Everybody is crazy these days:
Apparently we're down to only 42% of Republicans who think global warming is happening. Note that the question here isn't even about whether humans are responsible for global warming. It's only about the actual fact of warming itself, something that literally no one disputes. But thanks to Fox News this has become more a sign of partisan loyalty than a simple question of looking at thermometers.
On the flip side, 83% of Democrats think oil companies are responsible for climate change. This is laughable. We built highways in the '50s because we the people wanted them. We built gas guzzling cars because we the people wanted them. Oil companies sold us gasoline because we the people wanted it. And absolutely nothing has changed over the past three decades even as it became absolutely clear to everyone—regardless of what oil companies said—that climate change was a real thing. Even when we all knew it, we still insisted on buying gasoline and driving SUVs and overheating our houses.
We the people are responsible for climate change and we the people have consistently refused to do anything about it if it requires even modest changes in our lifestyle. Placing the blame on oil companies is just a way of trying to evade our own responsibility.
Republicans whore with their Semitic.brothers in the middle east.
Well, oil companies are "responsible" in the same way Fox is "responsible."
Oil companies are big enough and powerful enough to not only produce oil on an international scale, but also big enough and powerful enough to lobby, lobby, lobby against anything which would restrict or cut back the use of the product they make.
I mean instead of worrying about oil companies (I mean, what exactly do you expect from a friggen oil company?), I would focus more on the incentives which are obviously needed in this massive tragedy of the commons situation.
Yep, exactly. Not to mention killing the electric cars in the cradle, and teaming up with the anti-nuke fear mongers to make nuclear plants politically untenable, and spreading fears about other renewables/green sources, too.
As well as hyping "biofuels" and ethanol as somehow better.
I don’t disagree that we are all responsible but I can be as energy efficient as possible but I can’t make a dent in global warming by doing. We need action on a much larger scale and the oil companies and Republicans have done all they can to thwart those efforts.
The media is also to blame. They treated Carter like a joke — just a “peanut farmer” — despite his major strides on energy efficiency. In contrast the media still admires Saint Ronnie who was so anti-green energy he spent our money removing the solar panels carter Carter had installed on the rood of the White House. According to the White House engineer those panels had been working very well.
I remember Cheney using the “people want gas guzzlers” argument. It infuriated me because wanting larger vehicles in a vast country with no reliable rail or public transport (something else the oil companies wanted) didn’t mean they wanted gas guzzlers. At that time my kids were in high school and we needed a minivan for carpooling and for driving the family on the 19 hour trip to visit my family each year. Up until my kids were teenagers we had driven much small, high gas mileage vehicles — vehicles which had backseats that my very tall son couldn’t fit into anymore. I would have loved having one that was energy efficient but guys like Cheney and his oil industry buddies had made sure that wasn’t an option.
Had we kept Carter’s gas increasing gas mileage targets in place we would have had hybrids in SUVs long ago. As it was those original targets did a lot to lower gas usage by vehicles. His home insulation program also made a big difference. We owned a home that was built before that went into effect. After a transfer we bought one that had been built after. The second house was noticeably less drafty and much cheaper to heat.
Great response. I think even Kevin will agree when he’s in a less testy mood.
Straight up lying works to
"French oil and gas major Total deliberately downplayed the threat of global warming from the 1970s onwards, according to research based on interviews with former company executives and internal company documents."
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/french-oil-giant-total-downplayed-climate-threat-for-decades-study-says/ar-AAPKnkE
Excellent comparison to Fox
We are responsible for a lot of things apparently. We should stop talking about climate change. It’s triggering the rwnj.
“When Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk spoke at a far-right event in Boise, Idaho, this week, he took questions from people in the audience — including a man who made it clear that he was ready to resort to violence over lies about the 2020 election. Media Matters highlighted the clip on its website.
Echoing MAGA Republicans' false and debunked claims of voter fraud, and hinting at animosity toward vaccine mandates, the man told Kirk, "At this point, we're living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns? No, and I'm not — that's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?"
