• ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    How does buying a cheap new car even if you don’t need it going to save humanity or prevent the earth from burning?

    • Allonzee@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      The US is trying to keep these tiny ones out because they want you you buy their big gas vehicles or larger, more expensive electrics. Larger vehicles consume more resources, take more to produce, and even large electric vehicles draw more from the dirty grid than a small personal conveyance like these designed to move you and your groceries.

      And that’s a strawman to infer that our self-destruction hinges on this single point. This is yet another example on the heap of the larger problem. “it might hurt short term PROFITS for our greed mongers, so we won’t allow something that might begin to mitigate the scale of the problem.”

      That said, it sounds like you agree with them, and if that’s the case, I have good news, they’ll continue to get their way in every economic sector, and yes, cumulatively, our species is paying and will pay an even greater price for allowing blind, insatiable greed to make every decision.

      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/mexico-central-america-us-heatwave

      If we cared about having a future for the species at all, Humanity’s only mission right now would be to END the global economy’s jihad of growth/metastasis, every major nation would institute child limits, and we would work to end consumerism and find homeostasis/equilibrium instead for the sake of our very survival, because this reverse terraforming we’ve done in decades will take millions of years for the earth to heal from. That’s nothing to Earth’s 3.8 billion year old story of life, but it might as well be eternity to our short term monkey brains. Our reality, our world will continue to heat, and if we stopped tomorrow entirely, would take many times longer to go back to normal than our species has existed for.

      But as common economic decisions like this demonstrate, we have decided to burn the future so as not to disrupt the reckless party of avarice and gluttony for our owners today. Is what it is.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        There are numerous small vehicles for sale in the US already but nobody buys them because they want a vehicle that’s good at more than one thing (being small) when forking over tens of thousands of dollars for it. Nobody is legislating to ban small or efficient vehicles they want to ban a foreign country from manipulating our markets by selling vehicles at artificially low prices due to billions in subsidies for their national brands.

        This idea that if we simply threw out all 200+ million vehicles in the US and replaced them with new, more efficient ones, global warming would suddenly end is ridiculous. This is just consumer mentality and treating cars like disposable iPhones with the mindset that you’re “being green.” If you want to help curb emissions, go buy a used Prius or EV instead of demanding that a factory build you a new car and do so at an artificially low price. Go buy a bicycle or electric scooter. You’re not reducing emissions by destroying a product that has already been built and is in good condition just to replace it with a newer version.

        I didn’t bother reading the rest of your comment since it devolved into unhinged rambling.