Aramco does $300B revenue annually, and they are less than 10% of the market. Only an idiot would go into climate change advocacy for the money.
Climate Change. Renewable energy vs nuclear power. No we aren't all going to travel to other planets. You will never be a heroic figure. Women have their own opinions of things. Pandemic upends the daily routine. Car culture sucks and isn't sustainable.
None of those was part of The Plan and so the hive mind hates it.
When I was younger—before the internet was in every home—I read articles about how the "information superhighway" was going to bring the whole world closer together. To my mind, that was analogous to a major city gone amok: unprecedented competition with everyone vying for attention.
One guy paints his sign on his window. The next guy lights up his sign. The next backlights a plexiglass sign. The next uses neon. The next blinks his neon. And so on.
It took some time, but we're about at the point of maximum stimulus on the internet. And so to compete, the messaging follows a similar pattern. And eventually some people believe what they read. And others believe what they write.
Those that believe what they write become desensitized. Those that believe what they read become indoctrinated. And you're left with this emergent characteristic of a chaotic system stuck in feedback loops.
What you read as overstated, others will read as gospel and damn you for underplaying the emergency. And they will try to shout louder than the next, because everyone is a storefront for something; profit, or power, or ego, or social status.
So what's an apocalypse?
Not global climate change.
The apocalypse is what you witness as you try to decipher and pick apart the insanity that has become not only the internet, but soon the whole of humanity.
The climate change cathedral had it right all along: we are the apocalypse. But they got wrong the cause.
The cause is not climate change. Or fascism. Or racism. Or even hatred.
The cause of our apocalypse is us, by virtue of our connected hyper-competition. The apocalypse is the "human superhighway."
— Spider, Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Perhaps you may have seen this? Will Schoder on the Attention Economy
> Climate change is literally destroying the planet. According to the Trump admin's National Climate Assessment, with no action, climate change will result in 10% GDP loss by 2090.
That 10% figure is on the high end (see: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/how-much-will-the-green-ne..., under the heading "10% of GDP?). But even taking it at face value, it's irreconcilable with Markey's assertion about "literally destroying the planet" or the article's claim of "apocalypse." It's like two completely opposite thoughts in the same tweet, and I can't decide whether Markey is crazy or I am.
What is an apocalypse? The year my dad was born in Bangladesh, the under 5 mortality rate was about 1 in 3 children. That wasn't great, but it still wasn't "apocalypse." Will climate change be that bad? I don't think that's what the science says, but am I missing something?