Could you imagine if…

We would be so far ahead of everyone on this planet. it’s not even funny.

But the defence budget isn’t actually about securing the country, it’s about making sure there is conflict.

Rolling coal is one of the most mindbogglingly stupid things I’ve ever heard of. Truly, it makes it seem like Idiocracy didn’t go nearly far enough in their hyperbole. Nobody could’ve predicted people being this aggressively dumb.

Americans truly are a different species

wtf is this ? a locomotive ?

Actually if everything else was fixed we could probably still allow things like monster truck rallies etc right?

From Lemminary’s link

An increasingly popular phenomenon at the time of the incident, coal rolling happens when a driver of a diesel truck floods the engine with more fuel than it can efficiently process, emitting a thick black plume of exhaust across the road. The emissions systems of diesel trucks are strictly regulated under federal law. But some truck owners modify their exhaust systems with illegal aftermarket parts, or fail to fix broken exhaust systems. In the 2010s, rolling coal became a kind of defiant act, an aggressive backlash against the increasing regulation of fossil fuels. People using forms of transportation that don’t burn oil—namely, those riding bikes, walking, or driving an electric vehicle—became targets. Social media apps such as TikTok helped drive the #rollingcoal trend. Videos with captions like “POV: You roll coal on every bicycle you see,” showing the engorged tailpipe of a diesel truck expelling a bubbling smoke, accrued thousands, even millions of views.

They want that mad max life style

Yeah this is the answer right here. The fossil fuel industry and their conservative allies (as well as far too many liberal politicians) have been feeding into a propaganda machine that has been fear-mongering climate change policies, telling the public continually that all those policies are going to do nothing but raise the price of gas or remove some convenience they have. I remember that time when Republicans were fear-mongering that the Democrats were coming after people’s gas stoves, as if that was something that was even remotely likely. It was so fucking stupid but people were like “You can’t take my stove!!!” like a bunch of dumb shits. I remember one dingus on Fox News who strapped himself to his gas stove like there was a demolition team coming to his house to take it down any minute as an idiotic publicity stunt. Literally no one but the drones who watch Fox News cared.

I’d like to add that a lot of these people work in the oil or coal industry or have family members who do. The work, as dangerous and comparatively ill paying as it may be, may be the only thing that puts their town on the map and keeps food on the table. Not seeing a way out for those who can’t or won’t be retained for another job can be pretty scary, a fear that is very much preyed a upon by conservatives.

Right on. No matter how well meaning people may be, if we misunderstand the issues then we’re unlikely to craft working solutions.

The only comment I would add to yours is that local economies are interconnected with the global marketplace. If the price of oil goes up overseas, domestic producers will increase their prices too. Additionally, the cost of energy is baked into the price of imported goods. Even if a country were completely energy independent, a spike in the price of energy on the global markets would increase price of just about everything at home.

I just learned so much in such a short amount of time. Thanks for taking the time to drop some knowledge.

If OPEC limits production the prices will go up, but that means more profit will flow to the US. Assuming this is meant for a US audience, that’s obviously a good thing for their economy.

This is the only part I’d take issue with. Profits will be good for the oil companies but so many products will be affected by the price increase that this would be terrible for consumers. We’re already seeing that in food prices as transportation costs (oil) are affecting them.

“Peak oil” has been predicted for decades, and they just keep finding more and more oil.

I’ll raise one point on this. Peak Oil isn’t just a question of the gross quantity of existing oil, its about the cost of extracting a new barrel relative to the demand for that barrel. It is possible we can reach a moment in history when the value-add of a burning a gallon of light sweet crude is lower than the cost to extract it. We’ve already functionally passed that point for coal (which is why we’ve basically given up mining it, despite enormous reserves continuing to exist).

The BP Horizon spill is a great example of the consequences of “Peak Oil” as a practical concern. The Horizon rig was only economically viable because of the triple-digit price on oil, going into the late '00s. It was a largely experimental construction, given the offshore depth of the extraction with costs to match, signaling a depletion of “safer” inland wells. And the liabilities it generated (both directly from the spill and indirectly from political reforms instated afterwards and insurance demanded for future rigs) dwarfed the revenue it produced.

There’s still oil in the well Horizon had drilled and we could still conceivably build another rig to go back and keep mining it. But we won’t, because the costs exceed the expected revenues. If we ever see $200-300 bbl gasoline, a business might have the monetary incentive to return. But if wind/solar/nuclear become a cost-efficient replacement, there will never been an economic incentive to rebuild on that patch. We will have passed the point at which oil extraction makes financial sense.