Kirk responded, "I'm going to denounce that," but he nonetheless used the man's remarks as an opportunity to bash liberals and progressives, offer some inflammatory rhetoric of his own and claim that progressives were provoking the man's anger.
"They are trying to provoke you and everyone here," Kirk told the audience member. "They are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties, the likes of which we have never seen."
We the people are responsible for climate change and we the people have consistently refused to do anything about it if it requires even modest changes in our lifestyle. Placing the blame on oil companies is just a way of trying to evade our own responsibility.
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
Sure, but the oil companies pushed hard for us to use more of their product, they lobbied to get preferential tax treatment, they fight tooth and nail against environmental controls on their operations such as even monitoring how much methane is released as a byproduct.
So maybe not totally responsible, but partly so.
Also, we may be misreading the questionnaire. Another way to look at it is that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for GW simply because they produce the fossil fuel that eventually puts CO2 into the atmosphere. Maybe that is just a simplistic way of describing the problem. Placing blame is a more complex problem.
Actually, we should include agricultural operations, deforestation and various kinds of construction. I'm probably missing quite a few other activities that produce CO2.
"I'm probably missing quite a few other activities that produce CO2"
Human breathing?
Bovine flatulence.
(Go, vegan! LOL.)
As unpalatable as Kirk's pushback was for liberals, it's a pushback. And it is accurate to a level of "continue down this path and things will get worse, not better"
I mean, that's just about the limit of what might land on people that are this far gone.
For what it's worth, they *are* getting played, and provoked and wound up and pointed at doing something that's really, really bad for them and for the country. It's just not liberals doing it, but that's the convenient bogeyman for them.
No, it was probably a plant.
I am ready to resort to violence as well. Killing and torturing Republicans will be fun. All 300,000 in Shitaho. They have allowed massive non white overpopulation. They have destroyed the planet. Race traitors they all are.
Well, it's easy to lay most of the blame on oil companies for 3 reasons:
1. They lied about their knowledge regarding climate change and their role for a little over four decades.
2. Having known the effects of their products they nonetheless pushed, lobbied, marketed their products and their industry as critical to the nation.
3. Now that they've acknowledged the effects of climate change and the contribution of their products, they're playing the same lobbying game of spreading disinfo to maintain the oil industry's hold on energy.
What if the oil industry had come clean back in the 70s? What if they did so in the 80s? Go back each decade and ask yourself how the world would have responded to climate change if the oil industry hadn't spent billions on lobbying and marketing lies.
So yeah, they are mostly responsible for where we're at right now.
Once again, I miss the "Like" button" . You've summarized it well. Sure, "we the people" drive cars that burn gasoline, yada yada. What choices have we had, until recently? And plenty of people are now choosing to go electric, and previously, to go hybrid, because we can.
If folks don't get a choice to do the right thing, what do you expect them to do?
Yes.
You mean like when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sat together on a bench and promoted programs to deal with climate change?
And the people with money scuttled real changes, because they could.
Granted we (the voters in the US) voted for people who ran against dealing with climate change. Reagan took down the solar panels, ignored the advice of scientific advisors he didn't like, etc. And won re-election. Plus, you could always count on George Will, back in the day, drawing a chart claiming the Earth is cooling.
The industrial revolution led to climate change. Big coal, then oil, companies fed off that revolution. And when we realized the problem, the companies basically went for selling as much as they could before they were stopped. Yet, we haven't stopped them.
In the US, the train lines gave way to individual cars, trolley tracks were pulled up, etc. Canals gave way to trucks. Policies were put in place to keep gasoline prices low. Local officials need local gas station chains and car dealerships to sponsor their little league games and their campaigns. Talk about "regulatory capture".
Our infrastructure was and still is built to keep us dependent on fossil fuels and oil. We need to break with that and rebuild.
Great comment
IPCC was part of the scam.
