💾 Archived View for tilde.cafe › ~stack › gemlog › 2023-07-17.environment.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:30:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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The only way to save the environment is to drastically cut consumption, and that's not going to happen -- neither conservatives nor liberals are willing to stop consuming. Driving electric cars (literally moving the exhaust pipes to poor neighborhoods) does not count.
gemini://idiomdrottning.org/conservative-environmentalism
Probably not much. Capitalism pretty much requires exploitation -- of people and resourses. The care, usually, extends only as far as the next annual report.
People are getting harder to exploit - we ran out of far-away lands to colonize and enslave, and prisons are not as profitable as expected. Keeping a steep inflation regime keeps poor people in subservience, but not enough to expand profits.
Environment, on the other hand, is there for the plundering. And you can even greenwash it by mining lithium to make electric cars, or rare metals for wind energy -- things that are inherently polluting but subsidized. Moving pollution out of our neighborhood makes people happy and hopeful.
Short-term profits dictate maximum exploitation. Even accounting measures such as 'depletion' are there pretty much to play tax games and not plan for the eventual depletion of resources. I don't think anyone gives any attention to the total lifecycle of products, including the eventual disposal and pollution -- liberals are pretty good at getting the government to commit public funds for toxic cleanup, eventually.
Let us take a break from blaming just conservatives. We are all complicit, and liberals are perhaps even worse. Al Gore, the father of the Internet, turned environmentalism into yet another exchange, allowing corporations to trade "I didn't pollute today, so you can" credits. Biden's pipeline explosions and mishandling of Alaska is a slap in the face of any environmentalist. And massive green subsidies just create new eco-billionaires and do little other than make us feel like 'something is being done'.
And fundamentally, the only thing that can save us, short of a massive depopulation event, is voluntary and drastic cutbacks on consumption.
In the meantime, pretending that the government can help may make some people feel better, but I think we all know how it goes. Public land is handed out to billionaires for grazing cattle or digging holes to extract minerals.