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Disaster is nearing. Mass displacement. Mass starvation. Mass death. It is all imminent. Do you understand?
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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The memes of the climate
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Maybe someone needs to give the memo to these assholes, eh?
https://www.science.org/content/article/just-90-companies-are-blame-most-climate-change-carbon-accountant-says
It's not oil companies that burn the oil they pump, it's their customers. I know it's easy and convenient to point the fingers at this shitty industry and shift all the blame to them, but it's also not how we can solve the problem.
...And that's why we should be busting street dealers never direct out outrage at the kingpins providing the fentanyl! It's in no way their fault that people are dying!
/s, just in case.
If fentanyl disappeared overnight we would all be better. If oil disappears overnight we are all dead.
You don't solve global warming with simplistic analogies and "oil companies are responsible for everything"
No we wouldn't be
Good luck producing enough food, water and other essentials while suddenly cutting all oil production. The entire world's agriculture relies on oil and gas for fertilizers, machinery, transportation and sometimes cold storage.
Plastics aren't even that old, it really is quite doable.
Over several decades maybe. Overnight definitely not.
There's a multitude of issues that individual citizens have a very hard time solving or getting around.
In the majority of the US (and the world, really) people have to own cars to get from A to B in order to survive (which coincidentally means we're spending untold billions on the infrastructure to support that habit, at the cost of the liveable environment and citizens wallets, whether they drive or not).
Changing that is an enormous undertaking that will require an equally huge societal shift. In a culture where the car is the obvious choice it is next to impossible to get citizens to see that that choice is fucking them, and I'm sure Big Oil won't ever do anything to change that perception because it will hit their bottom line. So unless you move to a city where you can live without a car and still have the (positive) freedom to go where you need to be you will need to vote and write your congressman to make it possible for you to live without the yoke that is the car.
So yes, citizens burn gasoline because they must do so in order to afford a living. Further, as an aside, if people made the amount of money congruent with their productivity then maybe they wouldn't have to commute so much in order to have a roof over their head and food on the table. We could relax production and increase leisure time. Maybe. I'm just some dumb cunt.
I fully agree - it is a systemic problem (which is why I'm pointing out just singling out oil companies is misguided).
But I wouldn't go as far as making consumers simple victims of that system: we all also do choices that prioritize selfishness or instant gratification too. The number of pickup trucks in America that are used as one-person commuter is an obvious example - Americans could massively cut their gasoline consumption if they drove the same vehicles Japanese or Europeans chose. (and it's not like those live a life of poverty and sacrifice)
You say that as if we weren't massively subsidizing them, both directly and indirectly (e.g. by subsidizing the roads the cars that use their products drive on). You think that artificially-low price doesn't have a massive impact on demand?
But again that's not Exxon that is subsidizing roads or building cars, or forcing Americans to buy the biggest truck they can find. The issue is more complicated than "whoever pumps the oil out of the ground is liable for whatever happens to it afterwards"
It's not about who's fault it is; it's about where to apply the policy leverage to obtain the correct behavior. I don't give a fuck if Exxon is entirely blameless (and to be clear, they aren't); the correct solution is still regulating Exxon.
The notion that the only way we could ever possibly consider trying to solve the problem is by cajoling the public to change their human nature, because regulating a few corporations (that only exist as a goddamn privilege in the first place, by the way!) is somehow off-limits, is 100% pro-fossil-fuel-industry disinformation.
But it's not! The correct solution is to kill the demand for oil.
It's not Exxon that burns the oil they extract, it's the entire economy and consumers that buy it from them. You can regulate Exxon all you want, that won't change anything about that demand and the burning.
And the very first step in that is pricing it correctly.