I've started composting. I'm sure that'll outweigh the average Vegas visitor's emissions. /s
I'm being a bit facetious obviously, but it does feel a bit like tilting against windmills. We need policy and systemic changes, if we're relying on individuals to all collectively start doing the "right thing", we're sunk.
I agree. But at least in a democratic system, the "each and everyone of us" are politicians that each and everyone elects. So it starts from the basis, IMHO.
You laugh but if everyone changed just some of their behavior, we would be in a much better place.
We used to reuse glass jars, now it’s plastic. We used to can goods, now it’s plastic. We used to use refillable bottles, now it’s plastic. We used to have car doors that went “thunk” when you slammed them shut, now it’s plastic.
If we each are mindful of the amount of trash/litter/waste we produce and take an active step towards minimizing it, we would all be in a better place.
The problem is that a single consumer can't throw themselves into the gears of the industrial machine to slow its progress. If you stop buying food in plastic containers, the food will still be produced, and it will still be purchased by the large multinational corporations that have supply contracts with the food industry, it will just go straight into a landfill when its expiration date passes instead of being purchased. Unsold subsidized produce, which took petroleum based fertilizers to grow, and petroleum powered equipment to cultivate and distribute, will rot in a landfill. Farmers won't stop growing it if you stop buying it. The damage has already been done by the time you make the choice to purchase it or not, and it takes more than a handful of people making a conscientious decision to reduce waste to stop the waste from happening in the first place. And that's if you even have a choice in the first place. The only way to eliminate carbon emissions is to return to manual labor and subsistence farming, and since all the arable acreage is owned by land barons and the price is so high, even that is out of reach of the average consumer. We are trapped.
If you buy an electric car, consider the amount of petroleum it took to forge the steel, power the aluminum smelters, and ship the components around the world on titanic ships. How long does it take to pay off the carbon debt that was incurred by getting rid of that old polluting car? How much petroleum would it take to relocate to a locality with clean-energy powered public transit? What other externalities are incurred by such a choice, and are they greater than simply maintaining the status quo? Is it even within the means of the majority to make such a choice?
Consider that aviation is a much larger contributor to emissions. Airlines will consistently fly completely empty planes just so they can maintain a parking spot at a given airport. Or compare the carbon emissions of the military to the rest of society. Or the quantity of flare gas that gets uselessly burned off by oil rigs. All market forces which a single consumer or group of consumers is powerless to stop. And all of which are backed by investors with more clout to sway the powers that be than you or I will ever have.
As a sibling commenter said, it's a fun hobby and makes us feel a little better about ourselves, but it's a drop in the bucket. A depressing state of affairs to be sure.
I get what you're saying. I lived on a sailboat with solar so I understand... The sailboat I lived on was made with fiberglass, a petrochemical product. We would still be in a better place though even if the inevitable demise will still occur. It would just occur later.
the great thing about these sorts of personal choices is that you can make them for yourself without having to be afraid of any of the consequences that would come from actually confronting power.
Thats great that you can correctly manage a compost pile. That level of conscientiousness is a quality that doesn't seem common across the population.
A positive thing about a landfill is that it can take advantage of centralization by capturing biogas created by the large quantities of biodegradable material deposited.
So are humans (we breathe out CO2 constantly!). A process emitting greenhouse gases is not an inherent reason to eschew it, so long as the entire end-to-end process isn't net-positive.
Use that compost to fertilise a tree, and you are still net negative on carbon, versus sending those food scraps to the local trash incinerator.
It's all a cycle, They put carbon in, they release carbon out. At least the average American is doing a commendable job in increasing their personal carbon sequestration.
I make lots of compost for my own use. Composting is at best delaying carbon release. As soon as you stop recycling materials the carbon will be released to the atmosphere. In permaculture circles the goal is to close open loops of waste/resources. If you want to permanently lock carbon in your soil, and improve fertility, make biochar. Throwing charcoal in your compost is the easiest way to make it into biochar. It really works and is a permanent amendment.
If you wanted you could even weigh the raw charcoal to quantify the carbon you have sequestered.
None of the loops are open in the sense that it's all within the earth system as a whole. The issue is extracting carbon from geological deposits. Stuff about farming and methane is temporary and short term.
I don't mean to suggest we shouldn't compost or recycle things. Just that such measures are only indirectly related to carbon emissions.
We either stop extracting hydrocarbons from deep within the crust or else the problem will persist. (I guess technically we could industrially sequester the equivalent but that would almost certainly defeat the cost-benefit of extraction.)
In that sense even hydrocarbons are closed loop. Earth made the oil deposits so we aren't adding anything that wasn't already here. The carbon we pump into the atmosphere will eventually become oil again.
My point is that the timescale of a given loop is what matters. Specifically, extraction of geological deposits has a timescale (and thus an equilibrium) that is highly undesirable for us.
I can’t disagree with this more. Even on discord I have four accounts for different contexts. One, my real name. Another, my gaming name. Another, my music/stage name. Another still, a different gaming name. Why? Because I don’t want people in any of those contexts knowing anything about who I am in the other contexts. This is a feature, not a bug.
Agreed. I find it ironic that online communities thrived on the detachment between the virtual persona that posts are associated to and the real persona that is writing the posts, but for one reason or another some people insist in connecting both.
It's a "need to know" basis, and I don't need to know your face, I don't need to know your gender, your age, where you are from, what job you have, I don't need to know your political affiliation, your religion, your other hobbies, what movies you watched, games you played, books you read, whom you follow, what communities you have joined. I don't need to know anything more than what the words in the post say.
When you "need" to know what is real you end up with social media like "BeReal" which is just an enormous privacy nightmare (requiring you to take photos at random times) just to make sure that people aren't editing photos or showing only the good aspects of their lives to the internet. Since when has "posting on the internet" become synonymous with a panopticon?
How do you do this in the modern era where websites demand a unique phone number for each account? I couldn't even set up one Discord account due to the phone number requirement, which at the time wouldn't accept numbers in the country I was living.
same here, i keep my game and tech groups on different accounts. that's one thing that keeps me from joining facebook. it doesn't allow pseudonymous identities.
Having global identities that move with you between networks doesn't mean that your identities need to be singular nor openly tied to your government identity.
I think of mafia as providing services that a government/legitimate private entities cannot provide.
Human trafficking - yup, I should have thought of that. In the counties listed in the link the governments does serve that mafia function. I was US centric in my thinking.
Prostitution - no. It can be legal, but the government does not engage in it.
Drug trafficking - I am sure some governments do it. I wouldn't put US in that list. Both the government investigations and the newspaper investigations found the allegations unsupported, according to the given link. I would say it could happen incidentally but organized crime does not need to worry about the government as a competitor in this space.
Gambling - the lottery is not illegal gambling. But you can argue that is tautologically true.
Racketeering - I don't see where in that link it says that the government engages in racketeering. Rico is a law that makes prosecuting racketeering easier.
I’m not sure this as widely held a practice as you would think. For an app as low stakes as this I couldn’t care less who wrote the code, as long as it does what it says (and only what it says) on the box.
