- cross-posted to:
- anime_titties@mlem.a-smol-cat.fr
- cross-posted to:
- anime_titties@mlem.a-smol-cat.fr
German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
Ban straws! (even though disabled people need them and they create negligible pollution)
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
Reduce your carbon footprint! (even though its a term we invented ourselves to shift responsibility to you, while we fly our private jets around creating more pollution than you ever could in 10 lifetimes)
Recycle! (even though 90% of it ends up in landfill anyway because we don’t want to pay to actually recycle it)
All equates to
Look the other way while we continue to rape the planet and blame it on you!!!
Never forget - capitalists (and the governments they’re co-dependent on) only want more money, they don’t car about you or me or the planet, only about themsleves and the numbers in their accounts, and they will never willingly stop doing whatever it takes to make more.
Oh, quit this noise. In the same countries where electric cars are becoming common, wind/water/sun-produced energy is also on the rise. Electric cars decouple the energy used from the means of production in ways that gasoline will never have, and the potential outweighs the temporary conditions of power generation in socially backward areas like Darfur and America.
You are literally commenting on an article where one of those countries has shut down a wind farm to go back to miming coal (never mind that my point still stand regardless because renewables are still just a fraction of electricity production, or that it is the wealthy people buying the electric cars who contribute more emissions than the poorest 50% of the population, but good to see the greenwashing has worked so well on you), so which of us is actually making noise, and which is addressing the problems we face?
The wind farm (singular) they’re tearing down have been abandoned for 4 years now because the company that owned them went bust; bad placement was apparently to blame for these specific windmills being useless, doesn’t mean they’re 100% switching back to coal.
Also, I think they’d move the windmills if it is at all possible to not scrap them.
While I partly agree with your argument at the end of your comment, I think your examples are really unfitting.
Only single-use plastic straws are banned. There is also an exemption for straws that are necessary for medical reasons. The needs of disabled people are included in the exemption. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2021-003536-ASW_EN.html
If people buy a new car, the old one (if still functional) typically enters the second-hand market, not the landfill. There is no reason why this would be different if the new car is an electric vehicle.
The carbon footprint is a perfectly fine concept on its own, the problem is just that some people shit on it with their private jets, which are a legitimate concern. Some people also argue that “most of the pollution is done by corporations, not individuals”, completely ignoring the fact that these corporations only do it while producing goods for the people. That does not mean that we can just blame the people for it, but everybody has the responsibility to vote for policies that keep the corporations in check.
Recycling is really bad in some countries, but works pretty well in others. For example in Germany 56% of plastic waste is recycled, 44% burned. 90% of paper is recycled. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/muell/das-solltest-du-ueber-recycling-wissen/#lösung4
That’s a lot of words to say “I lick boot”.
But just to address my pet peeve (mostly because I can copy pasta my own comment, and no I’m not going to edit out the “ableist” because even if you don’t mean t, advocating and making excuses for the straw ban is ableist)
There are many reasons people can’t use different alternatives.
Never mind that to deny access to a literal lifeline for the sake of 0.003% of the plastics in the ocean (literally a drop in an ocean) because it makes you feel better and requires zero effort or sacrifice (from you), instead of actually acting to resolve the problem (like being anti-capitalist rather than just trying to apply band aids to its symptoms) is not only gross and ableist, but also a colossal counterproductive waste of time.
As for medical exemptions - disabled people shouldn’t need to ask for basic accessibility, nor should they have to disclose personal medical information to get it, but now that ableists like you have forced this situation to boost your own egos, they do, and are often denied, because wait staff are not medically trained, and are often abelists like you (or have bosses that would fire them for “handing out straws willy nilly” if they even have straws available which now many places don’t), so they get refused and called liars and accused of destroying the environment.
Never mind that expecting people to always have their own accessibility aids, rather than have them freely available creates an inaccessible society.
Which is exactly what ableists like you are fighting for.
I was exclusively talking about the EU ban, not about some random US cities’ bans (This is a thread about Germany after all). None of your points really apply to the EU ban.
It does not ban the distribution (you can still legally buy leftover stock - my local cinema seems to have a century’s worth of supply), just the first-time sale of newly produced non-medical single-use plastic straws.
The “medical exemption” is not on an individual basis, but an exemption for a production line of straws. Everybody can buy the straws afterwards. The EU ban is not cutting a “lifeline” for disabled people.
The links you provided talk about bans by local city councils in the USA, which have their own (apparantly stupid) rules.
Do you think cars are immortal, and are just passed on from owner to owner for all eternity?
Only East German ones. Then the pigs eat some rotten parts off of them, and the remainder is reassembled into fewer cars. The circle of life. The last people on this planet will still be driving a Trabi.
Luckily many people live in democracies where they can simply vote to enact climate policies.
Sadly most people living in those democracies choose to continue enabling climate change.
The reason nothing is being done against climate change isn’t corrupt politicians. It’s the millions of people voting for them.
Lol, no.
The fault lies with those who built and benefit from the system, not those trapped in it who are merely given the illusion of choice.
Get off your high horse and aim your anger at the right people, otherwise all you are doing is enabling their rigged system.
Your first link is US only, your second link is about a completely seperate issue. You don’t need to dismantle capitalism to protect the climate.
In Germany, where I live, the voters could easily vote for the greens “Grüne” and the left “Linke”.
If those two parties had a majority in government, we’d have a climate friendly system in no time.
But they don’t. We had a conservative government for 16 years. Now we have a center government, which sadly includes the small government / free market party “FDP”, blocking all significant progress.
No systemic oppression stops people from voting Left/Greens. But they never did, and never will.
There’s now an uprise of the far right party “AfD” in Germany, to the point it’s becoming one of the major parties.
In Germany people have the choice readily available to stop actively damaging the climate.
But every couple of years, they freely choose to not do that.
I feel like many left-wing people regularly forget about the billions of people who genuinely do not care to do anything about climate change.
Under capitalism, the capitalist class controls the media, and can use their wealth to control the political class.
A democracy can only make choices so far as it’s voters are informed, and when a group controls most sources of information, it can control the democracy as a whole.
You absolutely do. If it was profitable to destroy the envrionment capitalism would do it in a heartbeat. And guess what it IS profitable to destroy the environment, that is why it is happening! You cannot protect the environment under capitalism.
When you try to dismantle capitalism… you get capitalism under a different name, with a dictator on top of it. Better hope the dictator wants to protect the environment, and that he knows how to! (see: Great Chinese Famine)
You can limit capitalism without abolishing it.
In Germany people are guaranteed 20/24 paid vacation days. That’s not profitable.
That’s a limit imposed on capitalism. It can be done and has been done without abolishing capitalism.
That’s just one of the thousands of policies that limit capitalism.
You can limit capitalism (as literally every capitalist nation does) without abolishing it.
Enforcing climate friendlyness would be just another limit.
When you try to limit capitalism you get nuclear plants being shut down and coal plants being opened and the environment still being destroyed.
But the millions of people have been denied education, mislead, and propagandized by the corrupt politicians, it’s probably not productive to blame victims here.
I do not believe the majority of people don’t know about the effects of climate change. I believe that the majority of people voting against climate friendly policies simply choose to not think long term.
Someone who votes to continue the status quo is to be blamed for the status quo.
Most people don’t have a ‘green’ option for which they can vote.
-Doug Ford, 2018
-CBC news, 2023
Not that he was a green leaning politician to begin with but this is just another example of blatant lies used by politicians to get elected and totally fuckover their country.
No they can’t? If it was as simple as voting for green policies we’d see more of them. The only thing people can do is vote for greenwashed policies that do not impact the bottom line of industry.