It's a tenet of MAGA membership, culturally reinforced by the likes of Taylor Sheridan productions like 'Landman' - conservative machismo power-fantasies where the environmental strawmen are setup to be 'destroyed' by Billy Bob Thornton in a snappy youtube-shorts length monologue.
Unfortunately, similar to 'Yellowstone', much of the rabid viewing audience take this conservative land-right pornography at face-value as a source of truth for the state of the nation.
I'm in the PNW so I'll use timber and logging as my example but one can find similar stories in coal and oil.
Conservatives used environmental causes as a means to distract workers. What do I mean? Back in the 70s and 80s loggers were looking to unionize and get more pay. So what happened? The spotted owl, land rights, environmentalists, etc. Now we have campaigns like Timber Unity which resulted in more gates on lands, less loggers in general(automation) and lower pay/benefits for those workers.
Now, rural Americans fly banners of campaigns that have stripped them of money. They eagerly proclaim their timber unity while they lose their jobs, acting as if they're battling this environmentalist boogieman.
While the low paid workers hit their chests and declare unity against environmentalists, their employers lower their pay, cut benefits, etc while blaming an owl.
It's mind boggling how hoodwinked they let them selves be. You can see this repeated in other industries that use environmentalists as scapegoats.
Weird: My YouTube feed is suddenly (as of last night) full of “Landman” shorts and I was trying to work out wtf it even is? This makes a lot more sense now, thanks.
It isn't sudden, it was always there. 15 years ago I drove from iowa to minnesota. In iowa there were wind turbines eveywhere, in mn billboards saying wind is not the answer. Today iowa des moines is 100% wind powered (i can only find press releases stating that, official numbers for the whole state are around 50%)
I recently had a dumb argument with actually a bunch of folks on Nextdoor who claimed unironically that coal power plants were more eco friendly than wind and solar farms.
I ran the numbers like a good nerd. It is mind-bogglingly inane how wrong that idea is. I also learned new things about how ridiculously polluting coal plants are.
These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news). Or they were bots.
I have a lake home in Central MN. There are shit tons of wind turbines near my home.
The recent moves by the feds to limit wind makes no sense. If a farmer wants to lease some small plots of likely unusable planting property to a company that generates electricity via wind who the fuck cares? While the feds can stop land use options as they see fit, the way it’s worded makes it seem as if it’s not a good thing for farmers to use their land as they see fit—something that’s likely intentional.
Likely explanation for those numbers is that if it's windy 100% of the power needs are fulfilled by wind and statistically the local wind turbines make enough power that if somehow Des Moines could store that and sip from it, they could run all the time on pure wind power. But in practice what happens is when it's windy Des Moines exports power and gets money, and when it's calm Des Moines buys power that wasn't from a wind turbine.
One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.
Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?
I listened to the press conference the other day with Trumps cabinet meeting.
It is bizar to listen to.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that windmills had killed 100+ whales. I tried to find out what he referred to, but couldn't find anything but articles debunking any claim that windmills affect whales (after construction).
He also claimed that the price per kWh of wind energy is above $0.30, which is quite a bit from the $0.03 ($0.12 offshore) price per kWh listed in Wikipedia [1] for United States.
At the same meeting Trump stated that the only viable solution is fossil fuel."... and maybe a little nuclear, but mostly fossil fuel.". And that wind is about 10x more expensive than natural gas (again contradicting the prices listed in the Wikipedia reference where the prices for onshore wind and natural gas are almost identical).
There are some German guidelines for building offshore windmills - how noise should be reduced - and whales should be distracted and that ramming shouldn't be too loud. Most likely this doesn't come from nothing. So 100+ whales could be true, but I think all this is related to noise from construction.
A country can commit to 300 years of wind energy, temporarily harming a bit of nature.
Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.
We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.
Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.
You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.
Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.
So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.
The opposition to the construction of wind farms are mostly silly except in a very specific situation. We should not construct those in nature reservation. If a place is worth designating as a nature reserve then we have decided that such place is worth protecting even if the area could be later freed (common reason is keeping certain species from going extinct, which makes the threat nontemporarily). Ocean based wind farms has a tendency to want to be built in the shallows, which happens to correlate where we tend to designate as nature reservations.
Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.
Unless the change is shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants[1]. The energy transition in Germany has been handled horribly for reasons I can't understand.
True, but there is also its own brand of politicization of wind power going on, driven mostly by conservatives and the Bavarian CSU.
