To be clelar for anyone just skimming the article… It’s UK Farmers.
I guess they could have had more support if they didn’t Brexit…
Do you think the UK sometimes sits up late at night with a bottle of whisky and stalks the EU on social media?
Pretty embarrassing when they accidentally like a 200 year old post with bikini pics.
200 year old post with bikini pics.
Bikini? Don’t you mean ankle pics?
Ahh. Those foxy ankle daguerreotypes.
Mr Stanley said farms were facing “an existential moment” because of the changing climate, which could put many out of business, reducing UK food security.
“The problem that we’re facing is that weather is becoming so extreme that it is overwhelming our ability as farmers to continue to grow crops at all in some places,” he said.
Yes, but let’s not lose sight of what’s really important, by sacrificing the planet we’ve successfully prevented a few billionaires from having to sell their yachts.
While I’m not saying the farmer quote shares this belief but it’s hard to take when there have been so many “farmers protests” about changes to subsidies linked to reducing emissions and planting more trees
There was a Climate Town video that explains how the US tried to institute strict emissions standards in the mid to late 90s. Exceptions were given to all work trucks because it would make them too expensive for small farms. This led to car companies leaning into that form factor, and now the Yank Tanks are ubiquitous and infecting the rest of the world.
Vehicles over a certain weight can be exempt for a farm vehicle like a suburban. Also the longer the wheelbase the less fuel economy the vehicle has to have, which is why manufacturers are making larger SUVs that can’t even pass the moose test.
I think many farmers are being played for fools. They are being astroturfed by big agri businesses run by corporate billionaires.
Yeah we just had a huge protest here in France, except for a smaller union they all agreed that the pesky ecologists were to blame for their problems. And the government was more than willing to agree with them, better kill our remaining farming land for short term profit than reign in their buddies at Nestlé and Danone.
I’m with you, but it’s not even about having to sell their yachts. These leeches have so much goddamn money that they could lose most of it with no materiel impact to their lifestyle. They just horde it out of a combination of addiction and lust for power.
Can you provide evidence that billionaires yachts cause more environmental damage than say average people using their car.
I’d be really interested to to how billionaires are solely responsible for this mess.
Edit: Congratulations everyone. The oil and gas industries do not want individuals to feel responsible for climate change and want them to push the blame elsewhere so everyone keeps consuming. You’re doing what they want. This is bang out of the oil and gas playbook.
Okay
roughly 447 times the entire annual carbon footprint of your average American
So now back to my question does the number average Americans outnumber the billionare more than 447 times?
There are 333,300,000 people in America so that means there needs to be more than 745,637 billionaires living in America for billionaire yatchs to to more damage than the average person. There are only 756.
So the claim is wrong. People don’t like it but average people in the world do more damage to the environment than billionaires. People have no interest in changing but if they want to save the world they must change.
This deflection is not helpful.
That is soooo far from the point that it’s not even funny. Nice straw man though
by sacrificing the planet we’ve successfully prevented a few billionaires from having to sell their yachts
They are directly saying that we sacrificed the planet to allow billionaires to have yachts. It’s right there.
There is a huge danger in this world that nobody is taking action for the damage they are doing to the world. If billionaires have done no damage to the world then what? Everything is fine and we can go on living the way we are? No. The world’s fucked because of everyday people.
The average person needs to change and consume less and pollute less. Blaming billionaires for everything and acting like the everyday person is innocent is exactly what the billionaires want because then you just consume the stuff they sell and they get richer and the world gets worse.
The only way to fix this world is if everyone consumes less. Deflecting isn’t helping the planet.
you’re a fuckin idiot
You know, I don’t disagree with your ultimate point. But if you look through this comment chain you should recognize that the way you chose to make it is:
- Needlessly antagonistic, and (therefore)
- Not very effective
If you wanted to convince anyone or provoke interesting discussion I think you failed.
In the future, you should just make your argument/statement instead of asking “clever” bad faith questions.
Yes, but let’s not lose sight of what’s really important, by sacrificing the planet we’ve successfully prevented a few billionaires from having to sell their yachts.
This “joke” is more damaging than anything I have said and should be called out as such. Corporations directly try to convince people that there is nothing the individual can do to change the environment so they might as well just use as much oil and gas as they like.
It’s a direct play out of the oil and gas PR system and people are doing it for free. Billionaires want people to not blame themselves and it’s working.
All because people want to absolve themselves of all responsibility.
Billionaires are wasteful. But the damage to the world is coming more from the average person than from the Billionaires.
Shut up, moron.
Yachts, on average, burn 20-50 gallons of fuel an hour.
Super yachts and mega yachts have fuel capacities of 10k-50k gallons and burn 100-500 gallons per hour.
Before I had a PEV, I would run through about 10 gallons a week. I had that car for 10 years, meaning I used less fuel in a decade than a mega yacht does in a day. I traveled around 130k miles on around 5200 gallons of gas and that car had pretty shit MPG of 25.
