• SCB@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Through the corporations they own, billionaires emit a million times more carbon than the average person. They tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels.

    This is not a billionaire’s climate emissions.

    • hh93@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Yeah - at best they are morally responsible for not choosing to invest in something else but in the end as long as there’s capitalism and people are creating demand for whatever polluting thing they procude someone else will step in

      The Demand has to be slashed by making those products less profitable if the general public is not acting in their own interest because polluting is cheaper and more comfortable

      Especially if people are just going directly to “eat the rich” after articles like this I really wonder what they think will happen if the oil-production is stopped completely from one day to the next? And that even assumes that noone will step up to continue the production - what if the state takes over the oil-company and spreads the emissions evenly among every citizen - would that solve the problem of climate change in their minds?

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        capitalism and people are creating demand for whatever polluting thing they procude someone else will step in

        Capitalism is not why people like electricity, food, and entertainment. All of those things predate capitalism. The USSR contributed to climate change.

        Anyone trying to make climate change a leftist issue is a moron. Every economic policy would contribute to climate change becaus every economic policy needs to guarantee heat, food, transport, etc.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I think there’s one big difference here: the capital holding class has fought tooth and nail against making solutions viable. They’ve pushed pro fossil fuel propaganda into everything from our commutes to schools. They’ve fought against acknowledgement of the realities of climate change and done nothing to try to move towards a more sustainable future, instead choosing to invest in lobbying against solutions to reduce demand such as carbon taxes, reduction of oil subsidies, increases in clean energy subsidies, and mass transit.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Oh, look… an “enlightened centrist” has shown up to whitesplain that capitalist parasitism is actually poor people’s fault.

        Yawn.

        • hh93@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          I’m as left as you can get without being straight up communist - I despise neoliberalism and think that countries should to a lot more to make billionaires nonexistent via redistribution of money and higher wealth- and inheritance-tax but for this issue it’s just not enough if everyone washes their hands in innocence and only points to them

          sure their personal lifestyle is much shittier than the one from the average person but pinning the emissions from companies they own on them is just making things far too easy on the average person

          People need to vote for a green transition and not for some shortsighted utopia of “if we just remove the billionaires climate change will be fixed” - that’s not the case as long as demand is still there