It costs the shareholders money and destroys many billionaires empires.
These are considered a negative for people who actively want Neo Feudalism
We made a better world for nothing 😡
Exactly. We expect immediate and tangible rewards.
Give that oil rig worker a better job with bigger benefits and they’ll jump ship on the spot. Promise them a cleaner future and they’ll just laugh at you.
Yeah but have you thought about woke? /s
Uh, yeah, actually. Those are exactly the things that the people who create and stoke climate denialism are afraid of. It’s in the intrest of the fossil fuel industry to make these exact things unpopular.
-
you might inconvenience them by taking away their plastic straws, plastic grocery bags, or making them separate recyclables.
-
you prevent them from rolling coal or dumping other combustion byproducts in the air, or toxic waste in the ground or water. That costs money to clean up or filter.
-
you make things cost more when you force them to expend effort to responsibly harvest natural resources like trees.
Basically watching the earth burn is cheaper, more profitable, and less inconvenient to the people who have a problem with having clean air and water, and a habitable planet.
-
I think it’s mostly tribalism and fear.
For everyone, to some extent, belief is social. You tend to believe what your in-group believes. If your in-group is big on science and admitting fault and such, it’s not so bad. But if your beliefs are… I’m too tired to be nice… Right wing dog shit ahistorical afactual nonsense… then you’re in a worse place as far as having beliefs that match reality goes.
Secondly, fear. Admitting climate change and pollution exist means admitting uncomfortable truths. It means admitting things need to change, that the future may be from, and you have some culpability in the current state. The way things are now is familiar and comforting. Most people are, frankly, cowards, and will go to great lengths to avoid this kind of fear. Especially if it involves them not being a completely faultless person.
The longer you go being a denialist, I imagine the harder it is to change. Admitting fault isn’t something most people do well. Again, because they are on some fundamental level cowards. Many people are deeply uncomfortable with admitting they were wrong about anything. Admitting you were fooled by climate denialism is a blow to the ego. Can’t have that. Better stick to the current stance. And if it happens that the in-group also believes that, great, that’s comforting.
We should probably come up with a way to make right wingers (the most scared people of all) think that addressing climate change plays into their in-group. Convince them solar is AMERICAN INGENUITY and that coal is a Chinese plot to poison the white race, and maybe you’d make some surprising (and awful) allies.
That or, like, completely destroy the Republican party, spend fifty years hard deploying green technology, and wait for conservatives to defend it because that’s what they know, now.
Get them to believe their stance is woke and I’m sure they’ll change it pretty quick 👍
Surely Flat Earthers could be convinced to change as they believe there’s no atmosphere without a container. We should ask them to do an experiment where they put themselves in a closed container with a running car and ask them to sit inside and see what happens.
Best case scenario, they learn pollution = bad. Worst case scenario, they just sit in the car and remove themselves from the gene pool 🤷🏼♂️
But Exxon Mobil said I’d get hair on my palms and go blind.
Not a denier, but people fear the immediate costs. It’s not clear what meaningful climate action looks like. But realistically it would very likely mean a higher cost of living in the immediate future, because not all economic sectors can be trivially decarbonized. There are also possible immediate benefits. But in any case that’s what people fear.
For the last couple of decades, people’s quality of life have been decreasing while productivity numbers are still going up.
Trickle down supply side economics has completely failed. Taxing the wealthy and moving people from the marketing bullshit scam sector of the economy back towards manufacturing would put those increased productivity numbers to better use which would mean we could maintain the current quality of life while building infrastructure needed to have a better future.
The status quo is maintaining our current slow decline out of fear of change. The economy is shit for anyone but the wealthy right now, so why should we be afraid of changing things? Because the wealthy are telling us to be afraid?
When the higher cost of living is more important than actually living.
Regardless of the topic, posing a statement as a question is disingenuous and only enraging climate change advocates.
Or is that point, tankie.
There is a grain of truth to that. Posting it as series of rhetorical questions is essentially breeding aggression and harassment, and while the cause is very noble, this will probably turn off the opponents instead of convincing them.
And we need the latter.
They think it’s a hoax meant to funnel money into the pockets of scammers pushing these new green techs. They think it’s just enriching liars who want to vilify things these people loved, all while making things somehow worse. Their vision isn’t of a better future, they see a scammer getting rich while their power goes out every time it’s cloudy outside or the wind stops.
its true, I love oil SO MUCH and these climate scientists are just SO MEAN to oil, it makes me sad. im sad for my friend, oil.
good thing we can always trust oil execs. they’re such honest guys!
Unfortunately, some of those things do happen.
The bigger scam is the massive negative externalities of petroleum consumption but that’s an abstract concept and these people are simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know…
It’s really funny that you bring up the rolling blackouts. I’m assuming you are meaning in Texas, but since wind and solar there have been perfectly consistent while it is the coal burning plants that have been failing to meet the needs of the state and crashing their janky power grid your point is really quite stupid.
But then I won’t be able to race my black-smoke-belching rolling-coal truck with my manly man buddies :(
Rolling coal is one of the most mindbogglingly stupid things I’ve ever heard of. Truly, it makes it seem like Idiocracy didn’t go nearly far enough in their hyperbole. Nobody could’ve predicted people being this aggressively dumb.
Speaking of doing stupid shit and rolling coal…
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a60747401/waller-texas-coal-rolling-cyclist-crash/Damn that’s horrific, stupid and completely unnecessary.
Ignoring the tragedy of the actual situation, the way the title is parsed for the link implies that a diesel powered bicyclist crashed while rolling coal and that imagery makes me giggle.
