this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
1273 points (97.5% liked)
Political Memes
5494 readers
1980 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment. It's just a fact that snark won't change, or who owns the means of production.
Like, that's just how mining works. You take stuff out of the ground and it doesn't grow back, and, spoilers, mine tailings were some toxic shit even in antiquity.
Logging at least has the option of reforestation but that requires humans to stop building on the clear cut land.
Even industrial pollution isn't a new concern. The scale might be, but traditional tanneries and smitheries would poison the rivers and land of cities.
Your comment is a good example of two of the classic global warming denial tactics.
You're claim about industrial productivity causing unavoidable damage to the environment is setting up a binary in order to pretend the badness is unavoidable. In reality, different industrial procedures have vastly varying effects on the environment. One procedure might have an incredibly small effect relative to another, but if we listen to your claim, we would lump them all together and shrug our shoulders because it's necessary to have industry in modern society.
And then there's the scale argument. Well, the scale argument is another kind of deflection. I think the background assumption is that because human beings have done things on a small scale for the past few hundred years, we shouldn't worry that things have been ramped up in the last half century. Of course that doesn't make sense because the world population has risen massively, and the effects of increased climate change end up causing irreversible damage, damage that wasn't even close to being caused a hundred years ago.
And finally, the fatalistic tone itself is a deflection tactic. In fact we have created a lot of legislation to fix problems created by pollution. We have successfully regulated a ton of environmental problems away. So if we're trying to use history as a measure of how to create the future, let's get even more regulation into place.
It’s also setting up the fallacy that capitalism is completely unregulated. We have tons of regulations setting up the marketplace that capital works within, and that should certainly include societal goals like “clean up after yourself”. You don’t get to abdicate your responsibility, then blame it on capitalism
Talk about deflection, lol
There's no industrial productivity that comes from sustainability. You can only harvest to exhaustion. And you can never give back any more than you take.
This is the nature of industry and not at all the nature of profit chasing.
No mining but strip mining.
An unsolvable concern. Certainly not one that industrial recycling and waste mitigation can address.