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I guess my point was that it seemed a little shitty to belittle the gesture considering none of us are capable of doing much more than griping on a message board. Gift horses and all that.
Sure, but there is the problem of greenwashing and using things like this solely for tax breaks, too. There are likely multiple motivations on the part of Gates. I’m sure he cares very much about the issue, but he also gets incentives over and above the warm and fuzzies.
And I’m sure many of us do what we can, locally. But we’re just individuals and what we do is only going to have so much of an impact. Our best bet is to have national governments tackling this collectively, considering how much of an impact the environment will have on all of us, collectively. Corporations stepping in will only go so far, especially when it begins to contradict their bottom line.
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Well, the US government is most definitely going to sit the next 4 years out so the best we can count on is the fatcats’ paltry pledge of $500m a year, short of some sort of action from other quarters.
Look at the work of Chenoweth and Stefan for empirical numbers. The reality kind of stares people in the people in the face, but no one thinks about it: Every single violent resistance movement against the Nazis failed. Not most. All. The Allies don’t count as resistance, because the framework for understanding resistance is assymetric warfare, not wars between roughly matched state actors. Meanwhile, a number of non-violent successes were had against the Nazis, compared to the zero violent ones.
The big misconception is that non-violent resistance relies on the conscience of your adversary. It doesn’t. The conscience of your adversary has a complex interplay, but it’s not a strictky necessary component. NVR works using the same dynamics as VR: The imposition of unsustainable costs on your adversary. NVR has advantages here VR does not. One major one, but not the only one, is that for every one person you can find who fits the mould to be a violent resister, ten others could have been recruited more easily at less cost for NVR.
The thing is, when you look at why people think VR is more effective, you find the are a lot of unexamined assumptions, which once cast under scrutiny, dont survive. It’s not enough to point at successful violent csmpaigns. You have to count the ones that failed.
What I’ve found is that people don’t accept this evidence because of the same reasons as global warming denialism: The inability to seperate anecdote from data and the need for emotional satisfaction. The funny part is that I’m no bleeding heart about this: The refusal to utilize the most effective tactics available in favor of less effective tactics doesn’t make you no-nonsense. It makes you stupid, undisciplined, and immature.
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And stuck in a rut.
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Relevant:
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It is not necessarily a choice between individualism or collectivism - one of the most powerful things individuals can do is form collectives. Especially when none presently exist to do what is needed.
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Every single new example, I wonder if this is the one that will finally convince the People Who Matter that having a Republican in the White House for 4 years isn’t worth bringing down the entire country.
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It helps to have a government that friendly to one’s aims. We’re about to see an about face on energy and enviromental policy, and much less is going to get done on this issue.
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Probably! I have never been in that situation, unfortunately.
Well, we certainly can’t count upon them to do it.
Which is why we put pressure on the government to do what we want or need them to do.
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Not really. I’m assuming market forces will do most of the heavy lifting. Reliable renewable power will steadily displace fossil fuels over the next decade, as it’s already cheaper, and increasingly suitable for widescale deployment. What matters is that most of the world agrees that this is a good thing, and doesn’t get in the way. If so, decarbonization will proceed rapidly. Not fast enough for the UN’s 2C threshold, but easily fast enough to stabilize at 3-4C later in the century. Still a disaster on the scale human civilization has never witnessed before, but not, ultimately, civilization destroying.
But now with Trump and Putin giving oilmen free reign in all key positions of power in both countries, market forces will not be allowed to run their course. They will do everything they can to distort the markets to ensure they can still extract massive profits from remaining fossil fuel reserves. The resulting runaway climate change that will probably end human civilization.
Rest assured that the market for fossil fuels is so saturated, and thus the price is so low, that the companies who know what they’re doing are not digging as much out of the ground. It’s not cost effective. Nothing to do with climate change or environmental concerns…just the bottom line. The real money to be made is in developing the renewable options. The biggest oil & gas companies have already diversified that way, because they can see which way the wind blows (hah!).
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