Yeah it's a dumb, thought-terminating stat that makes you sound naive, like you haven't thought any of this through and your beliefs are fed by confirmation bias as you seek out stats online that support your initial view.
As leftists there is a pervasive stereotype that we don't understand the real world, yet our natural strength is that the facts are in our side. We need to be doing the hard work of reading discussing and building coherent world views so when people talk to us they code leftists as those who have their facts straight.
The stat is from here. It is frequently misquoted and misunderstood, but more importantly (as per your analysis) this isn't just private corporations being wasteful and blasting CO2 in the air because they're moustache-twirling villains, this is private and public enterprises that extract fossil fuels for energy.
Even if it wasn't, but it was just a measure of how much CO2 private companies produce, that would still mostly be reflective of the energy cost of producing goods for the imperial core, not waste from irresponsible corporations.
Edit: if people are looking for a coherent analysis of how production and fossil fuels are related I'd recommend reading the chapter China as Chimney of the World from Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital.
Yeah I mean Pipeline is good but it's really just a pamphlet on a very specific subject. If you want further reading from him I'd suggest White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Fascism. It's a heavy read but really enlightening.
People quoting that statistic are missing the point.
Why is it that some tiny number of companies are responsible for some tremendous percentage of greenhouse gas output?
It’s because they’re operating for profit and pollution comes from the point of production.
Of course someone has to transport the funco pops to the Walmart, so it’s not all at the factories that transform fossil hydrocarbons and trees into plastic dolls in cardboard boxes, but it’s that crazy percentage.
Can’t we just stop buying pops and stop that emission? No, because the pollution comes from the place they’re made and if you were a capitalist with a funco pops factory would you close down when everyone stops buying em or just make new molds to make something else? If you bought too many jet skis and can’t afford to retool, what’s the person who buys your factory gonna do, not make plastic shit?
No, they bought a plastic molding factory. They’re gonna make hydrocarbons into shapes they can sell.
People who use that stat to justify their individual choices are missing the point, individual choices don’t matter unless the social context they’re made in allows them to be effective.
It doesn’t matter that you throw your yogurt cup in the blue bin when it just gets collected and emptied into the pacific garbage raft.
It doesn’t matter that you threw your yogurt cup on the sidewalk when the street sweeper dumps into a shred and sort facility, you know, that exists and is real (this is sarcasm).
That doesn’t mean it’s okay to not care or throw your trash on the ground or whatever, just that saving the planet isn’t the reason it’s not okay.
Okay, so people all stop buying plastic dolls.
The owner of an injection molding plant isn’t gonna hang it up when they can’t sell dolls anymore, they’ll just get new molds and make something else out of the raw materials they already have familiarity with and machines they already own.
There are even consultants who specialize in helping companies pivot to producing shit that isn’t under heavy scrutiny by the public.
We’re talking about an insane hypothetical though because aside from like gun manufacturers, no one owns their own injection molding machines. They all just contract out to factories that are always running one hundred percent of the time.
It’s absurd to think that the volume of plastic going into funcos won’t immediately be diverted into something else about a week after the well dries up.
We live in a deeply extractionist society that tends to believe earth is a miraculous entity that can heal itself no matter how much we abuse it or take out of it. These brainworms tend to permeate leftists as well. There will need to be an intense restructuring of society after we win that isn't simply based on class. Sea freight and trade should be kept to a necessity basis, commodity production has to end at this point, not for communist ideals but for the planet. Industrial animal agriculture and fishing need to end. But you can't restructure society without having control over the means of production. That being said I think some of the people who say it's not worth talking about until we cross that bridge are deluding themselves. Climate change is the biggest radicalizing point for people my age and younger from what I've seen, and just going "we'll achieve communism and then figure out how to stop emissions" isn't a particularly inspiring rallying cry.
