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A New York Times article currently entitled “The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky” (modern NYT headlines tend to shift with the winds of likes and comments) discusses the innovative corporations and world governments looking to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for profit. On its surface, this is a potentially radical net-positive accelerant for humanity driven by its financial upside, in the same tradition as asteroid mining, child tax credits, and electric vehicle subsidies.
The comment section gives us a valuable insight into how the online progressive retiree set (many of them early architects and evangelists of the modern Left) see this news within the context of their worldview… and here it’s particularly interesting. I want to highlight one comment that’s emblematic of the general tenor there:
Here we see plainly spoken a bedrock concept underlying many political ideologies that rarely breaches the surface: apocalyptic socio-political shibboleths cannot be resolved without the perceived antichrist(s) paying the cost. The motte: “There is a crisis all humanity should unite in resolving…” The bailey: “… only insofar as it upsets people I dislike.”
This response also seems to chalk up another point in favor of the “modern-politics-as-religion” thesis, with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation. Those who circumvent this process are perceived with the equivalent spite of their ancestors imagining a sinner who never feels the fires of hell (or Salem, as it were). As a great Mottizen (@CrispyFriedBarnacles - thanks @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola) once reminded us, “Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban.”
Yeah, the reason behind the left-wing rally behind environmentalism was never about environment itself, but about obtaining another method of doing the Revolution.
If you ever spoke with committed climate leftists, you quick understand that any discourse is not related to the environment, the economic or tech tools to use, energy, consumption etc, but it is about how to change people to achieve their particular brand of Socialism of the day.
Bonus point if you speak with left-wing climate women: At least men will earnestly tell you that is about the Revolution, while women will shut out angry rants about Mother Earth or being attuned with nature or whetever. A telluric and Dyonisian cult with socialist characteristics, made by people that, without modernity and capitalism, would be better doing literally any other job.
This has not been my experience living in a half dozen left-wing circles. As much as you can't believe it, most of them genuinely care about the environment for its own sake. To the extent that they rant against capitalism destroying the planet, the causality goes the other way.
Of course I disagree, but at least get a handle on it.
I definitely agree on the more reasonable & moderate left-wing groups that dominate the PMC and STEM, but it's not that rare in the social sciences and adjacent university staff.
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Climate Change Solutions: An Opportunity To Subvert Capitalism and a million articles like it would seem to disagree. Does anyone have the link with the green party woman talking about how they won't need to abolish money because everything you could use it for will be rationed or banned by the state on environmental grounds, from shower time to travel?
Edit: here
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