8 ms·

Scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream

94 points by ahurmazda 5y ago

adrianN 5y ago
And still nobody who matters takes climate change seriously.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  That's because the voters don't want to change their live styles. There are many things (rich country) people can do (buy used clothes/things, eat less meat, smaller/no car, smaller house, green energy, less flying on holidays ...) but they don't -- grandparents buying new SUVs to shuttle around their grandchildren, oh the irony -- and the IPCC will announce on Monday that reality has progressed worse than assumed. Politicians don't make the climate, consumers are - consume driven climate crisis.
  - notadev 5y ago
    Even if all of the citizens of the US did what you said tomorrow, would it really make a difference with China producing (as of 2015) 29.4% of all CO2 emissions? Even if the US (at 14.3%) somehow cut emissions to zero, there are still the not-so-rich countries that comprise the “Other” group that is responsible for 31.5%. Your feelings are valid, you may just be directing them at the wrong culprits IMHO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
    - creamytaco 5y ago
      Those figures are hard to attribute correctly because they don’t account for export manufacturing. Consumption in the USA is fueling Chinese exports and is responsible for a large chunk of their CO2 emissions.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    And that's why politicians can and should enact laws that tax these externalities at the industry level. Cars might appear to cost more once the manufacturers pass on the tax to consumers, but that's just because you aren't accounting for the real cost of it destroying the environment when you buy one.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - loonster 5y ago
      Need to also add in wage and environmental parity tariffs. There is no point having higher standards here if it means China will use the higher costs as a competitive advantage while still polluting the same amount.
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    Companies motivated purely by capital are the only ones truly responsible for all this, and are subsequently the ones who can make the biggest changes to undo what they've done. Consumers have much less control over all of this than you seem to think.
    - KingOfCoders 5y ago
      [Edit] Voting me down gives me so much pleasure, it proves my world view. Thanks to all the downvoters, you've made my day. And don't we all just want to feel validated. Consumers have all of the control. Don't eat meat. Switch to a green energy provider. Buy small car. Move to a smaller house. Buy used clothes. Use your phone longer. Consume less! With all of this there is no climate crisis. Growing up in Germany, I understand your opinion. No one wants to take personal responsibility. After WW2 no one in Germany was responsible for anything. WW2 just happened. The others did it. I followed orders. This opinion changed when people grew up who were born after WW2 which lead to a cultural revolution. The same will happen with the climate crisis. Children born now will hold current consumers responsible in the future - and they will be angry with their parents and grandparents.
      - klipt 5y ago
        No really, corporations consume way more than individuals. I work for one and their consumption per employee is easily higher than my individual consumption. If you want to change the world, change the incentives. Tax CO2 released from fossil fuels appropriately (enough to offset the effects completely) and everything will adjust thanks to the magic of the market.
        KingOfCoders 5y ago
        "No really, corporations consume way more than individuals" Which ones? What corporations consume more energy that do not produce things consumers buy? If you buy a car, the corporation is using up energy, but for you, to build your car. They don't consume the energy for themselves. Facebook uses energy? Yes so you can consume Facebook.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Politicians make all kinds of laws that the voters don't really want. Usually when the lobbyists want them.
  - bookofsand 5y ago
    While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business. If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world. We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see: * World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles. * World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement. * Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle. * Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries. https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
  - FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
    You’re being a useful idiot for companies: put all blame and responsibility on individuals and you can easily shift away all blame from companies. But do you know what really works? Banning F-gases. Banning non-electric cars. Mandating new houses to be energy-neutral. Regulations at national or continental level are infinitely more effective than shaming individuals for not buying solar panels or whatever. Don’t let companies follow demand from consumers, let consumer only buy stuff that won’t destroy our only world.
- klipt 5y ago
  Why don't we let climate deniers put their money where their mouth is? Let them underwrite fire and flood insurance policies extending decades into the future.
  - nlitened 5y ago
    Isn’t buying property in coastal cities effectively putting deniers’ money where their mouth is?
    - klipt 5y ago
      Are coastal cities the only places that will become unlivable? Sea level rise gets a lot of attention but I wonder if a lot of the interior US won't just turn into unlivable desert too. San Francisco is coastal for example but a lot of it is actually at high enough elevation to survive sea level rise, and I suspect its proximity to the ocean makes it more likely to weather temperature increases than somewhere like Phoenix (which is totally screwed if its water source dries up).
      - hyperman1 5y ago
        In Belgium there was unusually heavy rainfall causing flooding in the inland. Coastal regions were spared. The rainfall has been attributed to climate change by our weather services. https://www.insider.com/floods-belgium-heavy-rain-wreaks-havoc-2021-7 https://www.insider.com/floods-belgium-heavy-rain-wreaks-hav... A few weeks before, a windburst, basically air dropping down from great hight, came from nowhere and destroyed some homes, again in the inland. No direct attribution to climate change, but another weather fenomena so rare they had to explain it to the news readers. https://www.msn.com/nl-be/nieuws/nationaal/beauraing-eerste-analyse-wijst-op-een-tornado/ar-AALfemI https://www.msn.com/nl-be/nieuws/nationaal/beauraing-eerste-... At least the coastal regions have an easy fix: higher dikes.
        tremon 5y ago