Not many whales around here unfortunately, but I'm amazed what kind of extinction-level dangers they apparently pose for birds, forests and generally wildlife.
And then there is the lasting psychological damage caused by the sounds and moving shadows of the rotor blades...
That denial of change, results in a build up of "change-debt", which then unloads in uncontrolled, dangerous events in leaps and bounds. All that autistic attempt to control reality to run on a rail, results on reality lashing ut to the systems opposed to it.
Giant metal towers make a dead tall tree look harmless by comparison. If that topples - and eventually it will - it will kill everybody in its path. So, we're probably not going to just leave on-shore wind turbines to rot.
Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy - they listen to propaganda saying that the value of houses near wind farms drops, that itself causes the price to drop.
Isn't the idea of npp decommissioning to leave the area as it was before npp?
Environmental impact of different techs was described in UNECE report I think
Uneconomical. The best way to dispose of things like the weakly radioactive reactor hulls is often to simply leave them when they are.
They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.
"Weaponized activists" was an instrument of non-market competition for a long while now.
It's kind of a more modern, more legal take on "send some mobsters to mess them up". You find (or make) an activist group opposing a certain development - and then covertly funnel funding and support to them so that they can do as much damage as possible and stall your competition for as long as possible.
Yup, and George Soros does actually funds pro-wind groups. Open Society Foundation gives $400 million over 8 years to green economic development. That said, I think that's a bullshit argument for not supporting wind, and I'd much rather have an argument with data about the long-term economics.
If I was a billionaire with tons of money and maybe 10 years of life left, I'd be dumping millions all over care free to counteract some of this MAGA nonsense that's trying to turn us into a country of conspiracies, "faith" in invisible sky daddies, and luddites.
I read the article but it's still unclear what argument the anti-wind groups use to say _why_ "wind is bad for environment/our children/the economy/greater good"?
Ruins the view, kills birds, noisy is the usual trifecta. Or to quote one site I won't deign to link to, "Protecting the marine environment and ecosystems from the industrialisation of our oceans."
Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
Those are the weaker arguments. In the UK, I've heard many more convincing arguments against wind power.
e.g.
- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.
> Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
Well, if they were entirely sincere in their concern for the view, the birds, and the noise, only one of those concerns would apply to offshore drilling.
Considering "preventing industrialization" to be an end in itself is something different, usually associated with being pro-wind-power.
From what I understand the point is precisely not having to straight up say out loud why, "attacking renewable energy solutions without necessarily questioning the science that the climate is changing due to human activity".
Two argument seem to be to "claim damages from the visual impact of offshore with projects located off their coasts" and "invoking the federal environment legislation such as the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act".
I don't know about those groups, but the arguments I saw so far are these:
- Unclear maintenance - there's no clear way what to do with dysfunctional mills on land.
Just letting them rot seems to be a thing. Offshore maintenance is surely no fun, too. How long do they last?
- Pollution - there's a lot of abrasion and this stuff is pretty unclear,
it's even going into places where clean water is collected. Does anybody care about this?
- Ecology - there are a lot of trees that get cut down for wind. Maybe keeping those trees would be better.
Kills birds and bats is also part of the argument
- Economy - a lot of energy is produced at the wrong time. So much that it's even expensive to dump.
How much energy goes into producing the mill, and how long will it last?
Does this break even if you subtract subsidies, maintenance and value the dumped excess-energy realistically?
Is there any good storage solution coming - or will this remain to be a myth?
In the end Economy is most likely the only thing that matters. But I guess this is not looking so good - if it would be looking good you'd see more logos of big energy companies on all these mills...
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.
"Creating value for shareholders" has done more for sustainability than eco-activists could ever hope to.
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.
I haven't come across any "eco activists" who solely push for straw bans etc and nothing else. It's pretty obvious that the way forward is to not use so much stuff. LEDs and solar panels are nice but don't encourage using less stuff. "Creating value for shareholders" encourages using more stuff. But you're probably right, "economic forces" look like they win, now and forever.
> Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels. Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
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.
> Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.
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.
Industrial capitalists irrevocably destroy large tracts of public and private land. Eco-activists lobby to at least have them cover the clean-up bill, if not incurr punitive fines. This goes back to 1969 when the EPA was set up when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire due to pollution from industrial waste. Some other highlights of "Creating value for shareholders"
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.
>Industrial capitalists make mass produced LED lights and cheap solar panels.
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.
A major reason I don't treat conspiracy theorists seriously is that with all their paranoia they have a huge blind spot for the Captain-Planet-cartoon-villainy the oil industry is engaging in.
