what you’re saying and it is probably true from a macro standpoint, but don’t be too hasty to minimize the role of malevolence. If a rich person were so inclined, they could read the same articles and books as me and conclude that systemic problems are already pervasive and still growing. They could then withdraw their support for politicians like Trump (or even most democrats, to be fair) who do anything and everything to amplify those problems for the simple reason that rich people stand to gain from them. I am so furious with people like Thiel because i think they DO know what they’re doing, but they care more about the gains than the people they hurt.
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But who will clean the cruise ship jets for them?!
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Out of Elon's 35 or so kids, some will have been Bokanovskied into Epsilon Pluses, just enough to push a broom.
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Robots, probably. ChatGPT will figure it out, probably.
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Test
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Test successful!
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Thanks buddy.
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if we reduced wealth inequality to the point noone could afford that kind of shit i bet we could ride the plastic straw wave for a few centuries before it really came back to bite us.
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Nobody:
Larry Ellison: Buys an entire 90,000 acre Hawaiian Island just because
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Fixed:
Larry Ellison: Buys an entire 90,000 acre Hawaiian Island just because
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Nobody:
Absolutely no one:
OP: I'm going to use this meme format that is dumb for multiple reasons.
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The irony of using AI to make this image...
Humanity really is a lost cause
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Meanwhile billionaires create thousands of AI memes a day and you say nothing.
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Says who? I give all my billionaire best friends shit every day.
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Wrong! I whisper ‘aw beans’ under my breath every time it happens.
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Those ships are powered by baby chickens.
First they load up the tanks full of baby chickens. The chicks travel into a conveyor belt where a long row of old women pick up the chicks to if they are male or female. The females are grown to make more eggs. The males are tossed into the intake. The males are then mixed with air and tar and then injected into the piston at high pressure. Once top dead center is reached, a spark drivers the pressures to hundreds of PSI and as much as 800 C. The chicks have been known to survive up to that moment.
If they can perfect chick injection they will try more compact fuels like puppies, crocks, whales, baby elephants, the homeless and or orphans. They might end up stuck with birds so they might try just eagles. There are enough of each eagle to push the boats a good two or three miles!
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We need the international court to set hard caps that will result in prison time.
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International? We need the Intergalactic Court!
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Look, if living in a densified treeless hellscape of concrete towers that all look the same, filled with 350 sq. ft. windowless suites furnished with sawdust furniture, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for the ruling class to continue living well.
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This fat cat gets 350 sq ft!!
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Sure but it's a 5 foot ceiling. Like Alfred Jarry.
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Oh no. The Fats will be rounded up and rendered for cruise ship airplane fuel.
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I never had any issues with paper straws. Is it a skill issue?
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Same.
The people I've noticed complain seem to buy giant drinks and let them sit around for a while.
Never been a fan of flat warm soft drinks myself.
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I've definitely noticed paper straws come in different qualities, and are affected differently depending on what you're drinking. But the ones that turn mushy were largely phased out of use because I'm sure a lot of people complained. I haven't had a mushy straw in years.
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I haven’t had a mushy straw in years.
Same and the great irony is that people use paper straws as an example of a minor change to stop climate change when billionaires fly around on jets outputting a ton of co2... but paper straws have nothing to do with co2 output or climate change... they are to reduce single use plastics polluting the environment...
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When people first started using them there were some that were pretty rough. Like flop over the side of your cup levels of structural failure.
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When you need to ship a cargo
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No cargo. Planego. Shipgo. Only peasants cargo.
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The billionaires aren't the ones teaching you about how the planet works. In fact how rich as person is has nothing to do with it.
If you want to understand how the planet works, learn it from planet experts.
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Ok I'm genuinely curious, what are you talking about? Where did you get "teaching how the planet works?"
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But they got those cruise ship private jets and that's bad
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I guess they didn't see the photo
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Not big enough. Fail.
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I'm curious as to why you're using a straw at all.
is it that because you're at a restaurant?
You should know that by giving most restaurants your patronage, you are contributing to a lifestyle that we all cannot participate in.
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What does this even mean?
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It means that anyone who does anything totally sucks.
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I gotta be honest, I would personally insert a straw into the nose of every baby seal on earth for a flying cruise ship.
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That's sad as hell tbh
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Baby seals know what they've done
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I don't know, there's a lot of baby seals
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Not with the pollution this thing makes there is not.
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i guess that means since billionaires fly on planes everyone else is free to: /s
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Would you recommend a better solution? A high speed railway over the Bering Strait, perhaps?
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“You have fuel efficiency improvements on the order of 1% per year, and flights are increasing 6%,” says Rutherford, “It's not even close.”
straight up we need to fly less overall, so think of all the things that help reduce people flying and we need to do that
but you’re right, i need to head back to see the family at christmas, look at my options
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Apply a worldwide carbon tax to all emissions, which gradually increases year by year. Knowing that flying will become a less and less viable business model over time, governments and investors will begin on alternative investments in infrastructure and novel technologies.
