To ask if the red weather warning will now make you take climate change seriously?

[YetiTeri]

Now you know what impact this heat will have (schools closing, travel chaos, threat to life) will it make you take climate change more seriously?

Someone asked why shein is bad for the environment. Answering that question isn't passing judgment on the people who need cheap clothing. I need cheap clothing. I choose to buy mine from vinted or charity shops and only when i need them, in order to not create more demand for new clothes to be created. There are more choices available than just choosing incredibly cheap clothes made by exploited people and shipped around the world.

I would hazard a guess that a lot of the people buying from shein are buying from there because its so cheap, if they don't like it, they can just throw it away and buy something else. Look at "haul" videos on social media. It's absolutely normalised buying a ton of stuff, trying it on and returning (or just throwing away) whatever you don't like. You can't pretend that's not problematic.

A generation or two ago, clothes would be worn to the end of their life, handed down and passed around then repurposed, and at the very end of their life, in my grandmother's case, turned into rags for cleaning. You suggest even repairing clothes, sewing on a button for eg and most under 25s would just look at you in confusion.

Here's an interesting article with some numbers.

uk.fashionnetwork.com/news/Throwaway-culture-60-of-shoppers-have-no-interest-in-long-lasting-clothing,1042181.html

@Sugerfree the media are really bad at explaining global warming and very few journalists have any STEM background.

The physics behind the green house effect and global warming is pretty simple. Light from the sun reaches earth mostly in the visible spectrum, light we can see. Most of that light passes through the atmosphere.

Light has energy, when that light hits something, either a solid, a liquid or a gas, some of that energy is absorbed. As that energy is absorbed the temperature of whatever it is increases. As the temperature increases whatever ii is will emit energy, often in the form of infra red light, which we can't see.

Green house gases tend to allow visible light through but reflect infra red back to earth, hence global warming.

My apologies if I haven't explained that very well, or if you are already up to speed on it.

ITT, people not understanding climate science and statistics.

Don’t worry, guys. Winter still existing means climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese to deny you your three gov’t mandated holidays abroad each year, and the biggest house and car your tapped out credit lines can afford.

I'm not dictating to anyone and it's not 'my' cause. I actually didn't say vegan, but meat is expensive so if it's about affordability then cutting down on meat is win/win. Tbf I should have just stuck at the first point though.

And I'm sorry it really really is vacuous to question the science because you remember warm summers as a kid. It's fake news / Trumpism. Record temperatures means we have not had this temperature before, and then it gets broken again really soon (the last record was 2019).

Someone up thread questioned 'global warming' because there are extreme cold seasons. It's been climate change not global warming for 20 odd years as the science shows extreme weather becoming more common due to the overall increase in temperature.

@YetiTeri yep, but even those businesses listed don't contribute as much as they'd need to, to climate change to make a meaningful impact if anything were to be 'done' to them.

China, and predominantly one state owned fuel company, contributes 28% of all C02 emissions for example.

I’ve already got a low carbon lifestyle. No car, no foreign travel, mostly local and no plastic shopping, don’t buy clothes but most of this is through being in the generation where I can’t afford anything!!
The answer isn’t in individual choice it’s in government change.

Yes one of the many many rich upper class & celebs who have multiple residences, fly in private jets, wreck the countryside for grouse hunting and generally do wtf they like while lecturing the rest of us

Give over.

Many understand, many have tried and made all the macro changes any regular individual can.

But bending myself out of shape and depriving my family certain comforts I am not willing to do.

Global change at government and industry level is needed for us little people to properly be on board.

Someone up thread mentioned industry serving a demand. True.

But until there is a systematic shift of how we ALL live, It is a no from me.

@Likeli
@QuestionableMouse
For better or worse we live in a consumer society, don't think your purchasing decisions don't matter.

Yes I take your fair points. Pollution is a huge problem. Storage of waste chemicals is sometimes non existent in some factories and something must be done. I know that last part sounded a bit casual but it's absolutely urgent.

My concern is though if we in the west were to stop buying cheap clothing, made in the third world, then what of the knock-on effects to people, [mainly women] who work in this industry in these factories? They often get to leave behind rural existences, and the concomitant grinding poverty, arranged marriages, in them, for the better paid work that can be found in manufacturing in cities.

In Michael Shellenberger's book 'Apocalypse Never', he cites the example of a young Bangladeshi woman, that he spends time with, named Suharti. Her experience has been exactly that. She got out of a harsh, high mortality, rural existence, back breaking toil and so on, for work in the city, making at first trainers and then to another factory - making jeans. She now owns her own home, has a scooter, a flat screen TV, has a boyfriend and a life she'd never have had if she'd stayed put, where at best she faced a future of being an illiterate baby machine. The unintended consequences of how we go about addressing environmental matters - in particular what matters to us here in the wealthy west is worth very careful consideration.