Just the stuff the Heartland Institute does is enough to write a book about and still not a peep from the usual crowd.
It is more likely they just don't care about the oil industry and focus their attention elsewhere. I would wager that most people assume that large corporations have dirty secrets.
e.g. I listen to a guy that goes exposes the conmen in the UFO community. The reason the guy focuses on UFOs is because he believes that when he was younger he saw a UFO. Over time he slowly realised over time that he had been lied to by these conmen. He isn't interested in the truth about the oil industry, he cares about the truth around UFO encounters because that is what he cares about.
Plenty of conspiracy theorists have conspiracies about the oil industry being evil, it's just harder to spot them when so many of them turn out to be true. Fracking, OPEC, exxon, BP, government deals with "suspicious" Saudis, and oil spills are common targets. The wild stuff is pretty much the usual though. Depopulation, psychic attacks, secret global government stuff, UFOs, etc.
You can learn about a scene without thinking they're competent.
It doesn't really prove war for oil, war tends to mess up production and also we have a huge amount of domestic production. But that depends on what exactly the claims are.
"Free energy" doesn't exist so that just goes back to them barking up the wrong tree. It's taking a real villain and blaming them for nonsense instead of something they actually do.
> how would you know if the conspiracy theory scene has already addressed oil industry corruption?
Because it hasn't. The "free energy" stuff is way off the mark and pales in comparison to absolute kookery of weather machines being responsible for things climate change is actually doing.
They don't have a solid grasp of reality and it shows in how they're unaware about the specific things the oil industry is doing. Much of their rhetoric is big oil propaganda being repeated anyway.
War for oil isn't a conspiracy - it's such obvious public knowledge that there are memes about it. Yes, the country that is a major oil producer and in the currency of which most if not all oil transactions are done uses its military might to preserve the status quo - that's hardly a secret.
Readit News
There are farms that are nearing completion and now are just in limbo.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/26/business/wind-project-can...
Unfortunately, similar to 'Yellowstone', much of the rabid viewing audience take this conservative land-right pornography at face-value as a source of truth for the state of the nation.
I'm in the PNW so I'll use timber and logging as my example but one can find similar stories in coal and oil.
Conservatives used environmental causes as a means to distract workers. What do I mean? Back in the 70s and 80s loggers were looking to unionize and get more pay. So what happened? The spotted owl, land rights, environmentalists, etc. Now we have campaigns like Timber Unity which resulted in more gates on lands, less loggers in general(automation) and lower pay/benefits for those workers.
Now, rural Americans fly banners of campaigns that have stripped them of money. They eagerly proclaim their timber unity while they lose their jobs, acting as if they're battling this environmentalist boogieman.
While the low paid workers hit their chests and declare unity against environmentalists, their employers lower their pay, cut benefits, etc while blaming an owl.
It's mind boggling how hoodwinked they let them selves be. You can see this repeated in other industries that use environmentalists as scapegoats.
I ran the numbers like a good nerd. It is mind-bogglingly inane how wrong that idea is. I also learned new things about how ridiculously polluting coal plants are.
These bad ideas come from somewhere (presumably cable news). Or they were bots.
The recent moves by the feds to limit wind makes no sense. If a farmer wants to lease some small plots of likely unusable planting property to a company that generates electricity via wind who the fuck cares? While the feds can stop land use options as they see fit, the way it’s worded makes it seem as if it’s not a good thing for farmers to use their land as they see fit—something that’s likely intentional.
The oil companies do.
One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.
Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/big-oil-donations-trump
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4961820-oil-bi...
https://climatepower.us/news/new-report-oil-and-gas-industry...
https://truthout.org/articles/big-oil-spent-445-million-to-i...
It is bizar to listen to.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that windmills had killed 100+ whales. I tried to find out what he referred to, but couldn't find anything but articles debunking any claim that windmills affect whales (after construction).
He also claimed that the price per kWh of wind energy is above $0.30, which is quite a bit from the $0.03 ($0.12 offshore) price per kWh listed in Wikipedia [1] for United States.
At the same meeting Trump stated that the only viable solution is fossil fuel."... and maybe a little nuclear, but mostly fossil fuel.". And that wind is about 10x more expensive than natural gas (again contradicting the prices listed in the Wikipedia reference where the prices for onshore wind and natural gas are almost identical).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
https://bwo-offshorewind.de/category/offshore-windenergie/na...
Once a better solution has been found, the land can be freed for the nature to take over again.
