RE: Global warming: Are we doomed? A poll.
November 13, 2021 at 12:51 pm
(This post was last modified: November 13, 2021 at 1:19 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
It's truly bipartisan. Joe Manchin (D) Exxon.
He and his fellow pocket legislators will continue to insist that the path to a brighter carbon free future somehow lies in the continued and increased welfare to the industry he represents. I know, I know, the idea is that at some point the consequences of our poor decisions will become so painful and so obvious that it will be impossible to ignore them and that business will by necessity change it's course to accord with the objective reality of profit in changing circumstances. That may have been true once..I don't know when, and we might want it to be true now, but it isn't.
What I do is objectively more profitable than what big ag does, just not to big ag..and they will and have and will always use whatever anticompetitive practices that are either avialable (or that they can create) to stop anyone else from making the money they believe is theirs by something indistinguishable from divine right. You now who the absolute best warriors in the fight against sustainable aquaculture are? Independent live catch boat captains. The great people of fishing states. Sustainable poultry? Purdues debt slave producers. No fan of their own corporate masters by any description..but even less of a fan of someone who hasn;t been saddled the way they have making money doing what they do while they go further and further into the red.
Society fundamentally misunderstands the actual business of the current big dogs..which isn't to produce a product, but to produce resistance at the ground level to the mere possibility of competition. Are we suddenly going to get smart? Are they suddenly going to get stupid? Will we suddenly find ourselves sitting on a warchest to rival theirs...so that even if we did get smart and they did get stupid they couldn't just outspend us in a show of brute force?
No, they've already got too much invested to ever change their course. If they, themselves, could have figured out how to profit from actual climate action..they;d have done so long ago and they would be applying these same anticompetitive practices to protecting that new racket, but they haven't, they can't. They're buggy whip manufacturers who, instead of making upholstery for automobiles, have correctly surmised that their best chance to profit is to make sure everyone is stuck with a horse drawn carriage. To that end, there's no pile of horseshit too high to stand.
That's why I focus on things that work specifically under the assumption that we do worse, not better. It may be the case, for example, that global warming leads to increases for some regions in the field production of grain..but you'd have to be smoking crack to believe that the people destroying the earth right now growing grain won't be the ones to use their endless pile of money to ensure that they're the only ones growing grain then. They'll leave where they are, and leave a husk where they are, and make sure that the people in the new producing regions never see a penny of the benefit that their malfeasance could have otherwise brought them. All the while funding candidates who swear that their exploited labor pool is to blame for the decline of their communities.
Think about this..just in terms of agriculture. Despite having gotten regular infusions of free land by taking it from the owners..by hook or by crook, and despite the availability of a captive labor market in the form of.... first, actual slaves, then indentured servants, and now substandard laborers....and despite all of the advanced knowledge and technical assistance and big giant train tunnel sized gushing subsidies..they haven't managed to either do it better, or even feed everyone. But boy howdy do those prices keep going up. It's more of that. That's the future. That's why we need appropriate technologies. Some measure of their propriety is not just in whether they're good for the environment in abstract terms..but also whether they're good for people, good for competition..and good for those things specifically in light of the reality of the contemporary model and the strong resistance it fields.
He and his fellow pocket legislators will continue to insist that the path to a brighter carbon free future somehow lies in the continued and increased welfare to the industry he represents. I know, I know, the idea is that at some point the consequences of our poor decisions will become so painful and so obvious that it will be impossible to ignore them and that business will by necessity change it's course to accord with the objective reality of profit in changing circumstances. That may have been true once..I don't know when, and we might want it to be true now, but it isn't.
What I do is objectively more profitable than what big ag does, just not to big ag..and they will and have and will always use whatever anticompetitive practices that are either avialable (or that they can create) to stop anyone else from making the money they believe is theirs by something indistinguishable from divine right. You now who the absolute best warriors in the fight against sustainable aquaculture are? Independent live catch boat captains. The great people of fishing states. Sustainable poultry? Purdues debt slave producers. No fan of their own corporate masters by any description..but even less of a fan of someone who hasn;t been saddled the way they have making money doing what they do while they go further and further into the red.
Society fundamentally misunderstands the actual business of the current big dogs..which isn't to produce a product, but to produce resistance at the ground level to the mere possibility of competition. Are we suddenly going to get smart? Are they suddenly going to get stupid? Will we suddenly find ourselves sitting on a warchest to rival theirs...so that even if we did get smart and they did get stupid they couldn't just outspend us in a show of brute force?
No, they've already got too much invested to ever change their course. If they, themselves, could have figured out how to profit from actual climate action..they;d have done so long ago and they would be applying these same anticompetitive practices to protecting that new racket, but they haven't, they can't. They're buggy whip manufacturers who, instead of making upholstery for automobiles, have correctly surmised that their best chance to profit is to make sure everyone is stuck with a horse drawn carriage. To that end, there's no pile of horseshit too high to stand.
That's why I focus on things that work specifically under the assumption that we do worse, not better. It may be the case, for example, that global warming leads to increases for some regions in the field production of grain..but you'd have to be smoking crack to believe that the people destroying the earth right now growing grain won't be the ones to use their endless pile of money to ensure that they're the only ones growing grain then. They'll leave where they are, and leave a husk where they are, and make sure that the people in the new producing regions never see a penny of the benefit that their malfeasance could have otherwise brought them. All the while funding candidates who swear that their exploited labor pool is to blame for the decline of their communities.
Think about this..just in terms of agriculture. Despite having gotten regular infusions of free land by taking it from the owners..by hook or by crook, and despite the availability of a captive labor market in the form of.... first, actual slaves, then indentured servants, and now substandard laborers....and despite all of the advanced knowledge and technical assistance and big giant train tunnel sized gushing subsidies..they haven't managed to either do it better, or even feed everyone. But boy howdy do those prices keep going up. It's more of that. That's the future. That's why we need appropriate technologies. Some measure of their propriety is not just in whether they're good for the environment in abstract terms..but also whether they're good for people, good for competition..and good for those things specifically in light of the reality of the contemporary model and the strong resistance it fields.
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