It's not a whataboutism to ask you to acknowledge the principals behind how GHG targets are set via an example when you're using a simplistic bar to attack another one.
Guess your answer is no, you aren't going to engage in good faith. Bye.
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First off, I’m not talking about India. I’m not a fan of their emissions either, but this discussion is about China.
So you simply can't engage with this discussion in good faith and are throwing up arbitrary roadblocks so you don't have to think about things like why climate targets differ relative to development and historical emissions.
I refuse your excuses. India is relevant. Either engage in good faith or I will ignore you.
You would probably appreciate developing direct personal connections. Could be irl or on the internet, just not super anonymous text based stuff like Lemmy.
Humans are a product of their circumstances, they can change over time, there is diversity within a community. Overly broad brushing can lead to a despair like you're describing and it's good to remember it's not accurate. At the same time it is good to be aware of tendencies and patterns because the risks you mention are real in various pockets and subsets of society. The best protection against them is relationships with everyone else, and particularly those who are opposed to and organize against, for example, fascists.
The narrative you’re promoting right now that individuals are blameless
I'm gonna write this out a third time and bold something. Let's see if you can pick up on it this time.
- Industry that produces commodities for sale in rich Western countries.
- Industry, military, and direct individual consumption in rich Western countries.
This was literally the first thing I wrote to you by the way.
because it’s all the government/industry/capitalism’s fault
Actually capitalism is the social system that ties it all together and is inherently part of industrialization, i.e. the production of virtually all excess GHGs we are talking about, and I've explained all of this to a decent degree but you have refused to engage with it even once. Pretending like it isn't the elephant in the room is foolish.
is not helpful
Correctly identifying primary root causes is actually the most helpful thing to start with. Then we can talk action.
You're concerned that I'm focusing too much on capitalism in the global GHG discussion where you asked lazy questions to point fingers at consumers? lmao.
I'm not the reason you're not engaging in good faith in this conversation. Gotta get over this habit of blaming others for your personal disinterest.
Shell manufactures to produce a profit it doesn't care who buys unless it is perceived as maximizing profit. Downstream costumers are companies, militaries, and individuals.
Shell doesn't care whether fuel is considered excess by a military. If excess fuel is used by the military to destroy something Shell manufactured it to do that. I think you're missing the point.
Shell does manufacture excess fuel and oil. Where else does it come from?
Shell does store fuel and oil including for the US military.
Shell isn't blowing up the "leftover" US military materials sure. Why does that matter here?
Industry makes it under the expectation to turn a profit. Overproduction is common and so is wasteful or pointless production. It doesn't even need to be "consumed" so long as they get paid. The US military constantly blows up "leftover" materials to ensure they get the same budget next year, for example. And most sales are between industries. How efficiently are those industries using all their purchases? Have you ever worked in a restaurant?
If consumer choice doesn't enter the equation then you've proved my point. Focus should be on the system itself that forces emissions as part of core economic activity.
Your question was, "Who buys and burns most of the fuel they create and why?" and I answered it and explained how it works. It's mostly industry The answer is absolutely not simply "consumer choice", which is quite clear if you review my simple 2-point list.
Here I'll write it again:
- Industry that produces commodities for sale in rich Western countries.
- Industry, military, and direct individual consumption in rich Western countries.
The cause of this is not individual consumer choices, it is capitalism - it seeks to increase capital and nothing else. Capital does not care about the emissions of growing fruit in Central America, packaging in Thailand, and selling in Germany. It cares that you buy the fruit cup for more than they spent on it. And to make that happen, capital had to force wages and production to be depressed and scattered across the globe. And it’s not going to waste money on making the processes themselves independent of fossil fuels so long as fossil fuel prices are low enough - and it keeps them low by constantly seeking more extraction for profit.
The reason I’m not debating China’s flavor of capitalism is because it’s irrelevant.
You brought it up (and are reasserting it in this quote), same as how you bring up China unasked. Clearly you thought it was relevant, you are just trying to avoid responsibility for your claims.
They don’t get a free pass on carbon emissions no matter what economy they have.
Which part of "meeting or exceeding their Paris targets" reads as "get a free pass" to you?
And yes there’s a trade-off, regulating fossil fuels increases production costs. That’s the trade-off everybody makes.
Oh so the decision of what to target isn't just "no increases immediately"? Glad we agree and can stop pretending it's so simplistic. Though I see you neglected to acknowledge India's targets.
Bottom line is that China’s emissions are huge and still growing. They are meeting commitments because those commitments were low in the first place.
The commitments of China were nearly an order of magnitude higher than the EU and US actually. By the way the US withdrew and is going hog wild.
