It’s a fair observation and very agreeable when the intent is to focus deserved ire on the primary element responsible for the wretched state of the world. But this could also be used to absolve oneself of inaction, deny any personal responsibility, to justify exhibiting similar selfish behavior oneself, or to feel smug about demoralizing or shitting on people who seek to improve society somewhat.
As the meme itself implies, the exploitation class is the problem that needs to be addressed. No need for anyone else to catch strays.
I don’t see it as a way to justify inaction. I see it as a way to be forgiving of myself if I mess up sometimes.
Example: in the worst of my grief, I threw away some recyclables because I just couldn’t wash them out properly. It took everything just to eat.
I didn’t pile guilt on myself over it. I recycle 99% of the time, I never litter. I have to check my pockets for random trash before doing laundry.
Utility companies, corporations, and rich people are not cleaning up after themselves and their inaction almost negates everything me and everyone I personally know can possibly do.
Knowing they are dumping faster than I can shovel doesn’t mean I stop shoveling. I still want and actively work to leave this place better than I found it.
Those 91 jets just mean I don’t feel overwhelming guilt when I fail. I just try to do better next time.
Do you think they feel “overwhelming guilt” about those jets?
The idea is to blame you for all the plastic shit they have forced you to buy because you need to eat and wipe your ass and clean your floor.
They don’t care what bin you put that shit in. It all goes to the same place anyway since they have admitted recycling is a scam and has been for the last 40 years.
It’s like conserving water. In the 80s, when there were “droughts” in California, they told people not to flush their toilets. 98% of water is used by commercial agriculture. THEY should be more efficient about their water use. We are subsidizing them. And they export a ton of this shit. Like almonds. Which take a ton of water to grow. (Spoiler alert on where they export that to…)
You ever see those public trash cans with like different holes for landfill and recycle, and then see underneath that it all goes into the same bag?
Utility companies, corporations, and rich people are not cleaning up after themselves and their inaction
almostnegates everything me and everyone I personally know can possibly do.There’s no almost about it. On an individual level, anything you and I do to recycle is dwarfed by the callous usage of resources by corporations.
You and I are out here doing our best to recycle the vast majority of our plastic waste when one of the local factories throws away more than a month’s worth of your plastic refuse every shift when they throw away the plastic wrapping on just supply pallets. They may recycle the cardboard, but so much pallet shrink wrap would get thrown away at receiving and a shit ton more applied at shipping.
I fucking hated working for one of the local places and just watched all the plastic waste build up every shift. I still recycle because something is better than nothing, but it’s still infuriating to have corpos guilt us about this shit while they do fuck all about it themselves.
Well put. Don’t insult the person doing what they can.
instead, redirect them to better use their limited energy
It’s not attacking the girl or suggesting she should stop. She’s doing the right thing. It’s attacking the rich psychopaths ruining the environment in ways that are orders or magnitude greater than my life will ever do.
The problem is interpretation. You read it one way because of your life context and frame of mind. Many others will have a different interpretation.
We need collectively to be pinching pennies ecologically, but doing so on drinks at the roulette table is not really responsibility; it’s delusional cope.
Until we pry ourselves away from that civilizational casino, possibly with guillotines, nothing else really matters.
It really just highlights the growing injustice in the world and that our problems are growing too severe to solve them with personal responsibility. We need to make billionaires illegal or things with keep spiraling downwards.
I think most of us understand that, and you’re just being obnoxious for pointing it out.
Eat the rich, but not with plastic cutlery!
Even better: compost the rich!
Shit the rich
Eating them creates compost in the long run anyway, but with the added benefits of also providing protein to hungry poor people without the damage from factory farming livestock.
Burn the rich so we don’t introduce prion diseases to the soil!
How much plastic and silicone will go to the plants?
please don’t eat apex predators, they’re high in lead content and other toxins
My Air conditioner tells me to conserve energy for the environment, when it gets warm out. Meanwhile the mall behind my house runs the lights and AC 24/7 even when closed
I’m kinda to the point where it feels like nothing us normies do will change anything so until billionaires are illegal it’s basically like fuck it.
