Steve3007 wrote: ↑November 16th, 2021, 6:10 am
Sy Borg wrote:Less that one percent of people held over 43% of all wealth. The top 11% held over 82% of all wealth. Presumably that top 11% have far more resources to spend in burning fossil fuels and bear more responsibility to change their behaviour.
It would be interesting to see a similar pyramid not for wealth but for CO2 emissions. Jeff Bezos, for example, is roughly a million times richer than me, but I'd be very surprised if he personally pumps a million times more CO2 into the atmosphere than me. If I had to guess I'd say it's 10 times, or maybe 100. But not a million. He probably has a bigger car and flies in planes more. And maybe he has a few houses in which he tends to leave the lights on when he goes out. Or maybe not.
Steve3007 wrote: ↑November 16th, 2021, 6:26 am
I think there's very little point in fretting and fuming about how bad those rich people are because they don't use their billions to personally bring about a reduction in CO2 emissions.
At no stage have I judged, fretted or fumed about rich people. That is a misrepresentation.
I simply pointed out that the MSM has a tendency - often more than a tendency - to advocate on behalf of their very wealthy owners and their very wealthy friends at the expense of the masses. That is, they spin the news to mislead the masses in convenient directions, often based on the "divide and rule" principle.
Somehow pointing out this very, very obvious situation has been spun as "hatred" and "fuming".
Is it not unfair to blame the masses for climate change, throwing the lion's share of responsibility on to them, while major companies and billionaires are cut slack, despite having far more capacity to control their greenhouse gas emissions? Private solar panels and electric cars are preferable to the alternative, but they are not going to make an appreciable difference when giant emitters are ploughing pollution into the atmosphere with no societal expectation to clean up after themselves, as they might have to do if they were dumping toxic chemicals in a lake.
I feel misrepresented. I have already said on the forum - more than once - that the exploitation of the masses is essential to long term human progress. So I'm hardly going to fume about the agents of that change. I have great faith in human progress "at the top end" but no faith at all in the masses. As athletes become bigger, strong, faster and more athletic as their audiences become ever fatter, weaker, slower and more cumbersome, and this bifurcation is the trend in all areas.
However, just because I effectively "barrack for a side" does not mean I should throw away my objectivity and become a partisan warrior like GE. I reserve the right to call out unfairness, even if that unfairness is ultimately "on my side".
I fume and fret about Murdoch because he stands in the way of most good policy options and promotes terrible ideas, eg. the Iraq invasion, Trump's election lies, COVID misinformation. Fox News is a misleading name. Giant Tapeworm News would seem more descriptive of the organisation's nature.
None of this should not be confused with my thoughts about the wealthy in general. Yes, of course they tend to be ruthless, disloyal and corrupt - the classic features of successful corporate psychopathy today that killed of the old idealistic notions of the "triple bottom line". However, top predators in nature must be utter rotters too. It's just life.
However, just because the masses must be exploited to allow those capable of major feats to achieve, that doesn't mean I should pretend it's not happening. Pointing out the bleeding obvious is not hating.