        The inland regions also have an easy fix: uiterwaarden [1]. Basically, accept that the rivers will periodically overflow and designate an area immediately next to the river as a perennial wetland. In NL, they're usually combined with rewilding projects. By allowing the river to overflow in certain areas, downstream cities along the river won't be faced with flash floods (just a prolonged period of higher-than-average water levels). (edit: it seems "wet meadow" [2] is the closest English equivalent, although those seem of natural origin and not specifically intended as a flood-management device) [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiterwaard https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiterwaard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh#Wet_meadows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh#Wet_meadows
- hulitu 5y ago
  A lot of blame comes from the journalists. Might is a very uncertain word. "The world might collapse" is equivalent with "the world might be fine". Also without explaining what a "Gulf stream" is, it might be an Algerian terrorist organization or a building or anything else. There are a lot of people who forgot about things they learned in school. They shall add some context, but writing is hard work.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
This reminds me of the condo in Florida which recently collapsed killing many of its inhabitants/owners. There had been warning signs and reports that something should be done to fix the building. But because it was a condo the fixes would have had to be paid by the individual condo-owners. So they voted not to do the expensive repairs, and then many of them died because of that. Maybe climate-change is a bit like that?
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago
  Jesus Christ. Talk about some next-level victim blaming. Were you in the HOA meetings? Do you know how the issues were presented? Do you know whether the severity was properly communicated? High horses also collapse from time to time, so best not ride yours so proudly.
  - Bishizel 5y ago
    It isn’t exactly victim blaming when the HOA wouldn’t authorize the repairs (several articles looked into this). You can’t just go do the repairs without approval in these buildings.
    - galaxyLogic 5y ago
      Right somebody has to approve to pay the bills
  - II2II 5y ago
    People typically frown upon victim blaming in cases where there is a perpetrator. In the cases of buildings collapsing due to known structural faults that were not addressed or climate change due to known behaviours that were not addressed, the perpetrator and the victim can be one and the same. There are times when we have to acknowledge what is happening around us and take action or face the consequences.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago
mikewarot 5y ago
The word might is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that article.
- adrianN 5y ago
  The plight of the climate scientist: Say you're not 100% sure about your results and people dismiss them as speculation, don't say it and people dismiss your results as fearmongering.
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    The thing with being a prophet is that the prophecies need to come true. Whether the prophet uses computer models and fat piles of data and is called a scientist or not is a detail.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      I mean, sure, we could wait until irreversible catastrophes happen before we listen to the people who predict them, but that sounds a bit stupid to me.
      - uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
        "There is no proof of global pandemic ever have happened in our lifetimes, no need to prepare for them." If you get bad news, look at the proportionality of cost preparing for the event compared to the cost of the event. A pandemic preparation and proper pre-warn system (as South korea and taiwan had it) would have cost absolutly nothing compared to the pandemic cost. Same goes for gulf stream collapse. Cost of the for-warning system, cost of agricultural switch of europe to the canadian model, against the cost of not doing so..
        mucholove 5y ago
        What is worse is that the United States had a warning system. The world depended on it. The budget for it was 800 million dollars. It was removed from the budget in 2018 and I believe the funding ran out September 2019. It only took three months. By March 2020-the administration was putting out $800 BILLION dollars. And since then they’ve put out more. Taiwan—which adopted the US system (and therefore was in Wuhan January 4) had no real outbreak until 2 month ago—and even then, the outbreak was contained. Frustrating…
aaomidi 5y ago
Snow hurricanes go brr
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  Karl the Fog is also going to level up.
Isinlor 5y ago
Does anyone have access to the original article? : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4 Sci Hub seems to not fetch it.
- Kaibeezy 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342
Ace357 5y ago
Adapt or die. Who cares if whales go extinct. They will evolve again. Isn't that what happened to the dinosaurs? Oh, wait...evolution seems to be working in reverse. The Gulf Stream could reverse and bring some nice cool weather down to Florida. The problem is, no one can conceive of any advantages to climate change. It's all doom, gloom, and disaster. Happy depression everyone!
kybernetyk 5y ago
Great. Yet another scare. Let me guess - I should be eating bugs to stop the Gulf Stream collapse?
- me_me_me 5y ago
  That's exactly what big business PR are trying to sell. - Don't use plastic straws to save sea turtles. When nets are majority cause of sea life death, straws are not even a 1%. Same with oil, coal industry. Recycling, vegetarianism, minimalism etc. are highjacked by big business to shift blame for pollution to an average person. Its easier to push narrative that if only people recycled, there would be no microplastics and heaps of trash. Only if there was less cows the global warming would stop. And the most recent only if we stop bitcoin the planet would be saved. When you say: > I should be eating bugs to stop the Gulf Stream collapse? You are falling for their narrative and getting outraged at imaginary people and imaginary scapegoat solutions (or people who fell for it and tell you that you should be vegan etc). You can help by not feeding that propaganda machine.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    Bingo. We've all be had. Keep eating the patented Plant Burger and all will be ok. It's your personal responsibility to save the world. Pay no attention to the world spanning business empires and world governments that are 40 times the size of the largest companies. You should be personally ashamed of that plastic cup, you made the invisible hand of the market use up all the tight oil resources of the planet.