I would add that, because of the oil (and automobile) companies, mid-to-late 20th century America was designed to promote, and indeed require, excessive automobile use by most of the population. Public transit was trashed after WWII and cities became labyrinths of motorways.
If we had followed a model more like western Europe, we might burn half as much carbon per capita than we do. So, yeah, the oil and car companies should get a whole lot of the blame.
Great post D_Ohrk
But it wasn't just the industry that did this.
Japan expanded its empire in WWII to get the oil fields in SE Asia. Hitler wanted the oil fields in the Caucuses and SHOULD have captured them FIRST but didn't.
Oil, nuclear materials, gold are all valuable commodities at one time or another.
But our history is rife with examples of this type of stuff
Smoking causing cancer
Burning fossil fuels causes climate change
Fast food causing us to become generally un healthy
But is the problem dis information? Or is it really a problem of influence buying? We, as a society are becoming more highly educated........but are we any smarter? Or is it the fact that we THINK we know better? Smoking was cool. Having a big car indicated you had money or power and eating out? The more the better it seems.
Thee are no easy answers nor can we change our past.
Sounds like Big Tobacco.
Surprised Chevron never told us gas fumes are good for our T-zone.
The only things the people demanded were safe, efficient energy sources and ways to travel. We didn't care whether those were via solar power, nuclear, oil, gas, etc or whether we traveled by gas powered car, electric car, train, bus etc. so long as they met those prerequisites.
The oil and gas companies were the ones who convinced us (and more importantly, members of Congress) that their preferred methods were the best options available.
They were the easiest.
Well, they were the best.
SoV is correct.
As an owner of two EVs and a solar system and battery storage to run my house, I have a layman's interest in energy, and there is more to it than just using gas or not using gas.
There is a great short lecture by Elon Musk where he basically pointed out that energy moved from cutting down every forest we could find and burning it to coal, and then to petroleum.
When you consider the size of the battery needed for an EV as compared to the energy in a gallon of gas, and also the fact that the gallon of gas can sit in a gas tank, easily stored, its not as if the proliferation of internal combustion engines was some sort of accident.
It was the adoption of a technology which far, far exceeded the horse.
Now, EVs are far better, and can be fueled (charged) by solar power, or from a grid which is at least partially powered by renewables.
Its a superior technology, and it will be adopted. The key is to adopt faster.
According to Art Bell, Big Oil killed an inventor that could make combustion engines run on water. So your whole premise is deeply flawed.
Water plus picric acid you mean 😉
Art Bell: Narcan for Alex Jones Overdoses.
Yes and no. I think the oil companies have done a lot of, not just lobbying, but "dark" public relations and public influencing around this.
It's pretty easy to do this sort of thing these days, because of the internet, which removes any need for accuracy or responsibility. It's just some guy on the internet with links to some website that's hosted in Croatia or something. But it's English, right? So it must be true.
This sounds like a nutty conspiracy theory, but let's remember that it's the Mission Statement of the Internet Research Agency. And they march to the orders of a petro state.
But that's not the only actor, in all likelihood. There are plenty other people getting in this game, and it's probably not that expensive.
Yeah, the public is culpable in that they don't really want to do the stuff that is needed to combat climate change. AND, that reluctance has been nurtured and fed and fanned into a revolutionary fervor. Not just by FOX, but they are part of the influence game.
It's all a house of cards, of course. Oil use is going to diminish and go away, because its finite. It's just a question of when, and how much gets damaged until then.
Human beings are very ill suited to dealing with questions of this sort. It's showing.
It's an age old thing:
Does the public get what the public want what the public gets, or does
the public get what the public wants?
I'm with D_Ohrk_E1 (above/below/somewhere). The use of fossil fuels was a combination of easily manipulated consumer desire and corporate profit-seeking. Both of those entities knew about the risks, but only one of them was actually an organization that could have done anything. They did not.
In fairness, I think people are just buying means of transportation of certain sizes, looks, and performance characteristics. I doubt many people particularly care how these means of transportation are powered.
