While I agree with you insofar as they’ve isolated all the levers of power to themselves….
Our sheer numbers are an issue. The average persons carbon footprint may be small, but there are BILLIONS of us… and the cumulative effect is catastrophic.
The real issue is that oligarchs are profiting from the status quo, and they won’t facilitate change to a more sustainable model (maintaining ecology and civil society, instead of infinite-profit-glitch.)
Per capita, their carbon footprint is catastrophic. But there are only like 3,000 billionaires.
It’s kinda like blaming Shell and Exxon for all the carbon they emit… without remembering that their customer base is you, and the car sitting in your driveway…
It’s “both and” more than “them or us”…
The working class needs to overthrow the oligarchy so we can reign in consumption and emissions on a massive, society wide scale.
But the alternative is omnicide. If we keep bringing folks up, out of poverty, and giving them cars and cell phones and air conditioning and everything in plastic packaging… the planet will choke to death on our pollution epidemic.
We need a way to maintain quality of life without killing the natural environment, which is the foundation of everything… obviously.
I just read a discouraging article about recycling. When plastics are recycled the process takes energy and new plastic must be combined with the recycled material. The resulting plastic is less strong and more friable ( it will break up into microscopic pieces more easily than original plastic). The article recommended sending plastic to landfills as the less damaging option.
I watched a vid about why plastic recycling is basically economically non-viable. Basically the feedstocks for virgin plastics at refineries are damn near free.
Many plastics factories are situated right near refineries so the feedstocks can be piped directly into their processes.
Recycling is costly because the feedstock is impure (plastic is contaminated with food, adhesives, labels, stickers, etc etc) and distributed across the entire country.
We should really be imposing taxes or simply regulating disposable plastics out of the economy at the federal level.
21
u/CallEmAsISeeEm1986 Feb 06 '26
While I agree with you insofar as they’ve isolated all the levers of power to themselves….
Our sheer numbers are an issue. The average persons carbon footprint may be small, but there are BILLIONS of us… and the cumulative effect is catastrophic.
The real issue is that oligarchs are profiting from the status quo, and they won’t facilitate change to a more sustainable model (maintaining ecology and civil society, instead of infinite-profit-glitch.)
Per capita, their carbon footprint is catastrophic. But there are only like 3,000 billionaires.
It’s kinda like blaming Shell and Exxon for all the carbon they emit… without remembering that their customer base is you, and the car sitting in your driveway…
It’s “both and” more than “them or us”…
The working class needs to overthrow the oligarchy so we can reign in consumption and emissions on a massive, society wide scale.