94 points by ahurmazda 5y ago

adrianN 5y ago

And still nobody who matters takes climate change seriously.

KingOfCoders 5y ago
That's because the voters don't want to change their live styles. There are many things (rich country) people can do (buy used clothes/things, eat less meat, smaller/no car, smaller house, green energy, less flying on holidays ...) but they don't -- grandparents buying new SUVs to shuttle around their grandchildren, oh the irony -- and the IPCC will announce on Monday that reality has progressed worse than assumed. Politicians don't make the climate, consumers are - consume driven climate crisis.
- notadev 5y ago
  Even if all of the citizens of the US did what you said tomorrow, would it really make a difference with China producing (as of 2015) 29.4% of all CO2 emissions? Even if the US (at 14.3%) somehow cut emissions to zero, there are still the not-so-rich countries that comprise the “Other” group that is responsible for 31.5%. Your feelings are valid, you may just be directing them at the wrong culprits IMHO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
  - creamytaco 5y ago
    Those figures are hard to attribute correctly because they don’t account for export manufacturing. Consumption in the USA is fueling Chinese exports and is responsible for a large chunk of their CO2 emissions.
- eloisius 5y ago
  And that's why politicians can and should enact laws that tax these externalities at the industry level. Cars might appear to cost more once the manufacturers pass on the tax to consumers, but that's just because you aren't accounting for the real cost of it destroying the environment when you buy one.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - loonster 5y ago
    Need to also add in wage and environmental parity tariffs. There is no point having higher standards here if it means China will use the higher costs as a competitive advantage while still polluting the same amount.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Companies motivated purely by capital are the only ones truly responsible for all this, and are subsequently the ones who can make the biggest changes to undo what they've done. Consumers have much less control over all of this than you seem to think.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    [Edit] Voting me down gives me so much pleasure, it proves my world view. Thanks to all the downvoters, you've made my day. And don't we all just want to feel validated. Consumers have all of the control. Don't eat meat. Switch to a green energy provider. Buy small car. Move to a smaller house. Buy used clothes. Use your phone longer. Consume less! With all of this there is no climate crisis. Growing up in Germany, I understand your opinion. No one wants to take personal responsibility. After WW2 no one in Germany was responsible for anything. WW2 just happened. The others did it. I followed orders. This opinion changed when people grew up who were born after WW2 which lead to a cultural revolution. The same will happen with the climate crisis. Children born now will hold current consumers responsible in the future - and they will be angry with their parents and grandparents.
    - klipt 5y ago
      No really, corporations consume way more than individuals. I work for one and their consumption per employee is easily higher than my individual consumption. If you want to change the world, change the incentives. Tax CO2 released from fossil fuels appropriately (enough to offset the effects completely) and everything will adjust thanks to the magic of the market.
      - KingOfCoders 5y ago
        "No really, corporations consume way more than individuals" Which ones? What corporations consume more energy that do not produce things consumers buy? If you buy a car, the corporation is using up energy, but for you, to build your car. They don't consume the energy for themselves. Facebook uses energy? Yes so you can consume Facebook.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Politicians make all kinds of laws that the voters don't really want. Usually when the lobbyists want them.
- bookofsand 5y ago
