Fossil fuel companies are running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy, the UN has said.
Really wish the headline would add in the who.
Free speech is one thing, but if you’re lying for personal gain there should be consequences. Clearly we can’t keep going on this way, especially when it comes to climate.
“fuck them kids!!!”
-big oil
Literally all of the global fossil fuel companies.
What does the World Health Organization have to do with it?
Pollution kills millions every year
There is this prevailing narrative – and a lot of it is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult, it’s too expensive
The thing is, adequately addressing the climate crisis is going to be very difficult and expensive. We should do it anyway, because if we don’t the consequences are likely to be severe, but I don’t think we should lie to people and say it’s going to be cheap and easy. This is going to be hard. Really hard. This is our moonshot, only many times more difficult. But that’s exactly why we should do it.
Somewhere along the line, we turned into a country that is afraid of doing anything too difficult. We used to do things because they were difficult, now we shy away from anything that’s even remotely challenging. Do people remember JFK’s ‘We Choose To Go To The Moon’ speech?
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win
What happened to us? I think I answered my own question: we need leaders who can inspire people to take on incredible challenges. We need someone who will stand up in front of the American people and say, “yes, addressing climate change is going to be hard, and that’s exactly why we are going to do it! We can do it, we must do it, we will do it.”
Late stage capitalism happened to us. Big money saw the writing on the wall as we got smarter and more ambitious and progressive as a people and said “not in my backyard”.
Goddamn, I love that speech every time I hear or read it.
Edit: unsaladed the thing.
we need leaders who can inspire people to take on incredible challenges
great man theory BS. In the 60s we had the profits from postwar economic expansion and a propaganda war/arms race to win against the Soviets. Now we have no such profits, and in fact profits are shrinking across the board, so our society’s major institutions are clinging to them as tightly as possible.
Not only that but the entire Apollo program was about to be scrapped before the CIA fucked up the bay of pigs invasion.
Two days after the Gagarin flight on 12 April, Kennedy discussed once again the possibility of a lunar landing program with Webb, but the NASA head’s conservative estimates of a cost of more than $20 billion for the project was too steep and Kennedy delayed making a decision. A week later, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy called Johnson, who headed the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to the White House to discuss strategy for catching up with the Soviets in space. Johnson agreed to take the matter up with the Space Council and to rec- ommend a course of action. It is likely that one of the explicit programs that Kennedy asked Johnson to con- sider was a lunar landing program, for the next day, 20 April 1961, he followed up with a memorandum to Johnson raising fundamental questions about the proj- ect. In particular, Kennedy asked Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program that promises dramatic results in which we could win?
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sp-4503-apollo.pdf
They needed a win so they pivoted to the space program. Kennedy didn’t approve that program “because it is hard” and he was a great man. He approved it because he was desperate for anything to show some kind of leadership and superiority over the soviets and communism and the space program seemed to have the only thing left.
Don’t get me wrong I think JFK was a great president but people shouldn’t make him out for something he’s not.
There are tons of profits. They are just in the hands of people like Musk/Bezos.
There are, but the rate of their increase declines year over year, causing firms to cling to them with ever more self-sabotaging tactics. Then there’s a crisis, and a collapse - there’s a whole book about this, I highly recommend it.
Again, just not true. From before the pandemic (2019) to now, profits have increased by about 25 percent.
“rate of profit” is not the same thing as “profit”. You would know this if you read the book.
it was a different time. people did things because they were hard because they themselves were harder. they were also teamed together, opposite of now. people use to get worried if the city over got the new jobs, not the country over.
Yeah it’s going to be very expensive. Not nearly as expensive as not doing it, but more immediately expensive. And the longer we hold off the more expensive and difficult it gets and the less resources we’ll have to do it with. We should have taken it seriously before I was born, but we need to now
Is America not the country that claims to be the greatest on earth? Why would we not do this then? Why should we not lead by example and show the world what can be done? This world has done so much for America, it’s time we ask not what the world can do for America but what America can do for the world. And worst case scenario, we get cheaper energy and a cleaner country.
Yep Big meat and dairy is doing the same in the food industry. Fuck those corpos.
Here’s a video about the subject in the US https://youtu.be/hmCvD9KxSB8
You said Big Meat, haha
You don’t say.
There’s a big orange man right now saying wind is fake, and kills whales.
In West Texas, renewable energy has been and will continue to grow like crazy. Nothing is going to be able to stop it.
We’ve reached a few critical tipping points, but there are certainly people trying to put the brakes on the transition as much as possible. 80 percent of solar modules in the world are currently made in China but we just slapped tariffs on them.
I’ve tried to tell people this for years
It also doesn’t help that the USA, one of the biggest polluters of the world, recently instituted massive tariffs on green energy technologies in the name of protecting domestic industry that refuses to price such technologies at levels that would let people afford switching to them.
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