There's just never a chance that we are ever going to collectively make individual decisions to the degree necessary to make a dent in global warming over the long term. "Modest" changes would lead to "modest" results anyway and certainly anything I do alone is a mere drop in the bucket. (I mean, there's a reason we didn't just ask everyone to make an individual decision to drive 65 mph on the interstate rather than making laws and having that policed.)
And just for an alternative opinion - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/polluters-climate-crisis-fossil-fuel
I'm curious to know if Kevin believes tobacco companies bear any responsibility for lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases? I mean, "[Tobacco] companies sold us [cigarettes] because we the people wanted it."
Like Big Tobacco, Big Oil decided a long time ago that "doubt is our product." It created and funded pseudo-scientific institutes that churned out "research" casting doubt on whether climate change is taking place, whether it is anthropogenic and whether there's anything that can be done about it. It also heavily funds the political party that has moved decisively against doing anything to prevent climate change since its 2008 Presidential candidate proposed a cap and trade system to control emissions.
Seems pretty obvious to me Big Oil bears a large share of responsibility, certainly for our relative inaction over the past couple of decades.
"It's only about the actual fact of warming itself, something that literally no one disputes"
This is an idiotic claim, considering that you know, you just posted a figure that literally says that a good chunk of people are saying that, and unfortunately plenty of them with actual political power.
"On the flip side, 83% of Democrats think oil companies are responsible for climate change. This is laughable. "
Not really laughable, because the biggest obstacle for actually doing anything against it through legislative means are indeed the Oil companies that through lobbying make sure that very little or nothing is done to address it no matter what the public says they want done.
The banks are capitalism's brain
The Cities are its heart
Oil is its blood.
Need anymore???
Kevin
"We built highways in the '50s because we the people wanted them. We built gas guzzling cars because we the people wanted them. "
You can't be that dumb
We built the interstates for quick troop movement from coast to coast. The red menace was THAT devastating on our psyche. We had desk diving drills in school should the "rooskies" launch an attack
We had bomb shelters stacked with food in most schools.
We didn't WANT the interstates - the military did.
As for gas guzzling cars yup we sure did want them, back in the 50s when there were 25M registered vehicles on the road. At the end of the decade there were 67M on the road.
Now today there are 276M registered vehicles
Anyone who wants to compare vehicle use from the 50s to today and makes the claim we built the interstates FOR private motor vehicle use needs to re-examine the nature of the post
Oh no, the public loved the interstate system once it was put in place. I'm on the young side of that, but I heard plenty of talk growing up.
Scent
The KEY to your post is this
"Once it was put in place"
What happened after that? Well entire cities sprang up around the exits off that interstate system.
But the key to all of this is what we are MISSING
70% of all oil produced is used for transportation
41% of all oil produced is used for gasoline
Are we prepared to reduce airline use? ship use? Plastic use?
If the answer is NO then we are not serious about addressing climate change.
So, when we drive down the road in our vehicles - which have (for the most part) passed a state vehicle inspection along with emissions tests in many states - and we see the truckers belching black smoke from vehicles that don;t have emissions tests, and look up at all those contrails from unfettered exhaust out of airlines jet engines - do we get all misty eyed that we are doing our part to protect the environment?
Or do we begin to realize just how extensive the effort would need to be to reduce ALL emissions from ALL sources? Even the production of those fuels, from extraction of the crude to refining to use produces large amounts of GHGs.
So when we plug in our EV at night in our garages do we THINK we are "green"? In that house that is wood framed, sheathed, and shingled? Do we think about the sheer number of trees that were needed to be cut down to build that house and how much CARBON they would have absorbed? Do we jump in the car the next day to drive to the airport feeling all good about ourselves using an EV to then get on a fuel consuming, noise and pollution generating beast to fly to Miami to get on a oil sucking ocean polluting liner to enjoy ourselves for a week because we "saved the plane"?????? While wearing clothes that contain 45% and more of synthetic materials?
