Powerful climate change deniers knowingly committed heinous crimes, and they should be put on Nuremberg style trials
I'm gonna try to be brief. This is the worst I've ever felt, weather-wise, in my life, and it's only the start of summer. It's heavily negatively affecting both my physical and mental health. I can't even properly work. I don't have AC. I can't afford it. Everybody around me is suffering very similarly.
I've been following climate crisis for years, but I've never thought I'd see such an extreme worsening this early. Even if I knew in theory that anomalies like this could happen, as it's very widely agreed upon that they would, it's much different to live through. It's hell on earth.
I'm one of the luckier ones, relatively speaking. There are over hundred thousand people dying from heatwaves each year. It's probably much higher than officially reported, because most governments don't track heatwave deaths. Millions and millions of people in India have been experiencing bigger and bigger water crises. Just in 2019, 600 million people faced a water crisis in India.. Hundreds of millions of people in Africa are suffering due to climate change related climate extremes and food security crises.
I also just found out that a location in Antarctica exhibited 70F (38C) higher than normal temperatures this year. Faster than expected, right?
I think this is inexcusable. Oil companies and such knew what was coming. There are countless documents and studies detailing this. Here are a few.
- Exxon confirmed global warming due to their emissions was happening in 1982.
- American Patroleum Institute similary knew in 1980.
- Exxon knowingly spread climate change denialism in response (source 1, source 2)
- Even in 2015, Exxon was dodging responsibility, telling people to "read the documents". So, two scientists, Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, did that. And found out that Exxon acknowledged global warming in the internal documents, while they denied it in public (article 1, source 2). In other words, it's been empirically shown that they fucking manipulated the public with full knowledge.
- Exxon is not alone. ExxonMobil, Chevrontexaco, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Conocophillips spent 3.6 billion dollars for lobbying in US alone during 1986-2015.. 61% of these expenditures are after 2006, when climate change started becoming a hot topic. So, when they attracted attention, they doubled down.
- Another document is of American Patroleum Institute from 1998, showing they intentionally focused on exaggerating the uncertainties of climate science in front of the public.
- Big Oil still opposes science and us. A study published in 2019 shows that ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total spent 1 billion dollars on lobbying and branding after the 2016 Paris Agreement.
- Oil companies are not alone. A study examining the 2000-2016 time-frame in US found that "fossil fuel and transportation corporations, utilities, and affiliated trade associations" are all major climate lobbyists. Only 3% of the total climate change lobbying was done by environmental organizations and renewable energy corporations.
These crimes are inexcusable. The people responsible should pay for them. And these should be treated as crimes against humanity and the planet, of the highest degree. These people don't deserve anything but to pay. They are the evil, who, in great awareness, have unreversibly damaged the planet, caused untold suffering. They still continue to do this, and even if they stopped now (hah!), their evil will continue to haunt humanity and a myriad of other species for unimaginable generations.
They should pay.
In liberal democracies, regulations of companies, including energy companies are us.
We, the electorate, are responsible for electing politicians that are failing and have been systematically failing at dealing with both climate change and the habitat crisis.
We, the people, underpin these companies and reap their benefits. Use their products and create the demand that causes their destructions.
It's too easy just to blame the "polluter companies". If they should stand trail, so should we all. Anything else would be a gross, populist miscarriage of justice. It'd be scapegoating rather than acknowledging our own culpability.
Me driving my petrol car. Me accepting that one is allowed to sell a plastic wrapped banana that's flown in from a different continent. Me taking long showers, me not paying the actual environmental costs of my consumption, personally reaping the benefits and letting society take the bill for the climate consequences.
I am culpable. We are culpable. We like our standard of living. It comes from not electing those who do not require us to change our lives. We're the ones not putting a stop to this in our own selfishness.
Blaming our companies is too simple. Why on Earth should they be held to much, much higher standards than ourselves, so we don't have to take responsibility for our actions?
People laugh at Greta Thunberg, at climate activists gluing themselves to airport runways, roads, that try to sabotage oil installations in dinghies or cutting a wire fence. At least they're living less hypocritical lives than we are, even if their personal sacrifices have minimal impact due to the rest of us de facto not doing our part.
I can write this online in a gross example of slactivism. Future generations may hold me responsible for doing too little about any of this, living my comfortable, cushy CO2-life instead,
just like we do nothing other than voting for the least bad candidate and posting empty words online while children are bombed or soldiers armed who kill children by or own countries in our names for our own "national security" and for the sake of our economies.