Eating one billionaire would do more for the environment than all the conservation and recycling we do
Sounds like the wrong thing is being fucked.
My nest app tells me the same, while there’s a strip mall of 8 stores with neon bright signs that stay on 24/7 directly across from my apt balcony. I’d have a great view of the mountains in the AC but nah the fuckin tanning salon deserves that juice
A while ago, when the energy crisis was in full swing, I emailed a corporation that owns a large office building in town, that’s completely covered with a light display (basically tower-scale christmas lights) that they should please turn off that energy waster.
Their response was like “Our lighting is eco-friendly, because once a month we turn it green to show our commitment to green energy, and that offsets all the energy consumption.”
Slightly off topic, but I find it goddamn funny that someone like MrBeast made a bootleg copy of squid game on his YouTube channel, considering the entire point of the programme was to show that billionaires will do whatever evil they please and get away without any single negative consequence. Not that the premise was too subtle, considering that the villains use humans as literal footrests. How someone can be this tone deaf or uncaring is beyond my understanding.
Edit: I just remembered it’s the guy selling kids highly processed food with rotten cheese on top. So, considering that, I’m not too surprised. Just slightly.
He wasn’t allowed to kill them, though, so he’s not quite on that level yet.
the irony is lost in them. but at the same time, reinforces the point of the show
Wait till you hear how much pollution the army creates when they decide to mobilize an entire camp for no reason
Wow, I’m starting to think the military might be a net negative on this earth.
Navy just dumping jets in the ocean, like fuck it.
Just the army
It may have changed now but when I was in the Navy in the late 80s we just tossed all our trash into the ocean twice a day. Everything: paint cans, medical waste, regular trash. It was disgusting
I get the feeling this is somehow also criticizing this particular woman. Someone did a small good thing, while others do bad things on a very large scale. What a naive idiot! Not a very helpful sentiment. One needs to look up for moral guidance, not down.
It’s not the woman that’s being criticized, it’s the people claiming that the ones not doing that bear all the blame for damaging the environment.
except it reads as if its all useless and dumb. I don’t understand how people don’t see this as that?
It’s not created to get people to be more on board with climate change policy. It’s meant to point out that we just shouldn’t do any of it.
It does read useless but not necessarily dumb, just in vain. For me it acknowledges that we should put a lot more responsibility for the rich and powerful undermining our collective effort.
Yeah, no amount of propaganda is going to get me to stop understanding math. Nothing I do as an individual will ever be even a molecule in a drop in a bucket.
I fucking can’t with this fucking shit. Like why the fuck do I need to explain to you how everyone doing something makes the impact. Nobody is expecting you to do it alone. Like why do you place that burden to explain something like that on others. An absolute tragedy you have a brain that produces a thought like this. I’m just fucking embarrassed for your parents honestly.
You don’t need to explain anything, I fully understand the angle. It’s just bullshit and you bought the lie.
Every single American could stop using plastic straws tomorrow, and the outcome would be negligible compared to what would happen if a single fossil fuel corporation shut down.
Any real, viable solution to climate change necessarily begins with corporate regulation. Their effect on the environment is several orders of magnitude higher than any other group. To the point where the damage they do completely overshadows any possible good that individual humans could ever do.
Plastic straws isn’t to fix climate change. It was a solution to help reduce these straws from ending up in the environment and causing impacts to marine life. It did accomplish a reduction in risk to marine life and all it took was being an adult and buying your own reusable straw.
You bought the lie
You’re right about corporations need to make the change. But your wrong about the rest
Math isn’t a lie.
But whatever lets you get to sleep at night I guess.
I just don’t agree with you about that. I don’t think yours is a ridiculous read on it, I just don’t perceive that myself. I think the part you are mentioning is what you’re inferring, not what it’s implying or stating.
Part of the reason is because the first place I saw posts like this was on right wing spaces. They were often trying to say how climate activists like Greta or Bill Nye or even celebrities that try to push climate action are also using private jets or other modes of transportation to get around.
