If we HAD trains and public transit, I would LOVE to take them!
Yes, the US has abysmal public transport (at least in houston, tx in my case) compared to even third world countries like Egypt. It’s downright embarrassing.
I live inside the 275 loop around Cincinnati. My work is 11 miles away. In order to get to work via public transit I’d have to walk 3.5 miles to the closest bus stop, take a bus the wrong direction, wait for a transfer to another bus heading closer to work, and then walk 2.5 miles to my job. The schedule is so sparse it would take me 3-4 hrs one way and I’d be walking more than half of it. No bike lanes or sidewalks either, and the roads are so dangerous that in almost 20 years of working there I’ve never seen a bike attempt any of my possible routes. I have seen memorial bikes on the roadside where someone got hit.
I live in Germany and while not perfect, I’m glad we have such a thing.
The problem is when a 10 minute car drive takes an hour with public transportation
Next problem is surge pricing and general ticket prices. I recall one city I was living in a few years back having advertisements for taking the train. And I was like “Yeah sure. It’s just double the price and triple the time”.
To me taking the train (at least for long distances) is a luxury thing.
Ok. If you don’t? There’s still countless aspects of your life that you interact through the economy to fulfill that have the potential for change and improvement.
Still buy new clothes from Old Navy or JCPenney? Maybe think about going to your nearest GoodWill or local thrift shop(s) (and on a regular basis) to see what gems pass by now and again. College towns right after the end of the semester are ripe for this, and I would wager that you have a college town somewhat closer to you than any kind of public transit. Not saying that you have to do this for your entire wardrobe, but choosing used over new means that resources are avoided in making that new garment, such as all of the fuels needed to move resources to and from each factory along the value chain, all of the solid waste destined for landfill or incineration from the scraps of cutting-and-sewing that new garment, all of the water pollution associated with dyeing or printing your new garment, or the potential human rights violations that could pop up throughout the value chain. A lot of these can be mitigated by buying more sustainable brands that seek to minimize these things, but a cheaper alternative is to buy used too.
Still have an air conditioner? Maybe think about hooking up a smart thermostat or equivalent and enrolling in peak-load demand response initiatives so that your AC or furnace works a little less hard in exchange for the entire grid not having to provide as much power (the alternative is blackouts or brownouts where everyone turns their AC on blast but kills the grid so no one has power anymore). Doing this means that demand curves by customers don’t reach as high of historical peaks, which allows utilities to avoid using peak response assets like Combined Cycle Combustion Plants that use natural gas to operate. You in turn create a greener grid, that’s also better for the climate. And if having a warmer house isn’t enough for you, there are other ways of mitigating this, like setting up phase-changers directly to your bedroom so that it stays cool, unlike the rest of the house, or buying ice vests that you can wear on your person, or going to a public facility like a library or mall and centralizing cooling loads to there instead of decentralized cooling loads via everyone’s homes.
How old are your assets like cars, AC units, furnaces, fridges, etc.? Perhaps if it doesn’t break the bank, look into purchasing models that are more efficient, as in those cars that have better mileage and/or that are hybrids and can be plugged in to a normal outlet to charge, or fridges and AC units that use coolants better and that have better insulation to keep things cooler for longer. These choices don’t necessarily have to be accompanied by the insane bits of technology and information that bigger companies want to shove down our throats with these newer, smarter devices.
Does your local grocery store carry organic goods as opposed to conventional ones? I know that ALDI near me carry those, and I’ve had to shop there for years thanks to the low prices they offer. If you minimize your costs while still going organic, maybe consider shifting your diet away from red meat and pork towards other options like chicken, fish, or straight up whole food, plant-based ingredients like vegetables, fruit, legumes, grains, nuts, seeds, mushrooms, etc. Or, if you’ve gone that far, have you considered seeking out local farmer’s markets near you that often offer these goods both organically (or “organically” since the official label is so expensive), in season, AND locally. A good resource for finding farmer’s markets near you is https://www.localharvest.org/.
Getting back to the public transit problem you bring up:
Is there public transit near you? Do you know for sure? Most major cities like Houston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even the smaller ones like Cleveland, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, etc. do have some version of public transit, whether that’s via subway, rail, tram, or bus, so perhaps there are more options near you thank you might think. And do you use these when you have the opportunity to? All of these services are offered via companies that use metrics like ridership and rider time to gauge how they might want to invest in these services into the future. If you start engaging with more and more public transit when you can, every human adds up on their balance sheets and can impact what happens with public transit in the future. I know that in my area, the public transit corp running our interurban train is constructing a new service line South, when it traditionally only extended East & West, which will capture an even larger portion of the market and make the service even more financially lucrative over time, leading to even more expansion and coverage. But I do agree with you on the lack of other interurban solutions like Amtrak. That service is downright terrible, and we as a country (assuming you live in the US) need to start demanding better service, as well as less of a grip on the railway network in this country by the railroad tycoons.
