They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change, so we’re busting our ass off to reduce and they don’t even pretend to care. In truth we could do more for the environment with guillotines than paper straws
They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change
They tricked us into believing metric fucktons of single use plastics would keep us safe and healthy.
But we never had any direct control over climate policy, because we never had any direct control over the capital itself.
All we could do was blame ourselves.
Did they?
I can’t recall anyone ever being anything but nonplussed and skeptical about paper straws. From what I can tell, it was a product of a think tank that pushed into the news, which then caused businesses to treat that as though it were public demand and pushed it out to everyone, and most people shrugged, used the obviously inferior product (because it was free and the alternatives require attention), and then people got on with their day.
On the wider scale this was pitched as ‘the only thing you can personally do to combat climate change’ - but I suspect it is the literal strawman of a figurative progressive position, purposely pushing a manufactured defective solution as a means to distract and suppress more substantive change and organization thereof.
paper straws were about trash, not C02.
they used to make them with a wax coating so they would not get mushy.
I’m so confused but you guys, how is reducing the amount of single use plastics in the environment a bad thing?
Individuals opting out of use doesn’t shape production or wholesale, because they’re so damned cheap to produce and the expense to dispose of them is on the public side.
Single use plastics are a classic case of Negative Externality. You can only curb them with public policies and bulk production level decisions.
The notion that “I’m doing my part” by not partaking in the fountain of free-at-point-of-service goods is predicated on an engineered misunderstanding of the plastics supply chain.
Canada has banned a bunch of single use plastics (including straws, cutlery, styrofoam containers, stir sticks and bags) as a direct result of public conversation that started with the straw in that turtles nose.
Fuck the billionaires that do that, but that doesn’t mean that me using a straw isnt still making the shit worse. At least I can sleep at night knowing I am not making the situation worse, and I will still try to vote for politicians that are fighting against the billionaires
It’s replacing real action in place of a good feeling. It’s THE plan to not do anything effective.
The normalization of needless single use products, like straws, by making them non plastic DOES make things worse. It delays real action, like removing straws altogether.
It’s greenwashing inherently unsustainable practices, just like introducing carbon capture technology on oil rigs or hyping electric cars as a way to keep the auto industry going (while suppressing more efficient means of transportation).
If we’re not going to fix shit, then why the fuck bother with mushy straws.
Agree with this take. It’s like yeah electric cars are technically better, but any advantage they have over combustion engines is blown away by things like public transportation, or designing walkable/cyclable cities.
Our solutions can’t just rely on swapping out for “greener” tech. We need radical changes to how we are currently living in order to ensure a livable future.
There is no future that is not radical. This gradualist, neolib (let’s make sure all the investors get a chance to divest from dirty tech before switching!) fantasy will fuck us. It’s been fucking us for a hundred years. It’s time to try literally anything else.
Our (Germany) cities are pretty much “walkable”, yet the public transportation sucks big sweaty monkey balls. Wherever you wanna go, plan a lot of additional time. And then it’s either
A) pay first class and enjoy SOME comfort (while still have to get TO the train in a horrible way)
Or
B) use the “normal” way and stay the whole time pressed against stinky other humans that breathe in your neck.
One way is far too expensive and the other even more.
And There’s not much to do about (except prices). How many trams, busses and trains and their tracks can you build. Yet our population gets bigger and bigger.
So fuck public transportation and fuck walkable. I wanna get to places quickly and comfortably. And that is a car. But at least we only have one, as we don’t need to work.
With adequate public transportation, it becomes much more comfortable and convenient.
My city installed a few additional bike paths, and added some more buses, and the difference is huge.
I don’t even need a car except when traveling longer distances.
But there is no adequate transportation. And we just have no space for more tracks and more trams and busses. Quite the contrary, we even canceled many routes. Public transport is a nightmare here and I wouldn’t use it if I’d be paid to do it. Well and bike-paths is the same problem. No space. Biking is bad here, the absolute opposite to our neighbors the dutch. But I wouldn’t wanna use a bike anyway. I wanna get to point B quickly.
The non mushy straws aren’t terrible, but all rubberized tires are, whether on cars or bikes. The car ones are much worse.
And air travel is even worse still
But not close to industrial pollution which is exponentially greater.
The billionaires could care more and put some R&D into it. They just dont.
Sorry, but I am confiscating your moral license if the straw you use is justification.
The straw you use does nothing but make you feel better, which I would argue is harmful. You shouldn’t feel better for doing nothing when such large problems exist.
Your use of the right straw is akin to you killing a single invasive ant in a rain forest, and saying you did your part to remove the invasive colony. You then spend every opportunity talking about how you killed that single ant, all while the ants have already multiplied and utterly nullified your non-effort contribution.
Shipping barges, data centers, meat production, gas and coal burning are all many orders of magnitudes greater problems than what straw you use. Gas, coal, and fossil fuel use is over 70% of all emissions, so that should be the primary conversation. In addition, these are all growing in use. Talk about that. Put your attention and action towards that.
The straw is a metaphor for doing what you can in your own world no matter how small, not the absolute culmination of all the good that we’ve done.
We can all do much more than straws.
Edit: let me rephrase this. Unless you are a billionaire, there is nothing you can do individually that matters. The problem requires banding together and holding these people accountable. This requires honest communication so people at least understand what the real problem is.
Given we are barely at the honest communication stage and ignorance is running rampant, and that we have a fast approaching deadline before nothing we do will work, I do not have much optimism for the survival of our species.
Do you know what a metaphor is?
Oh totally. billionaires carbon footprint is many orders of magnitude larger than multiple lifetimes and generations of us normies. Abolish billionaires. Redistribute that wealth. The environmental future we want - NOW.
