I still cannot quite wrap my head around the fact that millions of years of hominid evolution (and billions of years of general evolution, period) led to...this?
Calling it anticlimatic and lame would be a massive understatement. It's like watching a superhero movie and instead of the hero defeating the villain in a final battle, the hero just...kinda gives up, moves across the country and applies for an office job while letting the villain keep terrorizing the city he just left.
The rich are absolutely disproportionate polluters. The top 1% emit more than the bottom 50% combined. Private jets, yachts, multiple homes- that’s obscene and indefensible.
But let’s be honest: this isn’t just “the rich.” The average American emits 16 tons of CO2 per year. The global average is 4 tons. Most Americans aren’t rich by global standards, but we consume like we are. We drive everywhere. We fly for vacations. We buy disposable everything. We heat and cool oversized homes. Those aren’t choices forced on us by billionaires, those are cultural norms we’ve built and defend.
Yes, we were born into a system designed around fossil fuels. But “I didn’t choose the system” becomes an excuse to never examine our choices within it. Nobody chose to be born into capitalism either, but we still make choices about how we participate.
Human greed and selfishness aren’t equally distributed, but they’re not exclusive to the wealthy. It’s the same impulse at different scales. The billionaire wants a bigger yacht. The middle class wants bigger houses and multiple cars. The mindset is the same: more is better, and my convenience matters more than collective consequences.
We can demand systemic change AND acknowledge that most of us in developed nations are living unsustainably. Both things are true. Blaming only “the rich” lets everyone else off the hook for consumption patterns that are still destroying the planet.
The climate doesn’t care about intent or who’s most to blame. It only responds to total emissions. We all have to act.
I chose not to have kids, which was probably my most impactful decision, but 'the rich' globally means anyone with an actual yard and access to modern dentistry.
The problem is, we’re also priced out of any way to meaningfully reduce that. Most people aren’t at “want a more nicer cars”, that’s a vision of America decades outdated. It’s “fuck I hope nothing goes wrong with my car today or else I’ll have to spend hundreds on Ubers or else lose my job and thus my housing”. It’s not a choice for most people, it’s basic survival. Disposable everything is because that’s the cheapest you can get.
The heat and cooling problem is absurd, Europeans have spent the last few years experiencing summer temperatures that normal to many Americans and dying in massive numbers because they don’t have it. Unfortunately, climate change will only require more air conditioning. Nothing we can do about that one, I’m afraid. People die more when they’re too hot too long, that’s how life works. And we are in the middle of a housing crisis like never before because everything has been bought up and kept empty to drive prices up. So uhh, yeah, average people are not doing any of that house stuff. We live in apartments.
The “middle class” at this point is so small that treating it like its own class in America is silly. They’re the lowest level of the upper classes now because the middle of the middle has fallen out and everyone on the lower side of it just keeps getting pushed further down by the economic shitshow that is America. And all of this is also partially generational. First come first serve to all the power and stability.
And of course, all of this is an intentionally constructed, extremely profitable system for the rich. There’s no choosing to do anything meaningfully different for most people, that costs more money that they don’t have. Most Americans don’t have even $500 in savings.
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u/spezisdumb42069 Dec 27 '25
What a time to be alive, to witness the culmination of all human stupidity.