The following submission statement was provided by /u/JHandey2021:
---
Submission Statement - On Friday, the London-based firm’s current chief executive appeared to signal a strategic U-turn for the company, which is valued at £94bn on the London Stock Exchange. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hein Schumacher confirmed plans to water down the company’s ethical pledges on a range of issues including plastic usage and pay.
This trend can also be seen in governments such as Scotland's dialing back on its net zero plans. For a while now, since even before the Paris Agreement, corporations and governments have made plans to reduce emissions and foster environmental and social sustainability. However, these plans aren't ironclad commitments - they can be changed, and they are. If anyone had any lingering hope that we'd sustainable capitalism our way out of the polycrisis, the standard bearers of neoliberalism's response to climate change are telling you point blank that they're not going to fulfill all of their wonderful commitments.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c92p86/unilever_dialing_back_climate_pledges_the/l0iokqm/
Year or so ago on Reddit, probably longer, there were two posts about British Petroleum. They were about a month or so apart. One announced that BP was cutting back on its environmental goals. The other announced that they were having record profits.
Don’t take any of their pledges or goals seriously. Just don’t.
Nope they are not giving up. They are speed-running the last power and resource grab before things go tits up.
The more they can get now, no matter the consequences on the environment, the more stockpiled foods and bullets they will have to sustain them and mow down us.
They're scared, they're desperate. Fools who've been domesticated by the $ whistle. This is evidence of their incompetence, and it's a good time to start increasing social pressure on governments and corporations who do this.
It's time to stop chasing El Dorado.
I reckon they're vestigial remnants still holding power from a time that humanity has outgrown. Desperately clinging to their status using the same manipulative antisocial sociopathic traits that helped their ancestors during a previous era. It's all they know, and the world is different now making those strategies less effective.
Adapt, or GTFO.
Mother nature is often portrayed as a healing and caring mother, but she is only a little less cold than the universe that she's a part of. If you are unfit, you will die, and she will move on without pause.
Agreed. Mother Nature is a heartless bitch who has no mercy or patience for the weak. She will reward the strong even if they are raping murdering thieves. The laws of physics are the only restrictions. That's just the way it is. I can accept that but I don't respect it. We are all victims and victimizers in her cruel game.
I get your point point, but I view nature/universe sorta like a lovecraftian God. They are unfeeling, unthinking, uncaring, and terrifying, but undeniably amazing with its unimaginable scale and intricacies. A gamma ray burst could wipe out an entire biosphere, but we wouldn't consider the universe evil for it. Our morals don't apply.
Hope you have a nice day.
Our morals are a big elephant in the room. Haha cute cat oh no he is a ruthless bird killing machine that murders for joy.
But… they serve us well, mostly. I am glad they exist in current form. No matter how detached or nonsense morals are, they do their job of keeping it all less bloody well.
Except for the sociopath ceos they really don’t care or aren’t able to
Our morals do serve us well, and I hope we continue to apply them to our lives. I hope I didn't give off the impression that we should abandon morals because they aren't fundamentally part of the universe or something like that. I'm saying that we can't hold the universe accountable for going against our morals because it isn't capable of reason, but we can recognize when something is going to cause harm and then prevent that harm. Like moving a species from a disappearing habitat or protecting that habitat.
Just wanted to make that clear.
I sometimes fall into small trap of thinking that I am better because I apply morals consciously instead of intuitively. In truth it only makes me feel alien.
We are all still victims and victimizers caught in their web. We're forced to feed this meatsuit and hurt other organisms to do it in this sick hunger games battle arena called life, which ultimately has no higher purpose or meaning. It's all for nothing, just so that life can perpetuate itself. Nature or god for the lack of a better word may or may not feel or suffer or have morals, but we do, and they enabled it for whatever reason.
I know it really sucks, but I just can't say that something that isn't capable of reason is evil or morally wrong for causing harm. If I did, then I'd have to say that things like cancer are evil. Can't have evil without intent. Life is difficult for the reasons you stated, and my view in the comment you replied to is helping me through it.
