this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
817 points (96.9% liked)

Comics

5952 readers
3 users here now

This is a community for everything comics related! A place for all comics fans.

Rules:

1- Do not violate lemmy.ml site-wide rules

2- Be civil.

3- If you are going to post NSFW content that doesn't violate the lemmy.ml site-wide rules, please mark it as NSFW and add a content warning (CW). This includes content that shows the killing of people and or animals, gore, content that talks about suicide or shows suicide, content that talks about sexual assault, etc. Please use your best judgement. We want to keep this space safe for all our comic lovers.

4- No Zionism or Hasbara apologia of any kind. We stand with Palestine πŸ‡΅πŸ‡Έ . Zionists will be banned on sight.

5- The moderation team reserves the right to remove any post or comments that it deems a necessary for the well-being and safety of the members of this community, and same goes with temporarily or permanently banning any user.

Guidelines:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
817
Billionaires and the climate (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
149 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You sound like an AI. These mindless bots seem to be the only "magical" new technology that has come about in the past 7 years, and they are accelerating the climate catastrophe with the amount of power they draw.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

These mindless bots seem to be the only β€œmagical” new technology that has come about in the past 7 years

Molten Salt Reactors, high density batteries, mRNA vaccines, and high efficiency electric flying machines also come to mind.

Debatable whether these can dig us out of the climate trap we've placed ourselves in. But we're definitely still advancing technologically.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

No argument there. But the investor class will always find ways to burn more resources because of their growth addiction. I think the only way out of the climate trap is via social transformation (e.g. Green New Deal).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But the investor class will always find ways to burn more resources because of their growth addiction.

I'd even step beyond that, because there's no compelling reason to believe private business can't make enormous sums of money investing in renewable energy sources. This really does boil down to which investors are in charge. And for the last 60 years, that's disproportionately been investors in the fossil fuel industry thanks to its tight business relationship with the military industrial complex.

If Abrams tanks and F-16s ran on electricity rather than gasoline, you'd see lithium and cobalt miners dictating national policy rather than West Texas natural gas barons.

I think the only way out of the climate trap is via social transformation (e.g. Green New Deal).

I agree, to an extent. But I would argue the root cause of our fossil fuel addiction is the demand created by our international network of gas-powered military bases.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I largely agree with you, with the caveat that we need to separate climate emergency from growth addiction and capitalism at large if we're going to talk about the military industrial complex.

We will inevitably end our reliance on fossil fuels because even an intransigent sect of fossil fuel barons will eventually fall prey to free market economics. And then we'll have a bunch of great power competition incentivizing carbon-free military tech, and we'll be desalinating the oceans to build our sodium battery-powered UAVs whose autonomous targeting systems are trained by blowing up coral atolls.

I hope you see my point. Joel Kovel did a masterful job laying this out in The Enemy of Nature (2008). When I say social revolution, I mean some way to organize society so that we can get the psychopaths out of positions of power, i.e. a society that rewards cooperation instead of competition.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

we need to separate climate emergency from growth addiction and capitalism at large if we’re going to talk about the military industrial complex.

With the speed and scale of our military budget increases, these seem like entangled problems. The current rush to build out these massive resource-hungry AI tools is being driven, in no small part, by the NSA and FBI and CIA in their thirst for rapid data processing and analysis.

We will inevitably end our reliance on fossil fuels because even an intransigent sect of fossil fuel barons will eventually fall prey to free market economics.

We don't live in a free market (and we never really did). We live in an oligarchy, and these industries exist as a patronage network surrounding the seats of political power. O&G consumption is a kind-of sinecure for financial elites. A guaranteed income stream predicated on huge markups for natural resources paid out of the public purse, which is then used to fund political careers and fatten think tank and corporate media coffers of industry allies.

All this has to follow the Big Number Go Up logic. So we need more wars to consume more energy at a higher price, which then goes into new capital assets and rising equity rates that enrich a still-wider base of patricians. And all of these people form the foundation of the political network that keeps politicians and industrialists in authority.

We won't end our reliance on fossil fuels precisely because intransigent fossil fuel barons will prevent our transition to green alternatives.

And then we’ll have a bunch of great power competition incentivizing carbon-free military tech

The only thing that can really incentivize this transition is losing a big military engagement in a way that forces the transition. And for all the sins of ICE engines, Russia/Ukraine are proving out why they work perfectly fine as killing machines even when they're half a century out of date.