There are changes that can be made all around us that involve the economy and a corporation on the other side. All of the above examples I listed do. There are two sides to the economy, that economists tell us: Supply and Demand. Just because we can’t control supply outside of efforts like political action doesn’t mean we can’t control demand too. Little changes that every common person makes over time one way or another add up and show up on these corporations’ balance sheets.
Hope is not lost. Stay focused on sustainability and making what changes you can make in your life right now and into the future, including political action. All of this adds up.
Oops, there’s been another oil spill caused by a multi-billion dollar company shirking regulation and safety, all your effort is now void and moot.
Short-term catastrophes don’t negate long-term habit changes though. That oil spill doesn’t impact all water bodies across the entire planet at the same time. While I think more developed nations should introduce more punishments to prevent things like this from happening, we have technologies that can mitigate these things once they do happen.
Progress may be up and down, but as long as the slope trends upwards, it’s better than nothing.
Message stays the same: do as much as you can when you can in the specific ways you can.
Ok CNN. I’ll follow your lead and start using public transportation.
That just involves me leaving my house at 4am and driving 9 minutes to the local bus stop, then take a bus ride for 37 min, transfer from there to another bus for another 19 min ride, transfer to another bus and ride for an hour, then either call an Uber for a 3 min ride or I can walk for 30 minutes to reach my workplace.
Or… I can just drive and reach my workplace in 40min.
I would love to use public transportation, and when I lived in Japan that’s all I ever used, which I much preferred to a car.
America first needs to get serious about establishing actual reliable and accessible transportation in order for more people to use it.
To be fair the big three (Ford, GM, Chrysler) made some politicians very rich suppressing light and cross country high speed passenger rail, also public transit all across the nation.
The US (through its deeply corrupted electoral system) totally bought that ticket to ride that train… so to speak.
This reply misunderstands the fundamentals of market economics. If we, the consumers, start making the global climate more of a factor in our purchasing decisions, that will directly affect what gets produced in a capitalist system. Not trying to absolve these corporations of responsibility for the problems they’ve caused, just saying that if enough people start taking the bus/train instead of driving or substituting meats for plant based foods, we can have a significant impact. Of course the best thing we can do is vote to get ignorant climate science deniers out of office.
Choosing what to buy is a luxury most people don’t have. Companies need to be forced into changing because the market proves time and time again that it can’t regulate itself
Chosing to eat chicken instead of beef impacts the whole chain from fertilizer to animal feed to clearing the Amazon for pasture to methane produced by cows.
You have more choice than you think, like which meat to pick or to use more eggs and cheese as replacement instead. This is just one of the obvious everyday choices. Not all fish is equal too, with sustainable aquaculture being the best choice for the world.
If the oil majors, or just one of them switch off the taps tomorrow we will just get Russian gas crisis x10 and make OPEC and friends insanely rich. We need to transition to something else, that’s for sure, but blaming them for everything is super naive.
In order to make an actual impact on the environment, we’d need to all go back to living without electricity in stone houses. Everyone in the world could take the bus and it would do fuck all. Society needs to change how we produce energy and how we construct things. That’s stuff consumers cant do by changing their habits.
Here’s a great video by Kurzgesagt
That’s a 2 hour video from a guy with 35k subscribers and it starts off with Chad memes and an ad break for an alpha male bro podcast…
This Video is badly researched and the worst you could accuse Kurzgesagt is that they have sloppy research on sponsored Videos. Which in my opinion is also not correct.
Can’t buy what doesn’t exist, can’t buy a healthier option if one isn’t produced, can’t buy a more sustainable product if one isn’t produced, can’t buy a solar powered utility vehicle if one isn’t produced, can’t buy wind power if it isn’t produced, can’t buy items without single use packaging unless they’re produced.
Needs and wants may drive a market, but nothing is consumed before production.
This is such a fucking stupid argument to make.
The reason airlines make x% of CO2 emissions is because people want to fly, they’re an airline, and there is no emissions free way to power a plane.
The reason the plastic company makes x billions of plastic sporks every year is because I want a spoon to eat my Taco Bell Nachos in my car. They’re not making all the plastic pollution because they just hate the Earth.
They’re not cartoon villains like in Captain Planet that pollute just to make pollution.
