Decades of disinformation by fossil fuels halted US climate policy
npr.org
npr.org
They were looking for their own bonuses, it's laughable that so much egoistic behavior is sold as "we are just doing our work"
> Two names likely to come up at the hearing are Charles and David Koch, the conservative petrochemical magnates. They have poured millions of dollars into efforts to discredit the science of climate change.
People like these would be held accountable for their in bad faith actions. They damaged all the world just for profit, thieves in the streets get ready more for much much less.
What about holding the people who actually buy the products accountable? The Koch fortune originates from gasoline. That fortune would not be able to be amassed, and their influence would not have spread, if it were not for people driving. If you drive around, you are complicit.
Turning around & asking, why weren't we holding consumers accountable for their purchases, when they are being actively manipulated & lied to, is not particularly high in my rank of questions to drill into & explore.
but i hope just lying alone is a fairly big no no for most marketters; i for one believe in a society with ethics. there's probably some laws regulating consumer disinformation too, icd wager; certainly i'd expect it to open up the liar to liability lawsuits.
and it's not just consumers, everyone was bilked by these lying disinformationing Captain Planet grade villians. government policies were influenced & made based off research these folks paid to shape. the media told different stories. ultimately i actually agree: we all are accountable. one of those responsibilities is identifying the lying liars trying to set the world's pants afire. and stopping them from hurting the planet & society.
It's impossible to exist in modern society without using fossil fuels. Come on my dude.
There's a massive middle ground between "attempting to exist in modern society without using fossil fuels" and ignoring any personal accountability for willfully over-relying on fossil fuels to do things like drive half a mile to the neighbors.
However, it may be more productive to start with those who chose to and were actively engaged in misrepresenting the facts and science and lying to all the suckers who were essentially forced to buy the products they were selling to be able to participate in the economy.
"The coal industry has been shrinking in West Virginia for decades. But Manchin himself made nearly $500,000 last year from investments in the state's coal sector. He also raised $400,000 in campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies in the third quarter of this year, as he questioned the need for the CEPP. Manchin is the top recipient in Congress of donations from the oil and gas industry."
On top of this, I think we have a huge problem with the Senate. The representation is terribly skewed, giving far too much weight to rural people. We need to break up the big states or something.
This has been applied in the past with terrible consequences. The founding fathers developed the House and Senate to avoid a majority dictatorship.
How does lowering the support threshold for total political control, as long as the faction seeking control is disproportionately distributed in smaller (and/or more effective at disenfranchising those outside the faction) states do that?
It doesn't. It just makes dominance of a particular interest group, even with a majority, harder, while making dominance of the diametrically opposed group, even if it only has a minority, easier. (If the representational skew of the different bodies was opposite, it might do what you suggest, but both houses (and the electoral college) are, by design, biased in the same direction with different strengths.
The check on tyranny of the majority, beyond notional defense of rights, is that the representation of the House vs the Senate differ from each other and so agreement between them (and especially a durable agreement between them) probably means more than "mere" majority support.
Obviously that property can't be preserved while also making both bodies representative. It would be nice, however, if they were centered around "representative", differing in opposite directions rather than differing in overweighting the same voters a little vs a lot. I've toyed around with that a little but don't have a concrete proposal (... much less one that would get anywhere).
I don't have a concrete proposal either, but can I throw some ideas?
Among the 3 branches of the Government, the judicial one is the only technocratic one. We can try to replace the Senate with another technocratic body, some sort of "Council of Elders". I'm not sure how you'd determine the qualifications, so my idea is far from fully baked.
The opposite direction would be a lottery. Juries are a form of democracy based on lottery. For example, if the House proposes a bill, instead of the Senate having to agree on it, one could subject it to some type of "trial", where you'd have a "Constitutional" judge presiding, and a jury. The judge might be a Supreme Court justice, and would have to explain various aspects of the Constitution to the jury. There would be advocates (maybe from the House?) that represent both the case for and against the law, but finally the determination whether the law should be allowed to be sent to the President for signing should be done by the jury.
Obviously this proposal has between zero and nil chances of ever becoming reality, but I think at least in theory it's not really absurd.
As an example of the sort of compensation I meant, a potential proposal (which I'm not actually making but which gives the sense of what I mean) would be to leave the Senate alone but give each State representation in the House such that the total number of representatives across both chambers is (as close as practical to) proportional. This would mean the Senate would be undemocratic in its current direction, but the house would be undemocratic in precisely the opposite direction (in terms of the weights of individual votes, not necessarily in terms of policy), while the President would be chosen (approximately) democratically and overall the system shouldn't lean one way or the other.
In particular, there are a number of responsibilities assigned to the House of Representatives with the justification (at least notionally) that it is the more... well... representative body. If we make it - of itself - less representative, then we should consider those duties in turn, whether that original justification is well motivated and still important, and whether that should push us to move them elsewhere or change their form.
There are doubtless other things that need thinking through, but that's a potentially meaty source of them that comes readily to mind.
The problem with this theory is that while they differ, they don't have opposing bias (and the electoral college combines their biases, so the bias in the Presidency also doesn't oppose the electoral bias of either House or Senate. Which is why (with the present ideological configuration of the parties) Republicans outperform their popular vote share in the House, and the Senate, and the Electoral College; aligned bias does not inhibit total domination by the majority, it enables it (or even domination by the minority) in the direction of the bias.
