04-04-2021, 03:43 AM
(04-03-2021, 11:17 PM)Einzige Wrote:(04-02-2021, 12:26 PM)Anthony Wrote: So long as what I have dubbed the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation;" that is, the pre-Boomers, are still alive in essentially any numbers whatsoever, nothing will be done on climate change because they will never let go of how the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) was Lenin's would-have-been 100th birthday (April 22, 1870, in the "new style" calendar), indelibly branding the entire environmentalist movement as a "communist plot."
This has very, very little to do with the private preferences of "pre-Boomers", and absolutely fuckall to do with the anniversary of the first Earth Day. It has to do with massive corporate interests denying anthropogenic climate change for decades and now greenwashing themselves and posing as the solution to the problem.
The Soviet Union and its satellites had poor records on environmental protection and the stewardship of resources. Not until Gorbachev did Soviet officials admit this. Most Commies actually had something else to celebrate that day -- and it is obvious what that was.
The people involved in the original Earth Day were young adults then, and the youngest of those would now be in at the least their late sixties.
... Take note. Nobody has any cause to believe that there will be any worldwide Socialist revolution between now and the start of the next Crisis Era (about 2080), and much of the cause of the next Crisis Era will potentially be the damaging effects of AGW upon food supplies, complete with the prospect of famines and political chaos. There is no technofix for hunger, and the world's food supply is finely tuned to existing realities of climate. Humanity may be able to adjust to slow, steady changes of climatic pattern, but rapid changes can disrupt everything.
The world's most productive agriculture is in the tropical wet-and-dry climates -- in places like Bangladesh, the southern two thirds of India, almost all of southeast Asia, eastern Brazil, and much of Africa. It is telling that the PRC is investing heavily in Africa to increase the agricultural potential of many countries, and that requires large investments in highways to get foodstuffs to the ports. The PRC may have images of the definitive anti-capitalist Mao Zedong on its currency.. but the nominal Communists are as shrewd capitalists as any in the West.
As I have said, I assume that there will be no worldwide Socialist revolution, and Big Business will have a big role. Most obvious will be the bankers, people who at best serve as gatekeepers for access to capital in the form of "other people's money", whose initials sound much like "opium". When bankers do that job well, things go well. For that bankers need to be the least daring, the least entrepreneurial, and the least imaginative of capitalists. Know well that banks attract almost as a rule, the laziest, least intelligent, least daring, and least imaginative of college graduates. Banks also pay less than any other businesses except perhaps retail sales and food services... and that will have to change if corporate retailing and restaurant businesses are to remain competitive.
The fossil-fuel business will have to adapt to the vanishing reserves of carbon-based fossil fuels. A few years ago Exxon-Mobil made advertisements about how it sought to grow fast-growing algae that can quickly be compressed under great pressure into substances that imitate fossil fuels, taking a few years instead of scores of millions of years to create suitable petroleum-like fuel. I am unaware of how this project worked or whether Exxon-Mobil is continuing it. If companies like Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron find that the days are numbered for petroleum and that other activities in energy production and supply are profitable, then they will go that way.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.