Al Gore Might Have Saved the Climate, If the Country Had Let Him Try
Or Jay Lenno, Bruce Springsteen, any random person.
The point being that our society is being manipulated by politicians who have been bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry.
This whole bullocks around recycling, solar panels on our houses, buying wind power instead of coal power electricity is all fiddling around the edges.
We’ve got billionaires burning more energy than cities, industrial processes tearing up the environment and the big technology businesses have just invented the biggest energy guzzler of all time, “AI”, spearheaded by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and now Apple.
Supreme Court* on the first one.
(Adding my soap box here, not disagreeing with what you said)
Vote with your wallet and habits (and your vote). With the exception of maybe AI, most of those things are produced by the companies because people want them. They’re not just doing it for fun. I realize many of those things are essentials that you can’t readily decline in our society which is where the government regulation would ideally kick in. (And if it doesn’t we should hold our leaders accountable)
I know that individual responsibility is a corporate defection to avoid corporate responsibility but the other extreme of no personal accountability (“10 companies account for 90% of emissions, it’s their fault!”) isn’t exactly the correct stance either. We should all work to minimize our impacts, make green choices when mildly more inconvenient green alternatives exist. If companies can’t make money polluting they will adapt. And if we foster a social environment where it’s socially commendable to make those personal choices then the ecological awareness of the average voter goes up and the political situation gets better faster.
Except that when companies can’t make money they adapt by buying politicians to mandate use of their dirty product and outlawing alternatives. Voting with your wallet only goes so far, whereas taking out one CEO has managed to affect the behavior of an entire class. Imagine if they were hunted at the rate of american schoolkids.
and it’s more about ensuring the minerals in the ground continue to retain value than it is about any value those products offer us, the customer. we’ve said we don’t want the ai bollocks. but the companies pushing them keep pushing them. torturing the earth is the point, not a side effect
Not being listened to and then spending 40 years of having pundits call you naïve and not strategic enough is the price of being right in America. Remember all those pundits who were fired for being catastrophically wrong about the Iraq war? No? Because there were basically zero.
In corporate media, it’s better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right. The job is not to be right; it’s to shape opinions.
More like if the oligarchs had let him try.
Reagan.
Potayto, potahto.
But the country didn’t let him try/didn’t listen. So now we are here and it’s our job to try. Not asking anyone to let us try. We must try without asking for permission. Otherwise they won’t let us, just like they didn’t let him.
Live your life as if you’re already free
