There are literally millions of people in this country who would like to watch civilization collapse, and aren't even smart enough to get paid for it.

You haven't identified a group, a motive, a psychological mechanism, described the method, or explained the intention in any depth.

In other words, this is a cynical lament about how other people suck that's not descriptive enough to be useful or falsifiable. I believe in acknowledging harsh realities for the sake of dealing with them, but there's just no substance here to even acknowledge.

Nobody benefits from this sort of thinking.

There are accelerationists, who think that society is so flawed that it has to collapse so that something better can be built, as an example.

No, they think the risks of collapse are well worth the chance of improvement, because they view what we already have as so poor. They don't actually want a collapse.

Usually because indentifying groups, motives, psychological mechanisms, methods, or intentions, usually gets labelled as anti-business, anti-red, anti-blue, antisemitic, racist, or other such "bad things" that we're getting conditioned not to do.

They're called Trumpists. They claim to have some lofty constructive values. But whenever one tries to discuss the destructive actions of their hollow cult leader with an appeal to any of those values, they fall back to whataboutism. The smarter ones change to a different topic with cookie cutter talking points about that value. The dumber ones usually just complain about an arbitrary female democrat. The only conclusion that fits is that they want to see their country and their fellow citizens get hurt, while feeling morally justified about it.

The psychological mechanism seems to be [social] media psychosis. It's been slowly festering through decades of reactionary talk radio, but really went into overdrive when the attention-surveillance industry went to town promoting the dumbest least common denominator memetic reactions to outrage bait.

signed, a libertarian who actually believes in a strong natural right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, fiscal responsibility, individualism, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and many more unenumerated personal liberties.

I've listened to plenty of smart people who have what seems contrary viewpoints that seem to be reasonable after explanation.

for example:

1) more expensive energy of any kind is extremely harmful to society

EDIT: more expensive energy reduces prosperity for everyone. Renewable energy can and should be competitive and cost effective.

2) automatic filing of taxes is more harmful long-term than individuals filing taxes manually

EDIT: automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.

3) government funding of internet/broadband/etc is harmful

EDIT: picking winners is more harmful that makeing good public policies.

it's just hard to reason though the details, though it is worth the effort.

My point is that there could be valid viewpoints that are not self-serving/greed-based.

Effective propaganda is generally based around slivers of truth. The real problem is the people who believe these viewpoints for valid honest reasons, yet end up getting taken in by the people promoting them for self serving reasons. They feel so happy to simply "be heard" that they end up supporting movements not actually aimed at reforming, but rather furthering corruption. This happens to both political teams - in fact I'd say this is the professional parties' primary purpose.

One of the core problems of contemporary news media is that you only ever get exposed to the straw man arguments of the other side. It's just so lucrative to perpetually paint the other side as obviously idiotic, so people can jerk off their ago about how smart they are. Then after years of this they have built a solid immutable mental model of their opponent that is mostly incorrect, but the thing they hold dearest. All so they can keep you tuning in to watch fucking advertisements...

Don't the people who dislike socialized tax and regulation have reasons though?

Part of it is that there is more than one opponent. So for example:

> automatic filing will lead to silent frictionless automatic tax increases, forever.

There are presumably real people with this concern, and it's not completely ridiculous. But then there should be ways to mitigate it. Let's compromise by requiring tax withholding to show up on bank statements. Instead of your bank statement just showing that you got a +$1100 deposit from your employer, it's required to show the full +$1800 they paid you and then separate the -$700 in transfers to the state and federal governments for the various tax withholdings.

That should satisfy the people concerned about making taxes invisible because then you're actually giving them what they want. But then there are the other opponents, and that compromise is obviously not going to satisfy the politicians taking bribes from the TurboTax company.

But it's still useful to distinguish them, because you may not need both. You only need 51 votes, not 100. If you started with 45, maybe that sort of compromise can get you 6 more.

Look if reasons are "i don't like it" then that's fine. There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"

The point of argument is when people have to be reminded of the contradictions: if you file a tax claim and claim allowances you acknowledge tax exists. If your health fund demands you also exploit state or federal subsidy you're exploiting the benefits. If your company receives industry offsets or assistance...

> There's no arguing with personal preference or axioms of belief like "no matter what tax is bad"

But that's just a straw man. To hold that belief you would have to e.g. actually want to "defund the police" to avoid the need for tax revenue to pay them. Is that supposed to be a common position among Republicans?

The real contention is how much. There is a large difference between the government taking 5% of your salary and 65%, even if taxes exist in both cases. And then if you think ordinary people should be paying less than they are now rather than more, you'll reasonably want to oppose things that conceal tax collection from the constituents who are paying them, because then those constituents will be less likely to notice and object to excessive spending.

> Is it just money that motivates these people?

For fossil-fuel companies, it's about control and extending the world's dependency on their products as far into the future as possible. The others are on their dole to one degree or another, when you consider that many of the edges in the graph in the article represent not only relationships, but also flows of money.