If it’s that bad, then let’s make a law that fixes the problem.
You can take this and just welp, plastic spoon is cheaper and all my concurrent are doing it so fuck it.
We want a greener industry? Make the fucking law reflect that otherwise, fuck off.
Which is how this ends up being a chicken-egg problem.
Are people driving plastic usage or is capitalism driving policies that drive people to use more plastic?
And if so, why is industry writing policy instead of the public, or agents that are supposed to work for the public’s interest?
None of this ends until enough “regular people” coordinate to take power back from industry so that we operate like an actual democracy again. If you want to preserve an environment on Earth fit for human habitation, you have to get loud about… Campaign finance reform : P. And then realized that as boring as that sounds, that that will be when things actually would get violent and scary bc real power would be threatened.
I am not optimistic we’ll even get that far. Our population probably will take some very severe hits in our lifetime though. I’ll cut down on meat where I can, but I am mostly just enjoying the good times we have left.
It doesn’t help that a sizable subset of Americans will bitch and moan at any efforts to reduce the reliance on things like disposable plastic forks, plastic straws or plastic shopping bags because it’s “woke”.
For chrissake, remember when they sold Trump branded plastic straws?
Tbh the best way to avoid that is to use marketing instead of force, make carrying a reusable spork cool, market it differently to people (like for the woke say it’s green and one company that makes a certain spork is employee owned by gay people, for the trumpets say it’s good for their prepping or because the microplastics are estrogenating the children or some shit and also this other spork brand are god fearin’ christians unlike GaySporks, etc), until they become common like nalgene bottles were and then you can either just phase out the disposables or then pass your law with more support, or just let them be as emergency rations for if you lost your spork on the way to taco bell today or whatever and you need another.
Edit: shit, you could even have fast food and fast food+ style places rebrand a spork with their logo and sell them instead of giving away free disposables. Capitalism is the problem and it won’t go away? Exploit it against itself and make it work for the enviornment. To some degree it’s not only doable but probably easier than force through law.
You get a lot less support with “plastic straws are now illegal, go buy a metal one and some pipe cleaners to carry now” than if you figure out how to make the straws popular with everyone first.
From what I understand, a lot of corporations have power over the options consumers have, the market isnt as free as this argument implies. For example, coal and fossil fuel lobbies do a lot to prevent sustainable alternatives from being adopted.
The US doesnt rely on oil and coal because thats what consumers want, or because its necessarily the cheapest, its because the people that run those corporations have the means to subvert democracy. They are not cartoon villains, but they are absolutely villains.
What you are saying is true for plastic straws and airlines, but I would guess it doesnt really apply to many of these 100 corporations
there is no emissions free way to power a plane.
You can run it on biofuels. This is how Gates excuses his private jet, conveniently ignoring the possibility of combining biofuel AND comercial flights.
I’m sure tons of voters are going to be happy and will reelect the politicians that make air travel 2x to 5x more expensive.
You’re absolutely right. They aren’t cartoon villains. They’re just rational agents acting according to very real incentives.
But where do these incentives come from? They depend on how we choose to organize our economy, what guiding principles our society follows in how to distribute resources, and harvest them from the environment.
They come from our economic system. Our economic system is capitalism. And one of the many, many problems with capitalism — it can’t fucking slow down. In the eternal chase for greater and greater quarterly profits, there is no room for questions such as “is this growth sustainable?” or “I know there’s demand for this, but should we really be doing it?”.
Pointing fingers and blaming people is, indeed, a waste of energy. Instead, it may be better to ask: “How do we incentivise people to change their behaviour? What about our system needs to change? And how quickly can we dismantle the oil companies?”
We can’t incentivize people to change their behavior because no one is going to deliberately lower their quality of life.
What politician is going to win on a platform of…
Let’s make air travel so expensive that normal people can no longer regularly fly!
Vote for me I’m going to double your electricity bill!
You know that big SUV you love that is entirely impractical but you just like it because of how big it is… If you vote for me I’ll make gas $7 a gallon so that you can’t afford to have a giant SUV anymore.
You know how you like to eat your Taco Bell nachos in your car with a plastic spork… If you vote for me I’ll replace the plastic spork with a cornstarch spork that starts to melt when you use it.
The only thing that is going to save us is technology. Like air travel being fueled by biofuels, electricity costs kept somewhat normal by building new nuclear generation, giant SUVs being powered by batteries charged by nuclear/renewable energy, actually recycling the plastic spork.
