Climate Change

[mordant]

You seem to think the wealthy control our democracy, and many (but not all) are certainly trying to.  But we can see that the political pendulum is already swinging back.  The facts are getting harder and harder to deny.

Climate change is getting harder and harder to deny, but that does not mean that denial is the sole problem here. When denial stops working, there are other strategies at your disposal, if you do not want to bite the bullet on the environment.

I subscribe to (and occasionally even read!) a newsletter from Forbes and they have been making the point in recent weeks that corporate boardrooms everywhere are abuzz on the topic of climate change and the fact that it must now 'be addressed". The question is what "addressing climate change" means to the majority of them.

It does not just mean putting some solar panels atop the factory. It also means drastic reduction in consumerism / consumption and this is Bad For Business. It might well mean CLOSING some factories. I do not believe that business will abide such notions. Corporatism and consumerism require continuous growth, or, in the absence of that, it will feed upon society to keep itself alive. Stagnation or (gasp!) retrenchment are not concepts it's able and willing to work with.

You need look no further than how business has behaved during a deadly worldwide pandemic that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives in this country alone. They have pushed to reopen and normalize the economy far too soon. Apart from that, the Biden administration has for example said that the recent dire climate report "does not provide sufficient justification" to deny oil drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico initially approved by the previous administration. I expect these kinds of disconnects will continue to the level that whatever feeble concessions the corporate world makes to the climate crisis will be too little, too late. And even they admit that business alone can't do it all, they need government action. And the government is increasing, rather than decreasing the extraction of fossil fuels and the risk of further environmental damage through accidents -- so ... not a lot of hope there, either.

It may be that piecemeal and insufficient government and private actions on climate will combine with some technological advances (fusion power, solid state batteries and other applications for graphene as it seems to be coming into a commercially feasible form, thus improving adoption of electric vehicles, etc etc) to buy us time and keep us from complete collapse. But on the other hand our supply chain is wobbling in an alarming fashion as we speak and we could experience a domino effect of shortages and business or even crop failures over this very winter. It's a complex system with lots of moving parts and lots of simultaneous change going on, with increasingly extreme weather in the mix and so forth.

Time alone will tell I guess.