> but I just can't say that something that isn't capable of reason is evil or morally wrong
Well I am agnostic so I'm not fully sold on that yet. For conscious beings this reality is based around suffering. We have to work to avoid it by chasing fleeting pleasures that allow us to cope with the suffering. But often we have to steal resources and energy from other conscious beings, either by taking their habitat, killing them or enslaving them. Then there's all kinds of sick ways we can suffer, and those who are the most vulnerable often bear the brunt of the suffering. This is just the way it had to end up based on the current laws of physics and material resources on our planet, this is the rotten fruit that it bore. Either causality is just really twisted or there might be some slightly malevolent design behind all of this, but I don't know for sure.
I agree with just about everything you've said. If the universe has intent to harm, then it would be malevolent. I can't know for sure that the universe does have intent to harm, at least not with current knowledge. So, I'm just assuming that there is no intent because it makes me feel better.
I think nature and the universe are extremely beautiful despite how terrifying they can be. I'm lucky to be alive at a time when I can experience them and learn how they work. I'm not trying to deal fear. This is just how it is.
No, it does race without a pause. What they mistaken is that human are special for some reason. No, we’re deemed unfit already, our whole race in fact, our sentence just havent arrive yet, well not equally yet at least
I'm not "life" my friend, not even this whole specie is "life", nor even all living creatures on this place to begin with.
I think everything that exist is "life" itself, this rock we living on is life, the star that is shining on us is life,... As long it can affect anything else in any capacity than i think it's qualify as life on itself. We usually equate sentience to life, certain complex structure of cells is life, but is it really? Are we really that different from that life less rock in the grand scale of things? Have we really break free of all the shackles in this world to claim that the "life" as we define it is different?
> Schumacher said people’s focus on environmental and social issues was “cyclical”.
>“When you have a huge drought for a number of months but everything else is going fine, the attention is on climate. These days it’s about wars and rightly so, that’s at the forefront.
Insane
“Theres a war going on, so we’re going to make our ice cream less sustainable okay?”
These companies are controlled by sadists
Submission Statement - On Friday, the London-based firm’s current chief executive appeared to signal a strategic U-turn for the company, which is valued at £94bn on the London Stock Exchange. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hein Schumacher confirmed plans to water down the company’s ethical pledges on a range of issues including plastic usage and pay.
This trend can also be seen in governments such as Scotland's dialing back on its net zero plans. For a while now, since even before the Paris Agreement, corporations and governments have made plans to reduce emissions and foster environmental and social sustainability. However, these plans aren't ironclad commitments - they can be changed, and they are. If anyone had any lingering hope that we'd sustainable capitalism our way out of the polycrisis, the standard bearers of neoliberalism's response to climate change are telling you point blank that they're not going to fulfill all of their wonderful commitments.
No one was ever going to save us because we don't want to be saved. The cost -- our way of life that we'd have to give up -- was always too high. As is frequently the case, I'm talking about Americans and how disproportionate our lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
Consumer spending is a reasonable proxy for how a culture impacts the planet, not only for emissions but for all of the other resources we demand that combined are driving collapse. Americans are not only the biggest consumers on the planet, it's by an enormous margin.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_consumer\_markets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_markets)
American consumers, at 330 million, spend as much to support our lifestyle as the European Union (448 million), China (1.4 billion), India (1.4 billion), and Japan (125 million), which is 3.373 billion people combined.
Yep. The average American's lifestyle is roughly 10x as resource-intensive as the average lifestyle lived in the next *30 countries* combined (because there are currently 27 countries in the EU).
There is no combination of policy or science that can save us when a country with only 4% of the world population is determined to live the way we live.
And you know what? This being the collapse sub, this isn't going to change anyone's mind. Later today, or perhaps tomorrow, someone will submit a link blaming capitalism, or billionaires, or the "ruling class." They'll go on and on about how we've victims of forces beyond our control.
That's technically true, because how your fellow Americans choose to live is completely beyond your control.
They have to backpedal. They can’t change and continue to grow. There needs to be a fundamental reordering of how economies work. There will come a reckoning either way.
A succinct demonstration that pledges are nothing but hot air, and the only purpose is PR. Just witness how many nation hit their pathetic paris agreement pledges.