:xi-clap: remove :xi-clap: the :xi-clap: separation :xi-clap: of :xi-clap: town :xi-clap: and :xi-clap: country :xi-clap: to :xi-clap: heal :xi-clap: the :xi-clap: metabolic :xi-clap: rift :xi-clap:
i won't speak to what collective effort in bringing manufacturing to heel looks like, but i personally think it's important for individuals to just generally not be wasteful, as much as their own personal power allows.
as individuals, we all exist along the line of having some power. people with less power are less culpable. they can't avoid wasting energy due to inefficiencies created by capitalism (their landlord, building codes, zoning, etc). they can only eat what they can afford and have time for. they need to survive. they are helping others survive. you get the idea. most of humanity under capitalism has very little power or control over their resource usage, unless they are willing to have some primitive, unpleasant existence. i think that is a sort of trap as well.
for a lot of us westoids and ameroids, we might use a lot more resources to survive that our cousins around the world, but our power to conserve is still structurally very limited. but among those that have some power... like the ability to relocate, own a home, choose an employer/career, walk to work, make decisions for a group, make recommendations to a group, create organizational policy, etc, we have a responsibility to use that power to conserve resources and mitigate/adapt to climate change. of course, all that in isolation isn't enough. collective action to go after and shut down very powerful bad faith actors and organizations is crucial. but that doesn't absolve individuals with some individual power from pushing for conservation and just transitions.
we're not going to get there from "green capitalism" or green-branded conspicuous consumption. collective action against capitalism is the real fight, but for those on the left with a little bit of juice have a responsibility to push where they can and make sure we are targeting other decision makers and not shaming broke people for not getting an electric audi or whatever.
broke: "do your part! If we all buy hybrids and turn off the water when we brush our teeth we can beat climate change together!"
woke: "individual behaviors will never stop climate change because corporations pollute far more than individuals ever will, the only solution is to abolish capitalism"
bespoke: "engaging in reckless consumerism simply on the grounds that individuals don't pollute as much as corporations ignores that 1) consumer-derived profits enable corporations to pollute further and 2) a lot of that pollution is generated by manufacturing and shipping the consumer good you're thinking about buying. The only solution is to abolish capitalism, but reducing your consumerism both starves corporations of the profits they need to operate and accelerates their downfall, and also mitigates and delays the impact of climate change one tiny little bit"
Screaming NO ETHICAL CONSUMPTION UNDER CAPITALISM as I furiously pitchfork quarter pounders into the cargo bed of my F-350
direct action in the west will get you a terrorism charge if you’re a sufficient threat to infrastructure
This depends on the strength of your movement. Stop Cop City shows that by combining militancy and community mobilization you can get the state to drop terror enhancements.
The argument is a little silly, but you can kind of wrangle a sensible point out of it. An important thing to consider is the length of the carbon cycles, or in other words the time frame of different carbon reservoirs. As long as we keep pumping carbon from the very long time frame underground reservoirs, how we end up putting it in the short-term reservoirs matters relatively little. And corporations keep pumping it because it is profitable, and it is very profitable (top 5 industries), to the point where consumer choices seem to only plausibly affect the schedule of the pumping. They aren't shutting down productive oil wells because there isn't enough demand.
The sad part is that most people making the argument seem to be advocating for some vague kind of state intervention, which is equally unlikely as everyone doing their individual part.
The real solution is, as always, to educate, agitate, and organize.
Specifically these companies are not paying their fair share for the future cost of climate cleanup and need to be regulated out of existence. If the climate costs were priced in for coal gas and oil, renewables would look a lot more appealing and people/companies would change their behaviors to more sustainable practices.
Sorry, I didn't even begin to address your post. I typed out a big post but it was all doom and gloom. People won't give up their cheap fuels, they won't drive smaller cars, and they won't walk anywhere.
Maybe we just treat it as a job board and obstruct from the inside.
legislation and direct action. need to have a bus & bike lanes before theres people using & fighting for them & a place for traffic to be redirected when direct action disrupts it.
e: to use the tyson example, first enacting taxes and regs so fewer people have a stake in disruptions to a product they cant afford prior to direct action against it
It may be a simplified view, but I see it as part of a statement that changing power structure to be able to regulate these industries is more important than individual actions. That is, the status quo has these corporations running free controlling the govt, but only curbing the pollution at the point of production is what will bring non-negligable change.
