This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.
It’s not that Americans somehow turned “pasta e fagioli” into “pasta fazool”. They turned “pasta e fasule” into “pasta fazool”, which is a much smaller leap.
The statistic that “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions” is better understood as “Just 100 companies responsible for selling 71% of global fossil fuels”. It’s fundamentally saying that there’s a few large coal, oil and gas companies worldwide selling us most of the supply.
If you want those companies to stop polluting, that amounts to those companies not selling fossil fuels.
Which is honestly the goal, but the only way to do that is to replace the demand for fossil fuels. Cutting the US off from fossil fuels would kill a ton of people if you didn’t first make an energy grid 100% powered by renewables, got people to buy electric cars, cold climate heat pumps, etc.
Bullshit.
The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.
That is to say, if you multiply the emissions of the gasoline sold by ExxonMobil by whatever percentage of ExxonMobile that’s in Bill Gate’s portfolio, you get an absolutely ridiculous emissions number.
But that seems to assume that if it weren’t for those dastardly billionaires investing in oil companies, we’d all be living in 10-minute cities with incredible subways connected by high speed rail, powered entirely by renewables, and heated by geothermal heat pumps. And I honestly don’t beleive that.
Merriam Webster is a descriptive dictionary. They don’t tell you how words “should” be used, they say how words are used.
Using literally as an intensifier goes back literal centuries. The earliest written citation we’ve found of that usage goes back to 1769. It can be found everywhere from Dickens to Brontë.
It’s also hardly the first word to go on a similar path towards becoming an intensifier. Very originally meant “genuine”, really meant “in fact”, absolutely meant “completely”, etc.
But who complains about sentences like “I was really bored to death”, or “I was absolutely rooted to the ground”? Does saying “it’s very cold” just mean “it is a genuine fact that it is cold”?
Literally still means what it means. You can’t use literally to mean “yellow”, for example. People aren’t generally confused when they come across the word.
Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.
But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.
A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.