this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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Fossil fuels are the main actors in this. Corporations can only use the energy we provide them with.
Fossil fuel producers will never pay damages for climate change due to political donations. You may get the odd instance now and again, where there is selective scapegoating and that will be that. The tobacco industry (AFAIK) has never paid for the damages they have caused. They poured billions into politics and offset the argument against them for decades. Fossil fuel companies are doing exactly the same thing.
So rather than finger point towards specific actors, we should be sorting our political systems out. Political donations need to be banned. Campaigns should only be allowed to run through a single channel that is funded by the country. All other types of political advertising should be stopped. It is well known that the most successful campaigns have a price tag attached. Therefore it is easy to buy votes with campaigns. Moreso in a FPTP system. While we allow political donations we will never stop egregious profiteering without consequences.
People need to make a conscious effort to buy less shit. It's easy to blame corpos but we create that demand.
If it doesn't solve a problem you have, you don't need it.
Or we could create enough green energy to satisfy that demand. I totally agree that we have a social problem with greed. This is not something any government will fix because more taxes makes their live easier. Fight the battles you can win, not the ones you can't.
We don't have time to spin up enough infrastructure to match current production with renewable energy. Consumption must come down until then, and only scale up once the new infrastructure can handle it.
Not according to some.
No you cannot do it overnight, but it will never happen at if we do not start. The first step is to stop giving money to fossil fuel companies so they can gouge us further with higher priced energy.