> 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...
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.
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?
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.