I agree that there’s no way around petrochemicals, and we’ll have to offset the emissions to reach net 0.

Gas heating has an alternative though. Heat pumps are already cheaper to run compared to gas heating, even without any carbon offsetting.

The pressure to reach net 0 is only gonna grow as the impacts of climate change get worse. To reach net 0 we’ll have to offset all significant emissions. When the offsets are priced in, using gas heaters becomes insanely expensive in comparison to heat pumps.

It’s just a matter of time until gas heating is essentially dead. It might be in 10 years or 20 years, but there’s no way around it.

Read the second paragraph again. I explicitly said that I’m not happy about their suffering, regardless of their political opinions.

It’s just disingenuous to claim that people merely take issue with their opinions when it’s the actions that are the real problem, although that still doesn’t justify schadenfreude.

This is “people with a different political opinion are suffering, yaaaaaay!”

To be fair, the issue isn’t that they have “a different political opinion”, the issue is that they will cause insane amounts of suffering and deaths down the line if they get their way. Climate change will kill millions of people, and trump and his supporters seek to make it even worse for short term political gain (aside from the attempts to install an authoritarian dictatorship and all that stuff).

That being said, I’m also not happy when indoctrinated people suffer, regardless of their murderous ideologies. Imo it’s more of a cultural issue, and nobody has any direct control over the culture/social environment that they grow up in.

But the majority of us loves our animals

And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.

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I guess we should start barbequing pet dogs then. At least that’s less cruel than factory farms, fwiw.

This one isn’t human to human transmittable. It jumped to one human, but can’t infect other humans from there, so unless it mutates in a bad way it won’t start a pandemic. That’s very unlikely with one infection, but there will be more if it stays on animal farms.

It would take away breeding ground for human transmittable mutations. With literally billions of animals, mainly in filthy conditions, we just keep rolling the dice every day for a strain that starts a pandemic. We can either try to abolish factory farming, or just hope that the next pandemic won’t be much worse than covid.

I’d be very interested in the source for this…

America’s richest 10% are responsible for 40% of its planet-heating pollution

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/business/rich-americans-climate-footprint-emissions/index.html

The emissions of the middle class are also a huge problem and will have to drop to 0 as well.

I agree that many urban areas need a lot more and better public transport, which is a systemic solution.

In rural regions it’s not practical to build enough infrastructure to replace private transport though. Electric cars are a good solution there and will also get more affordable in the next years (over the lifetime they are already roughly as cheap as gas cars).

BP and Shell only have that much power exacly because people buy fossil fuels from them. If demand would drop, their profits and political power would drop accordingly. As long as we don’t even hold the biggest financiers of these companies responsible, how can anything change? Demand drives supply.

It’s like saying “As long as hitmans exist, I won’t give a shit about the people who pay hitmans, all consumption under capitalism is unethical anyways so anything goes.” As long as we ignore those who actually fund the problem, we won’t be able to fix anything.

the “quality of life” question is rather meaningless, animals that exist in the food supply chain were literally born so they could be turned into food.

And if someone bred humans to be slaves, these would be meant to be slaves, so it would actually be moral to keep them as slaves.

Solid logic. Abolishion was a mistake, guys!

There’s always a supplier and a consumer. The pollution of these 100 corporations is caused on behalf of their customers who fund them in exchange for fossil fuels, directly or indirectly. They are both responsible, it’s 2 sides of the same coin.

Of course, much of this pollution isn’t really avoidable at this point. We can’t have 100% renewable power and electric cars tomorrow. Some really polluting industries will take decades to decarbonize, like steel and cement production. But this makes it even more urgent to adress the low hanging fruit asap, i.e. big sources of pollution that can easily be cut. Private jets are a prime example.

You could say just a few private jet flights or chopping down one single forest won’t make a dent in global carbon emissions, but that doesn’t mean that thousands around the world can keep on doing it indefinitely without consequences for all of us. Especially if they are idols for millions of people, normalizing harm to society that we can’t afford.

A land rover isn’t nearly as polluting and doesn’t drive nearly as far. More importantly, the heart surgeon isn’t a role model in terms of lifestyle aspirations for literally hundreds of millions of followers.

People shouldn’t be judged on a single data point.

It’s not like we’re talking about stealing some sweets from children or something. Climate change just gets worse and worse and worse until we reach net zero co2 emissions. As long as it’s culturally accepted to cause massive amounts of completely unnecessary emissions, we don’t have the slightest chance of fixing this.

The only way a decent person could be doing this is if they were completely uneducated about climate change and their impact as a role model.

Admittedly I don’t know much about her as a person, but how can someone who uses a private jet in 2024 be considered a decent person by any stretch?

Having such a ludicrously unsustainable lifestyle in a climate emergency that will kill millions and displace hundreds of millions in just a few decades is a crime against humanity, change my mind.

in order to learn a language we have to buy a book and read it, so we did pay someone for our knowledge we then sell.

What if an artist got inspiration from a Google image search, without paying the creators for that? I think that’s fine, and I don’t see why it’s suddenly wrong when a machine learning algorithm does it.

Much worse for who?

My point is: if police were completely abolished, conservatives and the far right would feel very unsafe and immediately form militias that enforce their values. That would be much worse for everyone who doesn’t share their values, of course.

I get that in many countries, police is badly regulated and you might say that this wouldn’t actually change much, but I’d rather seek more accountability for police, compared to a complete abolishion, leaving a power vaccum that’ll be filled by right wing militias with zero accountability.

Divesting seems good to me though, much of the police is certainly overfunded (due to law and order populism) and does useless shit (like the war on drugs), while education, social workers and programs against poverty are severely underfunded. Changing this would surely help a lot with crime reduction and other issues.

Thanks for the links by the way, I will look more into them when I have more time to see if my concerns regarding abolishion are addressed.

So what’s the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.

We could tax greenhouse gas emissions to internalize the environmental cost.

If the beef burger would cost 2x more than the plant-based burger (which basically tastes the same but has 90% fewer emissions), most people would choose the plant-based one. That would massively reduce food related ghg emissions, and also create a huge incentive to develop better alternatives/lab meat.

There’s no way they would do that since climate change is a “tradegy of the commons” problem.

The tragedy of the commons is a metaphoric label for a concept that is widely discussed in economics, ecology and other sciences. According to the concept, should a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it, and may end up destroying its value altogether. To exercise voluntary restraint is not a rational choice for individuals – if they did, the other users would merely supplant them – yet the predictable result is a tragedy for all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Currently, every country seeks to maximize the emissions that they are still allowed to have without being penalized (internationally, and by their own population).