  While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business. If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world. We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see: * World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles. * World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement. * Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle. * Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries. https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
- FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
  You’re being a useful idiot for companies: put all blame and responsibility on individuals and you can easily shift away all blame from companies. But do you know what really works? Banning F-gases. Banning non-electric cars. Mandating new houses to be energy-neutral. Regulations at national or continental level are infinitely more effective than shaming individuals for not buying solar panels or whatever. Don’t let companies follow demand from consumers, let consumer only buy stuff that won’t destroy our only world.
klipt 5y ago
Why don't we let climate deniers put their money where their mouth is? Let them underwrite fire and flood insurance policies extending decades into the future.
- nlitened 5y ago
  Isn’t buying property in coastal cities effectively putting deniers’ money where their mouth is?
  - klipt 5y ago
    Are coastal cities the only places that will become unlivable? Sea level rise gets a lot of attention but I wonder if a lot of the interior US won't just turn into unlivable desert too. San Francisco is coastal for example but a lot of it is actually at high enough elevation to survive sea level rise, and I suspect its proximity to the ocean makes it more likely to weather temperature increases than somewhere like Phoenix (which is totally screwed if its water source dries up).
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      In Belgium there was unusually heavy rainfall causing flooding in the inland. Coastal regions were spared. The rainfall has been attributed to climate change by our weather services. https://www.insider.com/floods-belgium-heavy-rain-wreaks-havoc-2021-7 https://www.insider.com/floods-belgium-heavy-rain-wreaks-hav... A few weeks before, a windburst, basically air dropping down from great hight, came from nowhere and destroyed some homes, again in the inland. No direct attribution to climate change, but another weather fenomena so rare they had to explain it to the news readers. https://www.msn.com/nl-be/nieuws/nationaal/beauraing-eerste-analyse-wijst-op-een-tornado/ar-AALfemI https://www.msn.com/nl-be/nieuws/nationaal/beauraing-eerste-... At least the coastal regions have an easy fix: higher dikes.
      - tremon 5y ago
        The inland regions also have an easy fix: uiterwaarden [1]. Basically, accept that the rivers will periodically overflow and designate an area immediately next to the river as a perennial wetland. In NL, they're usually combined with rewilding projects. By allowing the river to overflow in certain areas, downstream cities along the river won't be faced with flash floods (just a prolonged period of higher-than-average water levels). (edit: it seems "wet meadow" [2] is the closest English equivalent, although those seem of natural origin and not specifically intended as a flood-management device) [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiterwaard https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uiterwaard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh#Wet_meadows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh#Wet_meadows
hulitu 5y ago
A lot of blame comes from the journalists. Might is a very uncertain word. "The world might collapse" is equivalent with "the world might be fine". Also without explaining what a "Gulf stream" is, it might be an Algerian terrorist organization or a building or anything else. There are a lot of people who forgot about things they learned in school. They shall add some context, but writing is hard work.

galaxyLogic 5y ago

This reminds me of the condo in Florida which recently collapsed killing many of its inhabitants/owners. There had been warning signs and reports that something should be done to fix the building. But because it was a condo the fixes would have had to be paid by the individual condo-owners. So they voted not to do the expensive repairs, and then many of them died because of that. Maybe climate-change is a bit like that?

