this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 17 points 11 months ago

False comparison. Blaming oil itself as an object, for the climate crisis would be like blaming farmers for obesity.

To reverse it, blaming the energy industry for the climate crisis is like blaming the manufactured food industry for obesity, which is accurate and true on both counts.

Food processing companies want to make their food tasty and desirable to keep people buying it, and do that cheaply enough to stay process competitive and turn a profit, so they cut corners and use heavily processed source materials, which may have little or no nutritional value compared to the fresh-from-the-farm items that those processed items replace. They add sugar, usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup to sweeten up dishes that have had all their natural flavor and sweetness reduced to nil by the processing of the source material, and now you have a high sugar, low nutrition meal that tastes decently similar to the product you were trying to make, but at a reduced overall cost.

Bad nutrition leads people to eat more, since their body isn't getting what it needs. With all the added sugar, and increased consumption, we get obesity. The best thing you can do to fight obesity is to eat more raw and natural foods like fruits and vegetables, also buy your meat from a butcher and learn to do some basic home cooking; avoiding the problem altogether.

To transpose this idea into energy, we can:

  1. Identify the issue

  2. ?????

  3. The world is saved from the climate crisis.

Obesity is as much about personal choice as it is about the industry itself. You don't have to eat at McDonald's every day (as an easy example). You can buy ground beef and make your own burgers, with fresh lettuce, tomato, onion, etc (whatever you like). I'm not going to shame anyone for what they eat, it's entirely your choice. Going back to energy... You are generally connected to the "grid" via one company. It's the only option. You can get third party "wholesale", but it's still coming from the same source. The power company doesn't want your opinion on how to generate the power you use, and even if they would listen to you, it doesn't mean that they would act on anything you say, you have zero ability to force them to act any differently than they already do. If they only use coal, well then, go fuck yourself I guess.

Auto manufacturers, as demonstrated by Ford with the EV-1, have actively refused to sell electric vehicles. Even now, taking an example from Honda, they have not released an EV, at all. One of the most popular vehicle manufacturers with the civic, accord and other very popular vehicles, and zero of them are EVs. The closest they came was the Honda clarity, a plug in hybrid. It has enough battery range that unless you were commuting more than ~20 miles (one way), you could run in EV mode indefinitely. They discontinued the clarity in 2022 or with the 2023 model year, I'm not sure, but they've canned it. To their credit, almost all of their vehicles are some form of hybrid (the E-CVT they use is essentially a gas engine on a generator with an electric motor driving the wheels, 90% of the time), but none of their cars are even PHEV now. The story is much the same with Ford with the exception of the F-150 lighting. Chevy did the bolt and later the volt, discontinuing the bolt PHEV when the volt came out. Bearing on mind these cars make up very little of their overall market and sales, and the other many dozens of models are either hybrid (with no plug in option) or just straight ICE engines. Toyota stands out a bit with the Prius, but again, the same story.

There's few, if any options for anything other than gas/diesel vehicles, and the oil industry has worked hard to keep it that way (IMO, one of their biggest sources of guilt). So most people are stuck buying ICE engine vehicles, or non-plugin hybrids, which are almost as bad.

Unless you're swimming in money, you can't exactly buy enough solar and battery to maintain your home energy needs. I've looked into it and a sol-ark 12k solar charger is nearly $10k, and alone will only put out 9000W. At 120v (North America) that's around 75A. Less than most homes are wired for. So you need two or four to even get close the same amount of power you would from the grid (150-225A @120v, most homes have a max draw of 100-200A @240v, which is easily double). Four sol-ark 12k's will put out a nominal 36kW, where 200A of 240v from the grid is 48kW. So you have a $40k investment for just the power management units and probably another $10-20k in solar panels and god knows how much more for batteries to keep you powered on while the sun is down, just to get away from these assclowns. Easily $50-100k cost for a 10-20 year system.

My point is, unless you have $100k+ to set on fire, your personal choice in the matter is next to zero.

Then they have the gall to say shit like this? Fuck you.