Corporations create the heat and cooling, build the cars and airplanes, and raise the meat for… wait for it… consumers. These things go hand in hand. Asking people to make changes to their lifestyles that will help the environment IS demanding the corporations to stop producing so much pollution. No one wants to take the blame.
When the world is on fire, no one will care, but the idea that corporations are somehow a separate entity from the consumers/individuals that line their pockets with profits is equally irresponsible. It does come down to daily choice, because the corporations follow demand. But no one wants to suffer the inconvenience of changing their lifestyle, so we blame the corporations that we then buy gas, electricity, meat, and cars from. It’s blindingly dumb from either direction.
Spiderman points at Spiderman.
Note that the IPCC acknowledges that no one is paying the true cost of energy or food. You could decapitate all corporate executives, and, if we truly wanted to pay the environmental costs of heating, cooling, and food, all prices would go up. If you think things are hard now, give it a decade. Prices for everyone for everything will go up. You could kill all the rich people on the planet, and it wouldn’t change that fact, and it wouldn’t suddenly make the environment sound. It truly does come down to fundamental lifestyle changes that none of us want to enact.
You cannot eat money.
This is classic dog wags the tail and vice-versa. Is it the demand causing these corporations to make the product or are they creating the demand through plentiful supply and marketing?
If these entities were to make something with lower emissions and marketed that as a better alternative will nobody buy that something? I highly doubt it…
I remember when the things we bought were extremely durable and could last for decades if taken care of, I’m talking about anything, from tools, to cars, to clothes.
Now, from the 2000s to present day, everything is made to be consumed extremely fast, products are made with cheaper materials and most likely designed to fall apart sooner, this increases consumption by A LOT on a shorter span of time meaning more money in less time, something corporations just drool at.
With things being replaced on a shorter span means more energy required for the factories, more materials, more waste, and yes, way more pollution.
A lot of the times the “consumers” were created artificially with this tactics. Many things that lead to the current state of nsumption by the common folk is engineered.
I’m glad someone else understands this. Everytime I see the statistic about corporate emissions, I can’t help but think about how it’s so misleading. Exxon et al keep polluting because we keep collectively buying their product.
That doesn’t absolve them from their efforts to discredit climate change research, but to suggest they are just some evil entity polluting at will is just ridiculous.
You can’t expect someone not ride a car if they need one for survival.
The same is true for the fast-food industry: a lot of people dont cook anymore and just go to McDonald’s. Hell, a lot of people don’t even make their coffee in the morning anymore.
If we want to get back on track, make a law that reflect this otherwise, fuck off.
Admittedly part of the issue is that huge parts of many cities, especially in the anglosphere, are designed in such a way that living there without a car is impossible, because they’ve been built too spread-out and too far away from anywhere people want to go
And remedying this would basically require densifying everywhere close to urban centres, up to 5 stories in most places, then fucking razing the suburbs to the ground and making it abundantly clear to anyone who wants to live at that old suburban density or lower that the price will be having a septic tank and dirt roads
Electric cars won’t change this, btw. Mass adoption of them is not practical due to their weight, strain on the grid, tendency to catch fire in a way that takes 1 entire tender per car, and use of finite lithium, and should be reserved for those with a very specific set of disabilities that make walking difficult while not impairing driving abilities, or those who actually want to live out in the country and put up with aforementioned septic tank and dirt roads
I think it’s hard to estimate how much effort corporations put into getting us to do what they want. If you’ve ever looked at why the public transportation in the US is shit you’d know there’s something suspicious going on with it.
US used to have cities that are great for public transportation, the grid design of the 1920s is excellent or public transportation. Some cities like NY still have that but cities like Detroit spent decades destroying that to build a highway going straight through the city. Suburbs in America are being built in a way that only suits car travel. And not just that, people have been conditioned to think that only poor people would use public transportation. Not only have been people made to believe they don’t want public transportation, they couldn’t have it even if they wanted to because it would be horribly inefficient.
Who benefits from those decisions? Definitely not the people who are now dependent on owning cars. But I’m pretty sure car manufacturers and oil companies are pretty happy because they get to sell more cars and oil. Now I can’t point the finger at that those companies because there’s no evidence they influenced this, at least none that I know of. But it’s awfully convenient for them that when the car boom happened in the 50s the US government was happy to spend money literally rebuilding cities to make them more car dependent and keep at it, while the same thing was stopped in Europe pretty quickly.
I don’t mind giving off some conspiracy theorist vibe, but I don’t think it’s far fetched that corporations are entities that put money above everything else and if needless polluting let’s them make more money they will do it without hesitation. I wouldn’t put it past them to deliberately build the narrative that somehow the people are to blame for this polluting. After all EXXON started the “is it even real?” and “is it even man made?” arguments that regular people used for decades to derail the climate change discussions, all with the purpose of shifting attention away from them. It’s literally their MO.
