Big corporations....that we keep rewarding with our money, incentivizing them to not change what they're doing. Human consumption is the largest driver of climate change.

Is there anything reasonable that we (those who have interest in living "like before" and won't die of age within 30 years) can achieve? I feel like many things are very out of reach, and the population is just too heterogeneous to agree on something. Older folks where I live just do not give a fuck, and elected someone whose major interest is in removing rights from people they actively hate. At least one big city where I live has been without water nor electricity for several hours (days?) because the heat has messed out the infrastructure, and I feel like even in my country barely anybody is talking about it... It's just very discouraging, I want to shift my perspective, but it's not easy.

Have you tried separating your recycling out? It'll help offset the cruise ships that each put out around 250,000 cars worth of straight up pollution a year, without factoring in other impacts.

I largely tuned out of climate change news a long time ago. I still care about it. I vote for it and have donated relatively large amounts of money to environmental charities. But otherwise nothing I do makes a difference.

There used to be plausible deniability. "Maybe it won't really be that bad, even though we should be acting in case it is."

Now it's more of a "I wonder where the various lines are and how many we've already crossed, which one will be next, and how soon we'll notice it."

Have you noticed the number of insects is way down this year? Maybe I'm wrong. They do still gather in the lights (which might be another part of the fucking problem...) but there just doesn't seem to be as many as there used to be this year.

The jets are bad but what is worse are the handle full of billionaires and csuite execs who have the money and power to decide company policies and bribe politicians and governments: lobbying, independent expenditures, gala dinners, super pacs, incentives, revolving doors, private fundraising, paid speeches; to look the other way so they can pollute however much they want.

Nothing is Ethical under Capitalism.

Social Democracy is better but still exports the suffering to the global south.

Workers of the world must unite to over come the absolute insanity of the capital class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine

Unfortunately, everyone participates and it adds up. If you want to compare such personal consumption like jets, then the rich account for about 15% of the global emissions.

Here's a chart:

from this report: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-15c-goal-621305/

The share of total global emissions associated with the consumption of the richest 1% is set to continue to grow, from 13% in 1990, to 15% in 2015 and 16% in 2030.

If you want to include the rich's capital, which you should, because that has to change:

the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total. Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions growth, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total. While per-capita emissions of the global top 1% increased since 1990, emissions from low- and middle-income groups within rich countries declined. Contrary to the situation in 1990, 63% of the global inequality in individual emissions is now due to a gap between low and high emitters within countries rather than between countries. Finally, the bulk of total emissions from the global top 1% of the world population comes from their investments rather than from their consumption. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00955-z

But if you imagine that the petite bourgeois lifestyle of McMansion in suburbia, cars and driving around everywhere, eating boatloads of primary calories, and the rest of the consumption isn't contributing, you should read more. Here's a start: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3691-the-imperial-mode-of-living

That's a lot easier said than done

I don't think you realize how much even stone age humans fucked up the planet. Half of Australia's forests were burned down and most of America's megafauna was hunted to extinction and the people who did it had little more than stone tools.

Now I wonder if some future intelligent race could ever come across us through archaeological digs, and we become that "highly advanced race that died out" that's so common in fiction.