Says exec of company that has objectively caused more environmental harm to the world than any others

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    We had the technology to start. Photovoltaic panels, windmills, etc aren’t new technology; the Carter administration actually installed photovoltaics on the white house and they stayed there until three guesses which president (yep, Reagan) took them down. Florida voted to start building a high speed rail project in their state (which would have decreased interstate and short-haul airline dependency, thereby decreasing oil dependency) and it was going to happen until Mr. State’s Rights himself, Ronald Reagan, blocked any state from launching a high speed rail initiative. More people believed in global warming and climate change in the 90’s than now, but in the 2000’s, the small government W Bush administration forbade government officials from talking about climate change, gutted government research on climate change, and collaborated with big oil lobbyists on pivoting to using softer, more nebulous terms to address global warming (this is actually where the widespread use of ‘climate change’ comes from). We’ve basically kicked the can down the road for forty years and only started taking it kinda seriously in the last ten or fifteen. If we’d been developing and implementing these technologies gradually over the last fifty years, it would have been a lot less painful and we’d have made a lot more progress for a lot more value on the money spent. Since we’re trying to speedrun the last fifty years of implementation and development into the last decade or so, that’s going to be really economically painful and not nearly as smooth as it would have been under the long implementation. But, it’s gotta get done, or we’re going to keep fucking up the same ecology we depend on to stay alive, getting in endless wars, and giving money to jackass countries to feed our voluntary fossil fuel addiction.

    As for storage, that’s not an unsolvable problem. Probably the most practical solution is a nuclear fission backbone, imo, but there’s several approaches that are in various stages of development and viability.

    • bioemerl@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Photovoltaic panels, windmills, etc aren’t new technology

      The big modern efficient and cheap ones are.

      More people believed in global warming and climate change in the 90’s than now

      I’m looking at a Gallup poll showing 30 percent of Americans worried about global warming in 1990.

      Modern day is 61 percent.

      collaborated with big oil lobbyists on pivoting to using softer, more nebulous terms to address global warming

      Which is a good idea because you get idiots showing up in Congress with a snowball, and was not a term just created out of thin air by big oil.

      If we’d been developing and implementing these technologies gradually over the last fifty years,

      We have been. Technology and it’s development rarely is some targeted thing. Big projects that get results tend to happen only once the base work has been completed and the investment will show hefty returns. The Manhattan project didn’t happen until the means to create nuclear power was discovered, for example.

      As another big example, most of our ability to have electric cars? It’s thanks to cell phone battery research.

      Without question these oil companies have stood in the way of progress, but don’t think even for a second that we would be in some magic fantasy land if it weren’t for them.

      All things match along and very frequently the decisions we made are much less impactful than you would think.