Gov’t and corporations are servicing the population.

Those lamenting the gov’t and corporations not stopping their output, because the market they have demands those goods and services, just breaks my brain.

Who do you think is consuming this shit? Santa?

Edwards Bernays was a terrible addition to the human race. We’re apparently too dumb to not fall for rampant personal consumption and connect the dots to why everything is shit globally.

Are you telling me if I keep buying new shit, they’ll keep making it? What a revelation!

I haven't got any children , have you OP?

Yes because you don’t regulate your way out of a problem. You invent your way out of it. You that thing called science. It can achieve amazing things.

People that buy most shit have DC, you only have to look at the Christmas lists to see that

I’m not interested in any responses to the climate emergency that call for individuals to make different consumer choices, eg buying organic or choosing an electric car.

1. it’s not doable for the majority of people due to cost. You end up blaming the poor when the reality is they have the lowest carbon lifestyles.

2. It obscures where the real power for change lies. It’s not with consumers, it’s with governments.

We’re all just the unimportant little people doing what we do so that the rich can carry on getting richer. I am not going to give up the small pleasures that come my way, whether that’s holidays, junk food or anything else.

Haha!

Shellenberger is a known shill for Big Nuclear and also, knows jack about climate change.

I guess from this post’s anecdote from his book, he’s also similarly clueless about natural resources.

Oh, but what of the dreams of Bangladeshi women to become like the overleveraged serfs of the West caught in their unfulfilled, consumption based lifestyles of unsustainability?

Clearly we need three billion others buying shit at American levels to help the capitalists I mean, planet.

There’s no point playing the blame game or saying it’s not up to me. The reality is it will take everyone pulling together to adapt to climate change and avert the worst consequences. It’s governments, it’s corporations, it’s rich, it’s poor, it’s everyone in the middle. Sitting there and saying, well I won’t do anything until the rich/government/big companies to something is rather childish imho. It’s like a child saying they won’t say sorry until their brother says sorry 😣 (you know the brother is going to say the same thing) and so because one party is too stubborn to just take the first step we get nowhere as a civilisation. It’s almost as bad as the doomists that come on and say it’s too late, humanity and the planet are fucked so live it up YOLO style.

As an actual scientist, lol at thinking there’s a technological solution to infinite growth on a finite planet.

Pretty sure they found in pre-school that there’s a problem there.

Cheap clothing should be banned, its something we should expect to pay a fair price for, it might stop some people buying so much

I have 1. But I care about the future for all children. They haven't done this. They haven't asked for this. I care about the kids in sub Saharan Africa which will become uninhabitable. And low lying islands like Tuvalu which is affected now. I don't think well I'll be dead so fuck 'em like someone else up thread.

No it won't, not any more. Until politicians stop travelling the world to take part in climate change events I'm doing nothing.

Excellent post @DoubleShotEspresso

There is way too much half understood information and cherry picking of facts which are presented to us.

Remember, energy companies are big global businesses too, whether they are supplying green energy or not. Their aim is to maximise their profits by getting us to buy more energy, what we need to do is use much less energy.

Turning off the internet would be a big help!

@YetiTeri but you deciding to have a child is bad for the planet.

The greatest impact people can personally have on climate change is not having children.

So childless people can take all the flights they want, it still doesn't add up to the damage your one child is causing

But it’s not “infinite growth” is it? We have been decreasing our per capita energy consumption and CO2 emissions for decades- through technology. In addition, the global rate of population growth has been slowing down for seventy years and is on track to stabilise into replacement level with even a good chance of declining- also through the technology of birth control rights for women.

And the planet isn’t exactly “finite” either as the basic resources for life are self-renewing. We even have the technology to insert extra resources into the ecosystem…all our hydrogen engines for example produce fresh water out of hydrogen and oxygen. We also can convert CO2 to O2- literally pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. We have green energy that is zero carbon. Again thanks to the wonders of technology.

Technology is the reason we have such good prospects.

Climate change is not getting solved because the solution is anathema to the global system as it is.

People are not going to voluntarily become poorer to support a lifestyle that could be considered anything like sustainable, and actually sustainable economies for industrial civilisation do not exist with eight billion people about. The planet may be able to support the average European lifestyle with well under a billion people, but eventually all non-renewable resources would vanish into the black hole of uneconomic deposits.

This is why the Green New Deal has got so much traction from proponents in the WEF and other gov't institutions and corporations, because it pays lip service to "we can have a guilt free way of life like this, we just need green energy" which soothes the capitalists and the consumers who see a planet (literally) on fire and hitting real limits on productive growth and don't like the alternative.

Anyone who has kids on here (Mumsnet...) should understand that they will NOT get to adulthood in a world anything like what you as parents grew up in. That time is over.