• SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip
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    19 hours ago

    On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We’re in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There’s some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we’ve become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It’s not just billionaires, it’s all of us.

    Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they’re not the ones releasing the gases. We can’t just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We’ve reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.

    Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we’d still have the climate change problem to tackle.

    • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      If we depose them, we’d have access to their wealth to tackle climate change. And it wouldn’t be for building the doomsday bunkers they are now.

      Zuckerberg spent nearly $400 million for a bunker to be built in Hawaii. This was after Hawaii had fires that cost them nearly a billion in damages.

      Zucks $400 million purchase could have repaired half the nation-state. It would have immediately improved ecological recovery, and restore the canopy biome that helps pull C02 from the air as a natural deterent to Climate change. He’d then have most of the population worshipping him for doing so. Likely welcoming him anywhere in the state he’d want to visit.

      Instead he can now visit his bunker, needs it because the island hates him, and helped contribute to ecological collapse in building it.

      The problem is that billionaires are the worst humans imaginable to have such wealth. It will always go towards cthe acceleration of climate collapse for their benefit instead of preventing it. Whether you feel they’re a contributor or not, they’re still in charge of the resources that could easily stop climate change faster than any other mechanism on the planet.

      Instead they’re building bunkers with that money to run from the problems they’ve actively contributed to more than any other human on the planet.