Start by taking away private jets and private flights from rich people. As all laws do, this one will also apply only to regular and poor people, not even big companies and certainly not for rich. Just look at what Musk is doing to nature reserve nears his launch pad. He was warned, didn’t get launch permissions, doesn’t have permission for letting untreated water into ground from cooling… and yet he does all that and no one bats and eye. Just look at the main page of Lemmy and you’ll see news of some dude flying alone in 747 because he can. Royal family has been known to fly across the ocean to get lunch.
I meant you can live as carefully as possible, walk everywhere, never fly a plane and live only on solar for multiple lives and you couldn’t offset what they fuck up in a day.
A lot of launches would be more safely done at sea or in the high desert than in coastal areas close to population centers.
We’re well beyond the point of industrial activity being done “more safely.” Either it stops entirely, or everything collapses before the turn of the next century.
Okay then, we just build Lofstrom loops and run them on nuclear reactors. Launch materials to put a solar shade up in a Lagrange point to cool the planet down until we stop all fossl fuel use and sequester enough CO2 when it is no longer needed. Construct the shade out of millions of smaller mirrors so that we can move mirrors away slowly over time so as to sync with the lowering CO2 levels.
Those loops only cost like $10 billion. That’s like a third of NASA’s yearly budget.
It’s not pie in the sky or some dumbass excuse to give the ruling class an out on climate change. Actually, the opposite – with cheap access to space, we will have access to near unlimited solar energy so we won’t need fossil fuels anymore, we can mine NEAs for metals making surface mining unnecessary, and actually build the Jetsonian post scarcity future our abusers promised us and failed to deliver on.
We really don’t have a choice anyway – we don’t have access to enough resources down here to make any of that happen, and without the solar shade no surface-only effort to stop climate collapse will work anyhow since the temperature will go up without it no matter what we do down here.
So we are left with a choice to kickstart human expansion into space or allow the biosphere to collapse. Grow or die. I say we grow.
Is the Saudi royal family’s emissions offset by planting 10 billion trees?
“Plans to” and actually planted those trees are two different things. But that would be a great solution. Wood is a renewable material, easy to work with and most importantly keeps carbon trapped until its burned or rotten. In other words, plant trees, make stuff with wood.
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No, carbon offsetting doesnt work. Only actual emission reduction
The least educated take on carbon offsetting.
Did you know that US EPA considers forestry management as an emissions sink?
Of course they think that, because the EPA will do whatever it can to pad it’s emissions ratings for the Paris Climate Accord. Carbon offsetting does not work, due to wildfire and insect risk.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/08/02/climate-change-carbon-offset-oregon/
Carbon offset isn’t real.
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Not like we punish war criminals that strictly either…
L m a o
This. Everything looks so tasty on paper tho!
Yeahhhh I don’t wanna shit on anyone’s day but this is entirely unenforceable.
All the rich would be arrested
No, they’d be able to afford the best lawyers. It’s the poor who would be punished the most. We already have fines for not recycling properly, even though the rubbish all gets mixed back together in Turkey or China and burned anyway. We have to use soggy paper straws with our drinks while the rich blanket the atmosphere in burned fuel from the private jets.
Thats a true revolutionary cry. But since being “rich” is quite a relative term, you might wake up in the realization that most of the world considers you rich and your lifestyle complicit in the mass destruction of the global environment.
That’s quite the stretch. Don’t regulate the rich cause we might be caught up?
I don’t take private flights from one side of a city to another. I don’t own a yacht (or 6). I don’t own a fleet of vehicles with a staff that drives them around. I don’t throw away more food than most people eat. I don’t horde dozens of acres of land that contain nothing but wasteful lawn.
There’s a pretty stark contrast between the ultra wealthy, and the vast majority of people living in highly developed countries.
When people get in a rage about “the rich”, those kinds of distinctions generally go out the window.
You’re not wrong, but it’s not likely that a bunch of moneyless people from third-world countries are going to come over and genocide us.
This is a form of slippery slope fallacy. Rich in this context refers to portion of society contributing to pollution on a massively higher scale than even an upper middle class American. How many ‘rich’ Americans regularly fly private jets or take yachts? How many average joes own and operate a cruise line or a refinery?
I think with regards to poorer people in other countries, they’d be on the same page with 99.99% of Americans about who’s considered so rich that they alone pose a threat to global health.