For example China only commited to peak emissions by 2030.
And they are meeting their commitments, even exceeding them, despite being the primary seat of global production while the EU continues to deindustrialize.
The US and EU never needed to make such a commitment because they had already reached their peak in 2005.
In production, yes. They are deindustrializing. Their targets are much easier to hit, they follow the global capitalist economic trend re: imperialism, offshoring. It is actually much harder to reduce emissions while taking on the industry that's being outsourced.
And yes they perform a large portion of the world’s manufacturing, this “shuffling” of industries that you mentioned. But their lower regulations on emissions is precisely one of the reasons why manufacturing moves there. If they regulated more heavily, then some manufacturing would move out, but at least total global emissions would go down.
It's really not. You move production to China because overall it is vastly cheaper, primarily due to the much lower costs of labor reproduction and how tightly integrated industries are and can be due to infrastructure and colocation of technical ability. If you want to make something in the US something like half your cost goes to maintaining the humans doing it, and they're expensive due to massive economic leeches: real estate, finance, insurance. When 80% of a paycheck goes to having a place to live (just renting), going to the doctor, and eating, your labor costs are just subsidizing rent seeking and finance.
Every country needs to participate in raising the cost of fossil fuels, in order for it to work.
Every country needs to meet their climate commitments. Is yours?
My comment directly replied to what you said. I numbered the bullet points, literally the first thing I wrote.
Various global poverty stats produced by major entities, e.g. below $x per day by the World Bank (which keeps changing its metrics but that's a different discussion). Capital apologists like (incidentally Epstein-tied) Pinker attempt to claim improvements to human development and well-being for capitalism, but these statistics are highly sensitive to exactly which countries you include as well as what metrics you use. But a trend re: global poverty alleviation is that China is responsible for most of it, sometimes the vast majority for certain statistics, and trends can reverse when you remove it from the equation.
India is a good metric for comparison. Similar population size, similar location, formerly colonized and formally liberated around the same time, but two very different paths. Capitalist economist Amartya Sen estimated tens of millions of deaths in India alone every decade in comparison to China.
If you want to have a conversation you'll need to reply to what I actually said.
Yes, walkable cities and trains but also planning out where people live and work. Where people live is currently left up to the anarchy of the market, real estate speculation, where employment is located, etc. Then they have to get from where they live to other places they want or need to be, usually work. With some planning these things can be made intentionally dense, closer together, cheaper, and on transit lines.
- Industry that produces commodities for sale in rich Western countries.
- Industry, military, and direct individual consumption in rich Western countries.
The cause of this is not individual consumer choices, it is capitalism - it seeks to increase capital and nothing else. Capital does not care about the emissions of growing fruit in Central America, packaging in Thailand, and selling in Germany. It cares that you buy the fruit cup for more than they spent on it. And to make that happen, capital had to force wages and production to be depressed and scattered across the globe. And it's not going to waste money on making the processes themselves independent of fossil fuels so long as fossil fuel prices are low enough - and it keeps them low by constantly seeking more extraction for profit.
These companies are monopolies, they can't be significantly materially affected by a consumer boycott. Most of their customers are in industry anyways. Any boycott against them is more about raising awareness than achieving something, it's a diffuse form of political education.
To take on the fossil fuel industry requires having control over big levers at the top of the economy. Those levers are currently pulled, anarchically, by capital, not actual humans. Capital pulls those levers and spurns its highest level servants to get out of the way or feed it more bodies. To end this society-wide violence we must displace capital, it must not be in charge. We must be in charge.
Basically all of the political class supports the fossil fuel industry, "voters" do not have a ballot option for dismantling it. Some Green parties promise it, perhaps, but they will immediately run into larger economic challenges that require them to take a socialist analysis and approach and this results in them being sidelined by the actual master in these countries: capital.
Posting something on a private platform is actually not public. It is the private property of the platform owner and they can make it public or private any time they want or find ways to commodity it in their terms of service when you sign up.
I say this to back up what you say about the myth of the digital commons. Most online networks are not a commons at all, they are the exact opposite, they are an enclosure to extract profit from what would otherwise be a commons, usually built by finance capital to have appealing features at first, generated at a loss, and then once profit needs to be taken the alleged "commons" is increasingly closed and monetized. Journalista don't really understand this, sure, but neither do most people. They expect, correctly, that social interactions should be analogous to chatting with someone on the street or at a public square, and social networks try to give that illusion.
Regarding individual choice, well a person is surrounded by the exact opposite of what we are saying and all their friends are on their addiction habit social networks so what would you expect them to do. These things don't just happen on their own, people must work to organize and educate on the way capitalism turns their social lives into profit.