Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
I agree much more with tame_deuces here than with you. I would say there are two implicit assumptions that you are making here that I think are false.
1) Big business completely controls the political process.
2) Big business uniformly doesn't view slowing down or preventing climate change as worth doing.
I think this is a simplistic view of my paradigm, but then I haven't really had the chance to go into more detail.
Wrt 1), this is the wrong way to view the issue IMO. It's not that 'big business' (and in this context I am primarily referring to the Oil companies) 'completely controls' politicians, so much as that any politician who wishes to retain power cannot afford to ignore what the Oil companies want, or significantly threaten how they make their profits, nor threaten the energy infrastructure that the Oil companies have brought into being because of the hugely negative impact this would have on their approval ratings. Governments, yours included, are even prepared to spend
vast sums of money, and the lives of their soldiers, and wreck entire countries in the process, in attempts to control the supply of Oil on behalf of the oil companies. We're literally fighting their wars for them. If you ignore how integrated they are into our society, and how vital their product is to our society, wouldn't this alone be an indicator of their power? Why is that money not being spent developing renewables?
Wrt 2), since I'm speaking about the Oil companies, and about the people who run them who have already, repeatedly demonstrated significant disregard for environmental issues and the quality of life of those impacted by their business, who routinely put profit before the protection of the environment, I'm going to disagree here. They have many reasons (all of them green on one side) to both not care about climate change (including actively funding efforts that debunk it) and to have no wish to 'slow it down'. Any efforts that appear to be to the contrary I think are meaningless PR efforts. They make Americans feel good about oil and all the products they enjoy so much to acquire that depend on the flow of oil, while simultaneously causing environmental devastation in multiple countries, such as Nigeria.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
Regarding (1), I'll point to a couple issues. <snip>
Given my clarification on what I meant by 'big business', I don't think that what you said here is particularly relevant in this context. The political efforts to reduce CO2 emissions fall into the same category of public appeasement whilst, in practice, achieving very little. I have no reason to believe that anything will really change until the oil, gas and coal literally run out. Do you?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
We've argued about this before and my view is still the same as before: the view that the most effective way to prevent climate change is to eschew political action and instead convince everyone to voluntarily use less energy is quixotic and naive. The real difficulty in solving climate change is not hard to understand: doing so requires global cooperation in the absence of a true global authority. In other words, this is a classic coordination problem. Claiming that we can solve this by just having people voluntarily stop ignores everything we know about these kinds of games. The temptation to free ride on other people's carbon reductions is just too high, and once you have a few defectors everyone has to defect or face extinction.
So I have no problem with you deciding as a personal matter to lower your use of energy, but I view doing so as mostly a signalling mechanism, not an act with real moral imperative. This is not to say that it is worthless--signalling a concern about climate change is probably on balance a good thing, but it is mostly only good insofar as it makes political action on climate change more likely to happen.
I didn't say that I reduce my energy use, I said that I give as little money as possible to companies that I don't wish to see succeed, or be the companies that are bribing the politicians or threatening their electability. It's not a disaster to the Oil companies when a politician who does intend to try to change things is elected, they simply have to stymie them until they're not in power any more. Politicians are mayflies, the Oil companies have been around for a long time now and have a long term view. If we all suddenly and completely stopped giving our money to the Oil companies (not actually possible I know), I believe that the world power dynamic would change overnight. It would literally bring our civilisation to it's knees.
I have no problem with profligate energy use, and I think that this is achievable too, I have a problem with the current source of that energy.
