61–70 of 285 posts
ngl, their marketing teams are brilliant. yes, they are destroying the planet, but they certainly succeeded in driving the language/narrative.
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> The latter policy really emphasizes to me that that there are a large number of people who do not want to change their behaviour in any way, and would much rather have a corporate scapegoat to point at. I find this to be a fairly common perspective, when talking to Canadians online; and there's some data to support that it is[0][1]. The truth is that individuals are _hugely_ influential on carbon emissions, and cha…
I don't understand why you would cite Covid lockdowns (a centrally-coordinated government policy) as evidence of individual impact. Is this not an argument against your own point?
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Nobody who travels ‘wants’ to burn oil. Capital decided oil is the most profitable way to deliver that. There was never a point where individual personal consumption habits could have changed this course.
It’s profitable because it’s physically efficient - fossil fuels are readily available and highly energy dense and relatively safe. Nothing else offers that. This isn’t some sneaky capitalist plot - the soviets burned lots of fuel as well. I’m not defending the continued dependence on fossil fuels, but let’s be realistic about how (externalities aside) fossil fuels are very, very good at what they do. The problem is…
Your car or plane can't tell the difference between fossil hydrocarbons and biofuel hydrocarbons. (Though you might adjust a car to use ethanol instead of longer compounds.)
Genuine question to all the anti "Big Oil" commenters here: what's your alternative? Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like? We have known for years that climate change is real, and yet the vast majority of people simply won't actually change their consumption when push comes to shove. This is the largest, most s…
Perhaps we would already apply environmental legislation to CO2 as a pollutant such that carbon intensive industries and products would be more expensive and low carbon products/industry more competitive giving consumers more choice.
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> People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. No, they’re not. > We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
Nope. Consumers knew burning gasoline and diesel created pollution 60 years ago. They could have push for clean alternatives but didnt. Don’t give them a pass.
People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. No point or even value in demonizing these companies — the whole world is complicit.
They call themselves "energy" companies, so where does it matter where that energy comes from? In that perfect world where once they knew early on that the consumption of their product would lead to an uninhabitable planet for future generations (because that's what we're facing now), couldn't they have pivoted (slowly) towards true renewables and battery technology? They could have been the leaders instead of the cu…
Big oil is big because billions of people rely on hydrocarbons for transport, heating their homes, electricity, and many other things. Demonizing "Big Oil" is a way to evade the fact that people are not willing to pay large amounts to stop the world from warming a few degrees.
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> People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. No, they’re not. > We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
Nope. Consumers knew burning gasoline and diesel created pollution 60 years ago. They could have push for clean alternatives but didnt. Don’t give them a pass.
Big oil is big because billions of people rely on hydrocarbons for transport, heating their homes, electricity, and many other things. Demonizing "Big Oil" is a way to evade the fact that people are not willing to pay large amounts to stop the world from warming a few degrees.
Big industry of all sorts routinely tries to manipulate public opinion and the machinery of government to keep itself in business. That goes for big corn as much as big oil, but big oil is the one fucking over the planet.
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If you want to frame this in terms of the demand side, then downsizing all of the PR propagandists would be a great start, along with all the other zero sum jobs. Instead of efficiency gains causing people to work less and consume less resources for the same output, central banks insist on "full employment" stimulus that creates make-work jobs to compensate. And despite their utility being zero-sum, these workers are…
I’ve never heard a complete argument as to how central bank policy makes people want new cars, fancy clothes, or big houses (or tropical and ski vacations)… I think people want those luxuries and (many) are willing to work for them entirely independent of central bank policy.
Consume consume consume! It's good for the economy (if you don't grow exponentially at any environmental cost then you can't keep up with inflation and our economy collapses)