Good evening! This is your Random Truth (RANT) bulletin with your random fact.
Today’s topic: people and climate change.
Let’s start with a video that says it much better than we ever could. Here it is, making the case on how the powers that be once insisted that the world was flat, ridiculing and punishing anyone who disagreed with them, only to be proved terribly wrong.
It’s happening again, with climate change and its deniers.
But there’s an even bigger problem than this.
The problem is that it’s not just ‘some powerful people’ who hold things back, as the video claims. What holds things back are people, period. Hordes and hordes of people.
See, it’s all fine and dandy when we talk about climate change. Everyone wants cleaner, green energy, but when the time comes to act they realize that for such energy to exist everyone needs to take a hit. Jobs may be cut, lost to green automation, green technology, perhaps falling returns. Green is expensive, and so is the innovation needed to drive it, at first anyway. It’s not as cheap and abundant as coal. It has consequences, some of which bite. Profit margins fall, making companies react accordingly. They lay people off. If they’ve incurred giant amounts of debt to fund the new technology, they have to make up that money somehow. This means wage cuts. The state may have step in and subsidize them, which takes some of the burden off, but that usually means a tax raise. It means sacrifices, belts tightening, an all-around hit taken to accommodate the ground-breaking reform, the emerging new paradigm everyone keeps raving about, and people don’t like that. They want their cake whole and to eat it too.
So they teeter and totter and vote for the politicians who guarantee business as usual, and then bitch about it until the cows are sausages and the air thick with ass gas.
Like I said, the problem is not some powerful people. The problem is people.
Fact!
From RANT headquarters,
Have a nice day!
First published in a blog on Oct 29, 2014.