On the surface it sounds good. But I guarantee you this is a primer.
It’s a way to target climate activists and force them to target by bicycle. It’s goal is to make any climate action hypocritical.
I guess we’ll have to make our own memes that are similar but convey the proper message about capitalism and institutional responsibility.
Honestly fuck yea. We are sleeping on how important memes and shit posts are too keeping pressure on and spreading ideas.
Just an example, Mehdi was on Jubilee the other day. The amount of clips is incredible. If I clip one, where do I share it here on Lemmy that would be worth the effort?
I think it’s more like a response to the way one of these things is given a disproportionate amount of time and attention. We’re all expected to micromanage every aspect of our lives to diminish our comparatively miniscule impact of personal choice while the state and the ruling class just do whatever the fuck they want actively slaughtering the environment for fun.
You know what would help me minimize my carbon footprint a lot? Public transportation. A renewable energy grid. Affordable food created along sustainable and environmentally conscious supply chains. Electronics and clothing that is manufactured with long term use, maintenance, and recyclability in mind.
Those things are all out of my reach to implement. Me properly sorting my recyclables (which i do) is such a minor impact compared with those other things. Any offsetting done by proper recycling is immediately undone the moment i step into a grocery store, having driven there in my car for lack of public transportation, and buy food that was wastefully produced and transported to my grocery store via fossil fuel based energy.
The majority of our time and energy should be going into fighting back against the state and the ruling class who refuse to structure society around environmental impact, not on almost the almost irrelevant impact of individual workers. We can and should promote recycling, but we can hammer home that point when our whole society isn’t top down engineered with total indifference to the environment.
I think it’s more of a comment on futility than her being naive if you’re looking at what her role is in this meme.
I feel this is cooked up by energy company’s in the same way that “snowballs in july” was but I’m not sure how.
What’s the point here? Shitting on a good deed because someone else has done something bad? Arguing that small contributions don’t matter because others cancel that out? Great, now everbody feels entitled to shitty behaviour because they’re not the most rotten apple in the barrel. I’m sure many good things will come from that line of thought.
The rule is “Don’t be a jerk”, not “Don’t be a jerk if you’re the only one”
The post is not an indictment of recycling per se. Rather, it points to the absurdity of promoting individual contributions while ignoring the carbon footprint of corporations and the obscenely wealthy.
deleted by creator
Even if most every day people would lower their carbon footprint as much as possible, corporations would simply say “Neat, we can pollute more, we’re within target emissions”, and they would
Bingo! Well said.
They do say that already, since that is how carbon credits work.
So, this ‘personal responsibility’ recycling thing was pushed by corporations to excuse their wasteful bullshit.
Except the situation really is bad enough we need to be pinching fucking pennies ecologically. So we should be doing stuff like this (and actually recycling things rather than just dumping them, as happens now)
But none of that matters while billionaires are fucking around; you’re just ordering cheap drinks at the craps table so maybe you can play a few more rounds. Your gains will be harvested to fuel the degenerate tendencies of the wealthy. They would matter in another world, be necessary in another world, but don’t in this one, where they are necessary but wasted.
Removed by mod
Really … separating that stuff takes like 5 seconds extra.
Benefits of trying to go zero plastic is: you can eat healthier. No highly processed food, sodas and all this industrial shit. It’s mostly fresh fruits, veggies, cereals, and once in a while, a bit of meat straight from the butcher or local market. And ok, you can’t be sure it wasn’t wrapped in plastic until it arrived in your kitchen, but at least, you have less garbage to throw out.
Not to mention avoiding plastic leeching.
Being ecologically friendly is its own reward.
If your neighbor’s house and lawn is cluttered with garbage and rotting food, do you also let your house gather the same?
Or do you wish they did a better job and kept your house clean all the same?
What if you had 95 neighbors all full of garbage and rotted food? Is there any number that would make you do the same?
