But Turkmenistan is not in the production chain - that's the point. This discussion has been trying to defend the idea that you're still responsible for emissions even from things you don't buy, so long as you buy a similar product from a more responsibly produced source. It's a rather warped concept and leads to some awkward conclusions (for starters it completely negates the idea of trying to purchase responsibly, since you still get the blame regardless).
actually, the uk
buys gas.
that was the discussion. you went in sideways and talked about solar panels.
on ethical purchases: it is literally impossible to detach from the grid and consume well atm. you can only consume less bad. so the gain from purchasing responsibly is not negated, it's, rather, decreased. what matters is broader policy. i'm not trying to denigrate ethical consumers here, but individual ethical purchase is functionally useless, and therefore unfair to really care about as a metric. what matters is switching the utility of purchase to reflect reality, which requires policy, and if all the world has to fess up, the uk has too. as such, you have blame. i have too. but i try to remove it from myself by acting, not by pretending that it does not exist. when calculating whether a purchase is ethical on a state level is also, then, difficult, but that's because of the cluster...bomb that the uk kind of initiated you know.
it's not a simple question because it's so interwoven.
anyways. the discussion was
actually about this:
If the global gas price is higher, then Turkmenistan is losing more value (in escaping gas) and ought
to earn more money (from selling that gas which doesn't escape) to pay to better control the leaks.
The UK has been diversifying away from fossil fuels, including natural gas, for some time now.
Of course telling people off for flaring gas (easily detected) may have encouraged them to leak instead,
but UK culpability would require evidence that the Turmenistanis pay attention to UK environmentalists.
this was what prompted the discussion. bolded mine.
so we were like, huh, what? again, ignore turkmenistan here for a bit. the uk buys gas. they're culpable for gas purchases, and gas production is part of that. and gas production has gas accidents. and
even if the accidents are not part of the equation - which they are -
the production and consumption is still awful. there's also accidents and abuse elsewhere. maybe not to this degree, but come on.
and you went in arbitrating the detachment of turkmenistan when we were noting that uk culpability for gas trade is present because they trade gas.
Yes. So, unless I'm very much mistaken, is Samson. But it is possible for someone to disagree for non-partisan reasons
. If you want to discuss, say, how much of the UK's emissions are hidden under the rug of outsourcing to the far east, then go for it, I won't dispute it. But this was a bit too blatantly a case of a non-sequitur leap from "emissions on the scale of the UK" to "the UK is responsible to these specific emissions". And then retroactively trying to connect them, though you could hear the logic creaking even before I started poking it.
we were talking about the uk because englishedward went defensive and tried to color the uk in a better light. the original appeal was that the uk couldn't be responsible for conditions that are part of a purchase. which is wrong. the production chain is part of the product, it's the premise for the product existing at all. it was a
general argument about culpability, not in particular about turkmenistan. even if you find the starting point void, the rest is relevant. you can't dismiss the production chain as someone else's moral qualm when
you buy into the production chain. the
energy trade is not like isolated lines you can sever from each other. it's a web. you really think none of
these countries were part of the picture in turkmenistan? or countries that traded with them? if you want to define the production chain as something that's isolatable, go ahead. use another word for it. uk's still culpable, and it wasn't something englishedward could defend.
even regardless of the disaster, what the uk is doing irt environmental policy is dwarfingly disastrous. if your point is that the uk isn't doing anything special... that's, well, not the point at all. we were talking about the uk in particular because the uk got brought up. pick your poison, really, western states are enfranchised with the companies that do this, both buying from them
and investing in them. it's active policy.
If this was really about the idea that all countries using natural gas are responsible for all leaks, regardless of supplier, we wouldn't just be talking about the UK. And yes, it was getting to be a bit of a pile-on to EnglishEdward, which was why I weighed in.
so this "only being about the uk". i'm going to ask you to do a mental step here - and i'm going to be blunt and maybe a bit rude, but please take this neutrally - drop the self-absorbedness over the fact that your country is the one being mentioned. take a step back. so:
say we were discussing a murder trial where someone was brutally murdered. it happened in... finland. and the court is clearly mismanaging the case, it's a farce, the perpetrator is going free because of connections. people are discussing how finland's justice system is being really awful here, with the prescriptive implication that it should change. do you then find it legitimate if a finn barges into the news, noting that some person got brutally murdered in another country, covered up because of corruption, so why are we heinously targeting finland? why do we pick on finland?
and i'd say, what's their point here, exactly? that partaking in injustice is then fine?
you may find that crass. but i know you understand that the climate crisis has much sheerer consequences irt suffering and death than two people dying.
uk is being mentioned,
not because
the uk does a thing, but because the uk does
a thing. people care about the latter, not the former. and yes, if
the uk then does a thing, the uk will then be the topic,
because of the thing. it does not matter if the thing is something general. the uk was useful here because - well, it was a necessary component because englishedward was deflective about the uk in particular in a very strange way - and indeed because the problem applies to other nations. ie, can
a country be culpable for its consumption? are you culpable for gas trade when you trade gas?
the notion that it's somehow only the uk to you, as if they're the only ones culpable - that's why i'm so weirded out here. it seems, again, self-absorbed; that because you're mentioned, noone else can matter.
do you really think we believe that only the uk is doing it? if not, why this weird defensive thing?
like, this:
If this was really about the idea that all countries using natural gas are responsible for all leaks, regardless of supplier, we wouldn't just be talking about the UK.
that's... just not the case at all. you can reread this post if you don't understand where i'm coming from.
-
also, i appreciate when people respond to my posts whole. i know i can be rambly, but come on. i literally note in the quoted post that my own country is conducting policy that's submerging itself. that might be a hint as to how much it's about the uk - even if the discussion about culpability was about the uk in particular. because, hint, i don't live in the uk.
