Yeah the “over-consumption” bit rubs me a bit wrong as it generally provides “neutral framing” for an otherwise EXCLUSIVELY greedy massive capitalist-driven issue. Families aren’t “overconsuming” drinking water or taking too long a shower, nor are our toilets not being a low-volume flushing devices the primary cause of our issues.
Instead things like like Nestle claiming aquifers for themselves, companies fracking using all available ground water in their proprietary chemical mixes and then dumping the waste water into surface pools that not only are deadly, flammable, and completely impossible to separate from water except via high-energy-cost processes like distillation… but that also slowly seep down into the ground water for places that then become permanent wastelands where clean water is no longer available in the ground.
The framing here is always like the fucking paper straws :
- “Littering is something we all have to combat” attempts to distract from the fact that the overwhelming majority of pollution comes from a handful of multi-billion dollar companies who dump garbage everywhere with little to no consequences.
- “Americans drive big cars too much.” Mother-fucker, we don’t have bullet trains or even safe bridges in this country. The problem is that our government is bought and paid for by private industries that basically write the legislation that controls how public transit never becomes viable. Me driving a 2005 vehicle that happens to the be the old SUV I could afford from a friend doesn’t make me someone anyone should spend any energy blaming. The fact that I can’t afford a new car while countries like Norway pass massive subsidies for buying a new electric car isn’t even the thing people should be angry about. It’s that countries like Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Japan, and China all have massive multi-billion-dollar high-speed trains operated by well-paid, well-trained, adequately staffed teams of subsidized workers who make cars seem stupid by comparison.
How about you stop saying “overconsumption” and instead tell the truth and say "a handful of massive multi-conglomerate companies are completely decimating all clean drinking water sources and their CEOs should be put in prison, have their personal and companies’ assets liquidated and re-declared public goods.”
I’d call it corporate gaslighting, passing the blame onto consumers to shield themselves from any accountability that could harm their bottom line. Similar to how they’ve roped a generation into believing the rhetoric of the consumer’s “carbon footprint” to shift the responsibility of climate action and deflect attention away from the world’s major polluters; multi-conglomerate companies.
That wasn’t corporations, that was a grassroots effort spearheaded by the left and famous climate proponents. Unless you’re insinuating Al Gore and Bill Nye the Science Guy were being bribed by big business the whole time.
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Corporate media sanitizes raw information for the masses to redirect the public’s collective anger and diffuse the otherwise clear responsibility that is nearly always a direct result of the oligarchs’ own actions driven purely by abject unchecked greed.
Individual journalists (who usually don’t get paid millions like the pundits who help “manufacture consent” from the public) usually barely can make ends meet are the ones who do the incredibly hard, thankless, and sometimes even dangerous job of actually attempting to inform the public through an unfiltered lens are few and far between.
In fact, even a large number of the supposed “independent” ones are astroturfed and just pretending to be genuine… but are in fact financed by dark money from groups propped up by billionaire libertarian shitheads like the Kochs in an attempt to muddy the waters and further disingenuously reframe issues by scapegoating minorities and the marginalized for problems - again - caused almost exclusively by the absurdly rich.
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The mass media IS the corporations fucking shit up. Most of the time it’s the same couple of people or their friends at the top.
The media used to be complicit but now they’re fully part of it.
Everything you say is spot! We definitely need to bring guillotine out for fucking Nestlé.
Thank you just subscribed.
I like how Amsterdam ended up in your list of countries. It clarifies the mindset of a lot of Amsterdammers.
Heh, sorry. Fixed. Was kind of just seeing red and naming all the places that came to mind with robust public transit.
Do not let your body become addicted to water. You will resent its absence.
I never realized we were trying to terraform the world to be Arrakis.
Those pesky sandworms ruin everything!
At least we’ll discover spice
More like “will spiral into a crisis”
Why did nobody warn us!!!111 /irony
Wait for it. Soon water will be the next best products and probably in some regions reason for war. We all have been warned
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Well. Maybe ignorant to believe it’s not already happening. Thank you
Hasn’t this been known for years and years? I feel like I’ve seen articles like that every week for years that say the same thing. We fucked
NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress in 1988 and the UN formed the IPCC that same year.
The atmosphere was still at a very safe and very reasonable 350 ppm (pre-industrial normal was 280-300 ppm), so all the emissions up to 1988 could be ignored if we had just taken action after 1988.
Since then, we fucked up. And we primarily fucked up by stopping the transition to cheap nuclear power that was already well underway, because we got scared of it after 1987 (Chernobyl).
If we had ignored those fears and listened to James Hansen, we probably could have kept CO2 below 400. It’s now 420.
This is not what happened. Takes like this, that oversimplify and make things seem inevitable aren’t very helpful.
For decades before 1988 and for decades after, people have advocated for the environment. The shift to an understanding that we can have an impact on our planet has been slow and hard-won. Don’t pretend like one person or one hearing or one technology could have prevented all this - that’s just not true.
