The point they are trying to get at is that the vast majority of carbon produced by these companies is produced to see to the wants and needs of common people, and it is disingenuous to imply that solving climate change would impact no one except these companies shareholders.
Most carbon isn’t being created to build data centers. It is used to build roads, apartments, office buildings, cars, and trains. It is created by people driving cars or using gas stoves or eating hamburgers or running a heat pump on electricity generated in a coal plant. It is created when cheap plastic knick knacks are manufactured in indonesia, shipped across an ocean, and then transported overland to a store where they can be bought, used today, and thrown in the dump the next.
So regardless of where you apply pressure to stymie climate change, common people will be impacted, and pretending otherwise is essentially telling a lie to those common people.
Yeah convenience culture will have to die. To keep food not in plastic and not shipped halfway across the world you’re going to gave to give up getting your favorite flavor of dorito from the gas station at 2am. They won’t be able to package specialty flavors at a plant 600mi away then seal them in airtight nitrogen and ship them all over the country to that stores that are open 24/7 where they’ll be shelf stable for the next few months. You’ll have to order them by mail yourself or make do with local / regional variants made with different ingredients. The kids who stop eating when their dino nuggies have a different breading are just gonna starve (had an ex like that at 25y/o he was exhausting.)
disingenuous to imply that solving climate change would impact no one except these companies shareholders.
Where did I imply that making it so the planet doesnt kill us impacts only the companies?
Most carbon isn’t being created to build data centers.
I used one single example among many, datacentres are a single part of the problem, but a not inconsiderable one given that 7% of the total power consumption of the entire US goes to datacenters.
It is created by people driving cars or using gas stoves or eating hamburgers or running a heat pump on electricity generated in a coal plant. It is created when cheap plastic knick knacks are manufactured in indonesia, shipped across an ocean, and then transported overland to a store where they can be bought, used today, and thrown in the dump the next
In no way am I saying that mass consumption of oil product tat that goes to landfill after a week isn’t part of the problem, given that plastic waste in the air and water is also a major part of pollution and feeding climate change.
I’m not pretending that people aren’t going to be impacted, but I’d much rather a change where people can’t buy useless tat, than one that we’re living in now, where we can buy the tat but where doing so is destroying the planet we live on.
Blaming people for the companies making products worse, advertising disposable plastic items as if it solves the problems we already solved (but its so much cheaper for the company to make things out of plastics and not materials that last, and they can sell it to us ten times over to make up their profits) and then shipping them around the world in boats that use bunker fuel is unsustainable.
I spoke at length about the processes of one small part, but none of what I said was all-encompassing, it was merely a simplified example of one thing among many that make up the system of manufacture and shipping that feeds pollution into our planet for the sake of profits.
Where did I imply that making it so the planet doesnt kill us impacts only the companies?
You implied it when twice you went on long tangents going into the minutiae of the carbon production process while avoiding providing the simple, obvious answer to the question. Why do those companies produce all that carbon? Because they are making things that people want and need.
The problem with this framing is that it implies that climate change exists solely due to a few bad actors, and if we just constrained them or sestroyed them or whatever, then we would all live happily ever after. But this is not the case.
Suppose we round up all the CEOs and major shareholders to these companies tomorrow, and put them on a firing line, and threaten anyone else with the same if they don’t immediately dissolve the companies. Well, after maybe a year or two of a global economic crisis and restructuring of the world’s supply lines, do you think carbon emmissions would have gone down? Probably not. Instead, you would likely have new major players who stepped into the old companies roles. Or maybe now those roles are more dispersed - so instead of 7 companies emmitting all this carbon, we now have 700 million.
Now, I’m not saying that the concentration of global economic power isn’t a problem. But it isn’t the main problem to solve if we want to solve climate change. Because the production of carbon isn’t driven by companies making products, but by consumers demanding products. Nigerians coming out of poverty want dirty two stroke mopeds. Vietnamese pho vendors want propane to power their food carts. Latvian software developers want to display their wealth by driving low end luxury cars. Argentinian housewives want to eat steak for every meal. And remote villiagers in Pakistan want to keep enjoying the power they now have in their homes for only the last few years that comes from the coal plant 100km away. And if we want to snap our fingers and decarbonize the world, then at least some of these people are going to face disruptions to some of these goods.
That doesn’t mean that a decarbonized world has to be worse for everyone. But it means that maybe Latvian software developers need to develop a taste for expensive watches, and maybe Argentinian housewives will need to learn to grill jackfruit, and maybe an NGO needs to pay for rural Pakistanis to have solar panels on their roofs. But the actual number of companies that are the endpoints of pollution based on whatever statistical analysis is fairly irrelivant. Whether it is 7 companies or 700 million, we need to stop the demand for carbon intensive goods that is driving the supply - and that means changing peoples preferences or creating alternatives for those preferences to be met which do not depend on carbon emmissions.