We have no issues with stealing a couple of square miles of nature in order to pave it for our cities or to use it for farming.
Once you remove the wind turbines, the harm you've done to the nature was minimal: production of the turbines, used area and generated noise, minimal pollution of the area, the troubles of recycling them. That's mostly it.
You don't have this with oil, nor with current-age nuclear.
Also, we've already accepted the noise of cars, trucks, motorcycles and planes.
So I really don't get what they are protesting about, specially in Germany.
Wind power is however not comparable to fossil fuels or nuclear power. Denmark is a prime example of a country that did commit fully to wind power in a very strong and consistent way, and do produce more total energy through wind that they consume. That energy however is not produced when people want to consume it, so as a practical matter, they import around 50% of their energy that they do consume, energy which is not wind since when the wind blow they export the excess energy. They could produce 500% or even 1000% more wind energy, and they would still need to import a large portion of their consumption from non-wind power. Producing that much excess power would mostly just effect exports and not in a good way for the producers since overproduction mostly just lead to lower prices. 50% consumption seems to be around the maximum of what you can do with wind (for now), and when the wind do not blow you still need 100% of the capacity from other sources in order to fill in the gap. Overproduction of nuclear or thermal energy does not have this issue, but rather carries completely different problems.
[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...
Not many whales around here unfortunately, but I'm amazed what kind of extinction-level dangers they apparently pose for birds, forests and generally wildlife.
And then there is the lasting psychological damage caused by the sounds and moving shadows of the rotor blades...
You probably don't even need to remove the turbines if you don't want to? I imagine nature would take over just fine with them left there.
Off-shore definitely. The UK already had a bunch of decaying archaic man-made structures off shore because of World War II, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts which I went to look at a few weeks back. Pieces of the forts clearly break off and disappear into the sea without incident.
They aren't particularly dangerous, and they don't leach contaminants. So you just bury them so no one can access them too easily. But it does require leaving the sealed reactor buildings in place - even if you can reuse the rest of the land and the exclusion area.
Deconstructing a wind turbine is far from simple and cheap.
Remember - that's the core issue. Development of housing or green energy projects or industries with low externalities should be by-right.
It's kind of a more modern, more legal take on "send some mobsters to mess them up". You find (or make) an activist group opposing a certain development - and then covertly funnel funding and support to them so that they can do as much damage as possible and stall your competition for as long as possible.
Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
e.g.
- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.
Well, if they were entirely sincere in their concern for the view, the birds, and the noise, only one of those concerns would apply to offshore drilling.
Considering "preventing industrialization" to be an end in itself is something different, usually associated with being pro-wind-power.
Two argument seem to be to "claim damages from the visual impact of offshore with projects located off their coasts" and "invoking the federal environment legislation such as the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act".
There is, of course, a debunking video response (14 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKVNFqqzvP4
NIMBYism (destroying the beautiful views from my golf course) and "Think of the birds" also feature high on the list.
> 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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's sad that this has become so normal, and that they can pressure opponents into silence. I'm wondering if we'll ever get rid of this.
Just the stuff the Heartland Institute does is enough to write a book about and still not a peep from the usual crowd.
e.g. I listen to a guy that goes exposes the conmen in the UFO community. The reason the guy focuses on UFOs is because he believes that when he was younger he saw a UFO. Over time he slowly realised over time that he had been lied to by these conmen. He isn't interested in the truth about the oil industry, he cares about the truth around UFO encounters because that is what he cares about.
The War-for-Oil conspiracy theories are proven correct.
The suppression of 'free energy' is discussed widely as being a result of oil-industry repression.
And on and on.
It doesn't really prove war for oil, war tends to mess up production and also we have a huge amount of domestic production. But that depends on what exactly the claims are.
"Free energy" doesn't exist so that just goes back to them barking up the wrong tree. It's taking a real villain and blaming them for nonsense instead of something they actually do.
Because it hasn't. The "free energy" stuff is way off the mark and pales in comparison to absolute kookery of weather machines being responsible for things climate change is actually doing.
They don't have a solid grasp of reality and it shows in how they're unaware about the specific things the oil industry is doing. Much of their rhetoric is big oil propaganda being repeated anyway.
War for oil isn't a conspiracy - it's such obvious public knowledge that there are memes about it. Yes, the country that is a major oil producer and in the currency of which most if not all oil transactions are done uses its military might to preserve the status quo - that's hardly a secret.
Almost all of the post-Iraq oil contracts went for Chinese companies. The US made very little of it.