Date Originally Created: February 12th, 2024
We always hear about it. Global warming, plastic in the ocean, and other blabber that the rich people use to put us in a state of fear. I am not going to deny that these things are happening, but what I am going to deny is that the bottom 99% is responsible for more of it than the top 1% with their private jets and luxury cars and caravans of bodyguards. This article is going to dive into this topic and explain what would need changing (rich people), and what we can actually do about it.
Let's get the biggest one out of the way here. It's no shock that plastic is bad for everyone, but the problem is that it's one of the most versitaile resources we have to our disposal. The problem is that it doesn't biodegrade. Yes, it breaks down, but not into its atomic components, it just becomes smaller pieces of plastic. Now, there are solutions, such as alternative forms of plastic that biodegrade, the only problem with that is when you need to make something that doesn't biodegrade. This opens up a dilemma: what do we do? This isn't a simple answer, as if you decide to impose either biodegradable plastics or just banning plastic altogether, we all know that the government is going to over-reach in its power to do this (as usual). But there is a way to mitigate this problem: stop planned obsolescence. I'm going to be mentioning that a lot in this article, and even though it's basically impossible to do it in this economic system, it means that the rich should stop opening their mouths about climate if they're not willing to change their ways and their values, instead of blaming the majority of the population. Yes, people could technically be responsible, but the ones making a profit off of plastic junk are the rich people.
I go more into depth about e-waste in my e-waste article, but I will cover it here. When it comes to e-waste, this is also a problem that the self-described climate gurus (again, rich people) always talk about. And again, they decide to blame everyone else. But here's the problem with that: let's say you're the CEO of a smartphone company, and you want people to constantly buy your phone. What do you do? Planned obsolescence. And this does depend on the smartphone manufacturer, but this applies mainly to those who lock their phones' BIOS down. I had this exact problem with a Google (cancer) Pixel XL I had since 2017. Of course, they stopped updating it, but I can care less about that, what I mainly care about is the Google bloatware/spyware on it, and I want to get rid of it. Now, just flashing LineageOS to it would be a simple solution, right? WRONG. When I tried it, I couldn't actually do it because the BIOS was locked down by Verizon (yet another cancer). I got this thing off of eBay used, and it said unlocked, but that doesn't matter, as that only applies to what carriers you can use, but not your right to the BIOS. Then the same people who do this to you decide that they want to complain about the climate and make policies which will just make you spend more money, and yet they do this. If they want to stop e-waste, agian, either stop planned obsolescence, or just give people a right to their hardware, because they'll still make money anyways sicne most people won't know how to install a custom ROM to their BIOS anyways.
This part definitely makes me question whether people actually think about things, or just go with what authority figures say. It's innevitable that I mention electric vehicles. The thing with electric vehicles is that they're powered by electricity. That may not seem like a problem until you realize that the electricity plants are powered with coal, natural gas, petrolium, and the like. Now for the minority of them that are nuclear, when times are good, it may seem like a good idea. The problem arises when you consider things such as tornadoes, human error, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, other natural disasters, and human-made disasters such as war, bombs, etc. Plus the risk of terrorist attacks. If ANY of these things happens and there's a meltdown, depending on how severe, say goodbye to that environment that you so dearly loved. Now I'm not going to point at Chernobyl and say that's what all of them are going to be, because that's just not true, but other things can happen. Plus, think about nuclear waste: the only solution is burying it, then you wonder, do you use a non-degradable casing (which poses the same problem as the whole plastic thing) so that it has a lower chance of leaking, or using a bio-degradable solution (such as iron) and having a higher risk of leakage? Either one is bad for the environment, but it's still being pushed for.
Besides how electric cars are powered though, we come back to the whole e-waste problem; with gas cars, you can buy a used one that can still get the same mileage and you don't have to spend $20,000 just to get the batteries replaced, you just gotta tweak it a bit and make improvements, or just do nothing at all to it and just use it to get from point A to point B, it actually gives you a choice. With electric cars, buying used is almost never considered due to the fact that batteries degrade, and people want the best mileage they can get, so if your car runs out of energy just making a one-way trip to Walmart, then you're not gonna want to have that. And the elements within (and on) an electric car are all harmful to the environment, such as the plastics used, the lithium and other elements used within a battery, and other factors such as the heightened risk of fire because of the reactive properties of lithium (and the difficulty of putting those fires out since lithium reacts with water).
A solution to these would be making city people walk/bike (that would solve the obesity crisis), investing more in public transport so that you won't get stabbed on the bus for existing the wrong way, and allowing rural people to keep their cars as it's needed if you're 40 minutes from the nearest Walmart. But this isn't going to happen, because our tax dollars are always wasted so the government can use their authority against us. If they actually did do this, I would delete my article on taxes, but I guarantee they won't do it, they're just going to push the most half-assed inefficient solutions possible so they can continue lining their pockets with our money.
I call bullshit on this one. It's gotten to the point where they say that farming both crops and animals causes climate change, despite humanity doing it for thousands of years. Here's an article from the WEF that claims this, but again, we've been doing this for thousands of years. I would understand if they were blaming the machinery or something else, but no, they're also blaming the products themselves. This, in addition to them telling us that eating bugs are the future, they're gonna make sure that poorer people eat crap while they get the premium steaks in their lavish private jets that cause 100x the emissions. Now, I understand that big corporate farms can potentially cause problems, but we all know that's not who they're going after. They're going to go after smaller farmers and land-"owners" (read my tax evasion article to know why I put "owners" in quotes), this will ensure that the only ones who have control are the corporations and the government.