But when they return from their trip and get confronted about climate change we get the standard answer
"We NEED to do MORE. Climate change is killing us. The United States is the biggest culprit."
We are approaching winter. How many of us will be all smug when we throw a log on the wood burning stove thinking we won't have to pay for too much heating oil or natural gas. How many of us will think - "Damn I wonder how much carbon that tree I cut down for firewood, would have absorbed?"
"WE" are the problem
If oil and coal didn't have so many lobbyists, I would stick with 'we are to blame' but, while we are to blame, those lobbyists are making absolutely certain that we continue to use polluting energy. Too bad politicians can be bought so easily.
It's up to "we" the voters to dump the jerks and get some green thinking and doing folks up front as it is now too late.
CO2 emissions in the US are down by 16% from their peak in 2005, according to Wikip. In 2017 they were at about the level of 1990, even though the population is 20% higher. That's probably due to more efficient cars, lighting, and manufacturing. The people of the US did elect people to raise gas mileage and disallow incandescent bulbs. The EU is doing about the same.
The issue is actually China. It emits over twice the US. It emits about as much as the US, EU and Japan combined. It has grown from 6.2 billion tons/year in 2005 to 10.9 in 2017. Its growth is the almost the size of the entire US output. They're still building coal plants constantly, even though coal poisons hundreds of thousands of their own citizens every year.
Of course the US could do better. The tech is already here, and actually cheaper than fossil fuels at this point. But it already is doing better, whereas China's emissions are still growing.
Be careful. When we outsourced our manufacturing to China, we outsourced our emissions too.
Also, it's total fossil fuel used, not just current use, that has gotten us here.
We need to get to zero as fast as we can. China needs to do the same, but just because they still have a way to go does not mean we should let up.
golack
But again, weigh the options we had.
Do we just produce enough to feed clothe and defend our borders? Or do we help our allies in their time of need? I'm not saying we should be excused because we were helping others but it's too convenient an excuse to say the US is the cause of climate change.
Climate affects everyone and now that China is manufacturing our goods for us yes SOME of those emissions went with those jobs but they also have to heat the homes of more people that we do.
Whats easier for them? coal.
Our technology advancements over the last 150 years gives me hope that we can overcome this.
It took decades to get here. It will take decades to make an impact
But BOTH sides need to stop the hype.
Yes climate changes - its does so even before man helped it along.
No we're NOT in danger of dying, we are thousands of years from that point. NO we cannot sit back and do nothing.
The biggest change that we have made has been in reproduction rates. If we could maintain the 25M cars on the road like we had before the baby boom we'd be fine even if they had no catalytic converters or pollution controls on them. WE WOULD BE FINE. But there are now 10 TIMES as many cars.
How many trees would we have saved had the population NOT exploded here in the US? How much more CARBON could those BILLIONS of trees have absorbed?
It's not just cars or oil - those helped create the problem
Trees helped mitigate the problem
We made both worse by quadrupling the population
What I'm saying is that we can not use China as an excuse to so nothing.
China may be the largest carbon emitter now, but renewables provide 26% of their energy vs 17% for the US.
Dude, without stopping it globally doing something nationally won't matter. Your such a retard.
Golack
But we HAVE done something. As jl;redford pointed out above:
"CO2 emissions in the US are down by 16% from their peak in 2005, according to Wikip. In 2017 they were at about the level of 1990, even though the population is 20% higher. That's probably due to more efficient cars, lighting, and manufacturing. The people of the US did elect people to raise gas mileage and disallow incandescent bulbs. The EU is doing about the same"
We could cut fossil fuel use to ZERO and 2 things WILL happen
China will continue to build coal burning electrical generating plants - AND -
Climate will still change
China is the United States of the late 1910s and 20s. Expanding, and requiring cheap energy sources within their own country. We had coal and oil in large enough quantities to be self sufficient. China has coal.
We are doing better than we have in the past but can do more. China has a 100 years of technological progress to make.......
Maybe Kevin should do an across-the-isle blog with a conservative[1] to lament the awful state of Our Failed Media Experiment.
