They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change, so we’re busting our ass off to reduce and they don’t even pretend to care. In truth we could do more for the environment with guillotines than paper straws
They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change
They tricked us into believing metric fucktons of single use plastics would keep us safe and healthy.
But we never had any direct control over climate policy, because we never had any direct control over the capital itself.
All we could do was blame ourselves.
Did they?
I can’t recall anyone ever being anything but nonplussed and skeptical about paper straws. From what I can tell, it was a product of a think tank that pushed into the news, which then caused businesses to treat that as though it were public demand and pushed it out to everyone, and most people shrugged, used the obviously inferior product (because it was free and the alternatives require attention), and then people got on with their day.
On the wider scale this was pitched as ‘the only thing you can personally do to combat climate change’ - but I suspect it is the literal strawman of a figurative progressive position, purposely pushing a manufactured defective solution as a means to distract and suppress more substantive change and organization thereof.
paper straws were about trash, not C02.
they used to make them with a wax coating so they would not get mushy.
Metal straws are nice
Just don’t trip
Yeah, but I’m terrible about carrying them with me
Start a cocaine or ketamine habit and you will always remember to have it on hand.
Do they have to be 3 feet long novelty straws?
Might get expensive to give one away with every drink
Yeah the last time I drank a can of coke it was crazy expensive. Like an entire dollar or some shit.
I was thinking those proper metal ones, but if we’re talking about some extremely thin aluminium straws then I’d more worry about how well they’d handle and if there’s some other worries about them. Lots of metal trash probably
Wheat stalk straws are surprisingly good. Don’t need to wash them like metal and silicone ones.
Metal straws are annoying to clean. You can’t just put them in the dishwasher, but have to use more water washing by hand and need to buy a specific tool just for that.
But why are we using straws at all? Just say no
some people’s necks don’t bend right. straws are a medical device
That’s where you’re going? Out of the billions of straws used every day, you’re concerned about the edge case where it’s medically useful? By all means go for the plastic single use. Medicine is a huge user of that and there’s no realistic alternative. Hospitals and nursing homes get universal exemptions. It’s also a tiny fraction of single use plastic straw waste.
can i interrupt your whine to remind you i answered your question
Thank you for interrupting our discussion of zebras where everything is striped black or white, by reminding us they’re striped light gray and dark gray
you wanted to know why people use them and “PFFF THATS AN EDGE CASE” do you feel this way about all disadvantaged groups or just the disabled?
it’s literally the edge case, and insignificant to the actual point being made. you excused like a few thousand uses of the straw, maybe. don’t excuse the thousands of metric tons thrown out every year
Be the change you want to see in the world.
throws a Molotov at the next flying cruiser
BORTLES!
Oh totally. billionaires carbon footprint is many orders of magnitude larger than multiple lifetimes and generations of us normies. Abolish billionaires. Redistribute that wealth. The environmental future we want - NOW.
And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
Nobody:
Larry Ellison: Buys an entire 90,000 acre Hawaiian Island just because
Fuck the billionaires that do that, but that doesn’t mean that me using a straw isnt still making the shit worse. At least I can sleep at night knowing I am not making the situation worse, and I will still try to vote for politicians that are fighting against the billionaires
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Agree with this take. It’s like yeah electric cars are technically better, but any advantage they have over combustion engines is blown away by things like public transportation, or designing walkable/cyclable cities.
Our solutions can’t just rely on swapping out for “greener” tech. We need radical changes to how we are currently living in order to ensure a livable future.
There is no future that is not radical. This gradualist, neolib (let’s make sure all the investors get a chance to divest from dirty tech before switching!) fantasy will fuck us. It’s been fucking us for a hundred years. It’s time to try literally anything else.
It’s replacing real action in place of a good feeling. It’s THE plan to not do anything effective.
Sorry, but I am confiscating your moral license if the straw you use is justification.
The straw you use does nothing but make you feel better, which I would argue is harmful. You shouldn’t feel better for doing nothing when such large problems exist.
Your use of the right straw is akin to you killing a single invasive ant in a rain forest, and saying you did your part to remove the invasive colony. You then spend every opportunity talking about how you killed that single ant, all while the ants have already multiplied and utterly nullified your non-effort contribution.
Shipping barges, data centers, meat production, gas and coal burning are all many orders of magnitudes greater problems than what straw you use. Gas, coal, and fossil fuel use is over 70% of all emissions, so that should be the primary conversation. In addition, these are all growing in use. Talk about that. Put your attention and action towards that.
Always remember that coke and pepsi do not use recycled plastic in their coke or pepsi packaging, yet they are outwardly huge proponents of recycling the waste they create
Me switching to European cans of cola :3
They’re not doing it out of spite, most plastics can’t be recycled, not the way aluminum can (ha).
I despise how sprite changed to clear bottles claiming environmental reasons, when that reason was that they wanted to be less indentifiable in trash heaps and microplastic samples.
huh? PET bottles are like, the single most recycled thing after asphalt, i think
That’s why the billionaires have decided to hoard all the wealth among a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. They’re trying to save the planet! When 10 people have everything and the rest are all dead - boom, planet saved.
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I get what you’re saying and it is probably true from a macro standpoint, but don’t be too hasty to minimize the role of malevolence. If a rich person were so inclined, they could read the same articles and books as me and conclude that systemic problems are already pervasive and still growing. They could then withdraw their support for politicians like Trump (or even most democrats, to be fair) who do anything and everything to amplify those problems for the simple reason that rich people stand to gain from them. I am so furious with people like Thiel because i think they DO know what they’re doing, but they care more about the gains than the people they hurt.
But who will clean the cruise ship jets for them?!
Robots, probably. ChatGPT will figure it out, probably.
Out of Elon’s 35 or so kids, some will have been Bokanovskied into Epsilon Pluses, just enough to push a broom.
We need the international court to set hard caps that will result in prison time.
International? We need the Intergalactic Court!
if we reduced wealth inequality to the point noone could afford that kind of shit i bet we could ride the plastic straw wave for a few centuries before it really came back to bite us.
Look, if living in a densified treeless hellscape of concrete towers that all look the same, filled with 350 sq. ft. windowless suites furnished with sawdust furniture, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the ruling class to continue living well.
This fat cat gets 350 sq ft!!
Oh no. The Fats will be rounded up and rendered for cruise ship airplane fuel.
Sure but it’s a 5 foot ceiling. Like Alfred Jarry.
Test
Ah Blane we meet again
When you need to ship a cargo
No cargo. Planego. Shipgo. Only peasants cargo.
Not big enough. Fail.