No, we would just abolish corporations
They should but never will, Laws don’t apply for rich people and even if, jail would BE to good for them
I love the idea but wonder how it would be handled for things like oil spills in the international waters space. Those are more more often accidental versus the types of just bad practice things like forrest destruction or such. Take that along with the notion of it being in international space would make even deciding jurisdiction a mess.
I think those responsible should be fined the same as you or I would be for dumping used motor oil down a storm drain.
By the quart.
Jurisdiction would be based on nationality of the business, just like it is now for other crimes. You can’t just commit a crime in international waters and go home scot-free.
Same way we would handle a vehicle accident that kills people, I assume.
Looks like the non-profit founded by Higgins and Mehta is active in promoting this law on a worldwide scale, with ongoing legislative efforts in Spain, Finland, and Brazil. Here’s their action page to get involved and offer support.
“On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities.”
Since we gave people the death penalty at the Nuremberg trials ex post facto, we can do the same with anthropogenic climate change. I would support such death penalties now already, tho I suspect more than a hundred million people would have to die directly from unambiguous climate change events within a short period like a week, before more people would agree. The problem is that the climate-change tipping-points will cascade, which means that the 1st one may cause other tipping points to be triggered, at which point billions of people will die unnecessarily in a Mad Max world.
“On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities."
Are they fucking serious? Why have any legal system at all then? People would just be allowed to rape and pillage as they please under that auspice.
This is how the legal system typically works when a new law is introduced.
It needs to change then, at least for stuff like this. It’s too serious to let off on a technicality.
Letting criminals off on technicalities is one of the things that put us down this dark road in the first place. Justice is far more important and letting them off is not justice, I don’t care how the original U.S. system was set up.
It needs to go.
Well the general principle is that you can’t be punished for behavior that was legal when you did it. Otherwise you open the door to “doing X is illegal now” and then locking everyone who was documented doing X in the last several years.
Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.
Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.
Funny how quickly people forget that they’re supporting authoritarianism just because it happens to line up with their belief system in one instance.
I think we need to address this not just at individuals or corporations, but at nation states in which those individuals reside and are licensed.
We need to kick them in the wallet. Allowing rampant pollution? Extra trade tariffs, and exclusion from various international groups/events. Complicit in rampant pollution? Punitive economic Sanctions, and loss of access to certain technologies, financial networks, etc.Trade tariffs hurt both countries and now is not really the time to be shooting your economy in the foot.
Targeted sanctions would be referable but are a much more serious form of leverage and will damage credibility.
It’s self defense. We have to get things under control before greed kills us all
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You do understand how much energy (and therefore pollution) it takes to launch any significant mass above the karman line, right?
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not really, civilization for a long time was perfectly fine living alongside nature. this problem is only really become a thing since the later industrial revolution
That’s bollocks. Humans have been clear-cutting land, burning fields and forests to enable agriculture, and hunting species to extinction since we came down from the trees, to say nothing of shitting in every body of water we lived near. The industrial revolution only made it tip the scales into an existential threat to our continued way of life.
Yeah m8, you tell him wot
Burning fields and forests is called back burning . It’s a practice that is saving the forest. If you don’t, the burning forests gets out of hand and all is lost. Just ask Australia circa 2019 when the PM refused to do the needed.
That’s a very different thing to clear cutting, it’s like saying dumping toxic waste in your fish pond is the same as feeding them.
I wasn’t responding to the clear cutting. I was responding to the burning. I don’t know what you’re on about but way to mangle a topic.
Ok let me explain in more detail, there is what you describe of back burning which exists in some places but there is also the widely practiced method of clear cutting which often involves burning down the forest to get rid of it and create farm land. Did you not see all the stories about deforestation in Brazil using this method?
Yea, I said backburning. Glad we finally agreed what words mean now.
TIL deforestation of the Amazon is good for the Amazon.
Calm down. you either clearly cannot understand the differences or refuse to understand the differences of back burning and deforestation. And until you do you should stop speaking on the subject of ‘what is good for the world’ cuz clearly you are doing it in a very bad actor/sensationalist way.
burning fields and forests is called back burning
Not always. Sometimes it’s deforestation. Most often throughout human history, it’s been deforestation
You’re talking nonsense man
I said backburning. I didn’t stutter.
Make it retroactive.
That’ll be the same Scotland with a shitload of oil rigs off the coast, would it?
Are the rigs purely Scottish, idk how the UK works
Punishing individuals over corporations has me concerned. I don’t think that’s a good idea
It’s a great idea. Corporations exist to shield individuals from illegal and immoral behavior. We need a new system, comrade.
Individuals lead corporations
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