This is why I don’t believe people when they say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a distribution problem”
Because if everyone in the world had my lifestyle, we would be emitting an insane amount of carbon. And I don’t want my standard of living to go down, and in fact I want everyone to live as nicely as I do. So clearly we need fewer people.
The overpopulation isn’t happening in the 1%.
It makes jack shit of a difference to the environment if there is one billion or two billion starving people. They’re not the ones burning carbon or eating steak.
But we want to stop those people from starving. And if we ideally lived in a world where no one is starving, emissions would go up astronomically.
The cover photo is a jet plane but remember, US$140,000/year is the threshold they’re quoting in the article so the reality is more like a decent car or two and a house in a nicer area will drop you into that range.
1% of the world’s population is 80,000,000 people.
There is too much variance in a population that large to make any reasonable statements or suggest adjustments.
We already know that people living on pennies per day aren’t the problem.
But shouldn’t it be easier to adjust the lifestyle of 80 million people rather than 8 billion?
And there are a few easy ones almost everyone in the 1% can chip in: reduce meat consumption, don’t fly, buy local and don’t buy single use items
The problem here is that this research works from a Capitalist understanding of responsibility. That is to say that Besos is responsible for the emissions of Amazon, musk for space x, etc. Which means absolutely nothing. It’s a bullshit number.
How else would you account for it? Am I responsible for 0.001% of Amazon’s CO2 emissions because I order sometimes from them?
I think the answer is yes.
Poor Besos cannot decide what and how he delivers. He just needs to deliver to anybody who posts an order on the website someone put up on the internet. Kinda like Santa?
He can decide, and his middle managers can decide, and you can also decide by choosing to shop from somewhere else.
You think you’re not?
I don’t really have knowledge nor control over how green Amazon’s delivery is. If you shift responsibility to a party that cannot make well-informed decisions, you kind of end up with the mess we currently have, no?
The whole idea of money not having a memory is a huge scheme of capitalists to get out of any kind of responsibility.
Amazon has the best logistics infrastructure of any company in the world. It is literally the most efficient system of moving goods ever known to mankind.
You are responsible for the carbon footprint of things you purchase, yes. This is why things like carbon taxes with dividends are such good ideas.
You are the person to set in motion the apparatus necessary to accomplish the task that you wanted to be accomplished.
Yes you live in this late stage capitalist hellscape with the rest of us, but that doesn’t absolve you from being critical and making the best decisions in it.
