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Title is bunch of whataboutism mixed with a strawman. Just because billionaires are destroying the planet, doesn’t absolve anyone else from the damage they are doing… Article itself is about of bunch of rich people being weird anyways. It’s fashion designers who like the look of no-wash raw denim so they stink up everyplace they go. No different than the Russel Brands who spend vast sums to look like vagabonds.
Just because billionaires are destroying the planet, doesn’t absolve anyone else from the damage they are doing
Under capitalism, industrial titans squander thousands of hectacres and billions of gallons of water to build a machine that stack ranks the population based on their loyalty to their corporate overlords.
Under socialism, industrial scale services are provided as near at-cost as possible, in order to improve the quality of life for the most people across the largest territory.
One of these systems allows an individual’s conservation efforts to echo through the larger population and afford one’s neighbors access to resources that would be otherwise exhausted. For the other, you simply don’t matter. Your actions are dwarfed by the capricious whims of the dominant economic force. Pretending that you’ve saved a thimble of water when you’re living next to the mega-liter chugging machine isn’t absolving you of anything.
Hot take but capitalism is not deliberately wasteful. No seriously, there’s no point in deliberately wasting time or money expending a resource that you have no use for. Now, does that mean capitalism is efficient with resources? No not really, at least not from a conservation perspective. But any company that consumes resources does so in order to provide goods or services to someone. And a large portion of those resources are to provide goods and services to consumers like you and me. Worried about water consumption? Here are the biggest water withdrawal sources in the US:
-thermoelectric power: directly tied to electricity consumption, about half of which is residential
-irrigation: different types of food use massively different amounts of water.
-public supply: goes without saying
Those 3 things are more than 90% of us water demand. If people could cut their power bills by 30%, stop eating meat and conserve water personally by say 50%, US freshwater withdrawals would easily go down by more than a third, if not more. And that’s with zero change in behaviors from billionaires or corporations (apart from producing less in general in response to reduced demand).
My point is that about 2/3 of water usage in the US is to provide food, electricity and water to the 99%. We have agency and our actions are not insignificant.
not deliberately wasteful
Planned obsolescence has entered the chat. And that’s just one of probably dozens of counterpoints. Conspicuous consumption is another one.
Planned obsolescence, sure, and that’s a bad practice. That’s probably 0.5% of the world’s water consumption idk. Conspicuous consumption is on the consumer though.
You shouldn’t just ignore points that are counter to your argument to preserve your current ideas.
I’m not ignoring it, I’m just saying the times when companies will deliberately make a product designed to fail quickly are pretty limited. If Dewalt makes a drill and it shorts out after a year, not only are people not going to buy that drill they are going to start avoiding that brand altogether. Planned obsolescence is basically limited to products where:
-there is an expectation of a short product life -there are steady improvements to the products so people are excited to buy the next new thing once their current product dies -there is some brand loyalty/lock-in so people won’t just buy a competitors product
So, this is most famously applicable to smartphones and similar tech. But you will notice that as smartphones start to plateau a bit and people aren’t as rabid about buying new ones, repairabikity, durability and long term support are becoming bigger issues. The big brands are advertising how many years they will keep their flagship phones supported, which you never used to see.
So: limited means your point about capitalism not being wasteful still stands? No. Planned obsolescence of any kind means your point is wrong. Capitalism causes waste.
That could be the end of the comment, but not only is your point disproven, but you’re wrong about limitations in industry as well.
Printers, incandescent light bulbs, cars.
I had a Nest thermostat before they were bought by Google, which then closed the API and forced people to control it through Google’s ecosystem. And soon you won’t even be able to do that: https://www.tomsguide.com/home/smart-home/google-announces-end-of-support-for-1st-and-2nd-gen-nest-thermostats-what-you-need-to-know
Hue bulbs discontinued support for their first generation bridge https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/philips-hue-is-killing-off-support-for-the-original-hue-bridge/
https://www.androidcentral.com/wearables/older-tizen-os-galaxy-watches-to-loose-support-in-2025
I’ve been through this bullshit a bunch. Maybe you’re lucky you haven’t, but the examples aren’t nearly as limited as you claim.
Please update your ideas instead of doubling down on ideas you can’t support.
