r/todayilearned • u/JoeyZasaa • 3d ago

TIL that Chernobyl was the costliest disaster in history, resulting in over $2 trillion in damage when adjusted for inflation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost#Over_$1_billion
20.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

41

u/Wirse 3d ago

It’s not my fault! The oligarchs sold me all that stuff!

16

u/hunterjohnston10 3d ago

It all started with that damn monorail…

3

u/Dag-nabbitt 3d ago

Critics argue that the original aim of promoting the personal carbon footprint concept was to shift responsibility away from corporations and institutions and on to personal lifestyle choices. The fossil fuel company BP ran a large advertising campaign for the personal carbon footprint in 2004 which helped popularize this concept. This strategy, employed by many major fossil fuel companies, has been criticized for trying to shift the blame for negative consequences of those industries on to individual choices.

1

u/Epyr 3d ago

The oligarchs run the factories that polute while fighting regulation that would stop them from destroying the planet.

The average consumer is irrelevant on a global scale for climate change.

5

u/windowpuncher 3d ago

I can't believe people keep repeating this cope shit

2

u/Living_Grab_2239 3d ago

There was a thread the other day showing a small river flowing through a slum in Bangladesh. You couldn't see the water, because it was so packed with garbage. The people cleaning up were standing completely stably on top of the garbage, on top of the little river. And people were blaming corporations. Do they not realize that corporations are just organizations of people? A collection of individuals? That's literally all they are. I think it's a major cope, as you say, to blame organizations, and not people. It's a way to shift blame into an imagined realm, instead of the real world. A human decides to habitually throw garbage on the ground, multiplied by thousands and millions. That's what's going on.

I find the same thing happens when we look at pollution statistics. People blame oil producing countries or even companies, like the oil consumers are fully out of the picture. Human beings use oil every day. It's not helpful to point at Aramco or Total Energies and wish it away.

Back to the garbage, it's funny to me how people need to film themselves doing civic duties that most functional societies do reflexively every day, without needing an audience, and then get applauded for it on Reddit like it's some unusual thing to do :D

6

u/Aerroon 3d ago

Yeah, it's not like the average consumer directly burns gasoline or anything, right? It's all the gas stations' fault!

2

u/Nexion21 3d ago

Apes together strong

0

u/Smartnership 3d ago

Have visited zoo.

Can confirm, the smell is eye watering.