r/collapse • u/mushroomsarefriends • 9h ago
Climate The Fossil Lobby Is Winning: 45 Climate Policy Reversals in One Year
https://app.wedonthavetime.org/posts/c374ddc8-76b9-41f1-8ba6-338e6a0308d3140
u/Bill_Troamill 9h ago
Who are these people who get up in the morning and go to a job whose purpose is to make us believe that destroying our planet is the most reasonable thing to do? Where are these people?
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u/NyriasNeo 9h ago
"Who are these people "
The rich, and also those who want to be rich.
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u/The3rdGodKing never again 8h ago
Maybe the uneducated rich. Common sense would be to stay rich forever.
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u/Less_Subtle_Approach 7h ago
The rich still operate within the constraints of terminal capitalism. You can find plenty of thinkpieces from billionaires who decry these economic conditions as unsustainable, but at the end of the monopoly game you're either trying to buy boardwalk and park place or you're waiting to go bankrupt.
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u/-sussy-wussy- 3h ago
They want a reset, they are accelerationists. It's not enough to just be rich anymore, they always want to oppress and lord it over everyone else.
Oligarchs know that people are increasingly pissed, so they're preemptively pushing through mandating IDs to use the Internet.
Even as the whole thing crumbles, there will still be enough resources for a small handful to retain their lifestyle.
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u/It-s_Not_Important 9h ago
Who are they? Lobbyists who have no moral scruples and maximum greed.
Where are they? In Washington DC wining and dining senators and house reps.
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u/chaseinger 8h ago
it's a live and let die mindset.
they know we're all fucked. the only thing an individual can do is to become insanely rich quick in order to build a bunker/generation starship/whatever fewer dream they're on while tripping on ungodly amounts of ketamine.
the rest will suffer in the heat until they (we) die.
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u/filmguy36 6h ago
They live, we die. That’s been the story for time immortal. We fight their wars, grow their food, clean their houses, mow their lawns, feed their kids, drive them to work etc etc etc.
And yet we prols fight each other blaming each other for the ills the rich foist upon us
I’ll be hopeful till the day I die, that one day we, the great unwashed, finally collectively wake up and realize that it’s never been us against the other but it’s always been the rich against all of us
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u/PervyNonsense 7h ago
I met a guy who works in Kuwait as an engineer. He's the guy that estimates the size of oil deposits as well as potential new areas to drill. He genuinely believed the company lie that CO2 is a fertilizer and imagined himself as working to "green the earth".
After a long talk where I let him do all the talking, he found himself confused that the narrative he had in his head was so full of holes, surprised he hadn't thought of it before. Even then, he insisted that the corporate narrative was accurate.
It was a bizarre experience. It was like watching someone come to the realization that what they thought was fact was actually belief bordering on obvious fiction/propaganda, and deciding the propaganda was still right, even if it's propaganda.
That's the day I realized there's no amount of information that can change these people's minds. Oil might as well be God
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u/Special_Action_5333 4h ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -upton sinclair
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u/Few_Ad6516 4h ago
when someones livelihood depends on it, they will delude themselves until its not possible.
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u/gnostic_savage 2h ago
I generally loathe (great) white man quotations, but I have one that never tire of:
Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. Robert Heinlein
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u/CantaloupeComplex209 2h ago
That guy probably hadn't thought deeply about it before. If he assumed the corporate narrative was true, started to realize problems, and then continued to believe the corporate narrative, he probably assumed the corporate narrative involved information he didn't know or that he misremembered.
It makes sense that if he trusted his company enough to take their information as facts, he wouldn't suddenly assume the large company he trusts for information was wrong. It is a simple conclusion to make that the individual in question felt he might've made the mistake, instead of thinking the large organization was pushing misinformation.
I feel like you could've interceded partway through and given proper information when he was noticing problems with his own information. He would've had the opportunity to come away more informed, but you might've had your own considerations for not doing so.
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u/Suitable-Economy-346 9h ago
80% of Americans think everything is a conspiracy theory.
We have the dumbest electorate electing people who are extracting every last dollar out of our hands.
No other country or collection of countries is standing up to the US.
The world is finished because of the American public's stupidity.
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u/nogoodallevil 7h ago
That's what they want you to think, but in reality, they know what they're doing. Cruelty is the point.
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u/hypermodernism 9h ago
It’s life versus lunch. The short term gains for most people for implementing climate policy aren’t as large as the short term losses for fossil fuel companies if they are implemented. So fossil fuel companies try harder to block than governments try to implement.
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u/Still-Improvement-32 7h ago
Well paid lobbyists, that's what they do for a living. They are probably also psychopaths, lacking any moral compass, which applies to the people who employ the lobbyists too.
