This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was first published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1448207
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1448207
If the fossil fuel industry has the money to shape public attitudes and government policy it also has the money to pay a higher tax rate to cover the government’s cost of addressing the damage from its product.
And, to lose the subsidies it has benefited from.
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This is a great example of the dog that didn’t bark. Outfits like Enron have enormous resources and excellent scientists working for them. If they saw the slightest possibility to set forth any kind of rigorous scientific reasoning to debunk global warming they would leap at the opportunity to do so. Instead, they can only channel people like Sydney Powell and pump out more crap than petroleum.
- List item
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It’s the end of the world’s climate as we knew it, but they’ll be rich!!!
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The fossil fuel industry is obviously guilty of widespread fraud. Sue them into bankruptcy then nationalize them. They’ve proven that they are criminals and need to be severely punished and eliminated from society.
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Extractive industries belong in a different category from most businesses and should be regulated differently, ideally by an international agency. There is no reason any longer to see natural resources as infinite, and our future literally depends on their rational management. But how we get from here there…
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There must be something about being a lying man in a suit to be able to convince people to devastate the only planet we have.
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Currently global sea ice is at its lowest level ever.
More dark water. Less ice albedo.
When once in a generation weather disasters are occurring every year, maybe, just maybe, we will summon the political will to address the issue as it should be addressed. It will be too late to stop but the perps in the fossil fuel industry should at least be made to pay for mitigation.
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Humans aren’t good at thinking in longer time scales than one or two generations. Your kids, your grandkids. Once it gets into great-grandkids it’s all pretty abstract. Especially if you don’t even have kids yet, or never plan to.
The hardest part of trying to convince people to do something about the climate crisis is avoiding saying the truth out loud, which is that we can’t do anything to stop what’s already baked into the planet for the next 50-100 years. No matter how quickly we switch to green energy, these changes are coming, it’s done. Climate change mitigation is actually about making the lives of our grandkids and their kids less of a disaster.
That’s not an easy time scale for most people to think about, or care about for some people. So when advocating for climate change mitigation, most of us maintain the convenient fiction that adopting electric cars and reducing consumption is going to make things better in the near future. Of course it won’t, and it’s depressing to think about, so I try not to think about it too much in those terms. We do what we can.
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I think “rich” is a real act of imagination.
Still, it’s even more ironic when you include the likelihood that many/most of them or their descendants will either not survive or be impoverished by climate change and its consequences.
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Watching the war in Ukraine, I continue to think that the biggest barrier to really addressing these issues (besides the concept of “private property”) is ethnonationalism combined with the boundaries of nation-states. International action is needed, but when people are still putting all their energy into fighting over territory, and when climate action is continually a distant second to national economic “growth,” I am just not very hopeful real change can happen.
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Back in the '80s/ '90s, there was a bumper sticker with this mindset, “The one who dies with the most toys wins!”
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From the Article:
["This likely helps to explain why it took Congress almost 35 years after Hansen first warned representatives about the dangers of climate change to pass a major climate bill, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act "]
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We have been using cleaner energy than we would have had we continued down the path we had up until people started to pay attention.
Think about what would have taken place had we done nothing
One thing that I have noticed about our messaging is the sheer hopelessness of it.
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It’s simple really. Everything we do to address AGW now will save lives in the future. Everything we don’t do will cost lives.
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The experiment confirming the greenhouse effect of CO2 was performed in 1861. 23 years after it was theorized in 1838.
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This makes me a minority here, but I still have hope. One thing is certain: GOP-level thinking has got to go.
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Fox Hosts Blame Infrastructure Spending Priorities For Ohio Train Derailment | Crooks and Liars
CAMPOS-DUFFY: But it does tell you, again, this bill would not have passed if it had said, if the name of the bill was what was really in the bill, which it was a climate bill. And after it passed, then they bragged this was the greatest investment into green energy and all that grift and the solar panels and everything else they’re doing to transition us.
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