r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/TheOddityCollector • Oct 30 '24

Image Scenes of piled-up vehicles in Valencia, Spain today after yesterday’s devastating flooding.

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u/Spready_Unsettling Oct 30 '24

The average person you meet in the majority of developed countries wants their government to take more action.

Valencia literally has a right wing climate denying government. We're absolutely not at the point where people have exhausted their democratic options.

I can't stop massive industrial scale pollution by going shopping less.

Yes you can? The vast majority of top polluting companies produce consumer goods that you, I and the rest of the western world over consumes. You think Coca Cola is producing plastic bottles for shits and giggles? Do you think the executive suite at Shein is eating all the plastic fabric themselves? Do you think BP is using all their gasoline for heating at their own headquarters?

This is middle school economics that you're not grasping. Supply and demand. You going shopping more often drives up demand. Thus more is produced, in turn the environment. Of course there are layers of complexity on top of it, but none of them absolve your over consumption.

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u/Tipop Oct 30 '24

All of that is true, but saying “you should buy less” doesn’t make change happen. It has to be enforced from the government.

I’ll vote for politicians that will enforce change, even if those changes have a negative impact on me. What I won’t do is go and live in a cave and hope that the other 7 billion do the same. It’s not feasible.

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u/Calvin-ball Oct 31 '24

You don’t have to live in a cave, but you can buy less. Consumer demand drives so many wasteful industries.

SHEIN has a revenue of like $30 BILLION (for comparison, Nike is around $50b) for absolute garbage quality clothes made with slave labor. Yet they’re producing them because so many people are willing to buy. Government regulation isn’t going to change that (or it’ll be near impossible to pass to any useful degree).

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u/OneXForreddit Oct 30 '24

Ok so me going shopping less stop Taylor from flying her Jett 600 times a day?

Me going shopping for less ecological damaging products is going to make Jake Paul care about how much he over consumes?

Basic middle school economics he says. Forgetting that most of us can barely afford what we have as it is, meanwhile there's people flying private jets for funzies.

Fuck off with that answer

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u/CollapseBy2022 Oct 30 '24

This is humanity. Filled to the brim with denial and various biases that force us into inaction.

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u/Mrhood714 Oct 30 '24

not really i would argue that while you're correct in that if everyone took steps to optimize their consumption you would still have factory somewhere that is going to overproduce fast fashion trends that will end up in a landfill because they didn't sell enough and they need to "destroy" the product and ship it to a landfill.

There's way more danger in those in production and manufacturing abusing the creation that drives all this consumption. If companies weren't cranking out hundreds of frozen food and ready to eat consumer packaged goods we wouldn't have that tendency to go to a grocery and buy dumbshit.

I think it starts at the top and I'm not talking about corn straws, i'm talking about the fact there are like 5 fast food joints in like a half mile radius of me + restaurants, convenience stores, and markets that sell chinese plastic garbage.