It’s one of the most disappointing legacy of the pandemic for me. The people.
The environment got better. Some people were not forced to commute any longer. We had an opportunity to start freeing ourselves from capitalism and move into a post-capitalist society.
But no. We doubled down on capitalism and even went into tribalism. I read so many comments of people saying they were missing their time lone from their family while stuck in traffic, and were eager to go back to the office. Now a few years later, those that could still work from home or remotely are demanded to go back to their office. Even if it’s not necessary. For team spirit!
I didn’t have high hopes about climate change and our policies before the pandemic. And now I’m entirely cynical and convinced we will not do anything. We will not reach any goals to avoid climate change. We will go head first into it. Because fuck you, I’m not letting go of my car and my lifestyle! I want cheap gas! Give me cheap gas!
I mean, if everyone in a workplace is almost always working from home, there’s basically no way for new people to get into the job. I know that commutes can be brutal in some parts of the world, but maybe you should fix that instead of putting on the bandaid that everyone should just work remotely.
You do get a lot more done by actually interacting with your colleagues. Plus it can be pretty nice as well. We should expect it to be nice to go to work and interact with the people who do the same job. If it’s not nice, something is wrong and we should fix it.
Also, if we don’t see our colleagues, how in the fuck are we going to organize?
You make it sound it’s a black or white thing (not racially ofc, but in a binary sense). Hybrid working would solve both issues; it reduces traffic without losing the social component completely. Most people don’t need/want 100% home office; just having 2-3 days a week where you can work from home would already be a complete gamechanger, because you gain a lot of flexibility.
I never said that nobody should ever work from home. I fully agree that working from home should be an option, and I think there are multiple good ways to do it. Might be you can do half the day from home, or as you suggested 2/5 days from home.
I’m just saying that the demand that workplaces should basically be deserted as senior workers work almost entirely remotely is unsustainable. New people aren’t going to actually learn how to do their jobs properly that way. And I don’t think most people want to spend their lives at home.
It depends on your type of job. I have been working remotely on and off for a bit more than a decade, and video calls are a thing. Virtual meetings are a thing. I can call my coworkers, see them, talk to them. Even if I’m not in front of them. We can organize just fine without the needs to smell each others farts.
And as an introvert, I prefer it that way. We’re not all extroverts that want to waste multiple hours of our life, unpaid, stuck in traffic, just so others can “interact face to face” with us.
In fact, you kind of sound like my manager that wants me to go back to the office a few days a week for “team spirit”. My team is all remote and we’ve been working like this for years. But now, suddenly, it’s not good enough. She wants to see our faces to foster team spirit. And to be quite honest, I will quit before being forced to needlessly spend energy to go to the office.
I know a lot of other people in that situation. In my country, federal workers that could do their job remotely were given that right during the pandemic. And now, after a few years, apparently, they really really need to be in an office and supervised for their job to be done.
To me, again, depending on your type of work, the organization “problem” is made up BS just so managers can surveil and monitor “their” employees.
See here’s the thing. The commute doesn’t need to be the nightmare that you’re describing. A country with developed infrastructure can get you to your job on foot or by bicycle in 5-10 minutes. A culture that doesn’t expect and demand that has a problem, and the fix isn’t to just do all interaction by screen.
I know I sound like your manager, because managers get talking points that have been distilled for them by PR firms, that have picked out the reasonable and good arguments for their position, and then they corrupt it for their own agenda. But I am not your manager, and I’m not some “extrovert” either. I’m just someone who doesn’t want to interact with other people only through a screen and only at designated times, i.e. a normal person.
When I talk organization, I don’t mean organizing the work, by the way. I mean: organizing the anti-work.
Yeah no that’s just plain wrong. Even in countries with good infrastructure/public transport it can still take ages to get to work, even if you live in the same city. Cities are just too big; you can’t really choose to live close to your workplace, especially in this current housing crisis.
To say nothing of the mask shit. People really are so disappointing.
