There's also a prisoner's dilemma situation. Suppose you're some wealthy media magnate promoting culture war distractions from your portfolio of asset strippers and polluters, thinking of defecting to team decency.

That hypothetical you can look around at the rest of the global political class and see that the rest of the establishment will destroy the livability of the biosphere whether that hypothetical you starts putting all of your money into unions, green technology and BECCs or not and conclude that the only available choice is whether to be poor in a collapsing world or rich in a collapsing world.

▲

wolvoleo a day ago | parent | next [-]

Why would investing in green tech make you poor? That's what's wrong with that argument.

Moving away from fossil fuels is cheaper. Green energy is very cheap, it just misses a base load component right now. It's just that the people benefiting are different ones. And those people are going to lose sooner or later anyway, because in addition to climate change, fossil fuels are also finite.

The only reason trump is on the oil bandwagon is because many of his buddies are benefiting from it. And probably because he's still pissed at the Scotland windmill thing.

But doing the right thing doesn't have to make you poor. It will benefit everyone including the investors.

▲

OgsyedIE a day ago | parent | next [-]

The optimal strategy for short term oligarchic revenue maximisation is a mixed strategy of mostly fossil fuels with some green tech.

The optimal strategy for long term biosphere habitability is a mixed strategy of mostly green tech with a tiny amount of fossil fuels exclusively for those metal smelting roles where arc furnaces and biofuels are unsuitable.

Investment portfolios dominated by technology that lifts everybody up are less profitable than greedy choices of risky investment, per some of the finer details of the mutual fund separation theorem.

▲

wolvoleo a day ago | parent [-]

Less profitable doesn't mean becoming poor. Far from it.

And oligarchs have kids too, don't they want them to live in a world worth living in?

	▲	OgsyedIE a day ago \| parent [-]
		"Hello, is this the Murdoch family office? I'd like to speak to your team's permanent director of assets strategy about how wonderful it would be for your income to drop by ten to fifteen percent." You could do the same with the accounting team on retainer for the US Commerce Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Education Secretary's family portfolio, or the US Interior Secretary's family portfolio, or the head of NASA's family portfolio, or the Middle East Special Envoy's family portfolio, or the Administrator-in-Chief of the Small Business Administration's family portfolio. These are all individuals with a net worth of over a billion dollars who each separately employ a full time accounting and financial team with its own IT and HR just to maximise family income. What's ten million a year in operating costs versus at least sextuple that in return? Each oligarch of size is the figurehead of a corporation dedicated to number go up.

▲

binoct a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> it just misses a base load component right now.

I’m sympathetic to the intent of your argument, but man, that’s a hallava gotcha there. Other than nuclear there isn’t a compelling story for a base load source of green energy. And all the new-gen nuclear tech is a long shot for safe, cost efficient, rapid scaling right now.

▲

matchbok3 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

▲

bix6 a day ago | parent [-]

Bot

▲

OgsyedIE a day ago | parent | next [-]

On the off chance they weren't a bot and were merely somebody sucked in to the culture war to the point of losing a lot of sanity, the answer is that the optimal amount of green tech for maximising oligarchic wealth extraction is somewhere both far above zero while also being at least one order of magnitude smaller than the necessary amount to mitigate emissions numbers.

▲

matchbok3 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for reporting my comment instead of engaging. Great contribution!

	▲	bix6 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sorry I guess. I got the exact same stupid comment yesterday on another thread.
	▲	CursedSilicon a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not a bot. Just someone with reaaaallly bad takes it seems