This is not like cancer from smoking, like asbestos, like a war tribunal, an oil spill, like apartheid, genocide or or illegal deforestation.
This one's on us.
Because they've routinely lied about climate change existing? Because they lobby against climate policy? Because their executives fly around in private planes and lounge in one of their five yachts?
I really don't follow your argument. To me this is like saying someone living in Germany is by necessity just as culpable for WW2 as their government. Were they culpable? Yeah, kind of, but were they just as culpable? Hardly.
Firstly, "culpable for WW2" is a bit of an understatement: the Nazi regime committed genocide in a scale previously unheard of.
Secondly: yes, they absolutely were culpable for committing that aforementioned genocide, given that they voted in the National Socialists on a platform of "we hate the Jews", and then watched as the Government then proceeded to get rid of all the Jews. Yes, it's not necessarily clear whether the population were aware that Jews were being systematically killed, but given the mass deportation, the treatment of Jews back home, and the promises Hitler had made about what he wanted to happen to the Jews, it was certainly possible to put two and two together.
In fairness, your point is that the leadership of Germany at the time were more to blame. My point is that that doesn't really matter: as a nation, collectively, the Germans enabled, supported, and even assisted genocide. There has to be some level of corporate responsibility there.
To be clear, I think the comparison between the Nazis and the climate crisis is crude and there's a lot there to unpack. But if we're just to take it at face value, then I think it's clear that we also have to bear some measure of corporate responsibility for, as a society, enabling the destruction of our planet. We all made various decisions to accept a more comfortable life over one that was sustainable in the long-term, and organised our societies around that goal. In that sense, we're all culpable here.
Light consideration here, not everyone voted for the National Socialists. Like when Trump became president I was derided by my friends abroad, but I didn't vote for Trump - in fact I wrote those get out the vote postcards and went door to door to register folks. But under your definition I'm culpable for his actions.
And to that end, individual blame for systematic issues is a losing game. If we flip the script and say "All Israeli's are culpable for the genocide in Gaza!!!" I don't think that would fly in the same way as the Nazis. There is nuance in every issue and for most people living in the world today we have very little power to influence global conflicts or change global energy networks or fuel consumption rates.
I live in an area where I need a car to get from my town to the next closest city, I'm locked in to fossil fuel use. So when I want to go to a regional meeting about divestment from fossil fuels, I drive. When I want to go to the county meeting for bike and pedestrian infrastructure that is 40 miles away, I drive. I have to live within a system I disagree with. Sure, we should all try to limit our use and vote with our wallets; but trying to navigate a muddy system and actively building and supporting it are two incredibly different things. The "individual responsibility" trope is just a tactic large organizations have to disenfranchise collective action and I say fuck that.
Please reread my comment: I am not talking about individual responsibility here. I'm talking about collective, corporate responsibility - that is, the responsibility that a group of people share when they collectively make a decision. You personally may need to drive out of necessity, but we collectively as members of developed nations choose to build the most personally convenient form of infrastructure and neglect other kinds (and repeatedly voted in governments that encouraged this kind of behaviour).
I don't think you can ever lay the blame for a systemic issue at the hands of a few individuals. Putting the heads of oil corporations on trial would surely be a cathartic experience for many, but it would be a poor form of justice, and it wouldn't change much in terms of producing systemic change to fix the problems that we're facing.
Thanks for the first note, I just reread it a few times. I think we're very aligned in thinking and I'm trying to figure out where the friction is coming from. Honestly it seems like it may just be semantics. I'm still having a hard time parsing between corporate responsibility and individual responsibility. I appreciate you giving me the definition in the most recent comment. I'm not advocating that we "off with their heads" of corporate CEOs, but like you, I expect systematic change and regulatory change - and we as a pissed off citizenry have to push for that. I think that is where you're at as well, let me know if I'm wrong.
I'm having trouble finding that logic the line you're talking about. The second sentence in that statement feels like an argument of individual responsibility (like this is all our faults) but the third calls it corporate responsibility. Which sure, to some degree we're all culpable, but most folks have neither the resources or the time to change things; and others of us are actively fighting against it. I'm inclined to give a full pass to those people. That's where I agree more with the initial sentiment, there needs to be accountability for folks actively committing fraud, disinformation, and regulatory capture in the name of profit. Us all feeling guilty about our small part is going to disenfranchise and demotivate people from taking collective action. If I feel the need to bike to those county meetings about enacting change, I probably won't go - I don't have the extra 7 hours to bike the round trip.
