348
Billionaires Spew More CO2 Pollution in 90 Minutes Than Average Person in a Lifetime
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
348 points (96.8% liked)
News
23367 readers
2914 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The math here is the sort of thing that drives apathy for me to make small incremental changes. If the superrich can dump ~250 avg. emission years over the course of a year, why should I do anything besides lobby against this mode of transport or other large consumers? Maybe it’s a “spirit of the thing,” but changes in my life seem so negligible compared to how ruinous some individuals are acting.
There are 801 billionaires in the US out of about 335,893,238 people. If everyone else were to reduce their carbon footprint by even a tenth of a percent then there would be significantly less carbon in the atmosphere than if every billionaire in the US were to reduce their carbon footprint to zero.
This is also assuming that the 300+ million Americans have the same size carbon footprint, which is probably not true if you think about it for more than a second. I doubt the bottom 60% of earners in the country have the purchasing power to create that much waste through excess consumerism at this point.
Most of those "Shein/Temu/Aliexpress" hauls or 10x vacations across the world in a year you see on social media are not done by middle or lower income people/families.
This is very much a top heavy issue.
Sure, but the individual contribution vs. companies / state-owned organizations is like 70% come from 100 companies / orgs. So the individual percentage is still negligible.
I’m not disagreeing with the math. I’m saying when you want to make changes, you start with the most meaningful funnel. If you have 2 factors contributing to a problem, factor 1 contributes 70%, factor 2 contributes 30%, going after factor 2 seems like a waste of time. 1%s contribute 1000x the amount of the average. Who should be making lifestyle changes here?
#voidscreaming
Ok now do millionaires
I can’t get 3 people to agree on lunch. No way are we goi g to all agree on carbon footprint reduction actions.
It’s easier to stop 801 people vs 335 million.
Or, you know, we could just......you know.......do the thing that really takes care of the problem.
The "turn the water off while you're brushing your teeth" crap on TV was a corpo psyop. Individual responsibility is a myth concocted and propagated by the very people who have actually been causing the vast majority of the damage.