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0 pointsvladms10d ago0 comments

> They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.

You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).

I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)

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7 comments · 2 top-level

Loquebantur10d ago· 5 in thread

No, you're entirely wrong.

The impact an individual has on carbon emissions is directly correlated with their wealth. The distribution of which is extremely uneven: as of 2024, the top 1% worldwide possessed as much as the lower 95% combined, 57 trillion US$. That has gotten only worse in the last two years.

It's not about "bad habits", impulse control or whatever, at all.

Paradigma1110d ago

Most of that wealth is just a tag on physical things that would happen anyway, just with another tag.

Timon310d ago

This ignores that physical things can happen in many different ways, most of which are decided by those who have the money. The choices of the rich aren't preordained, so there's no reason to absolve them of the responsibility for their decisions.

vladmsOP10d ago

Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many.

Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue.

This holds for other fields as well. Example: "... private air travel accounted for 6.3% of the ‘total commercial plus private aviation emissions’ in the USA in 2019, and 7.9% in 2021." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z

I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

There are no easy solution and everybody is responsible by different degrees. Pointing fingers and wanting "others" to fix it first is not in my view something that ever worked.

Loquebantur10d ago

Your simplistic take is fundamentally wrong. It would take someone in the bottom 99% of the world's population more than 1,500 years to match the personal lifetime carbon footprint of a billionaire.

People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also.

But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lack of proper action against the pollution.

Your "arguments" are precisely the deflection they employ to steer public attention away from them. Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.

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dqv10d ago

> I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

It would be even harder to ignore if the 0.003% of the population causing 7.9% of the emissions were banned from private flight and had to start doing "normal" flight like everyone else :)

tovej10d ago

It's an even smaller percentage of people that are most responsible. Any multimillionaire is already someone who could have an impact, but mostly it's the 100 million club and up that are causing the most damage. And bug LLCs in general, since those are essentially optimising for profit only.

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