Carbon Emissions on Rise

English: Biosphere CO2 Flux along 08.07.2006 (NOAA Carbon Tracker)

People are big on emphasizing individual initiatives to moderate one CO2 emission through lifestyle changes yet individual changes are not what we need in the face of the overwhelming pollution generated by the industrialization of China. It's even quite ridiculous to see ecologist media outlets praise small initiatives that concern only a few thousand people for each country.

Even the people who sympathize about this and are aware of the problems mostly won't take any daily life measures, not like these would be enough anyway.

One way to see it is that institutions in modern democracies just aren't designed to act on the long term and politicians won't take chances with actions that could damage their popularity. Companies communicate a lot on their environment friendly actions but even those that are not simply greenwashing are not enough since the actions taken tend to reduce ecological print by some margin but don't alter the nature of our economical system, which is to keep producing and consuming.

With only small adaptations and not a big structural shift, we'll probably burn every single drop of oil in the ground, while being contempt with having a symbolic part of energy being renewable.

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