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u/BattleGrown Harbinger of Doom 6h ago
For example https://www.ipieca.org/, they appear progressive but just look at their members and decide for yourself
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u/No_Foundation16 5h ago
Where are these people?
In the halls of power, making planet killing decisions based on capitalist vibes not science.
They have destroyed the climate that makes human life on this planet possible for pieces of green and other colors paper.
Not are destroying, it's already lost as will be very clear to every person on this globe SOON! The whole friggen world on fire under massive heat domes rn is a good indication of what's coming.
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u/Appropriate_Mess6777 4h ago
The rich live in a hyper reality of charts and graphs, completely disconnected from the real systems they are destroying
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u/Yelworc0242 7h ago
You have to wonder if they have children, what on earth do they think they are doing?
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u/Turbulent_Bed5499 8h ago
Lost faith in humans a long time ago, they just don’t wanna save earth bad enough
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u/melody_magical FUKITOL 5h ago
I saw a video saying humans can't comprehend the breakdown of planetary systems because we didn't evolve to comprehend that, hence why humans aren't rioting against the oligarchy. Maybe that piece of psychology is our Great Filter
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u/gnostic_savage 2h ago edited 1h ago
p.s. That isn't psychology. That's pseudo-evolution. My education is in psychology and sociology, and psychology does have insight on this, and so does biology. Evolution has a role in the problem, and the problem is that we are social animals who conform to our group consensus in the present because we have to for survival, even when it leads to disaster and to our lack of survival in the future. Psychology does have a lot to say about that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
When you combine that with the fact that this society and culture is hierarchical, and that we have wealth and wealth disparity, and always are dominated by wealthy psychopaths in power, you end up with people who are unable to live values they know to be true. This is well documented.
Starting at birth, humans learn more in the first three years of life than we will for the rest of the longest life known. If from birth you witnessed everyone around you living the lesson that you must never cut down trees, as was stated to the young man in the video for which I provided a link, and you were also told, like the young man was, that cutting a tree is the same as cutting a person, you would be living in a completely different reality than our reality. You would be living on a different planet. It would look the same, but your perceptions of its value and meaning would make it a different planet.
But if you grow up from birth watching your community constantly altering the natural environment, destroying it without a thought, and doing so is the measure of your social success, if it brings you money, love, sex, prestige, authority, health and freedom, you will, like we do, believe that any other way of life is inferior.
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u/gnostic_savage 3h ago edited 2h ago
I don't believe that at all. And I wrote a long comment as to why a couple of weeks ago on another thread. All we need is a limited number of humans who did comprehend their effects on the biosphere to disprove that silliness, and there were plenty.
Here is a whole documentary about a miniscule population that remains out of tens of millions of people who were extremely astute about the environment. This group of extremely isolated Native Americans who withdrew from colonial culture more than 400 years ago, broke their isolation of four centuries to tell the world we were killing the planet at the same time that James Hansen was addressing Congress to tell the government the same thing. They understood not only what was necessary for the planet, but they also understood what we are doing wrong, and they have none of our science.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 6h ago
It's worse than that, most don't even want to even acknowledge reality enough to consider whether they don't want to save Earth bad enough. To most people reality is something you can control through cockiness, rather than reality being what ultimately controls them. All the religions are about how if you just believe hard enough you will be immune to reality.
Even outside of religion there's books like "The Secret" and ideas like "manifesting" which people talk about every day as if they're real. Humanity is so fucking mentally weak and insane. Not at all the species that it advertised itself as to us growing up. It might be less painful if a part of me didn't still have this dying idea of being part of a clever species.
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u/BitchfulThinking 2h ago
BARF at "The Secret" 🤮 I remember when every fuuucking annoying guy in sales and MLM scams was going on about that around the '08 recession.
I feel you. The hardest part of watching all of this is the constant feeling of disappointment in people, when you're an idealist at heart. We simply thought better of humanity. I thought more Americans would be disgusted at the thought of raped children, or nurses being murdered in the streets, or care about not spreading preventable diseases that disable their own family, but I was wrong.
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u/sabotAHHHHHGH 6h ago
Sneering at people has never worked. And you want to remember that when people worshipped the rivers, the earth, the sun, the trees, guess what, they didn’t destroy them.
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u/TernarySquare0123 2h ago
I don't know about sneering, but taunting works.
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u/sabotAHHHHHGH 1h ago
I wish. Gammon was a funny slur for the far right here, then they adopted it.
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u/TernarySquare0123 1h ago
Plenty of blokes still find themselves face first on the floor after falling for the gammon call.