If someone put together a diesel powered bike that could coal out I wouldn’t even be mad
idk about diesel, but you can get a 2-stroke to run pretty dirty without much trouble
I pictured a cyclist with anthracite wheels.
wtf is this ? a locomotive ?
Yes, in that it’s a motive for locos
Steam locomotives burn far cleaner than whatever the hell this is. An efficiently running steam engine effectively consumes its own smoke and only exhausts waste steam.
Actually if everything else was fixed we could probably still allow things like monster truck rallies etc right?
No reason (other than a weird attachment to breathing in exhaust fumes) you can’t have an electric powered Monster Truck.
In fact it makes a lot of sense. Can have Monster Truck rallies in indoor stadiums. Electric motors are really powerful. Monster Trucks aren’t driving hundreds of miles so wouldn’t need batteries that are all that big.
Hate to break it to you, but they already have monster truck rallies in indoor arenas. That way everyone can hot-box the exhaust.
Yeah I should have said safely have monster truck rallies in indoor arenas.
I meant like continue letting people have their hobby cars with ice, just have to regulate it somehow. This is like in a utopia where the majority of the world isn’t using ice and we have renewable energy solutions.
Americans truly are a different species
Lead poisoning is one hell of a drug.
I’m convinced some of these people have some kind of brain damage.
that what happen when companies rule the country, and propaganda runs without regulation, who thought that protecting multimillionaire bribes would be a good idea
who thought that protecting multimillionaire bribes would be a good idea
The ones who made billions because of it
Where I live (Midwestern USA), there are guys who drive around just to roal coal on cyclists. It has happened to me a few times.
I worked with a guy who got run off the road on his bicycle by a couple rednecks in a pickup truck and was severely injured. That was 30 years ago, in Texas.
It’s fucking insane how those manly man with a beer gut feel endangered by cyclists. You get assaulted by a weak little wimp in his tank for choosing a different mode of transportation.
When I see hiw insanely stupid people can get I don’t believe in any hope for humanity.
They want that mad max life style
From Lemminary’s link
An increasingly popular phenomenon at the time of the incident, coal rolling happens when a driver of a diesel truck floods the engine with more fuel than it can efficiently process, emitting a thick black plume of exhaust across the road. The emissions systems of diesel trucks are strictly regulated under federal law. But some truck owners modify their exhaust systems with illegal aftermarket parts, or fail to fix broken exhaust systems. In the 2010s, rolling coal became a kind of defiant act, an aggressive backlash against the increasing regulation of fossil fuels. People using forms of transportation that don’t burn oil—namely, those riding bikes, walking, or driving an electric vehicle—became targets. Social media apps such as TikTok helped drive the #rollingcoal trend. Videos with captions like “POV: You roll coal on every bicycle you see,” showing the engorged tailpipe of a diesel truck expelling a bubbling smoke, accrued thousands, even millions of views.
One of the rationales of sane people regarding alternative energy sources is the cost of using “more expensive” energy sources when cheap (at least for the time being), albeit more polluting, alternatives like coal and natural gas are readily available.
The argument is that if Country A switches to full renewables, in the time it takes for the prices to become low enough to be competitive against coal, Country B, which is unscrupulous in its development and continues using coal as its main energy source, would gain a significant advantage over Country A.
You could even argue that for Country B, switching to alternative energy sources would be unfair, considering that Country A enjoyed decades of rapid growth and development using cheap coal, whereas Country B would not. Since Country A won’t fully switch to alternative energy sources to maintain its supremacy, and Country B won’t change for the sake of its development, we’re effectively in a deadlock.
Personally, I think all countries should work together and switch to renewable energy sources to reduce the impact of climate change. Unfortunately, the world is not so simple, and the conflict is more nuanced than simply “keeping profits vs. creating a better world.”
We’re already at the point that renewables are far cheaper than the alternatives. It’s just the capital costs that are higher (compared to keeping existing FF), but that’s not a huge issue for rich, developed countries.
So rich countries can massively invest in renewables and press their advantage. Ideally, these rich countries also subsidise renewable energy in developing countries (and to some extent, they are). But even without that in many cases it’s cheaper to just skip building a whole FF industry altogether and go straight to renewables.
It’s just long term vs. short term thinking really. And the question of who pays.
It costs an insane amount of money to have wars to secure the oil supply. But it’s not the oil industry that pays that cost. So oil is only “cheaper” from a very limited context, but in a broader context, it’s insanely expensive.
From an economic perspective, investing money into the infrastructure needed to eliminate dependency on oil is a no brainer. It’ll probably cost less than the next oil war, and once that cost is paid, there is no need for multiple future oil wars.
Given the US pays for most of the costs of oil wars, you’d think the US would be leading the charge towards transitioning off of oil. But instead there’s a lot of resistance in the US for this. There’s a strange denial that leads people to simultaneously demand the government to make gas cheaper, while also being against wars in the middle east. How do people think the government makes the price of gas cheaper?
If only all the countries could come to some kind of climate energy agreement. Maybe they can meet someplace like oh say Paris or something and sign an agreement like that. 🤔
The having fewer billionaires is always left out and always the reason none of the other stuff seems to matter
Why would renewable energy necessarily mean fewer billionaires? Major solar/wind generation plants have to be built by someone and somewhere, it seems like the best you’re doing is making billionaires pivot their investments/changing which people the billionaires are.
It’s called ✨nationalised/socialised utilities✨.
Imagine not being able to even, well, imagine, a world where profit isn’t the one and only motive for human behaviour… 🙄
