Gaming is probably among the most energy intensive activities you can do with a PC, but some research suggests climate themes in games can increase awareness:

“Of 389,594 respondents (split evenly across men and women with the greatest number between the ages of 21 to 39), 78.6% believe that gaming could help them learn about the environment and 35.4% want to see more environmental content in their games. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (61.1%) said they would be motivated to pay for environmentalist content if it added to their in-game experience, supported a good cause, or taught them something new.”

I think we could really use a game with gun nuts wearing MAGA hats driving around SUVs and pickup trucks (who the player must dodge on their bicycle), banks that invest in fossil fuels, various corporations that should be boycotted, like #Sony (who supports climate denial through its #ALEC membership) - and who has some green washing trickery according to the same article:

“When Sony pledges to plant trees for every “Reached the Daunt” trophy earned by players of Horizon: Forbidden West, an effort promoted as part of the 2022 Green Game Jam, it raises the spectre of greenwashing. Sony recently announced that it was accelerating its net zero commitments by 10 years, but 2020 emissions stemming from the use of its TVs and game consoles were the highest they’ve been since 2016, according to its 2021 sustainability report. Furthermore, an eye-watering 17.1m tons of C02 were created over the course of its products’ life-cycles, with a further 1.4m tons emitted from the company’s business sites. Next to these numbers, it’s hard to see tree-planting as anything other than trivial.”

So many people (IMO a vast majority) think they can sit back and wait for systemic changes to fix the climate problem.. that they don’t need to proactively take any actions themselves.

But what if Trump gets re-elected a year from now? In that event we can expect global system-wide #climateAction to fall apart. There will be a 4+ year setback. Russia and China are not going to make any sacrifices if the US is not onboard. Will that inspire more people into the activism that they have direct concrete control over (individual actions)?

Shifting your money into a bank which doesn't invest in fossil fuels results in a meaningful emissions cut

• air travel
• consumer banking
• diet
• residential energy
• car travel

I’ve boycotted Coca-Cola & Pepsi products for over a decade. All the non-alcoholic drinks at my workplace cafeteria were Coke products. Even the orange juice (Minute Maid is Coke).

So I complained… saying directly¹ to the outsourced catering company that Coke is contrary to local values and that we should have at least one ethical option, while at the same time stressing that bringing in Pepsi products would not solve the problem. I said I’m currently limited to water, beer, and wine. And obviously when I choose tap water they make nothing on that then they have to wash my glass.

They replied to say they’ve decided to bring in more drink options. Couple weeks later they had Arizona iced tea and various coconut water kinds with aloe vera. And I noticed lots of people buying them. There’s still the problem of plastic waste from the containers but getting some people off Coke was a bigger stride to make IMO.

Coke’s wrong-doings are only fractionally environmental, but I wanted to mention it here because the story demonstrates how a simple 1-person action can sometimes scale beyond just one individual. AFAIK, I was the only one to complain about the Coke monopoly.

Note that only the few colleagues I mentioned this to know it was boycott-driven. People buying non-Coke drinks were simply taking what they wanted with no idea that an anti-Coke boycott action lead to more options. The ease of it is notable. I did not have to undertake the big effort of rallying a crowd.

1. indeed I took the liberty to contact the catering company directly, bypassing my employer who actually had the contract with the catering company. It caused no issue. I guess it was clear enough that I was just an employee and not acting on behalf of the employer.

The link goes to a table that lists some of the most unethical banks/credit unions in the US. There is a column dedicated to environmental abuses.

W.r.t environmental protection, obviously consumers should boycott:

• #BofA (#BankOfAmerica)
• #JPM/Chase (#JPMorgan)
• #PNC
• #Suntrust
• #TDAmeritrade/ #Everbank
• #WellsFargo

Note that people outside the US may very well be unwittingly invested in JP Morgan. European banks often outsource their savings/pension accounts to JP Morgan in the US.

I posted this on !climate@slrpnk.net a few months ago, but figured I'd repost it here, as I think it fits better.

Original Post:

I was debating posting this here, since, ya know... Investing isn't very punk.

However, Climate Town recently did a fantastic video detailing how banks use our money just sitting around in our account to invest in fossil fuels.

Wanting to avoid this, I figured it'd be better to direct any unused money in an investment that's at least a little less planet destroying, which lead me down this ecological rabbit hole that I thought might be worth sharing.

The most powerful/useful thing I found in this regard was Fossilfreefunds.org, which allows you see exactly how much of an index or mutual fund is invested in not only fossil fuels, but also insurance companies and banks that support the fossil fuel industry.

