Highlights
-
2024-11-19 16:13 And every single time, they say the same thing, which is that they want more coverage of the climate crisis.
-
2024-11-19 18:25 But then after the Paris Agreement, this was kind of sharpened to 1.5 degrees as the limit that the world had sort of committed itself to respecting.
-
2024-11-19 18:30 This is just, you know, when you start to unpack these black boxes and look at, okay, what would these technologies that do not actually exist mean if they entered the material world?
-
2024-11-19 21:16 Colombia is a unique country. At this moment it is the third largest fossil fuel producer in Latin America. It’s the only significant fossil fuel producer in the world that now has a left wing government that is entirely resolved and determined to stop fossil fuel production in its own country.
-
2024-11-19 21:16 Colombia, as with every government, but it’s the best case that we have right now of a government that has actually banned the exploration of oil and gas, despite fossil fuels accounting for more than 50% of export from that country. So it’s a country that has become extremely dependent on fossil fuel production.
-
2024-11-19 21:17 But in Colombia you have Gustavo Pietro, the President and you have, not the least, Susana Mohammedi and environmental minister, incidentally with Palestinian roots, who have now said that we’re going to stop producing oil and gas and coal in this country and instead we’re going to produce more solar and wind and we’re even going to export solar and wind powered electricity through a trans American grid. And Susana Mohammed just unveiled a massive public investment programme. This is exactly the kind of policies that we need.
-
2024-11-20 14:36 But what about things like using reflective materials and urban heat islands to the, you know, really, I mean, it sounds goofy, but apparently, you know, it’s serious. But a big mirror in space. It sounds stupid when you say it like that. Big mirror in space. Also stratospheric aerosol injections. Like, are there any of these that you think, you know, not only are they not a scam, but perhaps rich countries should be leading the way in paying for and implementing some of them. Well, the short answer is no. I think I just said stratospheric correctly and now you’re saying no.
-
2024-11-20 08:09 And this has only become more evident in recent years, particularly after 2022 with the unprecedented profit bonanza that made Saudi Aramco reap the largest profits in the history of the entire capitalist motor production. And all the other big fossil fuel companies also made the largest profits in their corporations histories.
-
2024-11-20 14:37 Renewables cannot ever generate profits on this scale because they essentially come for free. There is no human labour needed for the sun to shine or the wind to blow, whereas you have to mobilise human labour to get coal or oil or gas out of the ground. And this, as Marxists know, is the source of profit, human labour. But it doesn’t exist in the flow of renewable energy in and of itself.
-
2024-11-20 14:37 No one has seen anyone, you know, extracting a tonne of sunlight and putting it into a tanker and shipping it across the world. You can’t do that. And the same with win
-
2024-11-20 14:38 JP Morgan and all the asset managers, BlackRock, you know, BlackRock made this famous statement, what is now four years ago, that we’re going to you know, diminish our investment in fossil fuels. And then of course, they did exactly the opposite because the profits are absolutely irresistible to these actors and they’re not motivated by planetary survival, nor are they motivated necessarily by. By the death drive, although you sometimes might suspect that they are. They’re just motivated by the compulsion to maximise profit. And if it’s more profitable to produce fossil fuels than it is to produce renewables, which it always is, then the capital will be directed to fossil fuels. And this is what we’re seeing every day.
-
2024-11-20 14:37 The renewable energy companies that you can see that exist, they tend to be very small still and they are not engaged in any kind of, you know, life and death struggle or any sort of antagonistic confrontation with fossil capital. They are happy with selling their products to fossil fuel companies. So, for instance, you have this perverse situation where because renewables are so cheap, you will find ExxonMobil and other oil and gas companies using renewables to power their oil extraction. So you will have large solar panels in the oil districts in Texas and elsewhere because it’s cheaper to power the pumps with electricity from the sun. And renewable energy companies are perfectly happy with selling their goods to the fossil fuel companies. There is no antagonist in between.
-
2024-11-20 08:19 One is we need to appease some imagined version of the white working class and not talk about climate, not talk about race, not talk about these woke things to win them back to us. This is something that, for instance, the left part in my own country has tried to do with catastrophic results.