For the record, I'm generally not against billionaires or capitalism. I'm fine with anyone who wants to profit from making a useful or innovative product/service. My problem is when a product clearly does harm and is not accounted for due to market failure, but then an effort is made to deceive people of it's harmfulness in order to continue to make profit, increasing the measurable harm along the way. How many lives could have been saved if the Tobacco deception campaigns never happened? It's a question worth asking. How much damage could we have prevented from severe climate change (which is looking likely at this point) if the fossil fuel deception campaign never happened?
I would like an honest, intelligent discussion on how to properly deal with market failures, including pricing negative externalities. However, an honest discussion is not what I see. I see comments boards on science articles being flooded with statements about Al Gore's private jet and the thoroughly debunked "It hasn't warmed in 15 years". Which tells me that the problem is that people are not just victims of misinformation, they WANT to be misinformed. That is a very important point. It is one thing to be misinformed and then make an effort to conquer your ignorance, that's perfectly noble. The problem comes when you are misinformed and then intentionally seek information to validate your point of view, and then spread the propaganda to others. This culture of willful misinformation makes me question on whether or not we are a worthy species of planetary governance. I am skeptical that we are. At 7 billion people, we really need to learn how to manage our resources properly and not make irreversible changes to our biosphere. That is going to really come back to bite us hard.
But, in the event humanity does die in it's cradle, which is not a guaranteed but instead a possible outcome due to reckless behavior, don't think of extinction as an unusual event. Over 99% of all species on Earth have gone extinct, so joining the vast majority would not be at all unprecedented. It's just be a shame to see something that was born out of billions of years of evolution into conscious, (mostly) rational beings capable of creating complex technology and sciences, not to mention being self-aware and seeking out ways to answer our place in the universe. It would just be such a damn shame to throw all of that away just because we didn't have the courage to stand up to a few million solipsistic morons that I refer to the "cult of ignorance". I think human life is precious and valuable and I think we are capable of great things. But there is one great thing that we MUST accomplish and that is properly maintaining not only our own species but since we are in the position of power, preserving the integrity of the biosphere as much as we can as well as not radically changing the chemistry of our atmosphere and oceans.
It drives me crazy because this argument seems so damn obvious to me, and yet it strikes others as ambiguous or malevolent. I understand that people want cars, boats, energy, airplanes, food, water, buildings, electronics, jobs, etc etc etc and that is PERFECTLY FINE and I want all that stuff too, but we need to do it in a way that does not destroy the very foundation in which we stand on.
Are we cool? Cool.