Corporate responsibility is the idea that when a group of people collectively decide to take an action, then they are all responsible for that action. Bear in mind that "collectively decide to take an action" is going to look differently in different situations — it might be a vote, but it might be acceptance of the status quo, or delegation of decision making to someone else. The important thing is that the decision made represents the group as a whole, not just one individual.
For example, in 2016, the UK voted for Brexit. The UK is therefore corporately responsible for Brexit. I voted against Brexit — I don't feel personally responsible for it — but I'm part of the UK, and we collectively made a decision to leave the EU.
That isn't to say that we can't also look at individual causes. For example, I think it's right to be critical of Boris Johnson's role in Brexit, in the decades of filing nonsense reports from the EU, in his campaign filled mainly with lies, and in his premiership forcing through a hard Brexit deal to keep his backbenchers in line. But on the other hand, we can't claim that Brexit was all Boris Johnson's doing — he didn't come round our houses and force us all to cross the "leave" box on our papers. We collectively made a decision to vote for Brexit.
Do you believe that the average German person had as much free information regarding the scale and impact of their governments actions, like officials did? Sure, you can make the argument that maybe they knew to some degree what their regime was doing, but someone had to have instilled in them the sort of hatred towards an "other" for it to be accepted. Someone had to push them along.
Much like the average person doesn't understand the long term impacts of climate change, I severely doubt the average German could even begin to imagine the scale of what they were doing and the impact it would have upon generations to come. To them it was the justified course of action as defined by the people that promised them a solution. Can they be blamed for believing a lie? A lie propped up and maintained by professional propagandists? I don't think so. Not to the same degree.
I'll reiterate my point; when a populace is lied to, repeatedly and knowingly, by people that they have been led to trust, then the central blame is with the liar. I do not mean to imply that there is no blame with the populace, but to make the claim that it is equal blame with the people who led them to their conclusions is quite frankly, in my opinion, a dead end from which you can't really get out of. What's the logical conclusion to it?
I only brought up Germany and WW2 due to the OPs invocation of the Nuremberg trials. Much like German citizens were never subject to such trials despite being somewhat culpable or potentially knowing about it, the average person should not be held to the same level of climate contempt as the people who have been lying for decades. Until they're brought to some form of justice, they're simply going to keep lying and lobbying, and the problem won't go away. If that's not responsibility, I don't know what is.
Someone tells you that they really hate one group of people - like, really, really hate them - and they're going to make that group of people disappear from your life, just like that, if you'll only look away for a moment. If you look away, are you complicit?
The Nazi party didn't necessarily broadcast their genocide, no, and you're right that their propaganda machine was impressive. But let's not pretend that this was some secret plot that they got away with because they were so good at hiding the evidence. The laws they passed openly at the start of their time in power, making Jews and many other groups second class citizens, were enough to make it clear that their regime was completely immoral. There was no justification for supporting them, and significant justification for fighting back against them.
Like I said before, serious comparison here is difficult - the climate crisis is not the Holocaust. But I do think that, in both cases, you don't get to evade responsibility by believing in lies and propaganda when the truth has been very plain to see.
I disagree with how easy the truth is to see when people are systematically told that it's nonsense by the very people responsible. But I don't think we're going to change viewpoints talking about it further. When you're knee deep in what you sincerely believe is true, the facts of the matter don't really change anything, no matter how easy it is to see them. Bottom line is, I think it's better to treat people with compassion and understanding rather than telling them they're responsible for a systemic issue.
I agree that we need to treat people with understanding, and talk to them in the places they are, rather than the places we want them to be. But in this case, the Nazis were very clear about their platform of imperialism and the eradication of the Jewish people (and other unwanted groups) from Germany. The people voted for them, and then most of the major institutions capitulated to them. They made Jews into second-class citizens, removed their businesses and their property, and sent them into ghettos and labour camps. This was all fully on display for the people of Germany to see.
And sure, at the individual level, it's understandable why many people might have felt uncomfortable with these actions but still decided that it was too unsafe to do anything about it. I'm not arguing that every German had an individual responsibility to end Nazism. But corporately, as a nation, the Germans collectively accepted the actions of their government, and therefore were complicit in that. And this is something that the modern German government accepts and sees as important: that they are the successor state of a nation that, collectively, performed deeply evil actions.