This unfortunately, too real. It’s really unfortunate that way too many people like them exist
typical… it’s always nocer out when you can not go out.
We should go no pollution days, so no cars, only renewable energy use. Weekends you can pollute with cars
til lemmy has never heard of inversions. Then they spread pictures of inversions like it’s pollution.
Please never think you’re smarter than reddit. You ain’t.
Hmm having lived in an inversion area I am going to have to ask what do you think is “in” an inversion!?
Several days’ worth of accumulated pollution trapped in a tiny area, which was my whole point to begin with. Passing this off as regular pollution is wild.
In your eyes is it ever okay for there to be enough pollution such that even during an inversion (as you’re claiming) that a city should look like it does on the right of this picture?
Because my answer is no. I don’t care if it’s L.A. or London or New Delhi or Beijing, I don’t think that amount of pollution is healthy. Or I know it isn’t, I don’t think it should be acceptable and we should be building towards a society in which that doesn’t happen.
I am glad you clarified that. Thank you. At first it felt like you were saying that inversion layers don’t hold pollution.
Obviously inversion exists without humans, but if humans are present it will trap their pollution locally until it goes away.
800 iq quy here
Damn
Greetings from Hanoi. We had a similar experience here.
they wont have to worry about sunburns, because there is no sun available.
This is why regulations are important.
Functional regulations are why you don’t vote for conservatives.
Source: I live in a valley that used to have way worse air quality until stricter SMOG and gasoline refinement laws took effect.
I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as a child in the 70s and 80s we had smog warnings where you weren’t allowed outside.
It’s not a big city, but the topography meant that pollution would sometimes get trapped over the city by the surrounding hills. Obviously it’s not like that now, but I’m sure it’s why we all got asthma.
The Earth can heal if we stop stabbing it.
But it’s fun giving the earth a frontal lobotomy, only so we can watch 30-second “AI” generated slop, causing our brains to become numb!
If you could just snap your fingers and half the world’s population would disappear would you?
Straight half? No. A select 3% a year for five years? Maybe. If you’ve seen any of the realistic critiques of the Thanos snap you know that doesn’t go well. Trimming down the fascists, oligarchs, nationalist, theocrats, tech barons, and similar greed and hate mongers should be enough without crashing everything.
Well resource consumption wouldn’t go down THAT much. Outside of private jets and the like, most shit is still consumed by people.
Making it all illegal works, killing the people who make it possible for us does not because new ones will spring up.
Disrupt their established power networks and put the fear of gods in the survivors would go a long way.
Yeah, Same here honestly. I wish
We could just behave, we dont need to kill half of everyone.
Id just have the wealthiest die 5 billion times
I would probably get botox for my chin first and then think about it.
If I could snap my fingers and all the world’s billionaires disappear I would, or oil refineries. Not people though. Humans aren’t the virus.
Snap for all the cars to disappear!
No. People would starve to death. Cars are necessary. Not everyone lives in the CBD of the capital city.
Cars are not inherently necessary. But we built around them and made them necessary. That can change. We control how we build and what assumptions we make.
Yep, cars are not necessary (esp what the vast majority does: one person in a car build for four or more). Public and freight transport would totally work.
Getting rid of half the population or half the refineries would accomplish the same thing right?
The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.
No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone. (Until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.)
I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.
If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.
Oil is used in the production and transportation of food.
Also fertilizer.
And the plastic that keeps the medical system running.
My point is only that not every person on the world has equal access to those things.
My point is those oil refineries keep a lot of people alive.
Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.
Just the collapse of the medical system alone due to the missing plastics would kill millions.
You can make plastics out of corn and soybean oil
Aye, so its a rock and a hard place then. At least when it comes to solutions like these.
I’d go for the quick and painless snap over the long drawn out biotic crisis caused by the removal of a key resource but that’s only because I’m a humanitarian.
They don’t refine oil for people to consume it, they refine oil to generate shareholder value.
Do they just dump it in a big hole and profit?