Because I think a lack of stimulating input is causing him to spin a bit. He should know better than to take a leading poll question like that at face value. (Proposed alternate questions: Is Saudi Arabia responsible? What about capitalists? Hey, what about those who make over $10k a year?)
I mean, people follow leading questions to deflect blame? No shit! What is this helping, exactly?
[1] I mean a real conservative, not a shouty fascist.
Many a shouty fascist created agw theory.
Lots of hot air from a shouty fascist.
"We the people are responsible for climate change and we the people have consistently refused to do anything about it"
Which is why global warming be remedied only when hell freezes over.
I had to laugh at a headline in today's Washington Examiner:
The guy in question had a falling out with Greenpeace 35 years ago. He's been a lobbyist for the nuclear power and forestry industries for years.
All the words in that sentence are true, so the Post rates this headline: zero pinocchios.
Well what about https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
You are correct that no one ever thought about the impact of auto oriented urban sprawl. It was the default choice of the public across the planet. There certainly are options for how to live.
https://twitter.com/BrentToderian/status/1452298832956514316?s=20
https://twitter.com/BethAmbaruch/status/1452697474171392007?s=20
Liquidation of capitalism is also remedy. The shutdown in production and reducing of excess population will drop CO2 by 80%
Just to toss an item into the bucket,
"According to an automotive-analyst study, running a gas-powered two-stroke leafblower for 30 minutes creates pollutants equivalent to driving a Ford F-150 pickup truck for more than 3800 miles."
I would want to see whether people were answering the second question were using "oil and gas companies" as a proxy for fossil fuels in general. Do they believe it was those companies' behavior or their products that were primarily responsible?
It's worth remembering the testimony of Bradford C. Snell: “General Motors and allied highway interests acquired the local transit companies, scrapped the pollution-free electric trains, tore down the power transmission lines, ripped up the tracks, and placed GM motor buses on already congested LA streets.”
It's also worth remembering that those same companies were convicted in 1949 of conspiring to monopolize bus and equipment sales to National City Lines (a key transit operator involved in ultimately buying up and dismantling the streetcar lines in various cities, most particularly in Los Angeles.
http://libraryarchives.metro.net/DPGTL/testimony/1974_statement_bradford_c_snell_s1167.pdf
Further to the blame of the auto companies, this additional portion of Mr. Snell's testimony is worth revisiting:
"Thirty-five years ago [Los Angeles] was a beautiful city of lush palm trees, fragrant orange groves and ocean-enriched air. It was servedqy the world's largest electric railway network. In the late 1930's General Motors and allied highway interests acquired the local transit companies, scrapped the pollution-free electric trains, tore down the power transmission lines, ripped up the tracks, and placed GMmotor buses on already congested L.A. streets. The noisy, foul-smelling buses turned earlier patrons of the high-speed rail system away from public transit and, in effect, sold millions of private automo- biles. Today, this city is an ecological wasteland: the palm trees are ~ing of petrochemical smog; the orange groves have been paved overby 300 miles of freeways; the air is fouled by 4 million cars, half of them built by General Motors, which emit 13,000 tons of pollutants daily"
Exactly.
The entire "American Dream" of living in the suburbs and driving a gas-burning car into the city for work (while destroying commuter rail), was a coordinated corporate effort, that they were convicted of to no effect.
Kevin's entire position is predicated on the notion that we are a nation where the Buyer, the Consumer, the Employee, the Student, the Homemaker, and everyone should just Beware.
He supports, in other words, the current Capitalist Oligarchy where manipulating the average American into destroying his own planet is not only legal- its profitable.
What I posted above rings truer. Capitalism is bankrupt. It cannot sustain itself anymore. It's why debt has been increasing since the 80's. Everything you complained about, is dead already.
Mitch-
Exactly right but think about society in 1029 through 1949.
Far fewer cars were on the road so people rode mass transit, or walked.