The point they are trying to get at is that the vast majority of carbon produced by these companies is produced to see to the wants and needs of common people, and it is disingenuous to imply that solving climate change would impact no one except these companies shareholders.
Most carbon isn’t being created to build data centers. It is used to build roads, apartments, office buildings, cars, and trains. It is created by people driving cars or using gas stoves or eating hamburgers or running a heat pump on electricity generated in a coal plant. It is created when cheap plastic knick knacks are manufactured in indonesia, shipped across an ocean, and then transported overland to a store where they can be bought, used today, and thrown in the dump the next.
So regardless of where you apply pressure to stymie climate change, common people will be impacted, and pretending otherwise is essentially telling a lie to those common people.
Yeah convenience culture will have to die. To keep food not in plastic and not shipped halfway across the world you’re going to gave to give up getting your favorite flavor of dorito from the gas station at 2am. They won’t be able to package specialty flavors at a plant 600mi away then seal them in airtight nitrogen and ship them all over the country to that stores that are open 24/7 where they’ll be shelf stable for the next few months. You’ll have to order them by mail yourself or make do with local / regional variants made with different ingredients. The kids who stop eating when their dino nuggies have a different breading are just gonna starve (had an ex like that at 25y/o he was exhausting.)
Where did I imply that making it so the planet doesnt kill us impacts only the companies?
I used one single example among many, datacentres are a single part of the problem, but a not inconsiderable one given that 7% of the total power consumption of the entire US goes to datacenters.
In no way am I saying that mass consumption of oil product tat that goes to landfill after a week isn’t part of the problem, given that plastic waste in the air and water is also a major part of pollution and feeding climate change.
I’m not pretending that people aren’t going to be impacted, but I’d much rather a change where people can’t buy useless tat, than one that we’re living in now, where we can buy the tat but where doing so is destroying the planet we live on.
Blaming people for the companies making products worse, advertising disposable plastic items as if it solves the problems we already solved (but its so much cheaper for the company to make things out of plastics and not materials that last, and they can sell it to us ten times over to make up their profits) and then shipping them around the world in boats that use bunker fuel is unsustainable.
I spoke at length about the processes of one small part, but none of what I said was all-encompassing, it was merely a simplified example of one thing among many that make up the system of manufacture and shipping that feeds pollution into our planet for the sake of profits.
You implied it when twice you went on long tangents going into the minutiae of the carbon production process while avoiding providing the simple, obvious answer to the question. Why do those companies produce all that carbon? Because they are making things that people want and need.
The problem with this framing is that it implies that climate change exists solely due to a few bad actors, and if we just constrained them or sestroyed them or whatever, then we would all live happily ever after. But this is not the case.
Suppose we round up all the CEOs and major shareholders to these companies tomorrow, and put them on a firing line, and threaten anyone else with the same if they don’t immediately dissolve the companies. Well, after maybe a year or two of a global economic crisis and restructuring of the world’s supply lines, do you think carbon emmissions would have gone down? Probably not. Instead, you would likely have new major players who stepped into the old companies roles. Or maybe now those roles are more dispersed - so instead of 7 companies emmitting all this carbon, we now have 700 million.
Now, I’m not saying that the concentration of global economic power isn’t a problem. But it isn’t the main problem to solve if we want to solve climate change. Because the production of carbon isn’t driven by companies making products, but by consumers demanding products. Nigerians coming out of poverty want dirty two stroke mopeds. Vietnamese pho vendors want propane to power their food carts. Latvian software developers want to display their wealth by driving low end luxury cars. Argentinian housewives want to eat steak for every meal. And remote villiagers in Pakistan want to keep enjoying the power they now have in their homes for only the last few years that comes from the coal plant 100km away. And if we want to snap our fingers and decarbonize the world, then at least some of these people are going to face disruptions to some of these goods.
That doesn’t mean that a decarbonized world has to be worse for everyone. But it means that maybe Latvian software developers need to develop a taste for expensive watches, and maybe Argentinian housewives will need to learn to grill jackfruit, and maybe an NGO needs to pay for rural Pakistanis to have solar panels on their roofs. But the actual number of companies that are the endpoints of pollution based on whatever statistical analysis is fairly irrelivant. Whether it is 7 companies or 700 million, we need to stop the demand for carbon intensive goods that is driving the supply - and that means changing peoples preferences or creating alternatives for those preferences to be met which do not depend on carbon emmissions.