I don't want to go too much further down this discussion, because it's getting increasingly off-topic. But when systemic issues exist, then we all share the responsibility for them. This is particularly important when we're talking about totalitarianism, especially in our modern world. It's not enough to say "I didn't vote for that", or "but I was lied to" when we're talking about genocide.
IIRC, only a bit over a third of the voters explicitly voted them in.
I'll preface this by saying I don't at all think you are doing this knowingly, but this is oil company propaganda.
One of the favorite and contemporary tactics of oil companies is accepting that climate change is real, because they can hardly deny its mere existence like they used to, but they downplay their own responsibility in it. BP even popularized the term "carbon footprint" in 2000s for this purpose. To ward off any responsibility.
A closer analysis shows that these are wrong.
If you are sincerely concerned about your own part in the general scheme of things, one of the best things you can do is participate in climate crisis activism, and also further your understanding of the topic. We do need people from all over the world, but especially in the developed world (and especially US), to fight the oil companies and their politicians. We need to break their power, stop them, and make them pay. They are one of the most important threats to humanity in the current age.
This isn't North Korea; there is easily-accessible information about climate change online and offline. Environmentalists have gotten their share of the airwaves. The message is out there. By this point, everyone who hasn't been living under a rock has been presented both the truth and the lie, the red pill and the blue pill — and people weighed the two and chose the lie, the blue pill.
People want to be lied to. The lie feels good. People want SUVs and pickup trucks, cheap flights, bone-chilling air conditioning, cheap crap imported from the other side of the planet. Self-storage is a multi-billion dollar industry—there are multiple self-storage facilities in almost every city—because people in developed countries own too much cheap crap and need to store their cheap crap to make room for more cheap crap.
It's the same thing with factory farming. Everyone knows that animals are conscious and suffer horrible existences, but the lie is tasty and convenient. Everyone wants their $2.50/lb. chicken or $5 Costco rotisserie chicken, nightly steak, and so on. The whole "consumers are getting squeezed by corporations and are just looking for cheap food" argument is frankly bunk: this isn't natural, the average person today eats more meat than kings of yore.
The truth sucks. The truth means buying a compact car (still not sustainable) or carpooling or walking or riding bikes, taking a vacation someplace local instead of flying to Florida or Hawaii or taking a cruise, sweating it out a bit in the summer, owning less stuff, eating potatoes or beans on a weeknight instead of chicken or steak.
The consumer has all the power.
It's bad faith to ignore most of my points and all the evidence I've presented, and talk over me. So I won't be engaging with your comment, as I don't see the point to do so.
However, I will say this for the people reading this comment.
This is not how human mind works. If you're inclined to agree with this, you should consider checking out the concept of manifacturing consent, the psychology of propaganda and why it works, how beliefs form and why they are resistant to change, nudging theory, and how the field of public relations was invented by Edward Bernays to not call it propaganda. You should also consider reading about psychology in general, to see how human mind works in general. The absolutist "free choice" ideology falls apart even with an introductory level understanding of psychological science.
My issue with your framing. I think that your focus on psychology and propaganda reflects a recurring bias that seeks to frame the issue as people versus oil companies and politicians, where the latter controls the former through psychological strategies — strategies whose effects are significantly overestimated, as revealed in the ongoing replication crisis in psychological science.
It reminds me of the recent New Yorker article about how many people in the Middle East saw the American CIA as omniscient:
I have worked at the nerve center of an oil mega-corp and gotten to know some of these executives, as a sort of corporate Hannah Arendt. They're all very nice, intelligent and educated, and surprisingly liberal and well-meaning people, albeit mediocre MBA types and organizational functionaries. Evil is banal. These academics in your links ascribe conspiratorial machinations to what's truly only bureaucratic amorality. I assure you, the machine only runs because the world as configured by people's desires demands it.
This framing
This framing has led countless environmental activists on fruitless crusades against oil companies. And it's why they always lose fighting this battle, crushed by the first principles of socioeconomic reality, and why Saudi Aramco is the world's most valuable company.
The reason why companies fight so hard for the hearts and minds of people is because that's where the real battlefront is. Environmentalists need to convince people that a desirable, prosperous life can look different from how it does today.
Any other battle is futile.
This is what corporates want you to feel. Thinking that people should change to reach climatic goals, will never work. Top down approach here is exponentially effective than bottom up.