I agree with this entirely. Of course there are corporations responsible for way more than myself. But using it as a means to justify myself doing nothing to reduce my own consumption is just backwards and stupid. It’s comparing a bad thing to another really bad thing but they’re both still bad things. Should they stop doing what they’re doing to contribute to this, yes. Should I also? Also yes lol. Plus like your comment said. These companies are driven by our own demand. It’s our fault for supporting and relying on the way things are for sure.
Thanks for your reply. I think the hard truth that we all need to look at is, regardless of who is to blame, we all need to make daily choices that work towards a common goal of salvaging this planet. And I think often those choices are annoying, inconvenient, or expensive. Some of us can shoulder the expense portion easier than others, but until we start acting every day like the world is worse than it was 100 years ago, we’re only going to make it worse in the future. Things are not going to be easier going forward. The more of us that make things harder now, the less hard things will be in the future for the young. It truly is a daily choice.
TL;DR:
Consumer choices can influence industries, but it is impractical to solely rely on this to drive ecological change due to factors such as lack of awareness, inconvenience, habits, price and limited to no alternatives. Government subsidies for ecologically detrimental industries and the lack of subsidies for ecologically beneficial industries worsen the effect. Improved legislation is necessary to address these issues by enforcing ecologically beneficial industry practises and guide consumers.
Verbose:
I agree with you partly. Yes, consumer choices do affect which companies get money and which don’t. But I would say that consumers are not completely responsible for the practises of a company. If a company chooses to power their production based on fossil energy carriers there’s not much a consumer can do about it. Sure, they can stop buying from them. But for that a lot of things must happen. First of all they must know about it. And if it’s not printed fat on the packaging or news are screaming about it, there is a high probability that they will never know about it. They could ask the companies themselves. And even if companies would be transparent and honest about their response, there’s only a small fraction of people who would do this. That’s because it’s inconvenient. As ugly as it sounds, people hate inconveniences. A lot of people don’t want to spend their precious free time with writing or calling the hundreds of companies, whose products they use, to ask about their production practises. Finally, if consumers eventually learn about the ecological impact of their products, they still need to collect a significant amount of mental energy in order to make the conscious decision of not buying them and possibly looking out for alternatives. That’s difficult, because people easily get used to stuff and it’s psychologically hard to change habits. And they’d need to do this for every single product they use. Even worse, in a critical amount of cases there aren’t even alternatives available to consumers. If you continue buying the wrong products (in an eco sense), because you don’t have access to an (affordable) alternative, that will send the wrong signals. The market won’t see an increased demand for ecologically friendly products in these (significant amount of) cases, but quite the contrary. I don’t say that it’s impossible, clearly humans seem to have the capacity of intelligence and can be educated to do better, but I claim it’s impractical for the everyday life of the masses. Especially, we don’t have the time to wait until the majority of people is able to change their consumption behaviour. That’s why we need laws, such that law makers do the hard work of paving the way for ecologically beneficial industry practises, so the Jon or Jane Doe going to the grocery store after a long day of work doesn’t have to worry about which products to buy.
Besides, in a lot of countries fossil based energy carriers are still cheaper than environmemtally friendy alternatives, sadly. If companies start to completely switch to green energy, this would increase the price. Increasing the price can lead to less consumers buying the products. Either because they can’t afford it or because they want or need to save money. This again would turn the circle of environmental destruction once more, since the cheaper alternatives, which consumers are looking out for, are usually less beneficial or even detrimental to the environment.
Also let’s not forget that also a lot of countries subsidise industries which are major contributors to greenhouse gases, e.g., the meat industry. Meanwhile there is a lack of sufficient subsidies for ecologically better industry segments. I live in a world where an organically grown cucumber is much more expensive than a pack of meat. That can’t be right.
We need good laws and can’t rely on the behaviour of consumers alone. There’s no way around it.
People demand goods and services. They very often do not care how those get to them. If they did, most corporations would go out of existence for using child and slave labor.
Your average person is not the one fighting against climate change regulation. It is the corporations throwing billions at government officials to not regulate them.
Shortest answer to the problem. Corps would LOVE if they could charge some people more for environmentally friendly shit while shoving more plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere for everyone who doesn’t and will never give a shit.
Not would, do. Energy providers, for instance, will often charge extra if you want to only use clean energy despite renewables being cheaper for energy production. That extra money subsidizes their failing coal contracts and investments.
