this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
452 points (96.1% liked)

Today I Learned

17770 readers
204 users here now

What did you learn today? Share it with us!

We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.

** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**



Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It was initially used by BP to shift blame to consumers instead of oil companies.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 60 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yup.

The same trick is played with recycling. Blame the end consumer for a supply chain completely out of their control.

The biggest polluters are corporations and we stop their pollution by regulation. These mega corps would have you believe that it's really your fault PFAS are everywhere because you shouldn't have bought those Teflon coated products. Nevermind the fact that Teflon is everywhere a nonstick surface is needed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).

It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola's "Litterbug" campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting "personal responsibility" over "regulations.")

It's "up to the consumer" to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.

As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The fact that teflon is still everywhere should be proof enough that regulations are worthless in the face of capitalism (a feature of course, not a bug)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not really, PFAS have been almost completely unregulated. It is just in the last 2 years that we are starting to see PFAS regulations globally. Up until that point, we allowed companies to literally just dump them down the rain or in a lake.

If regulations were so worthless, you should be asking yourself why every single industry fights new ones. Why the supreme court in the US has taken a position to kill Chevron Deference which weakens federal agencies ability to regulate.

The failure isn't regulations, the failure is a government system that severely neuters the ability of a government to regulate. The failure is a bunch of science denying corporate captured politicians that don't care how they destroy the planet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, the failure is capitalism and those corporations not wanting to be regulated owning the governments making the regulations.

Which is precisely why any regulation under capitalism is toothless bunk, since it is designed by and for the corporations, to make sure they can keep making money despite it.

Once in a while having a regulation actually come in in time for it to have any impact is like a broken clock being right twice a day, not proof that regulation under capitalism do anything (you claim that teflon now being regulated means regulations work, but can you seriously not see that it taking that long to get bare minimum regulation after decades of pollution and poisoning of consumers is proof that regulations are merely a lip service paid by government to the public to pretend like they're acting in our favour?).

The point isn't - don't regulate industry, it's - at the point where industry has control of government, regulation is meaningless and always in their service, otherwise they wouldn't concede (a little like greenwashing - the oil companies commit to producing x amount of green energy, but what they don't tell you is that that x amount is a tiny fraction of their entire production capability, which they'll continue to use oil for. We're never going to get them to stop using oil, because they just don't have to, no legislation will ever be allowed to pass that will stop them. Which is why eating the rich and blowing up their pipelines is the answer, but I digress).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Eh, don't really disagree with what you are saying. The problem is money and industry influence in politics and it's something that needs to be eliminated. I don't quiet take your point that regulations don't matter. Assuming money and industry influence are removed from politics we'd see laws and regulations more line with the public interest over corporate interest.

Even if we fully ditched capitalism, you'd still need/want regulations setting the bounds on how government can/should operate.