You’re doing Gaia’s work

Love it!

Yep. I think it’s Roundup. Used to be people used chemical herbicides with more discretion to avoid harming crops, so bugs could live on weeds in patches or at the edges of fields.

Nowadays you just plant a strain of corn or soybeans that’s immune to Roundup and soak your entire field in glyphosate multiple times a year. So the only insects that have food or shelter anywhere near you are ones that can live on your crop - and then you spray pesticides to kill those.

Result: millions and millions of acres of essentially sterile agricultural monocrop.

And more and more land is being turned into agricultural monocrop - not because a growing population needs more food, but because of bad laws and subsidies. Almost 100 million acres in the US - 40% of the American corn crop - is used to produce fucking ethanol, which burns more fossil fuel to produce than it replaces and is only profitable because of massive government subsidies procured by energy and agricultural lobbyists.

We are wiping hundreds of square miles of land clean of life in order to turn one fossil fuel into another less efficient fossil fuel. It’s species wide insanity.

And that being said: even though agriculture is a much bigger contributor to the ongoing insect omnicide than suburban pest spraying, when you keep the chemicals off your lawn and allow native plants and flowers to grow, it does help your local bugs, and you are making an impact.

Preach.

Housing is a human right.

Private land ownership violates that human right.

All land should be held in trust for the people as a whole and managed by the government for the benefit of the people. Including the houses and apartments on that land.

We should not have private homeowners. We should not have private landlords. We should have socialized housing, just like we should have socialized medicine. Apartment buildings and neighborhoods should be managed by tenant associations, with strict legal limits on their authority over individual tenants, and government facilitators to provide expert advice on building management and keep meetings running smoothly.

But we are a long way from implementing that.

It boggles my mind how people still insist there’s a “free market” in rent when we have proof of giant property management corporations colluding nationwide to raise rents.

This shit is why we need rent control.

Because during bad times the ones that make bad decisions don’t survive or at very least are removed from positions of power.

It’s more common for bad leaders to make the bad decisions that cause the bad times, and then either be deposed by violence or cling to power with violence, making everything worse. See Stalin, Mao, and also the entire history of sub-Saharan Africa after colonialism.

I’m certainly not a fan of American electoral democracy, but one can say that at least it’s mostly peaceful and allows in theory the people to make a choice between qualified and vetted candidates. In “hard times” the mechanisms created by civil society to select competent leaders tend to break down. So rather than removing bad leaders from power in hard times, it becomes even harder to remove such leaders, and even harder to determine whether a leader is good or bad until after he’s in charge of the army’s salary.

Why not try to do both?

Okay, let me write in “Climate for President” and see how that goes.

That factoid is vastly misinterpreted. In particular, the term “responsible for” does not mean “emitted”.

The study it’s referencing studied only fossil fuel producers. And it credited all emissions from anyone who burned fuel from that producer to that producer. So if I buy a tank of gas from Chevron and burn it, my emissions are credited to Chevron for purposes of that study.

The study is not saying that 100 companies emit 71% of global emissions. It’s saying that 100 companies produce 71% of the fossil fuels used globally.

Why not vote and protest and consume less?

A whole lot of people hate this notion because it essentially frames it as the consumer’s fault, but at the end of the day it kind of is.

Absolutely. Producers and consumers have joint responsibility for getting us where we are. Climate action requires joint action by consumers and by (or, more likely, against) producers.

Because politicians follow the money. And they understand voters follow the money. So when voters demand, for instance, legislation against fossil fuel companies, politicians look at all the gas consumers buy and ask themselves “what will voters do if we pass fossil fuel legislation and gas gets more expensive”? And then they decide not to pass fossil fuel legislation, because they’d rather have activists angry at them than have millions of consumers angry at them.

I was ranting in a different thread about the “discourses of delay” that corporate and right-wing propagandists use to delay climate action. And the fascinating thing is, the idea that only individual consumption matters (the BP carbon footprint ad campaign) and the idea that only the actions of corporations matter (a typical American activist attitude) are both industry propaganda. The former is meant to discourage political action. The latter is meant to discourage individual action. And by framing it as one against the other, propagandists discourage us from taking effective action on either.

We can do both. We have to do both.

Sure. The Google term you’re looking for is called “discourses of delay”.

Tldr: The propagandists recognize the global consensus, that climate change is real and must be addressed, is too strong to attack directly. Instead, they work to discredit potential solutions and discourage people from acting. The hope is to delay action on climate change until fossil fuel companies run out of oil to sell.

The four ways corporate propaganda encourages climate delay are by redirecting responsibility (“someone else should act on climate change before or instead of you”), pushing non-transformative solutions (“fossil fuels are part of the solution”), emphasizing the downsides (“requiring electric vehicles will hurt the poor worst”), and promoting doomerism (“climate change is inevitable so we may as well accept it instead of trying to fight it”).