Why don’t they invest in other sectors though vs doubling down? Tobacco companies, famously unscrupulous, did just this, saw the writing on the wall and now make their money off zyn and vapes vs trying to swim upstream selling traditional tobacco products. Seems to me an oil company has enough resources where they can out invest most any green vc outright and dominate the marketshare if they were so inclined.

This is playing out like the hubris film companies had towards digital sensors. Seems they don’t teach history in MBA programs I guess.

It's probably to do with vape companies still needing nicotine, and so the tobacco companies still control the primary source, so they can gain the advantages of vertical integration from buying up the downstream offshoots. Non-fossil fuel sources of energy by definition have different primary sources of energy than those controlled by fossil fuel companies, so they can't capitalize in the same way.

Btw, I looked up Juul from your other comment and saw they're 35% owned by Altria (formerly Philip Morris) who are "one of the world's largest producers and marketers of tobacco, cigarettes, and medical products in the treatment of illnesses caused by tobacco." [1]

You couldn't hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry than that combination of businesses to be in

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altria

Respectfully, because I agree with you, I would like to suggest that you look up Mission Winnow next and let me know whether you believe “you couldn’t hope for a more tragically hilarious summation of the cynicism in this industry” held up as an accurate statement.

> Why don’t they invest in other sectors though vs doubling down?

Control and relevance. These things matter to them as much as profit.

The barrier to entry to produce renewables is lower than fossil fuels - there is no natural oligopoly.

If you own your house, you can put solar on your roof and a battery on your house, and dramatically cut back on your fossil fuel derived energy needs. Communities can do the same, as can utilities and independent businesses.

That's a future where fossil fuel companies are far less relevant. Not irrelevant, but nothing like what they were. That future may be unavoidable, but they are trying to delay its arrival as much as they can. While that may seem like an anathema to many (including me), put yourself in the shoes of a major investor in or executive at a fossil-fuel company, and you might do the same.

Many oil companies did try. For example BP's "Beyond Petroleum" initiative was more than greenwashing (although it was also greenwashing).

Those initiatives failed due to short-termism, infighting, failure to commit sufficient resources, et cetera.

And yet solar and wind grow hand over fist internationally. One would think they would want to buy out some of these emerging companies in this sector and take advantage of the inevitable increasing investment and profit potential in this sector. Every other industry seems the investor class is elbowing and charging to get there first and secure marketshare e.g. ai but you just don’t see that sort of chomping at the bit with green technology for whatever reason. Seems so strange considering the entire world will need to be retooled and the money that stands to be made is so enormous. Probably more money that has been made in oil so far by several orders of magnitude thanks to parallel investments in other sectors and technologies that weren’t around when oil got its start 150 years ago.

Wind and solar grew as industries, but solar in particular is regarded as a tough business to be in because new entrants keep making better and cheaper solar panels leading to cutthroat competition.

That's a very different skill set than gaining access to scarce mineral resources and monopolising them to extract maximum profit.

Some subcontractors may have transferrable skills e.g. offshore boat crews but at a high level the two industries are fairly incompatible.

It doesn't help that the fossil companies have succeeded in using politics to salt the ground of their potential new ventures at home. A real burn the boats moment for them.

That's because there's nothing to buy. China dumped a ton of money into the sector and took full advantage of their tightly integrated manufacturing capacity to bootstrap it.

The US looked at that and said "let's tax raw material imports" and half the population is too stupid to realize that they're the ones paying those taxes.

EDIT: it should be noted this is hardly a criticism of China's strategy here- they wanted an industry they saw potential in, subsidized it and bought IP which other countries offered up, and reaped the rewards. They just literally played capitalism better.

Solar has been growing predominately because the Chinese government is willing to lose billions in subsidies to panel manufacturers.

Tobacco companies mostly just pivoted to targetting weaker nations, e.g. this summary from a study looking at price elasticity:

> The tobacco industry undermines tobacco control efforts in low-income countries and targets vulnerable populations through aggressive marketing and lobbying for less tobacco control and lower taxes.

Unfortunately for fossil fuels most of the world are importers of their products which makes them a tough sell as other options become cheaper.

Easier said than done. Legacy social media is dying, and Meta has plenty of resources to create products in and monetize other product sectors. And yet...

If what you know is how to pull oil out of the ground, and build multi billion dollar rigs to do it, that's your sector.

Meta posted increased revenues last year. Social media isn't growing like it used to, but that doesn't mean there's not plenty of blood left in the stone.

Plus you'll never find a better multiplier then software and consumer spending.

It isn’t like the tobacco companies knew any different. They just opted to buy Juul which they could do with their massive cash reserves. Their own efforts (blu?) failed. As the saying goes, those who can’t do, buy.

There are plenty of "legacy" environmental organizations that view any form of construction, including construction of renewable energy, as worthy of being opposed. They aren't all interested in the bigger picture of advancing renewable energy to slow climate change.