So, if changing your individual actions takes your time away from building left power than that's not worth your time. Of course, do what you can if it is doable within your capability.
These companies are incredibly wasteful and are opposed to the necessary changes to at minimum achieve net zero. This is because of the basic mechanisms of capital, i.e. they'd get less profit. And also because there's no cost - or much lower cost to them as companies - to be wasteful. Same reason they throw away food while people go hungry, at every step in the supply chain, multiplied tenfold because of how much redundancy capitalism has in production.
So, my first point is that there's plenty of room for changes and that they don't require us having less consumer goods.
My second point is about power and control. These arguments are brought up in the contexts of individual action, government regulation, revolution, etc. The fact that so much waste is upstream of "consumer choices" (which is already an anemic tool) means we can't fix this through "demand" or "the market" left to its own devices. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie makes sure this is the case: don't fuck with our short-term profits, they say (and are forced to say by the economic system). Pointing the finger at companies is the first step towards an ecosocialist position by undercutting the "individual choices" argument and placing focus on production and those who control it.
I never said that less waste in production was sufficient for net zero... I actually suggested that this is a talking point to push people towards ecosocialism, i.e. revolution.
Out of curiosity, have you read up on degrowth economics?
It's an entire subfield of economics with a substantial lefty contingent that lays out how transitions could look under certain alternatives of economic planning. One of the more interesting aspects is how it lays out consumption, particularly by income within and across states. The degrowth part is a reference to economic growth, like when people throw around GDP and how it needs to go up (line go up) under capitalism, but a transition to net zero does require changes that will come up in those stats as degrowth, the opposite trend to what capitalism needs to avoid crisis. Keep in mind that GDP and growth are incomplete measures of production, so this doesn't mean you destroy productive forces, just that less shit gets sold and bought on paper, particularly for and by the rich.
The fundamental argument of ecosocialism is that capitalism is incompatible with addressing climate change. The system will collapse when you try to take the necessary measures without having much greater economic planning than the bourgeoisie will allow. You need the economic planning to prevent capitalism from destroying everything as we try to go down that path. You can see a bit of that in how China mitigates the pitfalls of the FIRE economy, which would hollow out production and people's lives there if allowed free reign like it is in the imperial core.
An oversimplified example is that a transition would involve banning all big personal yachts and creating transit systems to replace the vast majority of cars. The former is part of the massive overconsumption by the rich and the latter, while leading to better outcomes everywhere, would create an economic crisis if done in the current capitalist context, and will fail if done piecemeal or too slowly. Imagine the dent to "the economy" (capitalist investments and short-term profits) if you permanently cut out 90% of car sales and related industries within 2 decades. Compare this to the current capitalist "solution" of half-assedly pushing expensive electric cars. Even that would create crisis if it went just a bit faster, if fossil fuel wasn't subsidized (keep in mind that you could take every fossil fuel subsidy and give it back to the people - given different rulers).
Anyways, point is that degrowth is about looking at how the economy is measured, comparing it to production, and comparing that to what a just transition could look like. And the thing that cuts through bourgeois talking points is that there is not, in fact, a necessity to adopt a dramatically decreased quality of life, or that you don't get to use a washing machine anymore, or whatever nonsense people start peddling. Energy consumption and overall consumption need to go down, but that doesn't need to mean truly having less in life, just a modified way of doing production and consumption: items built to last, moving away from fossil fuels, more efficient everything, etc.
The horizon for that future gets narrower and narrower with every decade, however. The changes needed become greater, the levels of energy use and consumption needed to achieve net zero become lower.
Anyways the final calculus ends up being pretty similar to the approaches and ideas we already have: socialism, more revolution, and a world driven less by American empire and more by the Chinese model.
