37° heat is depressing.
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@CiaraNi I have students, and family members, who go abroad on holiday twice, three times a year, and I've stopped pretending to be interested and pleased for them.
I try not to be a total arse about it, but I just had to cancel a citybreak in bloody *Birmingham* because I rely on public transit and the trainlines in Wales were buckling in the heat.
@nic Snap! I've stopped responding Oh Lovely! too. And lately have upgraded to mentioning that I don't fly for holidays. I'm not telling others they shouldn't frivolously fly, but just trying to normalise the fact that holidays are possible without flights. (Many people I know equate the two. They hear 'no fly' as 'no holidays')
"I just had to cancel a citybreak in bloody *Birmingham* because I rely on public transit and the trainlines in Wales were buckling in the heat."
Perfect illustration.
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@CiaraNi Yes! Plus we have to stop subsidising air-transport fuel. I got the train from London to Malmö last year, and it was way more expensive than flying. But I haven’t flown for 12 years, and can’t see myself doing it again, certainly not short-haul.
@arratoon The subsidising of air-transport fuel is a scandal.
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What you are describing is " #PathDependency ".
And billionaires are just part of the path. As are people cheering for combustion engines or the newest electric car.
This is the way inequal human societies just function - Persistence & Tradition is valued over everything else.
And when the powerful AND a great part of the powerless want the same thing - #stability - then survival becomes an afterthought.
@berlinfokus Not taking an airplane to go on holidays seems like a very simple thing to do here. Instant action that requires no actual sacrifice or loss.
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37° heat is depressing. So is the way we’re dealing with climate collapse. The language we’re using, the excuses we’re making. Making heat records a game, excitedly watching to see if Number Goes Up. The news said the latest temperature had ‘ruined the chance of another new record’. And we all seem to agree that, conveniently, there’s no use in inconveniencing ourselves personally by consuming less or not flying until the day after every billionaire has given up their private jet.
There is a pervasive sense of "what difference does it make?" when it's the 100 corporations and the 1% who do the biggest amount of damage. And there is a lot of truth in that, but waiting for that to be solved will not help prepare us for what is coming either. There is a lot of room between obsessing over "individual footprint" and doing at all nothing to change. Capitalism encourages FOMO; choosing to miss out is part of the resistance.
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I dunno. Some of it is conscious, by the most lost people. But I think it’s mostly the aggregated property of what most of us do at the individual scale.
A billion “yeah I could do the low carbon thing but there are ‘reasons’ why this journey, this meeting, this purchase can’t do that”.
What we most critically lack are contexts in which to talk about why our ‘reasons’ are dust and what to do about it
"What we most critically lack are contexts in which to talk about why our ‘reasons’ are dust and what to do about it"
Yes, this is it. We are refusing to even acknowledge this problem, let alone talk about this. The current heatwave has had the opposite effect, in my anecdotal experience - I have never heard so many people confidently state so many 'reasons' why it will make no real difference if individual people modify their individual behaviour.
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My generation and the one before it have made prospects for young people relentlessly shit. They know it. And we’ve trained them to think that voting is the only real agency they have. Which is bullshit.
For the most part, I don’t begrudge them making their lives momentarily less shit
@urlyman
I agree. My daughter not flying would not decrease the CO2 emissions. The fuel that she might have saved gets consumed by some other tourist, or by the military.In the meantime, part of my pension is coming from Big Oil etc.
There is very little an individual can do. (But of course Trump, Putin, the generals in Sudan, etc could have chosen not to start their wars.)
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“I've been thinking I should really start speaking up more. Someone should start changing the social expectation, right?”
Yes! Me too. We need to collectively change the social expectation and the conversation. To encourage each other to use our collective superpowers, taking action like a mass boycott of holiday flights.
@CiaraNi @marjon I get this too, stopped flying years ago thinking there would be electric planes in a few years time, but still nothing 20 years on.