Not quite a compare - you can move house, you can’t move planet. It’s not that I would stop looking after my own garden if my neighbours weren’t looking after theirs. It just feels pointless. Using your analogy, if all surrounding neighbours had rotten rubbish in their garden, no matter what you would do, it would still stink in your garden.
I hear this argument over and over again: “Why should I bother recycling? China is poisoning the planet.” It’s like reverse-whataboutism. I find it really lazy and a pointless attitude. The argument generalizes to: “Why do anything good when bad exists in the world?”
Cleanliness is its own reward. I can tell you if I lived in stink-town where 100% of everyone else’s house was a festering mess, I would keep mine clean.
If you had 95 messy roommates would you not clean the kitchen sink?
so what’s the verdict on hot sauce and yogurt
edit i think i meant that for elsewhere but fuck this, that’s a good headline in the image, and fuck this again
Seth Meyers just had one of his podcast eps where Ike Barinholtz talked about getting a sunburn and trying to do a gig the same night and because he looked so rough between sets a waitress at the club suggested he use yogurt to cool down his thighs. He ended up smearing it around with his pants down when some random woman walked into his dressing room thinking it was the bathroom.
Story’s toward the end of the clip:
https://player.fm/series/family-trips-with-the-meyers-brothers/family-trips-live-from-amsterdam
this is an epic level comment to find 19 days later bravo
This is exactly why I don’t beat myself up over any of this shit… I will do what I can within my own power, but I don’t go out of my way to stop using plastic forks or anything like that. It’s pointless.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
In the US the majority of recycling isn’t.
Yeah this is largely a US problem. Not that some of this doesnt happen in other countries but at least in my part of Canada most of the recycling is sold to in-province companies. A few get exported to the states. A very small amount goes to Europe or Asia.
Glass is good too AFAIK
Can I have a fucking plastic bendy straw now?
Honestly I don’t give one shit about the paper straws. I wonder if the people who don’t like them let their drinks sit for hours and chew on the straw till they’re soggy. Every paper straw I’ve had has lasted the length of time it takes me to drink the drink.
Still banning those things but not fucking everything else in the supermarket that is packaged in plastic is such a massive and stupid waste of everyone’s time and effort. Such an imperceptible inch forward they almost deserve no praise at all.
It was a surprisingly fast change, to the extent that I wonder if they weren’t planning something along those lines as an industry wide PR stunt or lobbied industry takeover already. Or maybe paper straw machines are just really easy to setup.
It does show that widespread lasting change is possible. Even if it’s just a single step, we won’t get anywhere if we stop taking them.
The reality is more like there are just a few massive suppliers for restaurants. Sysco just offers paper straws and removes plastic ones and every establishment just orders a different SKU the next week.
The manufacture of straws on that scale can’t be simple to ramp up though. Maybe they just speculated correctly on paper utensil production capacity?
Either way, there are opportunities for fast large scale change out there.
I wonder if the people who don’t like them let their drinks sit for hours
Yes
and chew on the straw till they’re soggy
No
What is it about flat warm soda that appeals to you?
It’s not that warm flat sodas appeal to me, but rather that carbonated drinks are painful to drink too quickly. If I have a paper straw, it’s also going to be accompanied by a meal, which takes time to eat. Also, if I’m getting a more interesting drink like a smoothie, slush, boba, etc, then I usually get something fairly large to enjoy over a long period of time.
It is always “Look, we are actually trying to help the climate” types of government. Helping to build sustainable shit? Put money towards developing open, essy to implement, and easy to service standards? Nah, we will pay a billion dollars towards some bullshit that will be forgotten in a year and 80% (if not more) of the cash will be pocketed by billionaires (to use towards lobbying either against shit that will lose em money or shit that will make em money) because the contract was overpriced.
Fuck humanity, seriously. I just wish we will get a revolution before we burn to a crisp.
I’d rather have a regular one, no idea why you want a bendy straw that fucks.
Welcome to dystopia. Time to choom it up or die trying.
Surely it’s fraud. They say they’re going to recycle (presumably charge whoever they charge based on that too) then just dump it.