And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
Eco-friendly straws don’t have to be mushy paper.
There are several other “vegetable plastics” that last long enough to serve as a fully functional straw, but months later degrade naturally. The reason you don’t see them being used is because McDonald’s doesn’t want to spend an extra $0.10 on every order, because that would totally bankrupt the billionaire company you know.
I still propose that we just stop with the single use straws and if people want straws for their drinks that badly they can bring their own reusable one, and if it isn’t takeout the restaurant can provide a reusable one.
Like seriously why does everything need a straw?
There is a hollow grass based solution used in asia which requires zero processing beyond cutting, drying and packaging. But I’ll keep the paper straws if the billionaires have to travel in paper planes and boats.
The best I’ve found is sugarcane straws. They cost 15cad for a 100 pack compared to 10dollars for 100 plastic straws, which is small enough to not matter to me.
I know for a fact they dissolve as I throw them into my own compost, and also they dissolve to nothing if added to hot water (side note, you should never drink hot drinks out of straws).
Yep, sugarcane polymers are amazing. They can be made to dissolve quickly or last a little longer, depending on your needs. Technically they could be used as full packaging for chips and bread and similar foods.
I carry metal straws for this reason. I also bring my own cup, and most places I visit let me use both.
I visited a Chinese monastery in 2018 and spent 4 months learning the discipline and art of tipfu -the study of tipping a cup at the right angle to sip liquid without the use of a straw. I’m currently yellow belt.
Flex!!
Man, I’m lucky if I remember to bring my bags to the grocery store…
Flex!
In the last week I had the opportunity to use metal straws and bamboo straws. Much better than paper straws.
Always remember that coke and pepsi do not use recycled plastic in their coke or pepsi packaging, yet they are outwardly huge proponents of recycling the waste they create
Me switching to European cans of cola :3
I despise how sprite changed to clear bottles claiming environmental reasons, when that reason was that they wanted to be less indentifiable in trash heaps and microplastic samples.
They’re not doing it out of spite, most plastics can’t be recycled, not the way aluminum can (ha).
Do they not elsewhere? Is it just Australia?
We want our packaging to have more than one life. In Australia, all our bottles and cans can be recycled and all our soft drink and water bottles under 1L are made from 100% recycled plastic*.
*Excl. cap and label
https://www.coca-cola.com/au/en/offerings/thank-you-for-recycling
That’s why the billionaires have decided to hoard all the wealth among a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. They’re trying to save the planet! When 10 people have everything and the rest are all dead - boom, planet saved.
It’s not like ”they” held a meeting to decide they were going to get everything for themselves. Rather they’re embracing this inevitable ”feature” of the ongoing collapse of market economics.
Increasing the concentration of financial capital in the hands of a few people changes the value of that capital. For normal people, the dollar value is measured in the cost of food and living space. Billionaires, who despite evidence to the contrary, are human beings, don’t need or demand more of those real resources – say potatoes or tenancy in small rental apartments – than anyone else. In fact, they can in many cases make do with less! They prefer to subside on lobster, filet mignon or whatever fad diet their longevity coach prescribes, and live in lavish palaces and/or bunkers.
Billionaires, and even down to the measly top 10 percent of earners, are the ultimate hedge when things go sideways in the real economy. They allow governments to keep printing money by diverting a tidy sum of it from potatoes and apartment leases to the lobster, filet mignon, yacht and private jet economy – and more importantly, their investment portfolios.
My point being, that malevolence isn’t the main driver here, but a widespread failure of people to acknowledge that the fantasy of limitless growth inevitably must be realized within the confines of the fantasy world of the financial economy by insulating it from the real economy. Because in the latter we eventually have to accept that we have reached the highest amount of potatoes and apartments possible. This failure is on everyone, not just billionaires.
At this point, though, I guess ”they” (Peter Thiel et al) have pretty much decided to help this collapse along with the help of every major government. So I guess you’re right.
I get what you’re saying and it is probably true from a macro standpoint, but don’t be too hasty to minimize the role of malevolence. If a rich person were so inclined, they could read the same articles and books as me and conclude that systemic problems are already pervasive and still growing. They could then withdraw their support for politicians like Trump (or even most democrats, to be fair) who do anything and everything to amplify those problems for the simple reason that rich people stand to gain from them. I am so furious with people like Thiel because i think they DO know what they’re doing, but they care more about the gains than the people they hurt.
But who will clean the cruise ship jets for them?!
Robots, probably. ChatGPT will figure it out, probably.
Out of Elon’s 35 or so kids, some will have been Bokanovskied into Epsilon Pluses, just enough to push a broom.
if we reduced wealth inequality to the point noone could afford that kind of shit i bet we could ride the plastic straw wave for a few centuries before it really came back to bite us.
Look, if living in a densified treeless hellscape of concrete towers that all look the same, filled with 350 sq. ft. windowless suites furnished with sawdust furniture, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the ruling class to continue living well.
This fat cat gets 350 sq ft!!
Sure but it’s a 5 foot ceiling. Like Alfred Jarry.
Oh no. The Fats will be rounded up and rendered for cruise ship airplane fuel.
We need the international court to set hard caps that will result in prison time.
International? We need the Intergalactic Court!
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Thanks buddy.
Ah Blane we meet again
Blaine is a pain and that is the truth.
When you need to ship a cargo
No cargo. Planego. Shipgo. Only peasants cargo.
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The billionaires aren’t the ones teaching you about how the planet works. In fact how rich as person is has nothing to do with it.
If you want to understand how the planet works, learn it from planet experts.
Ok I’m genuinely curious, what are you talking about? Where did you get “teaching how the planet works?”
But they got those cruise ship private jets and that’s bad
I guess they didn’t see the photo
Not big enough. Fail.