They’ve been convinced that climate change is a hoax. Nobody realistically knows how to fix people’s beliefs about this.

Well the problem is that the solution is unthinkable. Most people, not just fascists but also liberals, parrot certain ingrained dogma that has been programmed into them. They are deathly scared of regulating or nationalizing news or social media and want to abdicate government power to the seemingly neutral market. Meanwhile PR agencies and think tanks deliberately crafted and spread the climate hoax lie, and that side is where the money is.

The tankies, the people previously known as socialists, know precisely what to do about this shit. Except their system is ruled by the same calculus of power and wealth. So you’d need to deliberately choose a system that will be less liberal to fix climate change and propaganda by the capital.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/08/how-avoid-getting-burned-solar-or-clean-energy-scams

Unfortunately, some of those things do happen.

The bigger scam is the massive negative externalities of petroleum consumption but that’s an abstract concept and these people are simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know…

its true, I love oil SO MUCH and these climate scientists are just SO MEAN to oil, it makes me sad. im sad for my friend, oil.

good thing we can always trust oil execs. they’re such honest guys!

It’s really funny that you bring up the rolling blackouts. I’m assuming you are meaning in Texas, but since wind and solar there have been perfectly consistent while it is the coal burning plants that have been failing to meet the needs of the state and crashing their janky power grid your point is really quite stupid.

it’s so fucked how often they’re right to be suspicious about motives but only apply that suspicion to other industries or groups who aren’t trying to trick them, and never their own, which are. I guess the first step a cult must take is immunize people against being affected by any other outside forces, malicious or not. they’ll always implicitly trust the cult leaders who “let them in” on how their control works.

Educated populations tend to be more liberal

Liberally educated populations tend to be more liberal. Kids coming out of Bob Jones University, Arizona State, and Yale can be as archly conservative as anyone you see on FOX News or read the byline of in the WSJ.

Conservatives do not want an educated population.

Conservatives want conservative propaganda to be the believes that decide who is taken seriously and who is dismissed as unserious, uneducated, and extremist. There’s a rich body of conservative literature and ideology that you need to absorb before you can be taken seriously in the upper eschalons of the movement. The rank-and-file might revel in being a bunch of Know-Nothings, but the prelate class requires you to be well-versed in their dogma.

Education helps establish your priors and cements your conviction. People who don’t know anything on a subject can be easily swayed. People who have a ingested a certain quantity of coherently structured works are much more intransigent. That’s why institutions like the SCOTUS are such a joke. Its nine people who already made up their minds compromising to form a majority opinion before the case even starts, not nine idiot-savants rapidly accumulating an education on diverse subjects from a variety of experts before crafting a well-considered conclusion.

Yeah, it took me longer than I would’ve thought to understand that. It’s really hard to dumb yourself down and see their viewpoint a lot of the time. Scapegoating seems to work well for these folks.

Why would renewable energy necessarily mean fewer billionaires? Major solar/wind generation plants have to be built by someone and somewhere, it seems like the best you’re doing is making billionaires pivot their investments/changing which people the billionaires are.

When the higher cost of living is more important than actually living.

For the last couple of decades, people’s quality of life have been decreasing while productivity numbers are still going up.

Trickle down supply side economics has completely failed. Taxing the wealthy and moving people from the marketing bullshit scam sector of the economy back towards manufacturing would put those increased productivity numbers to better use which would mean we could maintain the current quality of life while building infrastructure needed to have a better future.

The status quo is maintaining our current slow decline out of fear of change. The economy is shit for anyone but the wealthy right now, so why should we be afraid of changing things? Because the wealthy are telling us to be afraid?

There is so much work to be done fighting climate change that we could easily replace every job lost.

But the economy will have to de-grow sooner or later. It is isnt an option. Sustainability is not a choice, it is an inevitability.

You mean those jobs in coal mines and coal factories that are literally being lost anyway because there’s a dwindling supply and the billionaires who own those companies are finding ways to automate and kick those workers to the curb? You mean those jobs? Or are you talking about the couple hundred people who work on oil rigs? Certainly you’re not thinking of gas station attendants or the guys who haul gas across the country. Because obviously they can’t get other jobs that are comparable. ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

This is more of that stupid fucking fear-mongering about climate change policy. Jobs come and go. Industries close down, other industries open up in their place. That’s part of the nature of an economy. To say that people will be out of work because of X policy is and always has been a political fear tactic that stymies technological innovation and progress in favor of pushing old outdated shit that just happens to make a small number of people a huge amount of money.