this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Have we gotten past the point if irreparable damage? Yes. Does that mean it's pointless to reduce further damage as much as possible? Not even a little.
We will not be able to reduce the impact unless we completely dismantle capitalism. And we frankly don't have a long time to do it if the goal is to reduce the impact before we're all dead.
That's completely not true. Yes, dismantling capitalism is the most important thing we can do to reduce the impact. But you're using some really strong words there. If I ride my bike to work instead of taking a car for one day, that'll reduce the CO2 emitted by about a kilogram. That one kilogram might reduce the severity of some hurricane enough to save a life. And yeah, it probably won't. But what about a year of riding my bike? What about a lifetime? What about installing solar panels at my house? What about not taking a flight? What about eating a vegan diet? Put all that together, I can probably save a couple lives in my lifetime compared to if I just consoomed. And yeah, in between all that, I'm on the streets volunteering for anarchist orgs and building systems to dismantle capitalism.
But the way I see it, fighting capitalism is like trying to win the lottery. It probably won't work in my lifetime. It almost certainly won't stop the climate crisis in its tracks right now. Making these changes in my own life makes me a healthier person with more money and a lighter conscience, and it's guaranteed lives saved. So I'm gonna do both. I'm not gonna bet on achieving communism and only then going through the degrowth that's inevitable anyway. I'm going to degrow my own life right now, so at the very least I'm ready when the communist revolution is complete and it's time to ban cars, and if communism doesn't happen before I die, I can still say with certainty, "I was part of the solution".