There are no easy answers. but less of our oil production is used for gasoline than anything else. Other types of fuels, heating, flying, bunker fuel for ships use the majority of oil extracted for transportation.
The first car I "owned" was a VW Beetle. At 6'4" that car gave me more head room than I ever imagined. It was good on gas which I paid around $0.23/gal back in the day. Today I drive a Toyota Camry, averages 29mpg - far FAR better than my VW did. It pollutes less. My head does brush up against the head liner but that's OK - I didn't want anything bigger to drive. It has more bells and whistles than I could ever use. Compared to my old VW it's a palace.
But if you are blaming GM for the sale of mass transit systems think again. Someone had to OWN that system that GM bought - usually its a government entity.
Mass transit is an adjunct failure in the United States. City transit busses go on their routes empty. Trains are used for commercial shipping rather than passenger use. We are a very lazy society. Did GM see this coming? Maybe. The world was a different place back then, thats for sure
But in 1929 through 1945 neither GM, nor the oil companies - knew what was about to happen to the US and the world's population. To blame them for that is pure BS
This is pretty much one of your more bullshit postings ever. Because Oil Companys lobby.
"On the flip side, 83% of Democrats think oil companies are responsible for climate change. This is laughable. We built highways in the '50s because we the people wanted them. "
I don't think this point proves what you think it does.
If you believe that oil and gas companies are responsible for creating uncerstainty about climate change, and if you think people might have chosen differently if they knew the truth about climate change all those years ago, then it makes sense that oil and gas companies were largely responsible for people demanding more highways, etc.
This requires a more generous view of human nature than seems reasonable to me, but it's not logically inconsistent.
'. Oil companies sold us gasoline because we the people wanted it. And absolutely nothing has changed over the past three decades even as it became absolutely clear to everyone—regardless of what oil companies said—that climate change was a real thing.'
Kevin, your abject denial of hundreds of millions spent in propaganda, corruption, information suppression, fake science, regulatory obstruction, and everything else necessary to keep the biggest con ever pulled on the world going strong, is completely disheartening.
100 corporations contribute 70% of the global warming gases currently being produced. NOT ME. Mother Jones has articles on how little difference the practices of the individual truly make,and how little power we have to change policy. Maybe you have heard of that blog?
Please Kevin, tell us about the world tour that you made in 2005 with your electric car and plane... we'd love to hear about that. And how your house generates all its own energy, and how you personally set policies for the power monopoly in your area, and how you voted for nobody except radically progressive candidate promising leaps forward in energy technology, and how you never ever use plastic anything due to all the excellent alternatives.
The Heritage Institute thanks you for your propaganda and shaming of all of us.
Kevin, Would you have answered "no" to the question? Of course it was a loaded poll question, but you'd just be plain wrong to assert that oil companies are NOT responsible.
So - Kevin Drum what have you done to save the planet?
Remember this post from a few months ago?
https://jabberwocking.com/saab-is-synonymous-with-turbo-i-dont-think-so/
Have you sold the Porche yet?
I am being snarky of course................
Sure, oil companies were just selling a product people wanted. So were tobacco companies. At the same time, they were also using their power and influence to make sure their product remained the only viable energy source on the market by fighting any regulation or environmental laws that would tax carbon, encourage conservation, or make non-fossil fuels cheaper. Oh, and funding "think tanks" like the Heartland Institute to make the public question the science of climate change because they *knew* what the actual science showed. I'm sorry, but Big Oil has been a Big Part of the whole climate change problem.
You can't call someone an innocent bystander when they've got anyone who could intervene in a crime in progress in a headlock.
In general, I don’t disagree with anything you wrote Kevin. That said - and as many comments suggest - one of these questions was actually representative of the political divide, where the facts and correct answer should be extremely clear to all sides (the planet is warming). The other question was far more nuanced and not a very good indicator that Dems are equally polarized in their crazy opinions, as it feels you are suggesting. Are oil companies responsible or were they just feeding our endless appetite for cheap power? Yes to both.