Please don't reply to a guidelines-breaking comment with another one. Ideological battle is against the guidelines here whether you initiate it or perpetuate it.
“Digging in on dying technologies” is an interesting framing.
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.
Solar and batteries get cheaper to build and maintain every year (almost to an absurd degree, seriously, look at the charts for the past 2 decades), while nuclear stays the same price.
That's not to say that nuclear power is bad to have, but there's an extremely obvious trajectory here of cheap battery-backed solar everywhere, with few regulatory hurdles and obvious incentives for people to have their own mini solar systems and batteries that take load off the larger grid.
We can debate how much nuclear is needed, but renewables can do a lot, and just hoping that AI will bring nuclear fusion in 5 years is not a great strategy
Wealthy people fund all sorts of non-profitable things, ie. non-profits, charities, philanthropic initiatives, etc.
Look at Bill Gate's philanthropy over the years. There's thousands of others, including all of the Hollywood Celebrities that like to crow about the climate so much.
The NCAR was spending less than $150MM per year - it's not some outrageous amount of money for donors to fund.
I think a prohibition to lie to the public would already be incredibly impactful (if it had no statute of limitations and adequate punishments).
A delicate issue I see is how to handle personal matters that the public don't need to know.
Anyhow, you might think that it's hard to know when someone is really lying vs just being uninformed, but in truth in the long term most lies become apparent; while you couldn't prevent
every single lie, you'd reduce them enormously, in my opinion; even in countries where the president doesn't lie almost constantly.
If it doesn't turn into a nothingburger *, can we get back the glaciers, the climate and the people who died to help your own cronies get some more billions?
* (that is, if there's not a global conspiracy of pedo-scientists set to harm poor oil tycoons)
As something hard to wrap your mind around?
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