Now, ignoring the aligned bias in those institutions, one thing that works against dominance by a transiently electorally advantaged faction is the electoral calendar. While the House is elected every two years and the Presidendy every four, only 1/3 of the Senate turns is chosen every two years.
The “good behavior” tenure of federal judges and the high Constitutional bar for removal (2/3 of the Senate) also serves this purpose ideally, though it has a failure mode that can instead increase the reach of a transitory political dominance, depending on timing of appointments.
I think the theory still holds, in that we see different results than if all of these bodies were picked with the same skewed representation at whatever the appropriately weighted average skew would be to match the existing "overall bias".
This, of course, very much depends on the exact scope of what we mean by "the theory"; I would limit it to a statement that distance between who is represented by various government bodies can have a moderating influence and that this can be positive and important. I agree it can be overstated and in particular that it doesn't fully (or nearly) compensate for the biases in the present system.
You are very much correct to bring up differing terms and term lengths as another moderating influence over time.
The only path I see going forward is waiting until climate change related disasters are extremely bad (loss of life on par or worse than COVID-19 in US/EU, every year, for probably a decade); then we will see massive government investment into carbon capture/sequestration (probably run by the oil/gas giants who caused this). This is what the world looks like in an age of regulatory capture.
Climate change is too gradual for that to happen. We will adapt faster than the mean temperature rises.
The greatest tragedy is climate will continue changing for some time after we take real action. And there is no obvious limit to the damage until we do take real action.
By the time we do take real action, on all the compounding problems (degradation of the oceans, deforestation, etc.) we may be left with only hard choices of what to mitigate at terrible cost, but no viable complete solution to a massive painful drop in human population.
I think the responsibility is shared here. Middle classes in developed countries are high CO2 emitters and aren't willing to change their ways of life, even though they are well aware of the problem.
But since our government organs and parties act as intermediaries, there are severe and opaque bottlenecks in the power chain that middle classes have little chance of controlling - without setting up an entirely separate but just as pervasive means of cooperating. Not likely without near 90% popular agreement.
When powerful interests interfere and disrupt coordinated efforts to solve a problem, it is their moral burden. Not the average persons.
The problem is our system has no mechanisms of systematic accountability for widespread public misinformation campaigns, or limits to political influence hampering progress.
I get the distinct impression some of them are planning on it happening, and their plans will be disrupted if it doesn't.
> then we will see massive government investment into carbon capture/sequestration
I rather suspect instead we will see massive investment in protection for the politically connected.
Look at how things have gone historically in nations in decline - you don't get more consensus building and egalitarianism. Now repeat that when there's no sane nations left to immigrate to, because everyone went hard-xenophobe.
Climate change ---> rising seas ---> ??? ---> BILLIONS DEAD
Can we not do this? Climate change is a serious concern. Divining billions of deaths from the tea leaves is unserious and makes the issue of climate change seem unserious.
It's not about the global survivability of the climate - it's what the shock will do to our own delicate social ecosystem. "Every society is three meals away from chaos".
The vast majority of our food comes from a small number of domesticated sources which aren't all that reliant on the 'fragile web'. 50% of plant food calories come from only corn, rice, and wheat. We only eat a handful of domesticated animals and fish. Is climate change going to kill off corn? Are chickens going to go extinct?
Clearly ecosystem collapse and mass extinction would be an absolute catastrophe--but we don't hunt and gather for calories, we farm and ranch. There is no indication that climate change is going to render us unable to feed ourselves.
> We're seeing supply chain disruptions already, just from our own internal failure to get our shit together.
These supply chain disruptions have nothing to do with climate change, and to my knowledge they have not resulted in a single missed meal, let alone mass starvation. Probably because we're capable of triage--the most important stuff gets shipped first!
> Are you really so confident globalized society can shrug off flooded cities... and entire countries being rendered uninhabitable?
When Katrina hit New Orleans, a million people evacuated overnight. During the Syrian civil war, millions of refugees were willingly absorbed into Europe. This year, the US is on pace to absorb ~2 million illegal immigrants. We as a society handle flash migration events on a regular basis. The changes that will occur due to climate change won't happen overnight--they'll happen over many decades. There is no reason to assume that billions die because of mass migrations. Mass migrations happen all the time, and we handle them just fine.
> Are you really so confident globalized society can shrug off... failing crops
These changes won't happen overnight, either. People are perfectly capable of adapting to changes in climate--we've been doing it for 10,000 years. And now we have read/write access to the genomes of our staple crops!
> Are you really so confident globalized society can shrug off... dwindling fish stocks
Fish are one of many sources of protein--they're not a staple. Dwindling fish stocks and even extinctions are likely, but nobody will starve due to a lack of access to fish.
In summary, climate change will wreak havoc, sure. But the floor will not become lava overnight. We know what's coming, we have the ability to adapt, and we will.
If pollinators die it's over. And it will be far too late fix the problem.
It's basically an IQ test, and at the moment the species is far too dumb to pass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNFBjcrU5Pc [10 mins]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v1Yg6XejyE [9 mins]
I found these to be a fascinating glimpse behind the scene of "political debate" about environmental issues...
Oh I misspoke. Let’s eat the kids from the developing nations. Far more civilized.