this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
582 points (99.3% liked)

News

23297 readers
3767 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

Yes, it is 100% that the actions of wealthy people represent the lion's share of the climate impact of the human race.

No, it's not because they fly jets around all the time. While that certainly doesn't help, switching to all-electric transportation and green sources of electrical energy would, just on its own, represent roughly a FIFTY PER CENT reduction in CO2 emissions. This is a good overview. That's a big task to just throw around as a hypothetical, of course, but there are proportional benefits to be had by making proportional levels of effort on partial measures. That and other big savings could be accomplished if the world as a whole prioritized it, but "the world"'s decisions are made by people who prioritize yachts and blowjobs from Estonian teenagers far above switching to greener energy sources, which is why we're all going to be fucked about a generation from now.

All billionaires switching out their private jets for greyhound buses overnight would do fuck-all for climate change. Flying on a private jet emits somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 times as much per person as flying on a commercial airliner. I.e. if there are more than 5 regular people for each billionaire, then they're not what's killing the planet. Aviation in general emits a ton of CO2, yes. Changing regulations would do more to fix the problem than curbing private jets, and certainly more than posting memes about private jets.

And, of course, it's suspicious that this concern about private jets in the media and memes came about all of a sudden, and all in reference to one particular type of billionaire-induced emissions and in fact one particular billionaire, right after she started expressing one particular type of political view. If there's one thing the propaganda industry likes to do, it's to take a genuine problem (emissions) and identify it as something caused by one person who's solidly on the "other side" in very public, consistently-messaged, and meme-able fashion. It kills two birds with one stone: It shifts blame to that person to tarnish their reputation and impugn and distract from the good things they're trying to say, and it shifts blame away from the people actually causing the problem.

I thought to myself, am I being unfair? Have I entered into some sort of bizarre the-shills-are-everywhere paranoia, such that even a story about the IRS that happens to highlight one particular aspect of their increased tax scrutiny with nothing whatsoever to do with climate change or Taylor Swift, sends me into a frenzy of propagandaspotting?

Yeah, maybe that's a fair point. I should look over the article and see if maybe it's just a story about the IRS and nothing about the suddenly-all-media-likes-to-talk about talking point which is all of a sudden a big deal, and just delete my whole painstakingly-typed comment.

I looked at the article. "Taylor" is the sixth word and "Swift" is the seventh.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

On the other hand, the article mentions climate or emissions exactly zero times. You put that there.

load more comments (5 replies)