dohboi wrote:But we do have to stop being tolerant of people who think it's cool to blatantly waste resources of any sort.
Well, we've entered into an "anti-shame" era of hyper-individualism. Social mores and stigmatizing is now equated with bullying. Everything people do is now classified as a valid lifestyle choice. So we're not supposed to weigh in on it. That means gay marriage is no worse than driving to work and back in a Hummer limo. You know, pursuit of happiness, right in the constitution. I just don't see a social climate towards "shaming" any sort of behavior other than "shaming" itself.
At any rate, trying to guilt-trip people for their environmental-footprints isn't really that new, and it hasn't succeeded, and probably never will.
dohboi wrote:If they can do those in ways that don't harm the planet, most would be more than happy to.
Except when those ways are more expensive and/or less convenient, which is currently the case. Plus you'll also have the "coal rolling" crowd who equate green with liberal weakness.
dohboi wrote:It is only heads of ff companies and the minions they bribe to do their will who are dead set on making sure that the only way people can fulfill these basic needs is by depending on burning up their fossil-death-fuels.
See my above quote. I don't think big oil are good guys but the fact remains that fossil fuel BTUs are still the cheapest way for joe sixpack to get things done.
The only way to help level the economic playing field would be a carbon-tax.
dohboi wrote:The people who are making the decisions that are damning us and our children and most complex life on earth to suffering and oblivion all have faces and all have addresses.
We all make decisions every time we pay for things (story of stuff) or the fuel that powers them. And what about people who have kids above replacement? Who here has ever said anything to a family with kids about overpopulation? (I groaned when my cousin announced she was going to have a 2nd child. She thinks it's ok because she's vegetarian. Whatever...) It's easy to attack a corporation or an institution. It's not so easy to talk about individual ecological responsibility with the neighbors or the guy in line at the grocery store. How many people would like to be the local pariah for bringing up third-rail topics?
People like to attack me by mocking how my animated doomer videos didn't amount to much. What they did do, for those here who watched them, was dramatize the likely result of any doomer actually speaking "truth to power"(TM) as it were. You get a combination of corny denial, deer in the headlights with crickets, and angry shoot-the-messenger blowback in response.
For instance. (cue some trigger point in the small-talk)
"Sounds kind of tragic to me. Tragic due to the massive die-off that awaits us due to peak oil, global warming, and population overshoot."<deer in the headlights, in through one ear and out the other>
"Have you seen Bruno yet? There's this scene of him swinging his schlong around."I see a wide gulf here between the rhetoric and where the rubber meets the road.
"If the oil price crosses above the Etp maximum oil price curve within the next month, I will leave the forum." --SumYunGai (9/21/2016)