not while there's still oil to be extracted. Rigs (esp. offshore ones) take a lot of initial investment, and takes several decades to fully pay out. It's not hard to imagine that those investments hadn't fully matured and so they'd want the demand for oil to continue.
However, there's also a trend that giant corporations are kind of like giant oil tankers (no pun intended). It takes a humongous amount of energy to change a company's fundamental core business. Oil companies are in the business of oil. Even if they expand to becoming an energy company, it takes a long time for them to change their "oil DNA". Based on that, I can imagine that certain oil companies - though not all oil companies - elect to maintain the status quo.
I don't think this is unique to big oil. It's unique to big {pharma, tech, oil, *}. What I find harder to find out is what the "weights" are for both sides and how they are influenced.
What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power. A parallel branch of Wind and Solar companies are doing all the installations and running the power but not to the extent of bringing new capacity online, its all purely for replacing the old coal and gas systems. Quite a lot of companies are having to buy their own installations and run them so they can have their new data centre.
What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power.
China has to import 70% of its oil so it needs to focus on renewables. If the US doesn't produce enough oil for its own needs, it too would be building solar and wind at scale I presume. But the US is a net oil exporter.
They'd rather see world go through an energy crisis which will make their profits skyrocket, before we eventually de-fossilize.
The financial modeling also relies heavily on the assumption of government preference (hard if there is a huge lobby who hates your guts) and wind speeds holding constant (wind speeds are falling and this is blowing holes in wind farm finances).
So Hill Farmer Bob can just put a turbine up on the big hill and get "free" electricity. If there was magically Oil everywhere, and Bob was legally allowed to just drill for it, that's what he would obviously do, but in most places there is no oil and oil companies ensured they control the rights so Bob couldn't drill.
This is what capitalism is about, you own stuff therefore you get free money forever. But you don't own the sun or wind.
I'm wondering if the current governmental backlash to wind is just a prelude to getting "wind rights" of vast geographical areas sold to some properly bribing oil corporation.
Then the company can totally control the transition from oil to wind in such a fashion as to extract maximum revenue without having to care about any external competition.
As an example I feel even Gas electricity LCOE equivalent is calculated as Capex + Opex where Capex amortisation over lifetime depends on capacity factor of Gas turbine plant. With more renewable penetration even in a competitive market like ERCOT the LCOE equivalent costs for Gas increases although technically this should drive overall electricity lower and should work for everyone.
This completely creates a significant issue for Natural Gas future too which I think was unthinkable for US Gas producers as it was the safest bet decades into the future.
Not too talk about what even a 3-4% Oil demand destruction in Oil for transportation due to EVs can do to the oil markets.
All this seemed theoretical before but now the tides are finally changing led by China and most of the world has a vested interest in reducing Oil and Gas dependency as most of the world are net importers too.
So all these plays are essentially trying to maximise the cash producing life of the current assets whether it can be achieved by FUD or whatever other means necessary.
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.
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.
Your disdain for the conspiracy theorist scene is mirrored in that scenes disdain for justice.
In the case where there is actionable justice that can be achieved, the conspiracy theory is no longer a theory - the conspiracy is prosecuted in the courts of our proud nations' democratic institutions.
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.
edit: apart from that, no one is willing to pay for a realistic substitute for the fuel oil (marine) or diesel, so the question is actually moot.
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.
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.
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.
Have you looked at the government subsidies for nuclear in the UK and the massive lifetime cost? In terms of offshore wind - initially it was subsidized to get it up and running - but now it's established those have dropped and dropped.
> 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.
Sure - but no-one is claiming 100% wind is the target - total strawman argument. The UK goverments own net zero plan actually still includes gas generation!
One of the more bonkers arguments in the UK was when there was a massive fossil fuel price shock a couple of years ago due to wars and rising global demand - the fossil fuel lobby blamed rewnewables for the high prices!
I said I don't know. I said had heard the argument and these are examples of better arguments against wind IMO if they are true.
I don't know what to believe. I am dubious of any reporting on these issues.
