Fun Fact

Here is a good fact I didn’t find in Facebook’s science center: Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions.

(It's The Guardian, so grains of salt are in order, but the reporting seems factual this time around.)

Gizmodo:

Facebook’s plan to combat climate misinformation running rampant on its site is here. It is a... “climate science information center” of facts, figures, and news stories about the climate crisis that obscures the systematic changes needed to address climate change while peddling tips that mirror Big Oil talking points. The whole thing is a giant hand-wave to distract us from looking at the real solutions to climate change and the role Facebook is playing in corroding them.

Here is where I would usually say it is good Facebook is doing something about climate change. But the era of corporate malfeasants getting belly rubs is over. What Facebook is doing is akin to the National Rifle Association’s argument that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In this case, Facebook is the arms dealer handing out guns to both sides.

Facebook’s announcement of the information center opens with the line, “climate change is real,” which is usually a precursor to bullshit. Congrats. Welcome to the party that scientists have been having for more than 100 years.

Many users who opened Facebook on Tuesday in the U.S., UK, and Germany were greeted with a chance to visit the climate science information center. The page contains information from trusted scientific sources, localized climate data trends, and, at least on Tuesday for this user, a prompt to share a photo of a place I want to protect from climate change with the hashtag #OurPlanetChallenge. If 100,000 users do it, Facebook said it would kick $100,000 to the Arbor Day Foundation.

The science is all well and good, but we are well past the era where science knowledge alone is going to solve anything. To paraphrase a friend of the blog and climate essayist Mary Heglar, all we need to do to understand climate change is look out the window. The fires in the West, relentless heat waves, and other crippling impacts of climate change leading to real-world suffering tell the story much more clearly than graphs showing local temperature trends.

More unsettling is that many of the solutions espoused on the page are garden variety life tips: turn off the lights, reuse things, and drive less. All great and things we should be doing, sure. But they are not going to address climate change, and highlighting them as the solutions plays right into the hands of the industry causing the crisis.

“The ‘solutions’ proposed in the information center are taken right out of the current fossil fuel playbook,” Genevieve Guenther, the founder of End Climate Silence, said in an email. “They are exclusively inadequate individual actions like recycling, turning off the lights when you leave the room, wearing your clothes longer, etc.”

Here are some solutions I didn’t see Facebook espouse: An engaged public that has a shared version of reality, politicians drastically curtailing the power of corporate monopolies from Big Tech to Big Oil, and a transformation of every sector of the economy.

Facebook is actively working against those goals, except (maybe) the latter. Its corrosive effect on democracy and shared truth is well-documented. I won’t go into it ad nauseam, but consider the past six days alone for Facebook with respect to the climate crisis and how the company contributed to dissolving reality.

We keep coming across these "revelations" that companies - particularly the really big ones - are somehow more interested in their revenues than they are in being good citizens, or even decent people.

What's weird is that we continue to be surprised by that.

And what's even weirder than that is our tendency to shrug it off, as if we actually believe those companies can exist outside the world the rest of us have to live in, and that they'll always be able to isolate themselves and never be effected by the shit they dump on everybody else.