For overland travel: trains.
For across oceans: probably also trains, possibly in tunnels.
Benefits to this approach:
- Actually reduces carbon emissions instead of moving them around.
- Doesn't tell the individual to stop flying or eating steak. Leaves it up to them to decide which carbon emissions they value most.
- Doesn't pretend to be omniscient and perscribe solutions. Instead lets everyone in the world solve the problem creatively.
- Creates a market incentive to accellerate the production of alternative technologies.
Most likely what would happen is that high speed rail would see a big boom immediately as governments looked for ways to reduce intra-country transit costs. Overseas flights, which are quite a bit rarer, would probably stay stable for several years (though with a fair amount of griping about the increased cost of flying). However, as time went on we would also expect to see overseas flights drop significantly. Businesses would prefer teleconferencing to sending delegates overseas for small matters. People would vacation overseas less frequently, instead staying on their own continents. Possibly there is a new industry - high speed sailing cruise ships - which would transport people across oceans at slower speeds for their vacations. Someone might invent better forms of carbon-neutral energy storage to make air travel more feasible again. Otherwise, nations start building undersea tunnels to connect rail lines across oceans.
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Real hyperloop, not the Musk bullshit. Scaled up pneumatic tube systems operating at orbital speeds (7 km/s).
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By far most planes in that screenshot are over land. You're right, when you have to cross an ocean to get somewhere there isn't really any alternative, but for all those over land they could've constructed and rode high speed railways instead. Countries like China and Japan show they can be proper alternatives, and there is no reason to use anything else for those distances.
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Most of the planes in that screenshot were over land.
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I’m pretty sure most flights are regional, not long distance, unless that’s only the us where we don’t believe in trains. There was an article a year or so back, where France started to actually ban regional flights for a few routes with good rail service. That’s where we need to be going.
Between high speed rail, and Zoom, we ought to be able to cut the number of flights in half while making travel better, and we can cut the least efficient flights since they spend proportionally more time climbing to altitude vs cruising
Even in the US, we have Acela and it’s arguably the best way to travel a few routes like BOS—>NYC, for the last two decades. Aside from connections, why do we still have hourly shuttles flying that route? Looking at the entire Acela service area, you probably have hundreds of daily regional flights. Most of those need to go
Edit: and this is part of my argument that California High Speed Rail is worth much higher funding to complete at pretty much any cost
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183 comments
Fuck the billionaires that do that, but that doesn't mean that me using a straw isnt still making the shit worse. At least I can sleep at night knowing I am not making the situation worse, and I will still try to vote for politicians that are fighting against the billionaires
It's replacing real action in place of a good feeling. It's THE plan to not do anything effective.
The normalization of needless single use products, like straws, by making them non plastic DOES make things worse. It delays real action, like removing straws altogether.
It’s greenwashing inherently unsustainable practices, just like introducing carbon capture technology on oil rigs or hyping electric cars as a way to keep the auto industry going (while suppressing more efficient means of transportation).
If we’re not going to fix shit, then why the fuck bother with mushy straws.
Agree with this take. It's like yeah electric cars are technically better, but any advantage they have over combustion engines is blown away by things like public transportation, or designing walkable/cyclable cities.
Our solutions can't just rely on swapping out for "greener" tech. We need radical changes to how we are currently living in order to ensure a livable future.
There is no future that is not radical. This gradualist, neolib (let's make sure all the investors get a chance to divest from dirty tech before switching!) fantasy will fuck us. It's been fucking us for a hundred years. It's time to try literally anything else.
The non mushy straws aren't terrible, but all rubberized tires are, whether on cars or bikes. The car ones are much worse.
And air travel is even worse still
But not close to industrial pollution which is exponentially greater.
The billionaires could care more and put some R&D into it. They just dont.
Sorry, but I am confiscating your moral license if the straw you use is justification.
The straw you use does nothing but make you feel better, which I would argue is harmful. You shouldn't feel better for doing nothing when such large problems exist.
Your use of the right straw is akin to you killing a single invasive ant in a rain forest, and saying you did your part to remove the invasive colony. You then spend every opportunity talking about how you killed that single ant, all while the ants have already multiplied and utterly nullified your non-effort contribution.
Shipping barges, data centers, meat production, gas and coal burning are all many orders of magnitudes greater problems than what straw you use. Gas, coal, and fossil fuel use is over 70% of all emissions, so that should be the primary conversation. In addition, these are all growing in use. Talk about that. Put your attention and action towards that.
The straw is a metaphor for doing what you can in your own world no matter how small, not the absolute culmination of all the good that we've done.