1178
Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
1178 points (98.0% liked)
World News
37361 readers
1631 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect!
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That's bullshit of a report. If you read it, you will quickly learn how they calculate emissions from the rich. They include things like owning company shares and having influence over the media. So if Bezos owns a major stake in Amazon, he is automatically responsible for all Amazon emissions. And if his PR team publishes some stuff to FB, he's now responsoble for emissions of Facebook servers. That's utter bullshit.
If you buy from Amazon, it's YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos. This report also doesn't take into account that better off people usually live in well-insulated homes, drive more efficient cars and eat better organic food, thus reducing their footprint further.
This report also mentions yachts and private jets a lot, but don't forget that ALL airtraffic accounts only for 2% of all emissions and private jets are a drop in the ocean.
A slight nit-pick here, but when it comes to greenhouse gas impact, organic food may be worse. It's certainly not clearly better.
Almost definitely worse lol. We have the option to modify the genome of the plants we eat in order to make then better in every way and still some people are like "no that's icky because science".
GMO != organic as far as I know?
In the US organic means no GMOs as well according to usda
Gotcha. That’s a shame
Usually people assume organic is the opposite of GMOs and stuff, but it's also nonsense because they'd never drink water straight from a puddle, but want the shit on their crops to be as untreated as possible. Or well, sold to them that way, of course it's not, it's just fertilizer #2 instead of the - more efficient and hence indirectly better for the environment - fertilizer #1.
Yeah I've overheard that before too. If they would just change their words to "eat less meat" they're be right, but to only say "organic" implies standard agriculture is worse, and it is not clearly so.
We should eat less meat though.
We sholdn't eat less meat, meat is pretty much zero emission and closed loop food production. We should more.
organic food definitely uses more resources per unit output than "commercial" ag. It can't supply the world's food supply unless they greatly increase their capabilities. It's either "modern methods" or we reduce the worlds population.
I'll be honest, I do believe that CEOs should be personally held repsonsible for the shit their companies pull, in general. And after-the-fact, too. If you led a company and later it gets fined for something it did while you were CEO, that's on you. Say 50% of fines have to be paid by the C-suites personally.
But independent of that, in a report such as this, it of course makes little sense because the title wants to strongly suggest they create more carbon emissions as consumers (say via owning yachts and shit) than the poorest 66%. And that's a very false equivalence. Now you could argue they're responsible for more carbon emissions, and I would maybe agree with that, yes. They make the decisions that enable this carbon usage, and they could, if they wanted to, cut large swathes of it albeit probably not lasting.
But yeah, agreed, pretty shit headline.
The point of a Limited Company is that people who own and work for the company are not held responsible for the actions of the company. Exceptions apply, of course. This is done to protect people from the failures of the business. If the company you work for goes bankrupt for whatever reason, you don't want to owe millions to the creditors of the company out of your pocket.
Limited Liability Company just means there aren't any shareholders. Only the owner can be held to account and/or will lose money if the business goes under.
Every trucker that owns their own vehicle/routes is running an LLC and it isn't so they can be protected from the failure of their business, it's because they're the only ones who will be impacted if the company goes under.
Source: I was an Owner-Operator and had to learn this terminology when setting up my LLC.
Remember Al Gore's house that he was touting back around 2007 as super energy efficient? Then some news outlets reported it used 25x as much energy as a normal single family home.
Snopes looked into it and said false, it only uses 10x as much electricity as a normal house, but that's okay because it's 4 times the size of a normal house.
I mean yeah, that's a really good savings.
That would only be true if Amazon had real competition and would not be acting like a monopoly, as many other companies do.
Amazon is very much not a monopoly. There are thousands of online retailers. There are also a lot of delivery services, no idea if there are thousands, but there's a lot.
Isn't it more planet reponsible then to order from Amazon where, if I order say 6 items, they'll come from the same warehouse in the same delivery (at least ove here!) instead of in 6 deliveries from 6 different vendors who also all had to get individual deliveries of their stock first?
Lol your statement doesn't hold true for where I live. We live more or less in the vicinity of the nearest Amazon warehouse, like 50 km away...
When we order several (like 6) items, they send 6 packages, each individually packed, with 6 delivery drivers over two days, ringing three times a day (noon, afternoon, late evening).
This is purely anecdotal but almost comically bad logistics.....
That sounds almost like a parody of Amazon. 🤣
Weird. I usually get the option to combine items in a single load, even if it means delaying some items to arrive together with others.
Yes, it's better to bulk order from Amazon. Just don't order one small thing like a screwdriver, a whole truck driving around for your 100g package is dumb.
Surely it's still more efficient for the truck to carry that screwdriver and a whole truckload of other goods, in a single journey, with optimised route, rather than me (and every other Amazon shopper) driving my car to the nearest hardware store to buy that screwdriver?
You can walk.
And if they would offer a envoirementfriendly alternative, that nobody uses.
But let me tell you a non secret, they dont give a shit
Amazon is NOT a monopoly. And the problem here is not Amazon, but the products YOU buy. It doesn't matter if you buy from Amazon or Wallmart or whatever.
yes, it is.
No, it's not.
i've presented exactly the same amount of proof that you have.
What proof? Amazon is not a monopoly, that's a fact.
That's one way to not be accountable
no, i'm not.
Yes, you are.
i've presented exactly the same amount of proof that you have.
Please explain how you aren't responsible for the emissions used to manufacture/deliver the product that you personally purchased.
Did someone force you to buy it? No? Then it's your fault.
REDUCE. REUSE. RECYCLE.
The more products you consume, the more emissions for those products. If you don't like it, then don't buy it. Source from responsible retailers, or at least don't buy from fucking Amazon. Everything about the system we live in exists because people like you throw money at billionaires and then complain that they're rich.
"I'm not responsible for being a consumer whore" is the exact lack of personal responsibility that makes anything else you say a joke.
if i don't buy it, will the producer have already done all the pollution? if i don't buy it, will any fewer trucks run? no. but if the producer doesn't make it, the pollution doesn't happen. the fault lies entirely with the producers.
If people don't buy a product, then there's no demand.
If there's no demand, a product doesn't get created.
Do you think people are out here making shit for fun until someone comes along and purchases it? That producers produce in a vacuum without any kind of reason as to why? They make it cause you'll buy it. Therefore the consumers create the demand that leads to the product being produced in the first place.
It's insane that you can fundamentally misunderstand basic economics this much, to think the consumers don't have any effect on what is created.
that's just not true. people make things without a proven market all the time. in fact, all consumer goods are made before they are proven to be able to be sold.
Christ, the number of people who don't understand basic economics...
this is handwaving, not a rebuttal.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
This guy either has no sense of personal responsibility or he doesn't understand supply and demand for shit.
"supply and demand" isn't a magic phrase that makes me responsible for what other people do.
Personal responsibility has been an excellent tool for large corporations who make deliberate business decisions causing their manufacturing process to be worse for workers and the environment. Belief in personal responsibility as a serious value is what allowed a scam like recycling to be knowingly pushed by polluters for decades as a consumer-driven solution that requires little to no work from producers even though most products can't be recycled anyway and recycling is, in fact, not a solution to anything in and of itself.
i didn't say that.
Go look at any multimillionaire's house in California and then compared its resource usage to a dilapidated trailer in the deep south in a poor county. They'll be using 50-100x the resources of the poor family.
don't punch down. that's fucking gross.
It is worth noting that the richest 1% includes everyone who makes more than 140k$/year.