Following this line of thinking, should patients who were prescribed opioids that later got addicted to them be prosecuted for their 'crime' of driving demand for opioids and furthering the opioid epidemic? Even though the producers of these drugs lied about their safety?
It's not dissimilar from what's happening here. Fossil fuel companies are constantly lying about the environmental impacts of their product. "Natural Gas" is constantly touted as "clean" energy when it isn't. When the electorate tries to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption, these companies spend massive amounts of money to lobby against it.
We've spent frankly absurd amounts of money trying to reverse the impacts of fossil fuel consumption through carbon capture rather than transition to green energy and energy storage.
We can maintain a very similar standard of living with significantly lower emissions and environmental destruction. Corporations–especially those dependent on our consumption of fossil fuels–will fight this at every level because it will cut into their profit margins.
While I think it's right to say that people are not blameless for allowing themselves to be bamboozled and brainwashed into electing ridiculously corporation-friendly politicians, I think that's a tiny fraction of the blame compared to the corporate execs who've lied, obscured facts, and seeded FUD to the population in service of chasing down profits; or the politicians who've accepted money to join in on the deception and give the corps everything they want. A democracy can only achieve the ideal outcome in an ideal environment where the voting population has all of the information they need to make informed decisions, and we (in the USA at least) are nowhere near that ideal, and it feels lately like that ideal is only moving farther and farther away at an accelerating rate.
Just editing to add a rant: I really don't get the mindset of the corp execs and politicians who are knowingly and willingly fucking the planet over to get money. Don't they realize they are also humans who live on this planet? That they're screwing themselves too? Their kids and grandkids? Is it just that they think they have enough money to buy their own way out of the problem? Or so old that they'll be dead before it matters anyway? I am truly baffled at how we've gotten to where we are with the environment and still seem to be continuing full steam ahead towards hell on earth. Is it some kind of ultra-rich groupthink going on? Is there a higher rate of sociopathy among the elite? Blah.
Oh yeah. I think that these companies should be dissolved and sold off in small pieces with the proceeds going towards things that will correct the problems they caused, and any executive involved should be tried as the criminals they are. The fact that we do not do this kind of thing to corporations is a crime against the public.
The sad thing is that you're only upset about the climate change related stuff. There are corporations who are involved in much more directly worse things. Heck. the oil companies are responsible for huge ecological damages that have killed immeasurable numbers of creatures; just look at the deepwater horizon oil spill for an example. Or heck, read the wikipedia article on Union Carbide; between things like the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster and the Bhopal incident, they have perhaps the greatest human death count of any corporation out there. But it gets worse - they were bought by Dow Chemical a while back, so now you can just add those atrocities together! And speaking of Dow Chemical, just about every major chemical company - 3M and DuPont come to mind, but there are certainly others - is guilty of literally poisoning the water supply.
It's astonishing that people are OK with the slaps on the wrist these companies get for killing so many people. Sure, it's forgivable because most people aren't aware of these things, but isn't that actually worse?
I think it's unfair to say that, because the OP is angry about this one that they're not also angry about all the other corporate malfeasances that exist. There's nothing in there that says "climate change malfeasance is bad, but all the others are peachy." It's possible to focus on one bad thing without needing to give lip service to every other extant issue.
You're not understanding my point. My point is that the the lack of appropriate retribution for this particular thing is part of a larger problem - the lack of appropriate retribution for anything corporations do.
When you say this, you're definitely distracting from the point you say you're trying to make, in that you're centering the writer's failure to call out broader issues. Why is them making this post sad? Why is expressing their upset in this area sad because they didn't mention every other corporate crime?
I'm honestly not seeing why you're having a hard time understanding that the thing I find sad is that the scale of tragedy and injustice is dramatically larger than what OP was upset about. Are you saying that this wording makes it seem like I'm upset or looking to put blame on OP? That was clearly not the intention and I do not know why you are reading it that way.
No, I understand. Your perspective on the issue is so much bigger than the little thing that the OP is angry about. With all their anger, they're caught in the weeds of a tiny fraction of the real injustice. I get your perspective.
I'm just trying to explain to you how it comes across when you talk about how it's sad that they're missing the big picture. You're right that there are other issues in the world, but your framing is minimizing their upset at this one issue. If someone wrote passionately about a single injustice that occurred to a friend of theirs, would it be helpful for you to come in and say it was sad that they weren't paying attention to all instances of that injustice everywhere? No it would not.