Cruising speed for yachts varies quite a bit, but assuming a speed of 50 mph means a super yacht gets between 0.5 and 0.1 MPG.
Then there’s the private jets, the 30k sq ft houses, and the fact that 80% of emissions can be tracked back to 57 atate-owned or private companies…none of which are owned or run by the poor or working class. All of that is only considering the western world and it’s definition of poor, the poorest 100 nations only account for around 3% of total emissions…so yes, its the rich people.
This will not attract a female sea lion, you have to find another way to show your mating prowess.
Well yeah, that doesn’t even require “proper” evidence. The physical structure alone contains more materials than a car.
You think one yacht uses more material than 440,873 peoples cars?
Of course not, but it’s a wildly disproportionate rate of consumption for an individual, which you’re well aware of. I agree that the ultra-wealthy are something of a totem when it comes to eco-rhetoric, but the fact is they perfectly represent human overconsumption, and acknowledging this as abhorrent and in need of curbing is the first step towards moderation in general. Also, telling the working classes they need to reduce their carbon footprint while tolerating this behaviour from the ownership class is not a coherent message. The vanishingly small kernel of a point you think you have is not contributing anything to the discussion, and I say this as a committed troll.
Billionaires should absoultely reduce their consumption and I never said anything to disagree with that point.
The issue is people are looking for any and every excuse not to do anything. That is an issue and it’s a bigger issue than overconsumption from billionaires.
Corporations directly try to convince people that there is nothing the individual can do to change the environment so they might as well just use as much oil and gas as they like.
It’s a direct play out of the oil and gas PR system and people are doing it for free. Billionaires want people to not blame the individual and it’s working.
All because people want to absolve themselves of all responsibility.
Billionaires are wasteful. But the damage to the world is coming more from the average person than from the billionaires. Misleading people on that fact is going to to more damage to the environment than anything billionaires do.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with that.
Your really out of line here. I’m not the average person, but I’ll compare with myself. Taylor Swift consumed more than 16000 gallons a month (or more than 70000 litres) for at least the first 7 months of 2022, and that’s after selling one of her jets due to public exposure. Compare to me, I work from home and made 3000 kms in 2 years, for an average of 23 litres a month. So she consumed 3000 times more than me. Even if the average person does 10 times my mileage, she would still be 300x the average.
I’m not out if line at all.
People underestimate how few billionaires there are and how many average people there are.
Average people do more damage than billionaires.
Do your calculations but times it by number of average people and number of billionaires. Which is the point I have directly mentioned in each and every post.
No. First of all there are a lot of billionaires and orders of magnitude more almost-billionaires with the means to do that kind of damage. In second place this is just jets which are used to go straight from a place to another, but yatches are way less efficient and are used to roam freely so overall they pollute much more. And these are only two of the thousand things the rich do that create infinite pollution. But of course let’s focus on straws.
Won’t anyone think of the shareholders??
Blame it on Biden. Oh, wait, it’s the UK. So, yeah Republicans will still blame Biden
And they want to put solar farms on the fields that grow food.
That’s a really interesting article. I didn’t know there were so many benefits to solar panels over crops.
However, I don’t see how growing crops under panels could become widespread.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimate that if just 1 million acres of farmland was covered in solar panels, the nation would meet its renewable energy goals.
For reference, Iowa alone has over 35 million acres of farmland. Solar panels are almost too efficient to cover a meaningful amount of farmland.
Iowa, eh. You could plant some trees as windbreak to stop erosion. Wide enough apart to still drive harvesters through, dense enough to provide shade.
This entire concept has been studied extensively in China, and the conclusion has been that the yield is vastly overclaimed when solar panels are deployed on productive soil.
See: CCTV exposes 8 million RMB solar farm built on prime farmland, leads to plummeting rice yields
You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe a PRC source posted on lemmy.ml.
Lol, this is funny for now but it’s gonna become a real problem eventually.
Your claim is that… China has incentive to reduce deployments of solar panels by criticizing the deployment of solar panels over agricultural land? We’re talking about the same China, right? World leader in solar panel production, being criticized by American and European leaders for overcapacity in solar panel production? I just want to make sure we’re on the same page here.
My claim is that I don’t see any reason to believe a PRC news source.
Your claim is that a PRC news source wants people to deploy less solar panels.
No, my claim is a PRC news source is not trustworthy.
If you want to show me a source that discusses this issue from a media outlet that isn’t state-controlled, feel free to do so and I will read it.
I do not give my time to state-controlled media.
As a matter of course I don’t trust things that China says.
What’s the incentive structure for which China would want people to deploy fewer solar panels?
There are crops that do well in shade you know.
But not high yield crops.
There are also crops that do well in Siberia, but this is prime agricultural land.