Those 3 things are more than 90% of us water demand. If people could cut their power bills by 30%, stop eating meat and conserve water
Electricity usage is largely inelastic without structural changes. 60% of our electricity is lost in transmission, for instance. Individual consumption habits won’t change that.
An enormous amount of our meat production ends up as waste. Again, just telling random people to become vegetarian doesn’t change this, unless the participants are concentrated enough to reshape how meat is produced and delivered. Even then, the US exports of meat range from 10% (beef) to 30% (pork) of gross production, with plenty of room to rise. Trade barriers, ecological limits, and land use policy go vastly farther to curbing animal methane emissions than politely asking people to stop eating meat.
And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
You’re fooling yourself if you think you have any influence on the macro scale through consumer habits. You’re missing a forest of waste and misallocation of resources out of a personalized guilt trip.
My point is that about 2/3 of water usage in the US is to provide food, electricity and water to the 99%.
That’s a fully made up statistic even before the advent of superusers like the AI farms. You’re straight up ignoring our enormous agricultural export markets, our municipal waste, and the impact of major pollutants.
Ok a few points. First off, I’m a power engineer. You’re completely wrong about transmission losses. Those are (almost) completely proportional to current, which is (almost completely proportional to load. So if you reduce grid power consumption by 50% you will reduce transmission losses by 45% or more (allowing for corona losses and current to ground etc).
Same thing with meat. It’s a supply and demand problem- the less demand for meat the less livestock, and proportionally less waste there. Livestock are expensive and people aren’t just going to raise them if they can’t sell them for a profit.
Agriculture and livestock can be exported, true, but that’s the same situation as before just on a global scale. Less global demand for meat, fewer livestock, less water usage. It’s really that simple. There are no “super-users” of meat, the 1% might eat more than the average person but not 10x more.
Municipal pipe leaks, sure, that does reduce the elasticity by up to half… with the caveat that in places that have serious water restrictions are much more vigilant because it really matters. Phoenix, AZ has a statutory limitation of 10% loss.
My stat is just some back of the envelope math based on my above statements.
As far as AI goes, it’s the same thing all over again. They (the AI companies) are offering a service to US, the consumer. We have the choice to not have AI generate pictures of snails wearing astronaut helmets. Actually AI is probably one of the things we need the least, relative to how much we use it.
We now have 1-to-1 plant based meat replacements like Impossible that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing without the environmental, ethical, or health concerns of real meat. Society collectively picking that at the meat isle would have make a tangible difference with no effort.
We now have 1-to-1 plant based meat replacements
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Society collectively picking that
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
Yes exactly. As an individual, recognizing that reducing energy/plastic/whatever use is a drop in the bucket and that systemic change is needed wouldn’t absolve you of all personal responsibility. It is a multifaceted problem and the corporations that deflect responsibilities and greenwash and individuals are both important.
People also refuse to acknowledge there is a network effect at play. Say a person recognizes that overfishing and plastic net pollution is a problem. If that person continues eating fish from entities doing the damage when they have the ability not to, some percentage of the blame lies with that person. A subset of people is so set in avoiding any type of inconvenience to themselves they lash out at any suggestion they could change their personal behavior on anything
This is, in my opinion, a high burden placed on an individual to to always research how every company they interacts with operates.
Unfortunately, as a consumer many ecological decisions are forced on me because corporations aren’t regulated properly. Blaming the consumer to make better choices is asking someone to become intimately familiar with something that they shouldn’t be concerned about, and to stay up to date since corporations change their business practices frequently.
This is something ultimately that needs to end up on governments to regulate businesses, and trying to shift the blame to consumers is quite frankly unfair. And even worse, it’s ineffective and disheartening to them. People can make better choices for themselves and their local environment. But don’t saddle Bob and Sally with saving the planet. It’s an untenable ask.
It’s not simply changing a behavior of an individual, it’s a dramatic shift to their lifestyle. Not in choosing the more ecological option, but asking them to remain interested and vigilant on every decision they make. Picking what fish to buy at the supermarket shouldn’t involve figuring out who caught the fish, googling the company, researching what their fishing practices are, and then figuring out if that is a sustainable practice. It’s not simple or quick, and most people just really want to figure out what everyone in their family will all eat for dinner that night. We can’t expect someone to do a half hour or more of research for every purchase.
