For the first situation, 3 h a day is a lot of time. I don’t think we should expect people to make such big sacrifices every day, at least if they work full time. People need leisure to stay healthy too. If it was 1h or 1:30h it would be reasonable to take the bike imo, but at 3h I’d cut them some slack. There are simply much more effective climate measures that we as a society should implement. They shouldn’t buy a new gas car if they can avoid it though.

For the second situation:

You want it so much, in fact, that not stopping there to buy a hamburger creates twice as much negative utility for you as biking instead of driving

But it also causes a lot more animal cruelty than the minuscule climate impact of one person commuting. Over the years, it would mean that many animals would have to endure an extremely miserable and painful life on factory farms with constant abuse and neglect, just to satisfy taste buds.

Compared to a warming of 0,00000000000000000001 °C or something like that, which has no measurable impact on any life on its own. Animal agriculture even has a larger climate impact than all cars on earth combined.

A more general analogy: By driving a car, you’ll do some miniscule harm to people and the environment. But if you’d knowingly chose to buy products that were produced in literal slavery conditions, and directly funded slavery that way, this would be a whole different ethical issue.

In reality, even if a person is addicted to burgers like a drug addict, they could easily buy plant-based burger patties that taste really similar to regular ones and make their own burgers. Vegan cheese isnt quite the same yet, but a little difference in taste certainly doesn’t justify torturing animals on factory farms. You still have essentially the same taste experience, especially after a small adjustment period.

In most countries, McDonalds even has plant based burgers available afaik.

If someone is literally starving and there’s only meat available, it can be argued that it would be vegan to eat it in that situation.

The definition from the vegan society is:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Is climate change cruel to animals? It’s not intentional harm, but it causes suffering. People will weigh that differently based on the ethical framework (deontology - utilitarianism spectrum).

Going on vacation by plane arguably isn’t vegan from a utilitarian perspective. Deontologists might still see it as vegan.

If someone needs to drive a car and can’t afford an EV, it’s not practical to avoid fossil fuels in this case. So that would be vegan either way.

I think the “avoiding as far as possible and practicable” principle also makes a lot of sense for the use of fossil fuels by environmentalists.

Who said capitalism isn’t a problem? I don’t see any comments claiming that.

Capitalism incentives the exploitation of humans and animals alike. It’s possible to recognize that both are a problem.

Its much weirder when leftists unironically believe that “animals are just animals, making them suffer is fine because they are inferior to me”, which is literally the supremacist thinking that racists and classists invoke to justify their mistreatment of other groups too.

I feel like lemmy.world is a bit shielded from tankies in general. I see some posts from lemmy.ml from time to time but rarely insane tankie posts. Engaging with political posts from there might not be the best idea indeed, maybe there should be warnings for those who are not aware lol

Welcome!

There are good Lemmy apps if you don’t have one yet. You can search “for Lemmy” to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.

but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?

You might want to block some keywords then, as there’s also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.

Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels were the only affordable energy sources that could meet the demand of industrialized countries. Until 5-10 years ago.

We’re now in a situation where most people can still pretend that climate change isn’t serious, and the fossil fuel lobby is stronger than ever. And yet over 90% of new electricity generation is already renewable, because it has simply become cheaper than coal and gas power in the last years.

As climate impacts worsen, the pressure to decarbonize will only get larger. The lobbies have been fighting tooth and nail against the energy transition for over 40 years, but they are rapidly loosing ground now in most countries.

It’s right to be alarmed about climate change, there will be serious long-term impacts, but it seems irrational to be completely fatalistic. Just comparing the battery prices and solar panel prices and ev market with 10 years ago reveals a truly massive shift. And this is just the beginning of the energy transition.

20 years ago you could have said “Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it’s absolutely futile.”

Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.

I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won’t have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.

Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.

The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That’s true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.

Most people don’t want Nazis in power again, even ~half of the AfD voters don’t, although some have certainly been radicalized. The AfD is just very successful on social media, because they exploit the dissatisfaction of voters, they are controversial, they don’t present as and are often not perceived as Nazis, and because conservatives helps them with the fear mongering against immigrants. The Cristian democrats try to get the AfD voters back by copying their talking points, not realizing that they make them seem more credible in the process.

Most social media platforms are also happy to promote right wing populists and extremists because they are good for business, and some are owned by extremists in right wing bubbles too, of course. The EU regulations need to be actually enforced, but the US will do anything they can to stop this.

Other parties desperately need better social media strategies. For the last few years, the AfD was basically unopposed in many feeds and the polls are the result of that. Gladly the left party has catched up quite a bit in recent months, but the AfD still has the lead online and other parties struggle to adapt.

Machine learning has some genuinely good use cases though. Protein folding is probably the most useful for society yet, especially for medicine research. LLMs can at least save a lot of tedious work, depending on the task, if used responsibly.

Regarding fossil fuels, it really depends on the use. For new electrity production, residential heating and cars for example it’s usually not needed anymore, and just a massive waste of carbon budget. For other stuff, the alternatives still have a long way to go to become practical.