> Sure - but no-one is claiming 100% wind is the target - total strawman argument. The UK goverments own net zero plan actually still includes gas generation!
Neither are they claiming wind is 100% the target.
> One of the more bonkers arguments in the UK was when there was a massive fossil fuel price shock a couple of years ago due to wars and rising global demand - the fossil fuel lobby blamed rewnewables for the high prices!
I don't remember this. I am sure people will point the finger elsewhere rather than themselves.
I blame the high prices on fuel duty and taxes. Fuel Duty is 52.95 pence per litre and then you have to add VAT. The current diesel price is ~£1.40 per litre at the local Tesco filling station. So that is ~50% of the cost if I am understanding this correctly.
The person didn’t ask if you know, they asked if you had looked at reports. You cannot for once believe there weren’t subsidies as these endeavors are very time consuming with hundreds of regulations that need to be met.
> Neither are they claiming wind is 100% the target.
What do you perceive when they say wind is not reliable and increase electricity costs? I mean, it is free electricity, with minimal impact.
The way you understand about gas prices, while dismissing some arguments in favor of renewables is a bit telling.
Obviously not. I said as much. I've listened to good arguments for and against it and I don't know what to believe.
My comments were simply about the fact that you could make better arguments than the ones that were presented.
> What do you perceive when they say wind is not reliable and increase electricity costs? I mean, it is free electricity, with minimal impact.
It isn't free electricity. There is a cost to constructing them, maintaining them and decommissioning them when they become EOL.
If the wind doesn't blow, they don't generate electricity. This means that there is more demand on other sources. So price is driven by supply and demand. All of this the energy company will factor into your tariff. So obviously it is going to affect the price of electricity.
> The way you understand about gas prices, while dismissing some arguments in favor of renewables is a bit telling.
Understanding a basic tax calculation that is listed on a government website is relatively easy and took a few seconds for me to guestimate. It is much more difficult for layman (like myself) to understand the Total Cost of Ownership of a Wind Turbine, it ROI and understanding whether that maybe a good investment.
I wasn't arguing for or against wind. I was saying there are arguments against wind that might be better than the ones are often highlighted. You are mistaking me highlighting there are potentially better arguments, with agreeing with those arguments.
The need for backup is not an argument against wind in itself. But it is important to consider the full system costs of wind generation, which includes the backup costs as well as the additional transmission infrastructure.
Obviously there are very good reasons to get rid of coal, but it leads to higher prices. Reducing fossil fuels in the grid will be expensive and I worry that the lack of candor from politicians on this will end up making the transition more difficult politically.
Firming argument is valid, but UK deploys nuclear/gas anyway. You can start feeling real challenges past ~70% ren generation - firming becomes more expensive due to opex but you still need it and gas opex is smaller vs nuclear in this low utilization area. So now you are in a moral dilema- ditch nuclear and build gas firming or reorganize capacity market so that nuclear has some CFD or is compensated for firming&grid stabilization (not all nuclear can operate in island mode so that's another factor)
Germany choose the path of gas expansion if you read Fraunhofer. UK is still in a mix. Nordics are lucky with hydro so they can expand basically all low carbon tech
For now they have sufficient power, but considering nuclear timelines, you better start now
Enhanced geothermal could play a role here, but for now it's debatable.
I have never understood this complaint about solar and wind. If we could have our electricity 100% generated by green sources most of the time and then rely on other sources (even natural gas) to supplement when there isn't enough being generated by solar and wind I would weep with joy. That'd be an astonishingly huge victory in the fight against climate change. I wouldn't even care if we needed significant government subsidies to ensure that the gas plants stay profitable while their demand is unpredictable.
I'm not even antioil in general but I am pro diversification, and think it's absurd to bring up government in that way when a major point of government should be to represent value for the citizens, that might not be represented in the market otherwise.
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".
- 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?
https://www.treehugger.com/the-marketing-of-gas-stoves-never...
Heats faster, doesn’t crack etc.
With gas you also have to worry about proper ventilation, and most homes don't actually have that. Not to mention that gas leaks are a risk as well.