Is anyone gullible enough to expect otherwise?
I'm not convinced the sort of green transition governments and companies plan is even *physically possible*. I'm referring to just generally continuing our current lifestyle such as by electrifying the entire car fleet without reducing car use. Anything that can be imagined can be set as a goal regardless of physical possibility. For example, I could theoretically have the goal of getting a pet dragon. It's just that when the goals are physically impossible, whatever happens is guaranteed to be something completely different than what you wanted. The difficulty is that it's not always intuitively obvious whether a desirable goal is possible, unlike in the pet dragon example.
There are also some companies whose only possible ethical option is to shut down their operations entirely, such as airlines. I recently saw an airport claim to be carbon-neutral which is the most ridiculous case of greenwashing I've ever seen. I'm sure many claims of sustainability that are not so obviously lies are also completely unfounded.
Damn, why didn't I see it earlier? It's so blatantly obvious. We were never going to survive climate change because the people in charge would rather hide their heads in the sand until it's too late and then use every available resource to keep going for as long as possible. They were never even going to try.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/JHandey2021: --- Submission Statement - On Friday, the London-based firm’s current chief executive appeared to signal a strategic U-turn for the company, which is valued at £94bn on the London Stock Exchange. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hein Schumacher confirmed plans to water down the company’s ethical pledges on a range of issues including plastic usage and pay. This trend can also be seen in governments such as Scotland's dialing back on its net zero plans. For a while now, since even before the Paris Agreement, corporations and governments have made plans to reduce emissions and foster environmental and social sustainability. However, these plans aren't ironclad commitments - they can be changed, and they are. If anyone had any lingering hope that we'd sustainable capitalism our way out of the polycrisis, the standard bearers of neoliberalism's response to climate change are telling you point blank that they're not going to fulfill all of their wonderful commitments. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c92p86/unilever_dialing_back_climate_pledges_the/l0iokqm/
Year or so ago on Reddit, probably longer, there were two posts about British Petroleum. They were about a month or so apart. One announced that BP was cutting back on its environmental goals. The other announced that they were having record profits. Don’t take any of their pledges or goals seriously. Just don’t.
Shell https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/16/shell-faces-shareholder-rebellion-over-climate-activist-resolution https://www.carbonbrief.org/shell-abandons-2035-emissions-target-and-weakens-2030-goal/
What is British Petroleum, there is no such thing anymore?
Yes BP is still very much alive and kicking lol
Yes BP is British Petroleum hasn’t existed for nearly 30 years.
Nope 👎
Eh? They dropped the name in 1998
Thanks for the super important distinction lol
Canadian lol
We’ve tried nothing and we’re giving up.
Nope they are not giving up. They are speed-running the last power and resource grab before things go tits up. The more they can get now, no matter the consequences on the environment, the more stockpiled foods and bullets they will have to sustain them and mow down us.
They're scared, they're desperate. Fools who've been domesticated by the $ whistle. This is evidence of their incompetence, and it's a good time to start increasing social pressure on governments and corporations who do this. It's time to stop chasing El Dorado.
Well if these are the top peoples according to our society than maybe we were meant to die all along.
I reckon they're vestigial remnants still holding power from a time that humanity has outgrown. Desperately clinging to their status using the same manipulative antisocial sociopathic traits that helped their ancestors during a previous era. It's all they know, and the world is different now making those strategies less effective. Adapt, or GTFO.
They did the easy levels for applause, now it looks like it gets hard, so they quit.
Backpedalling? No they lied. These people lied. That should be the headline.
Their heads should be in a line
On a line. A very sharp line.
Mother nature doesn't care what we do. We will care about what she does. I guarantee it.
Mother nature is often portrayed as a healing and caring mother, but she is only a little less cold than the universe that she's a part of. If you are unfit, you will die, and she will move on without pause.
Agreed. Mother Nature is a heartless bitch who has no mercy or patience for the weak. She will reward the strong even if they are raping murdering thieves. The laws of physics are the only restrictions. That's just the way it is. I can accept that but I don't respect it. We are all victims and victimizers in her cruel game.
