> so a few oil countries can squish some extra money
so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
so none of the users of those oil, who paid for it willingly, had any responsibility at all then?
But, when it comes to oil production what I would say is that due to the overlapping geography of the foundation and consequent spread of Islam and largest and easiest to extract oil resources in the world being very large combined with human tendency to overfit pattern matching that it is all too easy to see why some would conflate the two.
But Islamic majority nations aren't the only "oil countries", and not all "oil countries" are corrupt (but I'd guess the overwhelming majority of "oil countries" are corrupt, not least because of Dutch Disease).
I'm aware that there are non Islamic "oil countries" of course and I don't think the GP comment was equating oil with Islam. It's just something that does happen in other contexts and that we should be aware of when speaking, because there are very real real would consequences.
In the 1980s, as a child, I remember learning at school about the greenhouse effect, or whatever we called it then. It was not difficult to understand, and neither was the 'nuclear umbrella' that we also had to contend with.
In the mid 1990s I was working in TV weather. We self-censored ourselves regarding global warming, or whatever we called it then. None of us were paid by big oil.
The euphemisms for 'climate change' tell their own story, it seems we need to downgrade the wording for the inevitable catastrophe every decade or so, I think we are on 'climate emergency' now.
As a result of what I learned in school, I genuinely adopted a low-carbon lifestyle which was quite hard to do when everyone was going the other way. If you step inside a car (when you have chosen to not own one) then you are deemed a hypocrite. If you don't eat those cows that create so much methane then you will be called a hypocrite for owning a leather belt. If you read a book then you will be called a hypocrite since trees had to be pulped. Be green and those stuck in the past will get all passive aggressive on you even if you aren't preaching to others.
When all is done we could collectively blame the oil companies for obfuscating the evidence of climate change. Similarly, when all is done with the current genocides going on, we can blame the politicians or the media for not letting us know the truth. Yet we are all a few clicks away from seeing how our alleged enemies 'report our crimes'. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, we censor ourselves.
Care to elaborate what you were doing?
When the adverts that go with the weather are for the likes of Land Rover or British Airways, you know the deal.
As for colours, we had those graphic designers that wanted to do their own 'mark' on the product, so the maps made by them were artist impressions with stupid colours such as blue for land and yellow for the sea. This makes things difficult if the animated gifs for the icons use yellow and blue, for things like the sun and the rain and it is your job to encode those gifs. That one was resolved by sacking the designer and making base maps the more scientific way, with AVHRR vegetation index, a bathymetry dataset and so on.
You would not believe the battles that have to be had to have maps that are fit for purpose rather than 'graphic designed'.
Other mundane tasks included setting the clocks at 2 a.m. twice a year, which would be easy, had it not been for the clocks costing £40k each, with them paired up for redundancy, and that pair paired-up for even more redundancy.
The clocks worked fine, however,timings could move around during the changeover from summer time since the clocks try and correct themselves. Change one and the other clocks would gang up on it and it would acquiesce. Costing £40k the clocks obviously did not show the time as that would be too obvious, there was just the timecode on wires going around the building. Then the only way to adjust them was to solder your own lead, plug it into a laptop and then telnet in.
As for deception, look at weather forecasting as more like gambling. Forecasters have gambling mentality and a very different way of understanding the weather to mere mortals. The behind the scenes chat on a daily basis is what you want, not the forecast. You get the bigger picture listening in to their chats.
I’ve converted my car to run on renewable wood pellets, stop moaning start fixing.
It’s all about individual choice, the oil companies are simply responding to demand.
My next step is to build a railway through our local high street so I can decarbonise my commute.
Take responsibility for your own actions, stop expecting governments to do everything for you. The oil companies aren’t the problem, you are.
And have you seen how hydrogen burns or how easy it is to trigger an explosion? I wouldn’t live anywhere near a “jerry rigged” hydrogen storage facility.
Personally, I've largely replaced my car usage with walking and biking, installed insulation in uninsulated parts of my home, got more comfortable with less heating/cooling (sweaters and fans), and am planning to upgrade to a heat pump when the time comes.
It's good to live your values without falling into scrupulosity, both for yourself and others.
- Ecologists and native-right defenders being killed in many countries.
- Politicians being paid off by corporations to fight against wind and solar energy.
- Newspapers paid to mislead the public.
But you blame the guys that cannot make ends meet and buys the only thing that they can afford.
Stop blaming the victims. This is something that needs to be solved at the state level, blaming citizens for the crimes of oil producers is false, morally wrong and unproductive.
To blame others than the oil producing companies that bribe politicians and lie to the public is just a stalling tactic to continue destroying the world while most people is actually trying to stop that destruction.
> Take for example this distribution of age at death in Sweden in 1900. You will see, that in 1900, life expectancy was 52 years. However, the median age at death (the age above and below 50% of the population die respectively) is 63 years. Although the life expectancy is only 52 years, an individual has thus a chance of 50% to live past 63 years. Thus, if you went across a Swedish graveyard from 1900 (I'm not sure if the data relates to people born in 1900, or mortality data from 1900, but this is not the point of my comment), you would see that more than half reached an age past 60 years. (https://old.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/zzy2bh/no_avera...)
Antibiotics weren't widespread until after WWII, as were most of the vaccines we currently consider standard.
Medicine as a whole is an astounding example of diminishing returns to innovation.