There's no actual funding happening here! It's all just random links between random orgs and people. Anyone can draw such multi-hop links between any two groups of people. It's schizo but you can do it and "prove" anything in this way.
But it gets worse! The level of funding climate change lobbying groups get is astronomically larger and more evil than anything their opponents do. Climate extremists literally corrupt entire news organizations, filling them with paid lobbyists who pretend to be journalists:
https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-enterta...
Just imagine the extent to which the left would lose their shit if the AP, Reuters or the NYT hired entire newsrooms that do nothing but systematically promote right wing ideas without revealing that fact, funded entirely by wealthy right wingers. They'd claim it was the end of democracy. But when the left do it, that's alright then.
Step one to improving public debate about climate: ban news companies from taking money from "philanthropists" (lobbyists). Writing funded not by their subscribers needs to be correctly described as advertising.
Step two: oil companies don't actually fund attacks on climate activists, but they should! Climate activism is institutionally dishonest. Their claims are constantly being disproven, and their predictions keep not coming true. There's nothing wrong with oil company employees sticking up for their own by fairly attacking their opponents arguments. Debate like that is how civilizations work out what's true. The current environment where left wing extremists shut down debate is unhealthy and leads to terrible decision making, just like it did during COVID.
It would be nice if oil, gas, electricity and auto companies did in fact fund people like me to point out all the things climate activists say that aren't true. Pointing out misinformation is valuable on its own, and getting paid to do it would be a double benefit - getting paid to make the world better! I would thus accept that money happily.
Unfortunately they don't. Only the left do that. So people who investigate and reveal climate lobbying misinformation tend to be retirees. They can afford the time to do it as a form of charity work.
I don't spread misinformation nor lies. Just truths that the climate lobby don't want people to know about.
that's literally how lobbying works and same is being applied to spread misinformation against renewable energy projects.
Lobbying doesn't work like this: someone donates to someone else for reason A, who hires a lawyer for some unrelated reason B, and that lawyer has totally different customers who have hired them for reason C.
Have you heard of Fox News, Newsmax, or OAN?
And you'll notice that even despite keeping that basic tenet of journalistic integrity alive, they get attacked for bias constantly. We're told that the AP is a credible news source and Fox isn't, even as AP launders stories written by teams of full time lobbyists.
Read the AP story where they admit to this practice. The journalist writing it clearly feels uncomfortable, knows what they're doing is wrong and knows he's trying to defend the indefensible. Show me where Fox puts itself in the same situation.
https://x.com/RizomaSchool/status/1805813119664484836
See Also:
The False Promises of Green Energy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWuKqFUsDH0
No, I am not oil-funded.
- How many kWh the grid has to provide in exchange.
- How many kWh are obtained from other sources in order for this kWh to have been produced.
- How much CO₂ will be released for that kWh, considering the entire lifecycle of the source.
So that we can identify which other electricity production means would have been preferable (both in terms of total energy expenditure, and total CO₂ released).
At the moment, "net negative energy involved" seems like a proxy metric to me, and I don't know a proxy for what precisely.
Those mediums let arbitrary people post arbitrary non sense. Show me scientific studies, peer reviewed and published. And yes, even those can be bad, but at least I can read about their methodology how they conducted their study, the way they analyzed it, and then I can judge if it’s a good study.
Those links are borderline flat earth material.
This as opposed to a tweet about someone who 'read a life cycle analysis article in some engineering journal like 10 years ago'.
Please don't spread misinformation.
On the other hand,they seem to have rather 'anti-woke' views. They already posted the same stupid (sorry) Twitter link in another thread and got similar responses, by the way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43167067
So, they are certainly no bot by any sensible definition but rather someone whos is hindered by their strongly-held views and limited will or ability to critically evaluate sources. I wish them the best.
I am no expert on this topic but the first reasonably sciency and recent paper I found claims that all energy costs of a wind turbine are compensated after 6-16 months.
https://www.hb.fh-muenster.de/opus4/frontdoor/deliver/index/...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-06/what-australia-can-le...
> For the first time ever, California's batteries took over gas as the primary source for supplying evening power demand in April, providing "akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors" one evening, according to the New York Times.
