This is why I don’t believe people when they say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a distribution problem”
Because if everyone in the world had my lifestyle, we would be emitting an insane amount of carbon. And I don’t want my standard of living to go down, and in fact I want everyone to live as nicely as I do. So clearly we need fewer people.
The overpopulation isn’t happening in the 1%.
It makes jack shit of a difference to the environment if there is one billion or two billion starving people. They’re not the ones burning carbon or eating steak.
But we want to stop those people from starving. And if we ideally lived in a world where no one is starving, emissions would go up astronomically.
That’s bullshit of a report. If you read it, you will quickly learn how they calculate emissions from the rich. They include things like owning company shares and having influence over the media. So if Bezos owns a major stake in Amazon, he is automatically responsible for all Amazon emissions. And if his PR team publishes some stuff to FB, he’s now responsoble for emissions of Facebook servers. That’s utter bullshit.
If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos. This report also doesn’t take into account that better off people usually live in well-insulated homes, drive more efficient cars and eat better organic food, thus reducing their footprint further.
This report also mentions yachts and private jets a lot, but don’t forget that ALL airtraffic accounts only for 2% of all emissions and private jets are a drop in the ocean.
If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos.
That would only be true if Amazon had real competition and would not be acting like a monopoly, as many other companies do.
Amazon is very much not a monopoly. There are thousands of online retailers. There are also a lot of delivery services, no idea if there are thousands, but there’s a lot.
Isn’t it more planet reponsible then to order from Amazon where, if I order say 6 items, they’ll come from the same warehouse in the same delivery (at least ove here!) instead of in 6 deliveries from 6 different vendors who also all had to get individual deliveries of their stock first?
Yes, it’s better to bulk order from Amazon. Just don’t order one small thing like a screwdriver, a whole truck driving around for your 100g package is dumb.
Surely it’s still more efficient for the truck to carry that screwdriver and a whole truckload of other goods, in a single journey, with optimised route, rather than me (and every other Amazon shopper) driving my car to the nearest hardware store to buy that screwdriver?
You can walk.
Amazon is NOT a monopoly. And the problem here is not Amazon, but the products YOU buy. It doesn’t matter if you buy from Amazon or Wallmart or whatever.
the problem here is not Amazon
yes, it is.
No, it’s not.
i’ve presented exactly the same amount of proof that you have.
What proof? Amazon is not a monopoly, that’s a fact.
If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos.
no, i’m not.
Yes, you are.
I’ll be honest, I do believe that CEOs should be personally held repsonsible for the shit their companies pull, in general. And after-the-fact, too. If you led a company and later it gets fined for something it did while you were CEO, that’s on you. Say 50% of fines have to be paid by the C-suites personally.
But independent of that, in a report such as this, it of course makes little sense because the title wants to strongly suggest they create more carbon emissions as consumers (say via owning yachts and shit) than the poorest 66%. And that’s a very false equivalence. Now you could argue they’re responsible for more carbon emissions, and I would maybe agree with that, yes. They make the decisions that enable this carbon usage, and they could, if they wanted to, cut large swathes of it albeit probably not lasting.
But yeah, agreed, pretty shit headline.
The point of a Limited Company is that people who own and work for the company are not held responsible for the actions of the company. Exceptions apply, of course. This is done to protect people from the failures of the business. If the company you work for goes bankrupt for whatever reason, you don’t want to owe millions to the creditors of the company out of your pocket.
eat better organic food
A slight nit-pick here, but when it comes to greenhouse gas impact, organic food may be worse. It’s certainly not clearly better.
Almost definitely worse lol. We have the option to modify the genome of the plants we eat in order to make then better in every way and still some people are like “no that’s icky because science”.
GMO != organic as far as I know?
In the US organic means no GMOs as well according to usda
Yeah I’ve overheard that before too. If they would just change their words to “eat less meat” they’re be right, but to only say “organic” implies standard agriculture is worse, and it is not clearly so.
We should eat less meat though.
We sholdn’t eat less meat, meat is pretty much zero emission and closed loop food production. We should more.
