Yeah, in a way, I still find it shocking how we’ve come out of a year of climate-related crisis and the COP, which could have been a crisis taskforce meetup was just a handwaving event.
There were several nations represented there, that got hit hard this year by climate change. Why are these not demanding measures to limit damages?Honestly even, why are there still people working against this? What the hell are you going to do with your immorally amassed wealth in a world that’s falling apart?
I’ve been reading about what some of what the rich and powerful openly state they believe, and it’s pretty scary. They are extremely out of touch with reality. I wonder what they believe that they’re not open about.
So far, I’ve read about:
Effective altruism
- seems to be about exploiting people to amass as much wealth as they can, then use that wealth to “help” humanity by building space ships to launch rich people into space or something.
Effective accelerationism
- explicitly doesn’t care about humanity, only “technocapitalism.” Is fine with AI destroying humanity, because that would be the natural evolution of intelligence.
Peter Theil
- believes all kinds of crazy shit. Women and democracy are a danger to humanity because they’re anti-“libertarian”. World should be a collection of city-states or floating cities ruled by corporations.
Back in the '90s I worked at an Internet startup that was playing the usual game of desperately seeking venture capital money to keep going. At one point we were wooing RJR Nabisco, a conglomerate that included the former RJ Reynolds Tobacco company that had branched out into venture capital because it was the fucking ‘90s and what else were they going to do with their gigantic piles of cash? One day some RJR-N executives came to visit and although we were a non-smoking company in a non-smoking building (our lease even disallowed smoking) we put ashtrays in the conference room and these motherfuckers spent the entire day chain-smoking. We had no ventilation to speak of and by the end of the day the smoke everywhere was so thick that you couldn’t see the end of the 50’ hallway. The office stank for weeks afterwards. My bosses almost fired me because I made a point of coughing really loudly every time I walked past the conference room door. And it was all for nought because they never gave us a penny.
The thing is, these executives had so thoroughly bought in to the corporate need to suppress factual information about the negative health consequences of smoking that they were perfectly willing to suffer those negative consequences themselves (and it’s highly likely that they’re all dead now thirty years on, which warms my heart a bit). It’s no surprise at all that the people making gobs of money from fossil fuels have convinced themselves that global warming isn’t really happening.
Didn’t you see Don’t Look Up? They’re all hoping for a golden ticket to the naked people planet.
On a more serious note, it’s because all the rich and powerful people killing the planet will be dead before it gets really bad.
That’s why they have no reason to care, but it’s not a reason why they’re actively working against humanity. They’re hopefully not planning to bequeath their wealth, because of, you know, the whole destroying-the-planet thing.
So, once they’re rich enough to live the rest of their lives in prosperity, just like, stop? Their life won’t garner more meaning by having the bank account high score. In fact, they’re destroying meaning, because of, you know, the whole destroying-the-planet thing.I’m sorry, this rant isn’t directed at you. I just get angry thinking about that asshat with his self-righteous smile.
deleted by creator
I dont think there will be much looking back actually…
Inability?
It’s the will to do something! There a lot of green washing out there like Carbon capture and hydrogen cars. I don’t Private planes being be taxed out of existence.
The big problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by corrupt business interests. They have effectively gaslighted the entire movement to oppose their own goals. Instead of pushing real solutions like mass transit or hydrogen, they are now wasting huge amounts of resources on idea like battery powered cars. Even carbon capture will be needed eventually.
What is necessary is for the environmental movement to have a major shakeup. It needs to kick out the scam artists and adopt more functional solutions.
There are no simple or single answers. As many simultaneous solutions as possible would be nice. Electric cars are a good stop gap.
Not really, they aren’t stop gapping anything, a mild slowdown at most even if every single car ever was replaced. The majority of pollution is caused by like a handful of companies, electric cars will do exactly nothing to fix that while still massively contribute to the microplastic issue we got going.
Only a stopgap though. Not the true solution.
deleted by creator
Meh, that’s more an “the past 5 decades” thing, and not so much an inability as much as a “don’t give a shit”.
We knew since well over a century ago. For the past 5 decades it was clear to all governments that this was to be THE issue that would face humanity.
What did we get?
It’s a hoax! But muh economy!
So humanity is fucked, nobody stopped those in charge, we get what we deserve.
or also the year in which the contradictions of late capitalism became so evident that they are no longer possible to be masked
Until the majority of normal people suffer, politicians won’t have a real reason to do much more than providing themselves a quasi-alibi. “Look we tried, but it just didn’t work out” *sips on wine in climate controlled cellar*
