It’s not a job though, it’s just free money from an unsavory source.
I cashed the covid checks from the freaking US government.
I thought you were gonna say you’ve been accepted at a prestigious American university and weighing the odds of living your best possible life against being enslaved at an El Salvador concentration camp forever.
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Update
I sent a more polite, tongue in cheek version of the thank you. They still paid me.
Then I shared on LinkedIn.
Because fuck them. That’s why. These ghouls need to be laughed out of every forum until they change tack (which they won’t)
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Late to the party here, but I would have taken the money for sure. I don’t see any real or implied conflicts of interest.
Not to rehash, but I saw a quote that applies here.
“Companies are not people. Nor are they a collection of people. They are a collection of parts of people”.
When I say Exxon are the enemy who will never be an element of the solution, im talking about the whole that is a collection of parts of people.
This doesn’t comment on those people as people, or even on all of the parts that work for Exxon.
And yes. There is no solution without involving oil companies. But that involvement has to be that we tax or regulate almost the entirety of their current businesses out of existence. There’s no other way
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You are too smart to actually believe this. You obviously know that even if we could make some global decision to tax all oil and gas out of existence in the next few years (which obviously is never happening), the amount of global suffering it would cause would make every former plague or war look like good times. The level of human starvation alone would make the black plague look like a good time.
We need to tax oil and gas much more and pour billions into green energy research. But the idea we are eliminating all fossil fuel in any short to medium term is not tethered to realty.
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Who said short to medium term? To be clear on timing
We need net zero by 2050. We need to hit it on a very steep decline. That’s what the science says.
Almost the entirety of oil companies business models are inconsistent with that timeline. So yes. I’m deadly serious.
The fact that you think the established consensus is some extreme unrealistic position surprises me.
Also on the consensus. The suffering on this pathway is extremely lower than the pathway of not hitting it
And finally, I’m not proposing we stop using oil before we have replaced it with a renewable. But we need to do that in 25 years.
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Electrify road transport and half their business is gone. That’s both realistic and necessary.
That alone is such a threat that they will fight tooth and nail for every inch
The rest of the sectors are harder and more expensive, but we need to get them all by 2050, except perhaps the proportion of petrochemicals that doesn’t get burned eventually.
Oil companies don’t exist after that, except as shells of themselves or in completely different industries.
So the only we achieve that is by taxing or regulating them effectively out of existence. They aren’t going to do this themselves.
Oh I misunderstood. I thought you were saying now.
Yes. I agree we need a massive reduction by 2050 or a major increase in sequestration of a similar magnitude.
Right now I’d say our chances of achieving this are very low. There is just no political will anywhere on earth.
Energy demand is going to skyrocket and we don’t have the electricity now if it was all electric cars. Human and AI demand for energy is too big and oil is cheap. Just not going to happen and some chance science ends up wrong or it won’t matter by then anyway.
We can make massive amounts of electricity. Thats a solved problem. Only limit is money. The issue is replacing all the other ways we need fossil fuel.
This simply isn’t correct.
The idea that AI needs huge amount of energy is overblown. Competent forecasts put it about 3% of current demand. This is a lot of course, but not a game changer
EVs require a lot, but it can be charged during the day, so it works really well with solar, which is an easy, cheap, fully solved solution that is getting easier and cheaper
There are hard problems to solve. This isn’t one of them.
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The world needs to, but won’t.
Agree that it’s not hard in theory, but it still won’t happen. Too many people are married to it not happened.
There is some hope though, but it’s only that renewable is sooo much less expensive than carbon pollution that the people married to fossil fuels fail despite their best efforts.
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The thing is. This isn’t binary.
3 degrees is worse than 2.5 which is worse than 1.5
The impact will become more and more expensive and more and more obvious, while the solutions will become cheaper and cheaper
So we will get there eventually, it’s a question of whether we are fucked fucked or fucked FUCKED fucked.
I also have a firm belief that moral clarity is both spiritually important and the most effective way to approach this
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For sure.
EVs are cheaper and better than ICE vehicles. That gap will continue to grow. So even without policy support, the transition will happen eventually.
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Maybe in 25 years solar will improve to the point it’s viable on a large scale but it’s still only small scales and places with deserts at best and I bet you that’s all it’s going to be. Also solar would require a crap ton of materials dug out of the ground releasing a lot of gases into the environment but of course lol nobody cares about that.
We don’t need to get to zero emissions; I don’t know where that came from but it’s a blatant lie. We still need some of them, just maybe find a way to lower it but solar is clearly not the solution environmentalists all believe it is.