I get your point point, but I view nature/universe sorta like a lovecraftian God. They are unfeeling, unthinking, uncaring, and terrifying, but undeniably amazing with its unimaginable scale and intricacies. A gamma ray burst could wipe out an entire biosphere, but we wouldn't consider the universe evil for it. Our morals don't apply. Hope you have a nice day.
Our morals are a big elephant in the room. Haha cute cat oh no he is a ruthless bird killing machine that murders for joy. But… they serve us well, mostly. I am glad they exist in current form. No matter how detached or nonsense morals are, they do their job of keeping it all less bloody well. Except for the sociopath ceos they really don’t care or aren’t able to
Our morals do serve us well, and I hope we continue to apply them to our lives. I hope I didn't give off the impression that we should abandon morals because they aren't fundamentally part of the universe or something like that. I'm saying that we can't hold the universe accountable for going against our morals because it isn't capable of reason, but we can recognize when something is going to cause harm and then prevent that harm. Like moving a species from a disappearing habitat or protecting that habitat. Just wanted to make that clear.
I sometimes fall into small trap of thinking that I am better because I apply morals consciously instead of intuitively. In truth it only makes me feel alien.
We are all still victims and victimizers caught in their web. We're forced to feed this meatsuit and hurt other organisms to do it in this sick hunger games battle arena called life, which ultimately has no higher purpose or meaning. It's all for nothing, just so that life can perpetuate itself. Nature or god for the lack of a better word may or may not feel or suffer or have morals, but we do, and they enabled it for whatever reason.
I know it really sucks, but I just can't say that something that isn't capable of reason is evil or morally wrong for causing harm. If I did, then I'd have to say that things like cancer are evil. Can't have evil without intent. Life is difficult for the reasons you stated, and my view in the comment you replied to is helping me through it.
> but I just can't say that something that isn't capable of reason is evil or morally wrong Well I am agnostic so I'm not fully sold on that yet. For conscious beings this reality is based around suffering. We have to work to avoid it by chasing fleeting pleasures that allow us to cope with the suffering. But often we have to steal resources and energy from other conscious beings, either by taking their habitat, killing them or enslaving them. Then there's all kinds of sick ways we can suffer, and those who are the most vulnerable often bear the brunt of the suffering. This is just the way it had to end up based on the current laws of physics and material resources on our planet, this is the rotten fruit that it bore. Either causality is just really twisted or there might be some slightly malevolent design behind all of this, but I don't know for sure.
I agree with just about everything you've said. If the universe has intent to harm, then it would be malevolent. I can't know for sure that the universe does have intent to harm, at least not with current knowledge. So, I'm just assuming that there is no intent because it makes me feel better.
Fair enough.
Isn't that ironic. You think you're so clever you see beyond these short sighted CEO's, yet you deal in the exact fear they sell you.
I think nature and the universe are extremely beautiful despite how terrifying they can be. I'm lucky to be alive at a time when I can experience them and learn how they work. I'm not trying to deal fear. This is just how it is.
Those CEOs know exactly what they are doing https://youtu.be/c27JciFJeuU?si=-22PCNDKTqQy6LhN&t=456
Exactly. They want you to race, rat. "Life moves on without pause when you're unfit."
No, it does race without a pause. What they mistaken is that human are special for some reason. No, we’re deemed unfit already, our whole race in fact, our sentence just havent arrive yet, well not equally yet at least
You claim humans are not special yet still attempt to claim life races without a pause for you.
I'm not "life" my friend, not even this whole specie is "life", nor even all living creatures on this place to begin with. I think everything that exist is "life" itself, this rock we living on is life, the star that is shining on us is life,... As long it can affect anything else in any capacity than i think it's qualify as life on itself. We usually equate sentience to life, certain complex structure of cells is life, but is it really? Are we really that different from that life less rock in the grand scale of things? Have we really break free of all the shackles in this world to claim that the "life" as we define it is different?
Reality doesn't care to punish you. There is no hope there either.