I know there's a lot of controversy around ESG funds as greenwashing, and after checking a lot of common index funds and money markets with this fund checker, that controversy is unfortunately pretty well-earned. Most of them are still heavily invested in fossil fuels, or industries and banks that support fossil fuels.

However, there are a few funds that really do seem to divest from fossil fuels. Unfortunately most index funds will often still be invested in unethical companies like Amazon and Google, but it's nearly impossible to truly ethically invest unless you pick individual companies, which if done in isolation is probably a recipe to lose a good chunk of your money. So I settled for at least doing better, even if it's not perfect.

I also want to note that most ESG funds tend to have pretty damn high expense ratios (the yearly fee you'll pay on your investment for them to 'manage' it), though I have found a couple that buck that trend.

The most promising fund that has a low expense ratio that was the Sphere 500 Climate Fund, which is basically a copy of the S&P 500 minus all fossil fuel investments. The only downside with it is that it's fairly limited on what investment brokers host it, with the main one being Vanguard. It has an expense ratio of 0.07%.

The other low-cost option was Vanguard's ESGV ETF, which unlike every other mainstream Total US Stock Market ESG Index from Fidelity, Shwab, or Blackrock, actually does seem to limit their fossil fuel investments. It's not perfect, as a small percentage of the portfolio is still invested in the fossil fuel industry, but it's significantly better than its peers, which gets it consideration from me, purely due to its low expense ratio and the fact that it's an ETF, so you can get it from any brokerage. It has an expense ratio of 0.09%.

Vanguard also has an ESG Total International Market Index fund (for those of you who follow the Boglehead 3-fund strategy), VSGX, with an expense ration of 0.12%.

Alternatively, if you're willing to accept a higher expense ratio (0.91%) to divest from ALL fossil fuels, the Amana Mutual Fund seems like a decent one. It has a solid performance track record, and I believe (though I may be wrong!) this is equivalent to a Total Stock Market Index Fund.

Anyway, I hope some of you found that website useful! If you have any other suggestions on climate friendy-er money management, I'd be interested to hear it. :)

The following corporations are members of #ALEC, a giant far right bill mill and lobbyist in the US who fights environmental protections and promotes #climateDenial. Boycott them:

• #AmEx (American Express)
• #AnheuserBusch
• #Boeing
• #CenturyLink
• Charter Communications
• #Chevron
• #Farmers/Foremost
• #FedEx
• #Geico
• #LMG (Liberty Mutual/Safeco)
• #Marlboro (Philip Morris)
• #Motorola
• #Nationwide Insurance
• #PNC bank
• #Sony
• #StateFarm
• #Texaco
• #TimeWarner
• #UPS

Notice that FedEx and UPS are both ALEC members. So naturally you should favor your national post. But if you must choose between FedEx and UPS, FedEx is worse because:

• FedEx supports the NRA discounts. The NRA and ALEC are aligned and support each other and support the same politicians (e.g. Trump).
• FedEx ships slave dolphins
• FedEx ships hunting trophies
• FedEx ships #sharkFins
• FedEx aggressively claims in advertisements to be pro-environment with low emissions. This misleads consumers as they obviously do not acknowledge how ALEC, NRA, and their other activities are quite detrimental.

All of which are different forms of environmental abuse. So UPS is the lesser of evils IMO.

(link covers a 2021 study by Purdue, Yale, and MIT)

Some folks think teleworking is favorable to the environment on the basis that they avoid driving to work. IMO that’s quite far-fetched when you consider that a worksite with a capacity of ~1000 workers would consume much less energy than heating and cooling 1000 residential homes. Then you have account for the footprint attributed to heavy internet bandwidth demands.

Driving is not likely worse than heating a house but nothing beats cycling to work and working on-site. But if you are working from home, it’s worthwhile to try to attend non-video conferences. A presenter may have no choice in some cases but certainly you need not see everyone’s faces.

FWiW, these are steps to disable high-bandwidth frills:

Firefox

Chrome/Chromium

• Disabling animations- impossible (bug report from ~14 years ago still unresolved). Hence “stop using Chrome” in the title. This unmaintained extension by the creator of Ungoogled Chromium was suggested. It might work on some sites but the author admits it fails on many sites. The extension does not stop buffering, thus it’s useless from a permacomputing standpoint. He quit maintaining it in hopes that Google would produce a decent extension. Instead, Google created a junk extension which only mutes the audio and reportedly fails to disable the autoplay. This is useless for those who actually do not want to fetch animations due to bandwidth constraints.

I have deliberately spared readers from the source links to the above info because the information is buried in enshitified webpages with shenanigans like cookie popups that have no reject all option. Looks like this post is a bit enshitified itself since the details/summary HTML tags are broken here (they tend to be accepted on other Lemmy instances). If anyone knows the fix plz let me know. (reported)