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I think we're only gonna get out of this feedback loop if something drastic happens to knock most of the world's oil exports (war, some miracle UN tax on pumping oil out of the ground) or if prices start to adequately reflect carbon prices i.e. a CO2-standard that reflects the way fuels drive society and how you can't simply hide the price of your lifestyle through subsidies or diluting the future cost of pumping free energy out of the ground on everyone else.
Societies can't do it on their own without an individual blanket incentive (for all social classes) to save on CO2 emission (i.e. something like a currency). Or I guess there is maybe straight-out climate fascism, there is also that solution to this tragedy of commons, but I'd like to try to avoid that.
Most likely. That's all stuff at the top. Stuff that's going to be changed through political action,not any individual action. I was considering as well - corporations also have all of the leverage. They have resources SO VAST that the relative burden of tackling this problem is much smaller for them than it is for us. One company growing a backbone and acting for public good than for pocketbook good would have more impact than a million individuals completely destroying their way of living, and with far less self-harm.
But corporations don't have any incentive to do anything that hurts the profits they extract from the 99% (mostly indexed to energy prices, everyone is selling energy directly or indirectly) and politicians at best just do what people vote for (better standard of living, which mostly depends on cheaper energy prices).
Correct. And individuals alone are mostly useless. So the solution is to form collectives, get all the consumer class, or most of them, aligned, and then we have bargaining power.
It may work if fossil consumers like China, Japan, parts of Africa and South America, India and Europe work together to sustainably penalize and eventually get off fossil fuel dependence, but the fossil fuel exporter cartel will fight this :/
It's going to be a fight regardless. Anything worth doing always is. Can't shy from it just because they won't go peacefully.
It's not shying from it, many just don't see a way forward that doesn't involve a significant risk of massive suffering like starvation, war, authoritarianism if one or two things don't go exactly as the utopians would expect (like most revolutions).
This is not a utopian project, this is a "controlled landing" of a large spaceship from a 200-year old addiction to fossil-fueled growth: you need everyone on board and an awareness of the risks by everyone and possibility of relapses, calm and a notion of what is at stake, but there is still a chance that we'll fuck up, given our history :/
No one expects utopia. That's a bit of a false dichotomy. But it doesn't have to be utopia to be better than we have it now. I totally get not wanting to risk things, but that's the only way to move forward. You (broadly, not individual you) can either step up, grab the controls, and then at least if you crash, you had agency. We're flying into the mountain as is, gotta try something.