So I get family saying things like ‘you won’t stop your kids flying I’m afraid’ like some kind of cautionary tale *on me* (also I’ve never stopped my kids flying, they have to make their own judgement call). It’s the older / my generation, it would just be nice if we all supported each other in this crisis
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@berlinfokus Not taking an airplane to go on holidays seems like a very simple thing to do here. Instant action that requires no actual sacrifice or loss.
well, personally I'm @ 25 years flight-free now. never felt like a sacrifice at all, more like a liberation actually.
but thats an outsider-position. Not like totally rare, but not mainstream either.
so the question would theoretically be: "why are people not acting in their self-interest ?"
but whatever a scientific answer to that might be, I have made up my mind - they CAN'T. Usually most people are generally unable to anticipate or even see the consequences to their actions.
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@RVLara23 @tsturm @urlyman Lots of people who aren't part of the small privileged minority who can over-consume and fly on holidays are overwhelmed too. If people feel helpless to contribute, then a mass holiday-flight boycott (or similar) should help them feel less helpless. I do believe there are people who don't care, who just value their city break flights higher than they value younger generations' futures. But it's still not socially acceptable to say that.
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@CiaraNi Planetary destruction as a competitive team sport
@gimulnautti It feels like that right enough. The breathless news reports about latest temperatures breaking or not breaking records sound exactly like that - competitions.
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There is a pervasive sense of "what difference does it make?" when it's the 100 corporations and the 1% who do the biggest amount of damage. And there is a lot of truth in that, but waiting for that to be solved will not help prepare us for what is coming either. There is a lot of room between obsessing over "individual footprint" and doing at all nothing to change. Capitalism encourages FOMO; choosing to miss out is part of the resistance.
@hamishb I think there is also a pervasive sense of "what difference does it make?" when 'it' means giving up a convenience or pleasure we don't want to give up. Like holiday flights. And it's only a small minority of us who have the privilege to over-consume and fly in the first place. The 10% (I don't have the figure but believe it's around that) has massive collective power if we put all our individual footprints together. We know 'every vote matters' but struggle with 'every flight matters'.
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@RVLara23 @tsturm @urlyman Lots of people who aren't part of the small privileged minority who can over-consume and fly on holidays are overwhelmed too. If people feel helpless to contribute, then a mass holiday-flight boycott (or similar) should help them feel less helpless. I do believe there are people who don't care, who just value their city break flights higher than they value younger generations' futures. But it's still not socially acceptable to say that.
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@CiaraNi @marjon I get this too, stopped flying years ago thinking there would be electric planes in a few years time, but still nothing 20 years on.
So I get family saying things like ‘you won’t stop your kids flying I’m afraid’ like some kind of cautionary tale *on me* (also I’ve never stopped my kids flying, they have to make their own judgement call). It’s the older / my generation, it would just be nice if we all supported each other in this crisis
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@hemlockcookie Oh that's so depressing. And she's not the only one. I wish the news would show more courage about reporting within a context. They don't need to share that kind of thinking, making a climate crisis seem nice. Demoralising is absolutely the right word.
I have a prescription to not watch news
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In many ways that parallels the way that when you are held up by "Traffic" it is convenient to forget that your car is traffic too!
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@tompearce49 Yes. That's a good comparison.
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@CiaraNi I wonder how much pollution there is from all of the private jets.
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@hemlockcookie @CiaraNi God I want to punch people like that, or scream "we won't have coffee soon because the places where it grows will become deserts, and entitled imbeciles like you offloading responsibility to other people is a reason for that".
Grr.
@MiaMarkTwo @hemlockcookie That's a great way to illustrate it - 'there'll be no more coffee on the patio where we're headed, my friend'
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@hemlockcookie
Yeah. Now try taking your tea outside late afternoon and see how nice that is. (I'm 71 and decidedly undelighted.)
@CiaraNi@Eetschrijver @hemlockcookie Yes, good point. We don't have the freedom to do ordinary stuff in this heat.
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@MiaMarkTwo @hemlockcookie That's a great way to illustrate it - 'there'll be no more coffee on the patio where we're headed, my friend'
@CiaraNi @hemlockcookie There'll be no more *anything* on the patio in the less-distant-than-we-think future - not without protective clothing, anyway. I'm surrounded by neighbours who still think weather and climate are the same thing, or just simply "don't believe" in climate change. I've shouted more than once at them "it's happening whether you believe in it or not you fucking imbeciles".
