5 it's too late now (so might as well go on consuming oil)
We can't just throw our hands up and give up because we don't know how bad it will be yet. So we should still try everything we can to stop ghg emissions and sequester those already in the air.
People more powerful than you can dream with their arms up world government "leaders" asses telling them what to do and say are going to enforce maximum profit at the planet's expense until the apocalyptic day they retreat to the luxury climate bunkers they've been building around the world, look it up, they are. It's not a conspiracy.
Then they'll keep barking orders to keep burning the world for profit remotely from comfort and safety until the last capitalist true believer sycophant on the other end finally tells them to fuck off and die and hangs up, damage done.
It isn't too late because we couldn't, as a species mitigate some of the worst effects with concerted, global effort. It's too late because the egotistical, sociopathic world oligarchs that own you and I in every practical way have zero interest in the survival of our species after they've left the stage of life, and they'll play this planet like a harp from hell for every fucking nickel until they literally, physically can't. It was always a con, our oligarchs are just the snake oil salesmen of yore, they conned their way into conquest, and the damage or "externalities" they cause has never and will never make them lose a second of sleep.
And we the peasants will go along, afraid stopping them will inturrupt the flow of our pathetic subsistence opiates like social media, fast food, literal opiates, etc.
I'll be honest friend, I am so tired of that expression. People say it, and nothing happens ever.
There are people doing this. We know who they are, where are they are, and they're literally outnumbered millions to one.
Yet we will do nothing, because of 2 things:
from Kindergarten through schools of economics through all major media they own, they've trained any receptive peasants that their way is the only correct way. Capitalism is human nature. Greed doesn't exist, only "rational self-interest." if you give the owners everything they'll piss it back on you. On and fucking on. And unfortunately most peasants are effectively propagandized into this mindset against their own interests. And when that doesn't work...
fear of losing access to our subsistence opiates. We can't revolt and hang the profiteers destroying the planet, social media will go down, fast food restaurants will close, my favorite drama series might not come back!
When there's a meaningful group of people assembling to eat the rich, I'll be there with bells on, but only if it's there to do more than protest in a designated protest zone with a city permit out of the owner's line of sight.
Until then, "eat the rich" is just a sad reminder to me of how well defeated and compliant we are in the face of for profit Armageddon. Eat the rich? Sir, they're literally consuming this planet. The rich are eating us, right this very second.
Hear hear. I, too, am tired of that phrase, but the recent rounds of unionization and indictments of the powerful few give me hope that the gullible boomer generation, who believed all of their shit because of their selfishness, are either dying or are being replaced. I think it's only going to get larger and more organized the more we're pushed to the extremes.
It might be too late to stop the train from derailing, but their normal placations and lies aren't working on the newer gens. We know America is not the bastion of freedom and liberty our forebearers fawned over and ate up from the capitalists. We have eyes and critical thinking and they've taken everything from us.
The more people that realize how pointless money is, how debt is as fake as George Santos' gold medals, and the rich only hold that title because we believe it, the more they will reap the consequences of their actions.
While everything you say is true, it’s not all scornful.
Some folks work 8-16hrs a day and if they don’t, their child will cry in hunger, the lights get shut off, and immediate needs get difficult.
It’s not all about TV and fast food, it’s about the bottom layer or two of Maslow’s Heirarchy.
It’s why we had riots post George Floyd. People had time (off work) alongside an unemployment check (no scorn as I type that, just laying out some of the contributing variables that made it so.). Hell, lack of social interaction may have brought folks out to where other people were as well.
The root reason can be noble as fuck, but without the right set of circumstances that allows for some assurance of not losing job, roof, health care and such, it ain’t happening, at least not to any effective scale.
"While everything you say is true, it’s not all scornful.Some folks work 8-16hrs a day and if they don’t, their child will cry in hunger, the lights get shut off, and immediate needs get difficult."
I consider those children hostages to our oligarchs and our corrupt, rigged global economy that causes or exacerbates most social ills.
If you give the hostage takers what they want, staying the course and making them their money, they'll simply take more hostages as their former hostages become compliant capital batteries. That's surviving, not living. At some point, if you don't want most humans to live in a state of perpetual servitude, we must acknowledge that to end this cycle, innocents will die, and that blood is on the hostage taker's hands, not the hands of those that wanted their children to have a chance to be more than capital batteries for the owners, if the climate disaster they also caused for profit hasn't killed us yet.
But as I have said repeatedly, we will keep giving the hostage takers what they want, and pathetically thank them for the privilege. There can be no hope as long as the most provably greedy human beings are also the humans that lead entire world governments and the species around by the nose. There is NO EVENTUALITY where we convince these people to share or slow down their profit. You'd sooner turn lead into gold with a laser pointer than get Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk/Warren Buffett to do something truly selfless.
"Or we just give up and die because the solution involves money."
That is a falsehood. One you're conditioned to propagate. The solution would involve rejecting profit and the infinite growth capitalism requires in favor of homeostatsis with this world. Growing our own food and resources locally, re-establishing bartering instead of capital currency to revaluate things that matter, food/medicine/construction supplies, instead of things that don't, useless plastic/shiny metal junk, as we do now. abandoning consumerism for things we don't need to survive and prosper.
We won't do that, but that would be the available solution. We will instead stay the course, and buy the latest oligarch snake oil like planetary scale carbon filter vaporware they're trying to sell governments, just like "clean coal" and "natural" ethanol as solutions before it.
The capitalists dooming us all will continue to sell us the newest "solution" to the problems they cause, all the way into oblivion.
Is this why you put externalities in quotes? What you're calling an available solution is a massive prisoner's dilemma - whoever goes first is worse off.
I'm not saying its something our species would ever be willing to do, put the needs of the species over how do I get a better deal than other humans/what's in it for ME?
I'm saying its what we should be doing. Selfishness, at the end of the day, is the very reason we're doomed by our own hands though.
There is no long term eventuality where humanity survives AND continues to sanction greed, our most destructive, darkest impulse. At least someone who hurts others out of hatred cared about who they hurt and how they hurt them in some way. Insatiable greed treats its victims as nameless speed bumps to glorious acquisition.
Someone taking more than they need in front of other humans should be treated with the same revulsion and consequences as pedophilia imho. Again, that won't happen. We are doomed, after all.
That's what I was referring to as "give up and die".
If it can't work with the humans that exist, then it's not an actual solution, or even valid economics for that matter. There's been a lot of research into externalities and how to address them.
subsistence opiates like social media, fast food, literal opiates, etc.
I would argue they've had complete control long before all of that. No, humanity is inherently flawed when it comes to considering the collective good.
If you are like me and believe on a macro scale all of humanity is only an extension of a universal cosmic nature than hamanity isnt really flawed. No more flawed than when, say, a leaf falls from a tree only to become dirt again.
If it's any consolation I believe humanity can defy its own nature. I just haven't seen a lot of that, lately.
I think however, the problem is more that everybody wants to solve climate change, as long as it doesm't cost them anything.
And since big companies and banks are the only ones with enough money to make a significant difference, climate change will only be solved by having cost-competitive clean sources of energy. Which we have.