The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
There are specific people who are, together, responsible. The oil execs that chose to cover up the truth about global warming, the meat industry execs who did the same, the hucksters that sell the lie of carbon sequestration and ethanol fuel and hydrogen fuel as solutions, the investors that continue to pump money into oil exploration projects, and the politicians that have stopped any meaningful progress from happening. There are, in fact, individual people that we can point to and say “they are the problem” - it’s not abstract.
We have enemies and they’re killing us.
What about me? I drive a car, have a carbon footprint, etc.
How is my own (and your) responsibility for global warming different than theirs?
And don’t say “they profit off it”. You and I both profit off it too. We live in a veritable heaven compared to those in pre-industrial times. We inherited and enjoy enormous wealth that can be traced to the burning of fossil fuels.
Our contribution is miniscule compared to our enemies, and we only contribute what we have to because they sabotaged all alternatives! They killed public transportation, they made neighborhoods and cities unwalkable, they turned cyclists (like me!) into 2nd class citizens of the road, and more.
I’d sell my car if I could. I can’t and it’s their fuckin fault!
We are not the same as them. They are the enemy and they must be stopped before they kill us all.
But is our contribution minuscule compared to theirs? Like let’s say one man sells (an equal amount of) gasoline to a thousand people. Is that one man now contributing 1000x more to greenhouse gas emissions than any one of those people?
Does a given unit of carbon emission get counted multiple times at each step of the production chain from extraction to emission?
Like if 1 lb of carbon is extracted as crude oil, and then that 1 lb is involved in say five monetary transactions, with the processing followed by the eventual consumption and release into the atmosphere, does each person in that chain now have a carbon footprint that increases by one pound?
But that’s not all he’s doing!
He then takes the revenue from selling gasoline and uses it to bribe politicians and hire lobbyists and invest in more oil refining/exploration; he’s making the problem even worse.
Meanwhile, the people he sells the gasoline to don’t have any real choice but to buy it. They need to work to live, and they can’t get to work without gas because Mr. Gasoline destroyed public transportation infrastructure.
Stop trying to flatten everything down to only the carbon footprint (a metric made by the oil industry to absolve themselves on responsibility). They used that money from selling gasoline to convince you that you are equally to blame for climate change as billionaire oil families and it’s absolute nonsense.
And this is the sort of thinking someone comes to when they don’t take power dynamics into account. ~Strawberry
What I’m responding to is the sort of thing that arises when people place all the blame for a problem on others without consulting their own responsibility.
You want to know about power dynamics? When I order a shirt from Amazon it arrives at my door the next day. No king of history has had the kind of power that I wield, except maybe the new King Charles.
I can speak to my network of people no matter how distant we are. That’s power. I can go 110 mph by pushing my foot to the floor. That’s power. I can see inside my own body and detect tumors before they ever exist on the surface. More power.
People these days are powerful. But it’s tempting to pretend one has no power, because we know that power comes with responsibility. When a person wants to avoid responsibility, they will craft a story of how powerless they are.
There’s nothing admirable about pretending not to have power. It’s just a way of hiding from those who might judge how you choose to use it.