PraetorianGourd 5y ago
Jesus Christ. Talk about some next-level victim blaming. Were you in the HOA meetings? Do you know how the issues were presented? Do you know whether the severity was properly communicated? High horses also collapse from time to time, so best not ride yours so proudly.
- Bishizel 5y ago
  It isn’t exactly victim blaming when the HOA wouldn’t authorize the repairs (several articles looked into this). You can’t just go do the repairs without approval in these buildings.
  - galaxyLogic 5y ago
    Right somebody has to approve to pay the bills
- II2II 5y ago
  People typically frown upon victim blaming in cases where there is a perpetrator. In the cases of buildings collapsing due to known structural faults that were not addressed or climate change due to known behaviours that were not addressed, the perpetrator and the victim can be one and the same. There are times when we have to acknowledge what is happening around us and take action or face the consequences.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago

mikewarot 5y ago

The word might is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that article.

adrianN 5y ago
The plight of the climate scientist: Say you're not 100% sure about your results and people dismiss them as speculation, don't say it and people dismiss your results as fearmongering.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  The thing with being a prophet is that the prophecies need to come true. Whether the prophet uses computer models and fat piles of data and is called a scientist or not is a detail.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    I mean, sure, we could wait until irreversible catastrophes happen before we listen to the people who predict them, but that sounds a bit stupid to me.
    - uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
      "There is no proof of global pandemic ever have happened in our lifetimes, no need to prepare for them." If you get bad news, look at the proportionality of cost preparing for the event compared to the cost of the event. A pandemic preparation and proper pre-warn system (as South korea and taiwan had it) would have cost absolutly nothing compared to the pandemic cost. Same goes for gulf stream collapse. Cost of the for-warning system, cost of agricultural switch of europe to the canadian model, against the cost of not doing so..
      - mucholove 5y ago
        What is worse is that the United States had a warning system. The world depended on it. The budget for it was 800 million dollars. It was removed from the budget in 2018 and I believe the funding ran out September 2019. It only took three months. By March 2020-the administration was putting out $800 BILLION dollars. And since then they’ve put out more. Taiwan—which adopted the US system (and therefore was in Wuhan January 4) had no real outbreak until 2 month ago—and even then, the outbreak was contained. Frustrating…

aaomidi 5y ago

Snow hurricanes go brr

Gibbon1 5y ago
Karl the Fog is also going to level up.

Isinlor 5y ago

Does anyone have access to the original article? : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01097-4 Sci Hub seems to not fetch it.

Kaibeezy 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085342

Ace357 5y ago

Adapt or die. Who cares if whales go extinct. They will evolve again. Isn't that what happened to the dinosaurs? Oh, wait...evolution seems to be working in reverse. The Gulf Stream could reverse and bring some nice cool weather down to Florida. The problem is, no one can conceive of any advantages to climate change. It's all doom, gloom, and disaster. Happy depression everyone!

kybernetyk 5y ago

Great. Yet another scare. Let me guess - I should be eating bugs to stop the Gulf Stream collapse?

me_me_me 5y ago
That's exactly what big business PR are trying to sell. - Don't use plastic straws to save sea turtles. When nets are majority cause of sea life death, straws are not even a 1%. Same with oil, coal industry. Recycling, vegetarianism, minimalism etc. are highjacked by big business to shift blame for pollution to an average person. Its easier to push narrative that if only people recycled, there would be no microplastics and heaps of trash. Only if there was less cows the global warming would stop. And the most recent only if we stop bitcoin the planet would be saved. When you say: > I should be eating bugs to stop the Gulf Stream collapse? You are falling for their narrative and getting outraged at imaginary people and imaginary scapegoat solutions (or people who fell for it and tell you that you should be vegan etc). You can help by not feeding that propaganda machine.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Bingo. We've all be had. Keep eating the patented Plant Burger and all will be ok. It's your personal responsibility to save the world. Pay no attention to the world spanning business empires and world governments that are 40 times the size of the largest companies. You should be personally ashamed of that plastic cup, you made the invisible hand of the market use up all the tight oil resources of the planet.