• Fandangalo@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    The math here is the sort of thing that drives apathy for me to make small incremental changes. If the superrich can dump ~250 avg. emission years over the course of a year, why should I do anything besides lobby against this mode of transport or other large consumers? Maybe it’s a “spirit of the thing,” but changes in my life seem so negligible compared to how ruinous some individuals are acting.

    • the_artic_one@programming.dev
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      3 hours ago

      There are 801 billionaires in the US out of about 335,893,238 people. If everyone else were to reduce their carbon footprint by even a tenth of a percent then there would be significantly less carbon in the atmosphere than if every billionaire in the US were to reduce their carbon footprint to zero.

      • Fandangalo@lemmy.world
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        55 minutes ago

        Sure, but the individual contribution vs. companies / state-owned organizations is like 70% come from 100 companies / orgs. So the individual percentage is still negligible.

        I’m not disagreeing with the math. I’m saying when you want to make changes, you start with the most meaningful funnel. If you have 2 factors contributing to a problem, factor 1 contributes 70%, factor 2 contributes 30%, going after factor 2 seems like a waste of time. 1%s contribute 1000x the amount of the average. Who should be making lifestyle changes here?

        #voidscreaming

    • heavy
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      3 hours ago

      What really irks me are people that think there’s such a thing as a “good” billionaire. Had an argument one time because I said all billionaires are inherently shitty, and my colleague was trying to convince me that Bill Gates is actually a good person.

      Get real son, the path to billionaire is paved with blood.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      What? No. I’m so glad billionaires are a thing. They’re doing all of that polluting on my behalf!

      I mean there’s only 24 hours in a day…

      • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        And they are collectively shortening our lifetimes too so we pollute less so they can keep their jetliners running during a lunch break in France!

    • heavy
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      3 hours ago

      deleted by creator