You may be upset that nuclear wasn’t or isn’t used more, but it doesn’t really matter at this point - we are here, and we have really inexpensive and seemingly low impact technologies like solar and wind with battery or other types of storage. Plus, we can now have a more distributed grid with installs right in people’s homes.
Move past whatever has you hung up on nuclear, there’s lots of other ways to have a positive impact on our environmental future.
No, ignorant takes like yours are the real problem. We still can’t solve climate change without nuclear power, it’s simple math, physics and economics.
All the models we have show that we need a huge expansion of nuclear power, even if solar and wind growth fits the most optimistic curve we can think of.
If there was a way to solve climate change without it, I would be more optimistic about the future.
But there are too many ignorant people who can’t even do basic math.
No, ignorant takes like yours are the real problem.
Is this Reddit?! (Looks up at title bar in confusion.)
No…well, this is odd.
Just ignore him.
Truth is, you both are right. Everyone who can afford it should have solar panels or wind turbines put on their homes so we have a decentralized, people-powered power network in case the power plants brown out during heat waves, which they will.
We need nuclear plants to serve as a baseline power source so we still get energy at night, or on cloudy or rainy days, or when the wind doesn’t blow.
Por que no los dos?
Oh, there was nothing wrong with the gist of what they said, it was the personal commentary at the beginning that was unneeded. If they had skipped that then their point would have been likely considered more thoughtfully by those reading.
I don’t see why anyone should care honestly. Everyone is an asshole on the Internet. What’s key is remembering they have no actual power over you.
No u r!
Carter had a hugely ambitious plan to build solar power satellites to wean us off both of them. He didn’t like nukes and he was a nuclear physicist.
Nobody likes nuclear, but it’s less bad than terraforming our own planet.
Except he was in a position to push nuclear instead of a cockamamie scheme where you need to launch hundreds of rockets that are 10x the size of the Saturn V over the course of years to build solar farms the size of Manhattan.
A man who once had radioactive piss from a nuclear accident chose that over nukes.
Governments are starting to experiment with SSPSes so we’ll likely see those start to replace coal too.
No, he didn’t. He (or rather, Congress) financed a lot of research into alternative energy due to the oil crisis.
In actual fact, he pushed mostly for coal as a domestic energy source as a response to the oil crisis. His main concern regarding nuclear during his presidency was due to proliferation concerns.
In his defense, the magnitude of impact of fossil fuels on climate change was not as well understood during his presidency. That would take another 10 years.
As I said, 1988 was the year Congress got the expert testimonials and when the UN founded the IPCC.
Fucking almond milk I tell ya
dairy industry be like
Without water how will we ever make Brawndo?
Water? You mean like in the toilet?
I’ll be honest, this is part of the reason I’m not moving back to California, despite missing the sunshine a lot. I figure as global warming intensifies, we’ll probably get California weather here in the PNW, but with more water.
Monkey’s paw curls, you get the weather of Bakersfield.
NoooooooOOOOooooooo(breathes)OoooooOooooooo!
That’s what I’ve been thinking for a while too. That California would basically turn into Mexico. However I’ve been surprised by the weather these past 5 years. Unseasonable and strange extreme weather has actually brought more moisture, not less. To the extreme other end of trouble with flooding and such. There is a tropical storm warning in San Diego right now. The first one ever.
Global temperature rise means all kinds of different things for local weather. We shouldn’t assume that we can take the weather we have now and just dial it up 12 degrees.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
About 10% of the global population already lives in countries with high or critical water stress.
Meanwhile, scarcity will worsen in the Middle East and the Sahel region in Africa, where water is already in short supply.
Extreme and prolonged droughts, made more frequent and severe by the climate crisis, are also putting pressure on ecosystems, which could have “dire consequences” for plant and animal species, the report’s authors said.
Solutions include better international cooperation to avoid conflicts over water, Connor said.
“There is an urgent need to establish strong international mechanisms to prevent the global water crisis from spiraling out of control,” said Audrey Azoulay, the director general of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural body.
“Water is our common future, and it is essential to act together to share it equitably and manage it sustainably.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Here in Mayotte, water has been increasingly rationed since 2017. Today we have running water every other day, a bit less than half the time if you count the actual hours. Quite a few people have wells, but far from everyone. There has been an immigration crisis for the past fifteen years too, and the population is officiously estimated to be twice the census (600k vs 300k officially). People are coming in from the nearby islands where there is endemic corruption and France’s development aid (74M€ staggered through several years) only seldom reached the population, as far as retellings of immigrants have taught me it was largely hijacked. Anyway, that should be our clue… but nothing has been made so far, only vague plans about an additional desalination plant… the rainy season, Kashikazi (roughly november to april), becomes less and less wet by the year. It’s not looking good.
It already has
