> Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
* https://www.instagram.com/tbtoro/p/B_SdEVThgCr/
* https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
I recommend you put that one on your list instead because Instagram is very hostile to people trying to see anything without an account. The one on The New Yorker website is open to all and on the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250808141700/https://www.newyo...
Thank you for sharing the interview. I hadn’t come across it before. The cartoon is more popular than I realised, which makes me glad.
Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels. Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
It's pretty telling that oil lobbyists resort to non-market methods like bribing politicians to stall renewables. They know the time is running out - with all the new power generation and storage tech that's in the pipeline, fossil fuels just aren't going to be economically viable forever. Renewables are rising, and there is no moat - all the existing oil assets those companies hold are going to be increasingly useless as more and more of the world's power comes from non-fossil sources.
"Stall" is about the extent of it though. You can't fight economic forces off forever.
This is a lie - I have never had an instagram account and I was able to hop on there and copy the image.
(it might be of interest to some that the image shared by the artist on Instagram has the text justified how the artist intended and the New Yorker's text caption can look different depending on the device, but I can't pretend that I care too much about that...)
> Take your pick.
Why did you bother? I'm fully capable of googling a famous image and I'm sure everyone else reading this stuff is.
Seems like a myopic strawman to me. The main eco-activism that I remember for the last couple of decades has been for reduced fossil-fuel use. This is now being translated into policy in Europe especially, which has massively increased the market for renewables that the "industrial capitalists" can take advantage of.
Today, the best alternative to fossil fuels is renewables - but 40 years ago, it was nuclear. If eco-activists made sensible decisions, fossil fuel power could have been curbed back then.
Instead, we got what we got. Eco-activists, being what they are, made vibe-based policy decisions, and the vibe of nuclear power was Very Bad and Glowing Acid Green and Way Too Industrial. So nuclear power was strangled with activism and overregulation in many countries, if not banned outright.
So we had to sit on fossil fuel power for those 40 years - until the economics of renewables finally became more favorable. Which, again, happened not because eco-activists willed it into existence - but because industrial capitalists developed the relevant technologies and pushed them into mass production.
What would have happened in an alternate world where renewables just weren't economical? Would the world sit on fossil fuels for another 40 years, until fusion power actually materialized?
This time you were. I get sent Instagram links semi-regularly and it’s a gamble when they’ll work. And there are two other people on this thread who replied directly to you, before your comment, saying they wouldn’t have bothered to even try.
> it might be of interest to some that the image shared by the artist on Instagram has the text justified how the artist intended
Is it, now? Then why is the text justified entirely differently on their own website, their Etsy store, and their official link on Cartoon Collections?
https://www.etsy.com/listing/510225080/signed-print-of-my-ne...
https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoon?searchID=CC137952
And look at that, it’s the exact same crop I chose for my screenshot. Almost as if I tried to respect the author’s choice, even though I very much doubt they are anal-retentive about how the text is laid out. They likely changed it for Instagram to fit better into the obligatory square.
> Why did you bother?
Perhaps cut it a bit with the hostility? It’s not like my screenshot harmed you in any way.
Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. BP paid over $20 billion in fines and compensation.
Love Canal: Occidental Petroleum dumped toxic waste into the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, resulting in pollution causing birth defects. $130 million in settlements.
Exxon Valdez oil spill: Alaska’s Prince William Sound contaminated with 11 million gallons of crude oil. Exxon paid over $1 billion in cleanup and compensation.
DuPont Chemical leak: DuPont contaminated the drinking water of over 300,000 people. $670 million in settlements.
Hinkley Groundwater Contamination: PG&E contaminated groundwater with chromium-6 in California. $333 million in settlements.
Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests. $25 billion in settlements.
Kingston Fossil Plant Coal Ash Spill: A retention pond breached, releasing over 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge into the surrounding area. Cleanup cost over $1 billion.
Wow, those cheap solar panels were done entirely by the private sector? Without decades of government-backed research on how to make solar panels viable to mass-produce?
Without eco-activists lobbying for government-funded research on solar panels, there would be no mass production, because nobody is paying $100k/kW.
And making cheap LEDs doesn't necessarily reduce energy use, thanks to the rebound effect - we've known this since Lord Jevon noted that James Watt's new ultra-efficient steam engine increased demand for coal instead of reducing it, because it made steam engines cheaper to run. If you look at car headlights, you'll find that instead of using LEDs to reduce power use, car-makers instead used them to crank up the lumens as far as humanly possible. They only save power on paper, when underwritten by implicit environmental optimism.
Note that I'm not opposed to "creating value for shareholders"; they made cheap solar panels possible. I'm saying that powerful economic forces require far more precise alignment than you'd think for them to be useful, and they are almost never conveniently placed in the right spot by chance.
You have posed a potentially interesting (and well researched!) question that would probably be more fruitfully targeted at someone who did not make the effort to state "but I can't pretend that I care too much about that..."
At best, you can make a claim that because of Germany's push, renewables got to today's price point a few years sooner. Which is quite valuable, but not a make-it-or-break-it difference.
It's pretty clear that people didn't replace their 100W incandescent bulbs with 200W worth of LEDs. Modern LED lights sit in a range of 6W to 20W - which is a factor of 5 reduction in power draw no matter how you cut it.
It's about the money. "Eco-activists" can't achieve shit if there's no money in it. Think about all the other things they've been trying to kill - meat, fossil fuels, jet travel - and are nowhere near succeeding. Why do you think that is?
Fossil fuel interests killed nuclear. "Eco-activists" took the rap. And everyone else fell for it.
Cheap solar panels were subsidized by governments to get the costs down. I know eco-activists that are pro-nuclear.
More generally: a lot of these things were done to reduce costs and due to price pressures. There is currently no mechanism to put a price on climate change that is directly noticeable by the general consumer. (Only 'indirect' costs due to climate inaction, like higher insurance premiums due to more extreme weather events.)
Perhaps if the O&G folks and others would stop trying "create value for shareholders" of the fossil fuel companies we could use The Market™ to properly price in climate change instead of subsidizing climate-damaging actions and subsidizing the operations of these companies.
People like using stuff, and if someone tries to take away their QoL, they'll oppose it strongly - and rightfully so. Which is a very basic thing that, somehow, almost no environmentalist seems to grasp.