Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
The amount they can reduce it by is “all”. Claims of any less is simply making excuses for bad behavior.
That’s cool and all but I’m an industrial electrician. I have to drive to the shop every day, and travel all over the country. Can’t exactly just walk over to a coal mine in bumfuck nowhere Kentucky
Walk, bike, scooter, train, tram, metro, trolley, bus. Plenty of countries can swing public transportation and plenty of people don’t need to drive but still choose to.
Edit: It occurs to me now this person may have been sarcastic.
I drive among 12 different locations for work. Can’t really give up the car.
It’s not really that simple and a lot of these things are out of people’s control. People who eat more meat than they need to just because they can are the ones who should be changing their behaviour. Not the people who have a constrained diet due to circumstances like poverty or medical conditions. But even then we should be targeting large scale polluters rather than just focusing on individual behaviour change.
I agree that not everyone can go 0%, but the vast, vast majority can. Especially if we’re talking about people with access and time to chat on some internet platform, aka everyone reading this.
Not every man can stand up for womens rights either. For example, his sexist boss might constantly make sexist jokes about his coworkers. He needs the job, though. He can’t afford to do the right thing. Do you think, therefore, it’s a good thing to ALWAYS BRING THIS HYPOTHETICAL UP, whenever the topic is that men should stop supporting the patriarchy, feminism is good, etc.? If non-feminists were the ones always bringing up the exceptions, would you believe they actually cared?
But even then we should be targeting large scale polluters rather than just focusing on individual behaviour change.
This 1000%. The campains to put the responsability of recycling and not polluting in the common citizen, given the immensely greater damage companies do, is just a trick to distract, create guilt and not work actively to visibilize the main culprits.
So tomorrow all politicians decide to do the right thing. Meat (just as one example) suddenly costs 5 times as much, because environmental and animal welfare regulations (ones with teeth, this time). In what universe do you think the population would accept that???
ANY sustainable policy change absolutely REQUIRES the support of the voting population. And that’s a million times easier in a world with even just 10% vegans. Any collective action is comprised of INDIVIDUALS choosing to participate, and do their part.
I think the taking point you’re sharing is actually the one pushed by corporations to curtail social movements that could end them.
I always hear people talk about how ten companies are responsible for 90% of plastic use, one of those is Coca-Cola who create billions of tons of plastic bottles which the CEO swims in like Scrooge McDuck… oh no, they put drinks in them and everyone that’s too lazy to carry a water bottle buys them, drinks the liquid then maybe puts the bottle in the trash, many just throw them on the ground.
You know what happened when we all stopped renting videos? Blockbuster died, also all those VHS cassette stopped being made… Try and imagine how it would look in the coke corporate office if everyone decided they weren’t going to buy drinks in plastic bottles. How long would it take for them to turn off the machines when all the outlets cancel their restock orders? How long could they sit paying rent on factories sitting idle and stacked with unsold product?
Of course we need policy and regulation but ignoring our responsibility to make personal choices only benefits the corrupt and damaging corporations, we could crush them so easily but instead of trying it’s now popular to pretend our choices don’t matter