Probably, I don’t know.
Holy fuck why does Lemmy have so many ecofascists
Where in the fuck do you get ecofascism from!? Do you even know what the word means.
"Ecofascism is a political ideology that blends environmental protection with extreme racism, white supremacy, and violence against marginalized groups. "
How about you do the bare minimum reading and take a look at the wikipedia page for ecofascism instead of presenting me with a dictionary definition of the word, which only highlights your obvious ignorance on this topic, and then get back to me when you’re done.
You are so fucking wrong it isn’t funny. Please tell me your made up definition as you act like an ecotardburger.
Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive. As the world currently exists, and under current economic systems, population growth is a pretty huge issue, especially while basically zero effort is being put into reducing carbon emissions globally.
There was an article somewhere in these threatlds that gave a decent summary:
The Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources
What a lot of people (myself included) struggle with is that the amount and significance of change needed to make an actual difference is huge right now, and it requires a concerted global effort to get anywhere close to halting what feels like an inexorable rise in earth’s temperatures.
Until we can change this then humans might as well be described as a virus and looking at forced population control (in this case of transport etc. under covid) and seeing a measurable improvement in our environment feels cathartic and, honestly, easier to obtain than the global overturning of capital.
Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive.
Goes on to describe their definitionally ecofascist beliefs in detail
Overpopulation is a myth started by nazis and eugenicists. People aren’t viruses.
Define ecofascism then, because its easy to just fuck around and shit on an opinion without providing an alternative.
I’m not saying we need eugenics or a cull., and I’m certainly not blaming the global south for existing in a world that was driven by short sighted rich European capitalists.
What I am saying is:
- Population is a problem provided the status quo doesn’t change
- The status quo just ain’t changing. Not fast enough, anyway.
- In light of this the current state of human existence (and the systems which support it) could be reasonably described as a virus. Exponential growth at the cost of a host? Prove me wrong.
- Solutions? Fucking sea change and a total shift in the way we occupy the planet. We’re not over crowding we’re over producing (and over consuming).
What’s eco-fascist about that, and if you don’t agree, please let me know.
Yeah, you definitely don’t know what that word means.
Also, try telling the civilization of Easter Island overpopulation isn’t a problem. Did you know the Middle East used to be a forest?
No ecofascists here, but I am starting to suspect someone is an ecotard.
Yeah, overpopulation is really easy to handle and doesn’t require violence. Give kids a genuine education that they can continue into adulthood, and access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and bam, population growth is fixed.
The population problem is intentionally caused by the epstein class, so they can have abundant, desperate, cheap labor.
It’s not like they are welcome in many other places
If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
But even with these slower rates of growth, our population is already far above the sustainable carrying capacity given by Bradshaw and team’s models.
The gap between their optimum number of 2.5 billion and our current population size of 8.3 billion may help explain the problems with overconsumption our species currently faces.
Earth’s Population Has Surpassed The Planet’s Capacity, Study Suggests
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
It’s a number of people that the planet can carry based on reality.
Without a second thought
I was on Thanos’ side the entire time.
I felt like this watching Black Panther. The “bad” guy wanted to give Wakanda’s weapons to the oppressed and downtrodden people of the world, and I was like “yeah, sounds good.”
*Starts dancing flamenco
I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we’re going to rape the shit out of this planet until it’s a lifeless husk. It is in our nature. And it’s not like we have to rape the whole thing. Just the surface.
Even if we got really good at recycling, we’ll always produce waste and use resources that can’t be reproduced in a reasonable timeframe. 8 billion of us and counting. Raping.
It is in our nature
No dumb dumb, it’s capitalism. A temporary system that has a beginning, and will in one way or another, end. We can change things. You’re not a slave to some nebulous “human nature”. Now, log off, stop doom scrolling, and go do something about it
No dumb dumb, it’s capitalism.
Is capitalism the only reason we produce waste? If capitalism ended tomorrow, so would all our consumption and production of unnatural material?