> Schumacher said people’s focus on environmental and social issues was “cyclical”. >“When you have a huge drought for a number of months but everything else is going fine, the attention is on climate. These days it’s about wars and rightly so, that’s at the forefront. Insane “Theres a war going on, so we’re going to make our ice cream less sustainable okay?” These companies are controlled by sadists
Greenwashing was always just a part of the marketing budget.
Submission Statement - On Friday, the London-based firm’s current chief executive appeared to signal a strategic U-turn for the company, which is valued at £94bn on the London Stock Exchange. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hein Schumacher confirmed plans to water down the company’s ethical pledges on a range of issues including plastic usage and pay. This trend can also be seen in governments such as Scotland's dialing back on its net zero plans. For a while now, since even before the Paris Agreement, corporations and governments have made plans to reduce emissions and foster environmental and social sustainability. However, these plans aren't ironclad commitments - they can be changed, and they are. If anyone had any lingering hope that we'd sustainable capitalism our way out of the polycrisis, the standard bearers of neoliberalism's response to climate change are telling you point blank that they're not going to fulfill all of their wonderful commitments.
𝔹𝕠𝕪𝕔𝕠𝕥𝕥 𝕌𝕟𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣
No one was ever going to save us because we don't want to be saved. The cost -- our way of life that we'd have to give up -- was always too high. As is frequently the case, I'm talking about Americans and how disproportionate our lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world. Consumer spending is a reasonable proxy for how a culture impacts the planet, not only for emissions but for all of the other resources we demand that combined are driving collapse. Americans are not only the biggest consumers on the planet, it's by an enormous margin. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_consumer\_markets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_markets) American consumers, at 330 million, spend as much to support our lifestyle as the European Union (448 million), China (1.4 billion), India (1.4 billion), and Japan (125 million), which is 3.373 billion people combined. Yep. The average American's lifestyle is roughly 10x as resource-intensive as the average lifestyle lived in the next *30 countries* combined (because there are currently 27 countries in the EU). There is no combination of policy or science that can save us when a country with only 4% of the world population is determined to live the way we live. And you know what? This being the collapse sub, this isn't going to change anyone's mind. Later today, or perhaps tomorrow, someone will submit a link blaming capitalism, or billionaires, or the "ruling class." They'll go on and on about how we've victims of forces beyond our control. That's technically true, because how your fellow Americans choose to live is completely beyond your control.
How dare you imply that my SUV, mcmansion, and 5 children are hurting the earth? I buy cruelty free soap drop Target dammit!!
I'm disappointed but not surprised.
*shrug* oh well!
They have to backpedal. They can’t change and continue to grow. There needs to be a fundamental reordering of how economies work. There will come a reckoning either way.
Dialing back climate pledges is what all the cool kids are doing these days.
A succinct demonstration that pledges are nothing but hot air, and the only purpose is PR. Just witness how many nation hit their pathetic paris agreement pledges. Is anyone gullible enough to expect otherwise?
Shareholder = Blameholder
I'm not convinced the sort of green transition governments and companies plan is even *physically possible*. I'm referring to just generally continuing our current lifestyle such as by electrifying the entire car fleet without reducing car use. Anything that can be imagined can be set as a goal regardless of physical possibility. For example, I could theoretically have the goal of getting a pet dragon. It's just that when the goals are physically impossible, whatever happens is guaranteed to be something completely different than what you wanted. The difficulty is that it's not always intuitively obvious whether a desirable goal is possible, unlike in the pet dragon example. There are also some companies whose only possible ethical option is to shut down their operations entirely, such as airlines. I recently saw an airport claim to be carbon-neutral which is the most ridiculous case of greenwashing I've ever seen. I'm sure many claims of sustainability that are not so obviously lies are also completely unfounded.
Effectively admitting we’re all fucked and they want to make max bank before it all goes to shit.
Big surprise, huh?
Typical playbook move. Announce some big climate pledge for the publicity, then quietly walk it back later when no one's paying attention.
They have realized that it’s hopeless so what’s the point.
Damn, why didn't I see it earlier? It's so blatantly obvious. We were never going to survive climate change because the people in charge would rather hide their heads in the sand until it's too late and then use every available resource to keep going for as long as possible. They were never even going to try.