You'll notice in your article they are almost always talking about power instead of energy because energy is the problem.
We still need about 100 - 1000x improvements to rely on batteries without reliable power plants, depending on how much the generation capacity is overbuilt.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In reality we will still have a lot of fossil generation which will make it 'easier'.
There are numerous camps with strong impassioned and conflicting arguments as to cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
For the past year in the UK the average is ~30% generation from wind. https://grid.iamkate.com/
So seems it's possible. Swings in generation are dealt with via inter-country interconnects, pumped storage and gas turbine generation. Nuclear adds a steady base.
The UK's prices are a political choice due to the mapping of voters over the energy generation distribution.
I don't think anyone is expecting wind farms to supply anywhere near 100% of energy production. Probably not even 50%.
In the meantime how many GWh of wind, solar, and battery storage can they install without waiting?
A recent detailed CSIRO report on exactly this considered nuclear modular reactors to be a dud option that kicked the can down the road while continuing a reliance on fossil fuel for power generation.
Renewables were judged the pragmatic best bang for the buck in a multi decade near timeframe.
And wind, even if it was not a pipe dream, does not escape this. Norway cannot make wind power feasible at all, it will never be able to do that, because even if it could in theory be feasible, which I doubt, our regulation makes it impossible even after the government has thrown billions of dollars of our tax money after it.
We do not need wind, wind is not faster, it's not better, it's not going to fix Europe's energy crisis. Nuclear can and will, but the impediment there is not the nuclear industry, its the crony European politicians that run our economy in China's favour.
Nuclear is still needed since expanding hydro isn't an option. And it's great for district heating in the north
You are right about regulations but even if you fix em now, framatome and whouse are just some shadows of what they've been in the past compared to current rosatom/chinese nuclear. Ramping up to the past lvl will be hard.
Fyi, I'm not sure but I think the statement about funding Ukraine is a bit misleading because EU as a whole and each EU country have different funding and budget mechanisms. Maybe I'm wrong but I remember I've read something about this in the past
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.
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.
Some countries may have postponed decommissioning because it's cheaper to wait a bit Some countries allow recycling of some stuff, even concrete, like Italy
[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out...
The way I understand it, Germany had a horrid mix of anti-nuclear eco-activists, local coal lobbyists and Gazprom's natural gas lobbyists. The politicians not included in any of the above were too toothless, and couldn't fight through this bullshit and secure good outcomes regardless.
Some of those critics focus on nuclear (Like AfD: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/populist-afd-sand-gears...) and some of those pretend to be angry about the slowness of Germanys transition but it doesn't really add up to anyone who pays attention to the local facts. It's just a meme to get people angry at the left and/or environmentalists, while the right openly and continually sabotage progress.
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.
> 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.
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.
Also why does this feel like any typical cult like conditioning of, “we the righteous ones against the evil anti-us false opposition”? It is “they hate you, but I love you, and they want to use the state to take your babies away from you so you better come love in my compound” vibes.
That’s propaganda and abuse, especially when “scientists” is used like some kind of omnipotent deity.
If they are supporting it, who wouldn’t expect oil companies to support opposition to this? It’s being treated like some kind of heresy against the corrupt church though, and only if you support the subsidized, corrupt wind turbine industry that has politicians on the payroll to push selling wind turbines at public expense, are you righteous.
The problem is that all industries and all of our governments are massively corrupted and rotten, and everyone wants to get the other-peoples-money the corrupt politicians have to hand out like the despotic kings or lords they effectively have become.
“Oh yes, lord, you are the most gracious lord for bestowing upon me the lands ands peasants that work them”
In the case of America, where do you think much of that $32 Trillion dollars in national debt deficit spending went in the last 25 years?? If you spend any time in the circles of the 0.1% it will become apparent where that money went, even if you can’t understand that it also went into your 1% pockets.
If you’re having a hard time or will never get access to the top 0.1%, reference the graph of the wealth of the richest people.