Use common sense, my bro. The only way we aren’t damaging the ecosystem is if we turn back into animals and the only waste we produce is feces. This isn’t rocket science.
Username checks all the way out
Its not our nature, this entire thing is huffing the momentum of a couple thousand rich assholes who own everything. What we are wired to do is not change jack shit until we get fucked up. If we could conquer that and throw these assholes out you’ll see a better world in a single generation.
Eh. Still 8 billion people and counting consuming and generating unnatural waste.
We will always be chipping away at our environment unless we turn back into animals and the only waste we produce is organic.
That still leaves one viable choice with our current technology: find a way to live in balance. Which is totally not happening with the current zeitgeist.
been thinking about this a lot, feeling so accelerationist because of it.
Mood AF. I hate feeling this way, but I almost feel things need to get worse before they get better.
I won’t actively work towards that, and I’ll work to make my community and city a better place in the midst of that. But I think humanity will only change when things are really drastic.
This is kind of misleading. Delhi commonly experiences fog in the winter months. Since the same weather conditions that form fog (atmospheric stability) also cause pollution to accumulate rather than blow away, the city gets AQI spikes and fog at the same time. The photo on the right is smog, but also representative of what you’d see if there were no air pollution.
For real. I can cherry pick photos of Seattle that gives the safe effect.
I’ve cross-posted this to “Actually Infuriating” where it belongs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_Delhi
Air pollution in Delhi, the capital of India, was found to be one of the most lethal of any city in the world in an August 2022 study of 7,000 world cities by the US-based Health Effects Institute.[2] Air pollution in India is estimated to kill about 2 million people every year. India has the world’s highest death rate from chronic respiratory diseases and asthma according to the World Health Organization.[3] In Delhi, poor air quality has irreversibly damaged the lungs of 2.2 million children.
On 25 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India expressed their sentiments on the pollution in Delhi, saying “Delhi has become worse than narak (hell)”.[4] Supreme Court Justice Arun Mishra remarked that it is “better to get explosives, (and) kill everyone.”[5]
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in India, the air quality in Delhi significantly improved.[6][7]
India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences published a research paper in October 2018 attributing almost 41% of air pollution to vehicular emissions, 21.5% to dust and 18% to industrial emissions.[8]
If the largest single factor is vehicle emissions, I wonder how far people there typically go. Like, if it’s people who are only driving around the city, that might be a good candidate for EV use.
EDIT: Sounds like they’re already on it, just started some major push.
Delhi’s new EV Policy 2.0 introduces financial subsidies for electric vehicles starting July 1, 2026, and implements a phased ban on new petrol/CNG vehicle registrations (including petrol two-wheelers by April 1, 2028), though existing registered petrol vehicles can still be legally driven
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Delhi will stop registering new petrol and CNG three-wheelers from January 1, 2027. Registration of new petrol two-wheelers will also end from April 1, 2028.
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The ban applies only to new vehicle registrations. Existing petrol vehicles, or those bought before the 2028 deadline, can continue to be used legally until the end of their permitted lifespan.
Highway there is like literal hell, 50 ppl sharing one lane, you are quite literally bumper to bumper on the highway going highway speeds, youll see 3-5 ppl sharing one moped somehow, like poor families that need to travel for whatever reason.
Somehow no one crashes, no turn signals, just constant never ending honking which lowkey feels like sonar. (they can tell the distance without looking)
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Good lord… I wonder if overall things were healthier for them during the pandemic than now.
It is very similar to how people in the UK were actually healthier during WWII as the food rationing program meant they weren’t eating a total shit diet.
They also got more exercise as more of the population was engaged in physical labor (women’s land army) and factory work to produce food and war goods.
Oh that is an interesting part I never knew.
I think that at this point they should look into building a New New Delhi
And a brand new sun gets buried alive roughly twelve hours after it sprouts. /s
Without additional data, this only tells me that visibility is lower and the lighting has changed.
