*late stage capitalism just transitioned to end-stage capitalism
*peak oil just transitioned to end-stage oil
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And risk it turning back into dinosaurs? No chance!
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It is, but here in Houston, if you want a well-paying STEM job, the biggest employers are the medical industry and fossil fuels. When nearly everyone, from your high school counselor to your professors for basic college courses when your major is ‘Undecided’ are telling you nonstop that STEM jobs are the future, and you take out student loans and go into massive debt to get the kind of degree that everyone tells you you need to have, are you gonna have enough wiggle room to be picky about which job gives you the moral high ground?
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Perhaps, but world oil extraction is a huge complex operation. I can see in the short term pumping out more than you can store. I can also imagine malicious reasons to ruin competitors business model.
here in the states, based on last year’s numbers, it’s only 15% or so taxes. ( probably a little less actually. )
it was around 50 cents per gallon.
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Near me it’s down to $1.79 (Massachusetts, south of Boston)
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“Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.” (Quote from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri)
The same applies to social change, but people are much less able to accept it there.
@Snork I think that still fails, since it can’t scale to everyone. The Good Place was right. The modern world has gotten so complicated that it is no longer possible to be a good person. No one can control the cascading consequences of their actions.
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A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin - 9th Thesis - Theses on Philosophy of History)
H/t @anon61221983
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I’m not well schooled, especially in economics, but isn’t this negative pricing on of those fancy “signals” saying: STOP PUMPING OIL OUT OF THE GROUND!!?
Apparently OPEC+ (+ Russia and Mexico?) agreed to production cut of ~10Mbpd, with an expectation that “others” (a.k.a. the USA) would make similar reductions.
So how much has the USA reduced production to help? I heard 2Mbpd. Anyone know for sure?
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Good point, I had not thought of that.
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You are 100% correct. That said, the entire modern recycling movement started when I was a kid and all the detractors said the same thing. “Individuals can’t make a difference It has to be a top down system reboot”. What actually happened is that kids started pushing their parents to recycle in their home. You solve the solvable problem that is right in front of you to the best possible degree you can. That is how things change. Not by looking at the entire system, saing it is too big, throwing your hands up and doing nothing but thoughts and prayers. When I realized we waste massive ammounts of water in our homes I did not buy a composting toilet and stopped bathing. I bought a dual flush toilet, removed all the grass and replaced it with rocks and plants that require no irrigation, added a water capture system for rain that now flushes the toilets and always turn off the shower when soaping up. I still critique the system but I do it from a position of action that Is not puritanical but also far from hypocritical.
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I think you misunderstand hypocrisy in this context. Hypocrisy is advocating for others what you’re unwilling to do yourself, not advocating for a future in which we all partake, but currently might not be.
Making personal changes is great, but don’t delude yourself you’re doing your bit by recycling or making a few water reduction changes. It matters more as an example, and because, yes, people dismiss others using the same stupid argument you did.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’ve spent several tens of thousands of pounds of money i don’t have to reduce my carbon footprint, and largely eschewed driving in my daily life. That said, I don’t think this is going to make any difference to the world beyond being part of a slow cultural change.
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I agree that we should attempt to make good choices in our personal lives.
The example you use, of recycling, is actually a really good example of why I think that by itself is not a solution, and can even make things worse. In the 70’s there was a very effective marketing campaign pushing the narrative of personal responsibility in the case of littering. This was pushed by the food and drink manufacturers because they didn’t want to change their behavior. So we end up with a system where the individual end user is responsible instead of tackling the problem at the source and making the creators of trash more responsible. Making less of it, making it easier to recycle, those are things that are easy to tackle with some legislation, consumers have little to no influence over this.
Instead of some systemic changes, we are now some 50 years further and are still struggling with this. Only now are we realizing how fucked we are and that leaving this to individuals was probably a bad idea.
Read more about that campaign here:
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One more graph showing pricing differences by state. So, even if the cost goes low, the tax man cometh.
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What? History isn’t inherently about progress!?! Nah, can’t be true! /s
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I can understand your point but my philosophy is get your house in order first.
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You’re putting the cart before the horse and insisting that is the correct way.
It’s like saying you first want all weels on a shopping cart to point themselves in the right direction before you start pushing. Sure, that would be better, but it’s never gonna happen and starting with pushing is a lot more effective.
The fact that the polluters are eager to shift responsibility away from themselves and onto individuals should tell you enough about the odds of all of all individual people doing the right thing.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the right things anyway, just don’t expect only your individual actions to be enough.
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i honestly have no idea how other locales tax it. My town + state + county all have skin the game, to the point where if you have a hybrid or electric car, you have a special tax that they mail you for consuming less gas.