This is why government needs to regulate these industries for us. They have the time and knowledge to assess all of that and the power to enforce companies adhere to those practices. We need to help educate people that regulating a business is not the same as regulating their choices or their behavior as an individual. That these sorts of regulations and legislation simply do not, and will not, ever apply to them so that they will encourage their legislators to push for regulation.
I agree on regulation. There is an interaction here you have to acknowledge though. Again I’ll use the example of overfishing. When scientists have recommendations to government about fishing regulations, invariably, the government will take the number scientists say is the limit above which ecological damage will occur, and a number that fishers say they want to fish, and choose a number in between. Convincing individuals to support these initiatives (that will force them to change their habits when the upstream dependency of those habits changes) is the same education that would convince them to change their habits in the first place.
I also must insist that you’re misrepresenting my opinion. I don’t expect every individual to research everything they interact with as you insist. I merely ask that they do the best they can, instead of sticking their head in the sand as too many do currently. I would never fault ignorance, but I will fault willful denial.
Market forces are there, sure. There is no denying that having a demand leads to these practices. But regulators who are compromising between sustainability and corporate interests, aren’t truly regulating. Regulators need to have hard stances on these things and it should be up to the corporations to deal with the limits. Consumers are going to have to deal with products having seasons again, limited availability, or higher prices. The system will stabilize, but it’s going to end up there anyway as the climate changes or resources get depleted.
And I apologize. I didn’t mean to misrepresent your opinion. I ended up on a bit of a rant there that was only sparked by a notion in your opinion.
People only need to do the best they can, for them, in whatever situation they are in. I get frustrated with the messaging that corporations push that it’s up to us as individuals to be responsible and prevent climate change or save the planet when it’s our collective responsibility as a society through government regulation.
How about just asking them to make the obvious choices they don’t have to think about or research as much? As an example, switching to plant based meat alternatives like impossible meat or quorn. Not only are they a 1-to-1 drop in replacement, they also haven’t skyrocketed in price like real meat has, so they might even save money.
Or at least cutting out red meat and replacing it with impossible. That requires very little thought for both environmental, ethical, and health gains.
I doubt you’ll get much traction on that. Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up.
While you may consider it a 1 to 1 replacement, and while I’ve no doubt it’s gotten closer to real meat than it was when impossible burgers first came out, I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. I also may be wrong in this, but as far as I know, it only replaces ground meats and processed meats like burgers and chicken nuggets. It isn’t a product that can replace steaks, roasts, shanks, or ribs. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.
As a fellow life long heavy meat eater with a picky palate, I can attest that impossible ground meat is genuinely indistinguishable from animal ground beef. If you were served a dish containing it without being told it wasn’t animal meat, I think you would be hard pressed to pick up on it.
I have tried many, many alternatives, including TVP, Soy curls, beyond beef, etc. They all had an off flavor that I found unappealing unless heavily masked. Impossible’s current formulation has none of those drawbacks, and requires no recipe modifications to obtain perfect results. They do have a steak-bite now, which is also extremely good, but they do not make a full sized steak product. For that, you could try Meati, which is made from mushroom, and is also very good in my experience.
Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up. I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.
I’m probably not saying anything here you don’t already know, but I still want to emphasize that unless the earth becomes rapidly depopulated by an insane amount on a timescale that would require genocide to achieve, the reality is that the quantity of meat we farm to make it affordable for average people is simply incompatible with a live-able biosphere.
The meat of it is, we realistically cannot prioritize the pleasurable minute flavor or texture of a particular foodstuff if doing so results in the destruction of organized human civilization as we know it, along with the extinction of tens of thousands of species and plants.
If we as a species reject a low-emission plant based alternative that is 95% similar to the the planet destroying and horrifically unethical animal based product purely to get that last 5% of the experience, then… Those people are choosing death in the same way a smoker chooses to smoke, but instead of just killing themselves, they doom their children and the rest of humanity with them.
We have to be willing to make concessions to survive the future we have made for ourselves. Animal meat unfortunately must be one of the concessions.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying in my other posts. Yes, we need governments to regulate companies to make them do the right thing, but if not farming cattle is the right thing, companies want to sell cattle products, and consumers want to eat cattle products, in what world is the government going to do the right thing? Education and attitude adjustment that acknowledges the need for change is prerequisite for anything to improve.
