> IMHO, most activists are exactly just that sort of monkey.

If you value accuracy in the analysis then you are doing yourself a disservice by only looking at the most ludicrous of street level activists and have somehow missed the incredibly wide variety such as the countless people who are highly highly educated and have strategically placed themselves in international roles in everything from attorneys, to the ceos of their own companies who are building interesting alternatives, and even ignoring the scientists who have been tirelessly and meticulously researching. And most of these who you seem to have missed are incredibly professional humans. Yet you’re trying to portray them as too stupid to realize something as basic as “We need to refrigerate our food.”

It would seem you’re willfully ignoring the decades of research and decades of many different other attempts to bring forward alternatives. They spent those decades of time and resources precisely because we need alternatives.

In my experience, these professionals make up the overwhelming vast majority of those fighting for our climate, I don’t know how you missed them, or if you didn’t miss their existence, I wonder why you’re implying they’re so rare.

Do we agree that there are more uneducated people than educated people?

And that if equal parts of a randomly selected sampling of people join the "pro-oil" and "anti-oil" sides, the majority (by headcount) of both will be uneducated?

The majority of time and effort towards solutions (on both sides) may be spent by well informed people. But the majority of heads will be of the "Fuck tree huggers" or "Fuck oil workers" ilk.

Which is my original gripe about this subthread: do a position (and honestly, my position) a service by having some nuance in speaking about it.

You seem to be disregarding the level of influence that they had in misleading people across the board, guiding opinions toward views that upheld their position as the active incumbent of "best available energy source". They were allowed (and are still) to externalize their true costs by downplaying the impact of fossil fuels on the ecosystem. Had they not been engaging in fraudulent statements and active disinformation campaigns, then the people in charge of making those decisions would have been able to shift efforts toward alternative energy sources much earlier. The reliance on fossil fuels has ultimately caused more death, disruption and destabilization. They should be held accountable for their responsibility in those deaths, as well as the reckless disregard for humanity on the whole, all for the sake of profit and appeasing shareholders.