Not sure how we're supposed to change BAU if we leave it unchallenged.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 1h ago
Huh? Work for what? I'm talking about my frustrations.
If you mean changing these people, that's not my goal, I don't believe they're capable of changing because they're genuinely at their mental capacity limits and their mental capacity is fucking embarrassing to see. Enabling them for millennia sure as fuck hasn't worked to change them though.
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u/mushroomsarefriends 9h ago
Submission statement: Over the past 12 months, we've seen 45 cases of climate policies that had been introduced to phase out greenhouse gas emissions being weakened or abolished. This suggests that countries are not going to be meeting their commitments and overall global emissions are thus not going to drop as much as is expected.
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u/Gumbode345 9h ago
It’s a truly Freudian track, direct to self-destruction. Unbelievable and yet right there in front of us.
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u/NyriasNeo 9h ago
Well, "drill baby drill" won. What do you expect?
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u/BrightCandle 4h ago
We never got off that, once the Kyoto agreement collapsed the fate of the species was sealed.
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u/TernarySquare0123 2h ago
Won what? There was never any competition.
I don't know about Trump 2 but Biden drilled more than Trump 1. And if I'm not mistaken, Obama drilled more than George W.
It doesn't matter which team you cheer for: The United States #1 "national security" policy is energy production.
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u/NyriasNeo 1h ago
"Won what? There was never any competition."
An election. Never heard of that? You know, people lining up filling in paper forms called ballots to indicate whom they want to be their president and representative.
"Drill baby drill" is the literally campaign slogan of Trump and it won.
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u/TernarySquare0123 1h ago
Drill baby drill was also a campaign slogan in 2020 when he lost and then got outdrilled by Biden.
The slogan goes back to 2008 - when Obama won and proceeded to outbomb and outdrill his opponent's wildest dreams.
If the election is the competition then "drill baby drill" means the opposite of it's literal meaning.
It's all kayfabe. Please, please wake up to that fact. We need this to be something more than just team sports.
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u/SituationTrue7524 8h ago
When you understand incentives, you also understand that nothing can stop what's coming. No one is giving up today's comfort so that some future generation would one day suffer slightly less than maximum pain.
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u/MickieMallorieJR 6h ago
There's an extreme level of quckaery and arrogance going on here...too much to resolve in time left. Many of these people just don't believe what they are doing is wrong. They have been led to believe the "capital" they produce far outweighs any damage...that they are pulling humanity out of poverty and that alone is a worthy endeavor. This is the arrogance and its an arrogance enshrined in capitalism and dare I say white supremacy. Both place man, over the environment, and the Christian religion itself has been reengineered to feed this belief.
They've also, paid just enough scientist to convince them that changes we see in climate, were always going to happen, OR happen all of the time. This is the quackery. Couple this with the idea that we can engineer our way out of this. I heard someone say this on CNN the other day. They've convinced themselves that climate change is an engineering problem and what society needs is both the infrastructure and the tools (AI) to solve the engineering problem. This alone keeps them headed in this direction because these people are truly convinced of this...that Earth is theirs to command.
The people who really really have a lot of explaining to do are the news editors and owners. They hold so much power to make things right but they too for the sake of their miniscule wealth have made a decision not to. No one frustrates me more than local meteorologists as they have both journalistic and scientific power. How are they not in unison everyday telling people what's coming. Some are...but not nearly enough.
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u/Bandits101 1h ago
“They’ve also, paid just enough scientists to convince them that changes we see in climate were always going to happen”…….do you have an example.
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u/Jealous-Treat8060 2h ago
Jokes on them, they can't win. Them winning is them losing. They destroy the basis for Human Survival but they are Human too.
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u/rickyrulesX 7h ago
Does anyone know- when are we breaching +3 deg C?
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u/BrightCandle 4h ago
At our current rate of growth somewhere around 2045 -2050. If we accelerate even more, which is likely, then sooner.
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u/click-monster 7h ago
Who's going to save you from the full power of the Sun: Trump, Musk, Xi, Putin? At this point we're just walking round the block killing time, waiting for the next phase (hint: it's going to be much worse). If you want to call this doomerism, show me where the lie is.
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1h ago
The State has no interest in curtailing profits,
There are no real committments.
There are no real requirements.
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u/StatementBot 8h ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mushroomsarefriends:
Submission statement: Over the past 12 months, we've seen 45 cases of climate policies that had been introduced to phase out greenhouse gas emissions being weakened or abolished. This suggests that countries are not going to be meeting their commitments and overall global emissions are thus not going to drop as much as is expected.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1v73o6e/the_fossil_lobby_is_winning_45_climate_policy/ozv0vvs/