> As we've seen with Russian propaganda efforts, the firehose of falsehoods can be extremely effective at keeping people in the dark or convincing them of something not in their best interest. People demanding a shift requires education around the topic, and Exxon literally prevented research on the topic from coming out for decades.

We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.

> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.

And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.

> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.

We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.

Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.