In the case of Europe and Germany especially now, they’ve been trying to get at the national “savings” of the German people for decades now, and it seems that BlackRock Merz has finally cracked the vault and he’s going to let the thieves plunder Germany and Europe, as he commits $9 billion annually to the Ukraine for absolutely no rational reason and funding the whole EU project to plunder the German savings, while he tells German pensioners that they can’t get what they worked for all their lives because foreigners that have invaded their country need to be prioritized.
I know regular, grounded people who are in “anti wind” groups they themselves founded, who are clearly not “oil funded” and simply oppose “wind” in their local community because they have heard from others about the impacts. They just don’t like deforesting tracts of woodland and natural habitat, putting in massive concrete foundations, digging up orchards, killing thousands of birds, the noise pollution of the turbines son at all, and the massive corruption due to kickbacks, subsidies, and political aspirations; to build wind turbines where there is basically no wind at all and the turbines won’t pay for themselves even with massive price distorting subsidies. They’re not opposed to “wind” in general, just not the corrupted kind that makes no ecological or business sense, to enrich individuals at the public expense.
I personally think the best solution to these things is that supporters not only get signed up to pay for what they support, but they also get bonded to the projects doing what they promised they would do. You support “wind”; ok, great, you get taxed another 10% to pay for the cost and compensation to anyone affected, and if the turbines don’t produce what you said they would, then you pay for full removal, ecologically sound disposal, and ecological restoration.
But it’s always so allowing to be con artists to trick others out of their money instead.
There are farms that are nearing completion and now are just in limbo.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/26/business/wind-project-can...
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
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.
I mean, is it really surprising that a law company with expertise in the energy sector would handle energy clients? And is it really surprising that a publication with clear bias harming the reputation of its clients would elicit a legal response?
How did the publication even get through peer review in the first place without a reviewer requesting the equivalent links for other energy sources to ensure this wasn't effectively p-hacking?
e40•3h ago
I n my ideal world these people would be prosecuted.
usrnm•3h ago
oulipo2•3h ago
xyzal•3h ago
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Real answer? Pick a battle and commit to it. That means allying with folks who agree with you—or have an incentive to agree—on your one issue with whom you may strongly disagree on other policy or even moral positions. This doesn’t need to be a permanent alliance, after all, just a transactional one to achieve a goal.
ceejayoz•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
westpfelia•2h ago
If you HONESTLY want to try to convince people that these politicians and industries are a net negative you can not just sit there and call people fucking idiots. It makes a person retreat into their view that much more. You have to just calmly explain things. Sometimes you have to explain that thing a lot.
A lot of people who voted right wing are looking for reasons to re-evaluate their decisions. Dont give them a reason to double down by calling them fucking mornons. Soft language will win this fight.
Dylan16807•2h ago
chii•2h ago
i dont believe this to be the case. If they have such a reason, then surely they would've already examined it much earlier and came to a conclusion under which they won't have been a right wing voter in the first place.
So there's something else at play, such as preconceived notions, or the inability to sort out facts from fiction (being presented as fact on TV), that makes them behave the way they did.
Upvoter33•2h ago
If only
jimkleiber•2h ago
This.
Sometimes I think I want people to change their minds extremely and instantaneously. When I look at the micro-changes they make, and have the endurance to see these changes over time, they can actually make extreme changes and in a short period of time. It's just rarely instantaneously extreme.
vincnetas•2h ago
shoobiedoo•2h ago
and then everyone clapped
Dylan16807•2h ago
danaris•14m ago
The far, far easier (at that end of things) way to solve our problems would be to shift our economic policies to favor the poor at the expense of the very wealthy, because a huge share of the cause of their stubborn stances is economic insecurity. But unfortunately, that...probably requires getting them on board, at least to some extent. (Not to mention actually having a free and fair election again, which...looks pretty dodgy at the moment.)
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t•2h ago
easyThrowaway•1h ago
The only way to stop those people is boots-on-the-ground political, social, and cultural activism. No, writing mean tweets and just taking part to that fancy "guess your next leader" powerball variant you do once every four years is not remotely enough.
myrmidon•29m ago
Our current system makes it much too easy to hold on to profits even when direct negative externalitites cost millions of human life-years.