Does that help you understand why I'm having this conversation with you? You may not have intended to make this about their lack of vision regarding the true scope of injustice, but that's how your words came across.
I honestly feel that to get that kind of impression you would have to ignore practically everything else I wrote. The paragraph I wrote immediately preceding that was me wholeheartedly agreeing with them and validating their feelings. I'm not saying that there are unrelated injustices happening that eclipse their concern; I'm saying that they are all related. I'm trying to amplify their points, not overwrite them.
If they had taken offense at my choice of words, I would apologize immediately. But they are not the ones who are upset about it. You are. Do I need to apologize to you because you chose to take the worst possible interpretation of my words?
I think this conversation has been counterproductive since it has gone so far off course for the topic, so I'm going to choose to leave this where it is now. I'll try to be more careful about my wording, so in the future please refrain from assuming I'm trying to talk down to people.
That's because I was on the verge of a heat stroke when I wrote this, for simply sitting in my home. Of course I was focusing on what felt more personal to me in such a situation. This post is directly a product of my suffering. I mentioned at the start that I'm suffering greatly from this.
I do agree on the ecological aspects with you, but there is no point in one-upping. It feels like purity testing. Different people can focus on different things, not to mention at different times. You're always welcome to make a similar post but for ecological subjects.
I really did not mean to one-up you. I'm sorry that my words have come across that way. I merely meant to point out that there is a history of corporations not being fully held accountable for the damages they have caused. I share in your frustration, having been through the same kind of experience you have had, multiple times.
Thanks and no harm done. We are on the same side. Many species suffer because of these criminals. It's why I said in the post that they should be judged for crimes against humanity and the planet.
"Crime", as generally understood, such as personal murders, muggings, etc., pales in comparison to what these monsters have accomplished and still continue to do so.
I think this is more or less the story of asbestos (minus the criminal proceedings). After asbestos was discovered to be hazardous, many asbestos manufacturers were found liable for damages and forced into bankruptcy, at which point those companies essentially became trusts tasked with paying out personal inury claims.
Prologue: I agree with you. Both corporations and govts -- particularly, the leadership "in the know" -- should face criminal charges, not exclusively for the Climate Crisis, but for a wide array of ecological pollution and destruction, and resource depletion, and social ... well, for a lot of things.
Except ... well, "should" is a funny kind of word, isn't it?
I've been arguing aggressively for more/better/faster response to the Climate Crisis (and other things), for 40+ years. Over the past 5-10 years, I've gradually lost hope.
These days, I mostly look at it all as a kind of failing of human nature -- perhaps as simple as our tendency to underestimate geometric progressions, or a limitation in our ability to understand and adapt to game theory, and/or other grand philosophical ways of saying, we were doomed from the start.
That may not be true; there may still be hope. It might just be 40+ years of frustration that has built up in me. And of course, like everyone else, I'm biased. So who really knows?
And because I know I might be wrong, I do still try to do the most I can personally, and socially/politically ... but it all feels like I'm just going through the motions. Internally, I've accepted the idea that 3+°C is inevitable, that the next century or so will see our population decline by about an order of magnitude, and that the planetary ecosystem will be undergoing wild systemic changes for centuries to come.
From this perspective, the idea of punishing the ones most culpable certainly feels satisfying ... but also, ultimately futile. "Justice" is a luxury reserved for stable societies that still have a stable future ahead of them. We have initiated the planet's 6th major extinction event, which will continue to play out for centuries, if not millennia ... followed by an explosion of new evolutionary development. Perhaps our species will survive to see it happen, perhaps not.
More and more, these days, I find my personal equanimity in the excitement and curiosity of knowing I get to live thru and witness this one-in-a-billion event on Earth.
The New York Times' Ezra Klein show podcast recently did an episode that feels relevant to this discussion. It's here on YouTube, but, as they say…
A summary and transcript can be found here, if you are a New York Times subscriber.
Anyway, all of that out of the way, it was a discussion of the environment/climate change and the global economy. Here is the introduction:
Finally, here is a TL;DR in the form of an AI summary of the transcript (from ChatGPT-4o):
I think it's a good discussion that's worth a listen for anyone who is concerned about climate change and how we are going to tackle it. I don't know that the AI transcript really captures everything well.
Hey, there's something important I forgot to mention to you before - be very careful with heat. Heat fatigue is cumulative; the longer you are dealing with heat the more it builds up. Do everything you can to stay cool.
Oh, yeah, definitely. Thanks for the reminder!