And here’s the thing. We need both individual and collective action to mitigate climate change.

Arguing that only individual action can stop climate change is delayist propaganda used to discourage climate action.

Arguing that only collective action can stop climate change and individual action is useless is also delayist propaganda used to discourage climate action.

The propaganda takes an extreme position on both sides and encourages people to fight with another instead of unifying and acting - much like how foreign propagandists in the United States take aggressive, controversial positions on the far left and far right to worsen dissent and discourage unity.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/08/05/scientists-dissect-the-tactics-of-climate-delayers/

European scientists last month catalogued what they call the “Four Discourses of Climate Delay”—arguments that facilitate continued inaction.

1 Redirecting Responsibility

U.S. politicians blaming India and China, Irish farmers blaming motorists, organizations blaming individuals—these common techniques evade responsibility and delay action.

“Policy statements can become discourses of delay if they purposefully evade responsibility for mitigating climate change,” the scientists say.

The scientists label as “individualism” the claim that individuals should take responsibility through personal action. I asked if it weren’t also a discourse of delay when activists insist that individual climate action is pointless, that only systemic action can address the problem.

That too is a discourse of delay, replied Giulio Mattioli, a professor of transport at Dortmund University. The team considered including it under the label “structuralism,” but decided it’s not common enough to include.

(Depends on where you are. I’d argue that’s very, very common among high consumption American activists.)

A fascinating study about how much people have internalized these discourses of delay is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378024000797#:~:text=Consisting of four overarching narratives,with its own emotional resonance)%2C

How do you expect to change those few dozen companies?

Especially if the majority of us really wouldn’t be able to survive without them?

We’re actually to the point where wanting people to consume fewer fossil fuels makes me a fossil fuel shill.

Wow.

The absolute state of rhetoric today.

Your vote is also 1 in 26 million. Do you believe that has an effect?

Again, carbon footprint is not a BP talking point. It was a pre-existing concept that was appropriated by BP to prevent climate change legislation by shifting responsibility for climate change to individual consumers.

And then, some years later, once corporations had more solid control of legislatures and were no longer afraid of legislation, they started using the carbon footprint idea in reverse as propaganda - they claimed individual responsibility was a myth, only legal action against corporations will help with climate change, so eat whatever you want and buy all the gas you want and buy all the corporate products you want, and don’t feel guilty about it, because it doesn’t matter.

In reality, both individuals and corporations bear responsibility for climate change, and both of the above arguments are corporate propaganda aimed at getting you to give up, do nothing, and buy shit.

BP oil company pushed the idea that our individual carbon footprints matter so that everyone can share the blame of what the fossil fuel industry has done.

The article discusses this, yes - along with how the carbon footprint is a good metric for individual consumption even if corporate propaganda abuses it.

The most significant difference individuals can make is to create political and legal pressure by voting and protesting.

I agree with you that political action is vital. I don’t agree that it’s necessarily more significant than personal action. Feminists used to say “the personal is political”, and it’s still true. How you act in private demonstrates your commitment to the values you endorse in public and gives your voice more weight when you speak your values.

If you reduce your personal footprint, but never talk about it or encourage other people to do the same, your impact is limited to yourself. If you reduce your personal footprint, and make your actions contagious by talking about them with people you know and encouraging them to do the same, you can impact many more people, encourage them to follow your lead and reduce their footprint, and then they can encourage others to reduce their footprint, and so on and so forth.

Limiting the damage from climate change takes collective action. And collective action requires a community, and a community requires communication.

If you assume you are a lone individual and your personal decisions have no effect on anyone else, it’s easy to imagine reducing your personal footprint is meaningless. If you see yourself as part of a community, and by reducing your personal footprint you encourage others in your community to do the same, you can see how much larger your impact can be.

And lawyers required laws.

First laws had to be passed protecting the environment. Then lawyers (and government agencies like the EPA) could go to court and enforce the laws.

And we got those laws passed because enough people advocated for them loudly enough and persuasively enough that government listened.

In other words: talking to people worked.

I think this is more directed to conservatives who claim people are inherently selfish and self-serving, which is why only capitalism works (because it starts from the assumption that people are inherently selfish and will always do what profits than the most) and communism / socialism / anarchism can’t possibly work (because they require people to cooperate instead of exploiting each other for personal profit)

Besides, the idea that “we should all be forced to pay” for anything presumes a capitalist system where money is exchanged for goods and services. The point is to get rid of that.

This is why you talk to people - ordinary people - and convince them to (1) buy less plastic garbage (2) vote for restrictions on plastic garbage.

And then the people you talk to talk to other people and convince them.

And then those other people talk to still other people.

And eventually you have a critical mass. And politicians listen to them when they demand changes in the laws. And corporations have less money because enough people are boycotting their products so it’s harder for them to hire lobbyists and bribe politicians.

And all this starts with you talking to people.