Last edited Thu Jul 1, 2021, 07:00 AM - Edit history (1)
and reported on since the mid-80's, what have we done about the problem? Make some pledges at international conferences? What else?
It may make us feel like wonderfully wonderful progressives to put it all on the evil oil companies. Yes, its in our progressive DNA, I get that. But precisely exactly what fucking difference would have it really made whether or not the oil companies had been totally transparent from back when some of their scientists first start seeing a problem back in the 50's or 60's or whenever? Would we have done a damn thing more about it sooner? Like what, exactly, precisely?
Meanwhile we're in a big arms race to upsize our cars to SUVs and monster pickup trucks. (We have people in DU that are pissing and moaning 24/7 about electric car incentives, OK, but I wish at least a tiny fraction of that ire was reserved for people who must drive a monster pickup truck in order to feel like a "real man" ).
and when it's 1 degree above perfect, I hear air conditioners going on all over the place. I live in Minnesota ... in the summer I wake up and often it's in the 60's degrees F outside and I step outside and I hear the neighbors' damn air conditioners blasting away (I live in a 60 townhouse community). It's like people demand that the temperature be within half a degree of perfect, and supplementing their air-conditioning with fans (or supplementing fans with a little air-conditioning as I do) is just too much of a bother. And "progressives" saying that even 70 degrees is not cool enough, and not a goddam single person points out the environmental impact -- https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215530212
And of course we live out in the weeds and drive an hour or more to our jobs in our cities.
And considering the extraordinarily high GHG emissions of air travel, do we really, really need that fancy planet-killing vacations that we brag about here on DU? Will our cross-country extended families fall apart if we visit a little less often?
Or eat a little less meat?
Who was it that said, paraphrasing from memory, "in order to understand the cause of the problem, a mirror might be the most useful tool"?
Edited to add - I'm not saying oil companies are blameless. I have made it clear above what I think about the argument that we have a global warming problem because the oil companies kept it a secret for so long.
But what is a real concern is their lobbying against most measures to do anything about it, funding PACs and politicians that vote against any measures to fix the problem, e.g. another thread here in E&E that they are fighting the carbon tax (and gasoline taxes -- but then so are a lot of DUers "regressive tax regressive tax" - what about an overall equal dollar reduction in income taxes at the low end?). Funding misinformation campaigns (although one has to be extraordinarily stupid at this point to be swayed by that -- but then we do have tens of millions of extraordinarily stupid voters, and it does have an impact, unfortunately).
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