Maybe, but this study is about specific, named organisations with documented personnel or financial ties to fossil fuel companies. Not sure how your comment is relevant to them

If the waters are a bit muddier now, that’s the relevance. Flooding the zone with confusion and whataboutism is the tactic of choice these days.

Even if you don't care about climate change, spending money to stop all development of wind energy technology and its deployment into the national energy mix is very very dumb. There are a lot of people who just hate certain things and make it their life mission to inflict damage onto it no matter what. It's not a rational thought process.

I did hear an argument on Mastodon that made some kind of sense: currently the US dollar is the reserve currency of the world, not least because oil is bought with USD. Reduce the world's dependency on oil, and you reduce the world's dependency on USD. If the USA loses the benefit of the rest of the world needing USD to buy oil, that changes the US economy in bad ways. Hence the USA opposing renewable energy as much as it can.

I'm not saying it's true - I have no idea. But it's at least a rational reason for opposing renewables, which otherwise seems to be very irrational.

What I don’t get about all these evil scrooge types that run out world, is why wouldn’t they want to make money off things like wind and actual climate salves? Seems to me the coming climate crises is going to cost a ton of money and lead to destruction of entire national economies. Meanwhile they could have been raising all boats and made even more money and had even more things to invest in.

Is oil really that profitable to ignore the havoc it wreaks and will wreak on virtually every other industry, including itself when there is less money moving around to spend on oil and oil products?

I just don’t get it how being so objectively shortsighted is actually the corrupt greedy money position instead of ensuring the world as we know it doesn’t collapse and that the money printing machine doesn’t fall apart. But what do I know I guess.

Its because they're in a death cult purity spiral.[0] They suffer from cognitive dissonance so a part of them understands this stuff but another part of them identifies so strongly with their peer group and profession that this second part wins out.

It's really unfortunate that such glaring cognitive defects appear to have doomed the human race smothering itself to death on this planet instead of reaching out to the stars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_spiral

The oil industry sees some of the most advanced applications of engineering on earth. One would think this is a sector used to disruption and investing in emerging technoligies with potential for profit because that is how they’ve been optimizing the oil industry this entire time. I guess somehow a line is drawn in the sand with oil vs not oil but I don’t know why. It seems hard to imagine that these massive corporations are structured such that the influence of engineers and consultants are eschewed for the feelings of a few of uninformed people. Seems unbelievable to put that amount of money behind such obstinate thinking.

It might be psychological, Exxon famously held back their report on the impact of oil on the climate in 1977. If you've fucked the whole world over that badly and know it, and then denied it for decades, it might be very difficult to acknowlwdge and repent. Doubling down might be easier.

The uncomfortable truth is that they most likely have the same loves, passions, interests and motivations as us. They are not some alien other, they are us.

But that is uncomfortable. We like certainty more. We prefer an easily identified enemy.

The difference (in many things) is not the motivation but the beliefs about what to do about it. Political opponents are more similar than different. By understanding the other you can reach them and effectively change them.

If you are puzzled by a group of people the issue is not that group - it is the puzzlement!

However one effective political tactic is to outgroup and other an opponent. It strengthens your sense of belonging to the right group. The danger is that it is inward facing and lowers inclusiveness. Empathy generally weakens ones own political passions but brings more peace. Restricting empathy increases enthusiasm and energy and action.

Moreover, there are academic studies and popular schools of thought that say empathy is dangerous, that people should be entitled to their rage and emotions and that people shouldn't be forced to understand. That empathy itself is a tool of power.

The same reason why they almost the same people behind anti-nuclear initiatives. Maintain the status quo.

As I understand it, at least some of these groups are nominally pro-nuclear. They are aware that nuclear plants have a very long lead time, while wind (and solar) can be installed quickly. So they can advocate for nuclear as a way of fending off other non-fossil-fuel energy sources, without actually replacing any fossil fuels with nuclear.

SMR changes that game.

Even under ideal conditions, nuclear is much more expensive than solar and wind. And when was the last time there were ideal conditions?

20-30 years ago nuclear was a quicker path towards decarbonization than solar was. So pushing solar over nuclear made sense for those hoping to delay decarbonization.

Now solar is a quicker way to decarbonize, so similar efforts are anti-solar, pro-nuclear.

If you haven’t heard the term you should look up accelerationists.

There’s several competing flavors of it like the ones who think “the good” communist revolution will happen after society collapses vs the ones who want democracy to fall apart because they think monarchical societies are morally superior, but they all have the same line of thinking that “the collapse” is coming any day now and they want to accelerate when they say occurs

Organised communism is almost completely defunct and afaik the 4th international likewise. At this point accelerationist left views would be as fringe as sovereign citizens and certainly not allied to the coal oil and nuclear industries.

The former RCP members who joined the tory party in the UK, people like Dominic Cummings are interesting of course. And Steve Bannon is fond of posturing as a Maoist in style if not in substance. His oilskin coat is a performance Mao jacket.