Not go out and publicly try to discredit work they know to be true? Start shifting their companies aggressively towards energy sources which will not kill us all decades earlier by using their insane benefits to invest in R&D? Anything which is not akin to sacrificing millions and handing a terrible situation to the next generation to make a quick buck? Have a soul?
Imagine an alternate history where the CEO of Exxon had gone to Carter and said we're in trouble, we need a space race to save the planet. We'll cooperate with the EPA & DOE if you can help us out with federal support pivoting our entire company behind a crash nuclear power plan rollout, large-scale biodiesel production, etc. A bit over half of the total CO2 emissions were produced in the current century so starting a couple decades earlier without lavishly funded opposition would have bought us a lot more runway to find alternatives and if it'd been successful we might have sat out the recent misadventures in the Middle East, too.
That's the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted your grand children to grow up in a world as good as the one you enjoyed. Unfortunately, people who think like that usually tend not to make it to C-level positions. Y2K also reminds me that right now we'd probably be hearing a lot of people saying it was an expensive overreaction.
You would believe that at some point in the past decades, with the multiple crisis caused by failure of leadership in the financial sector and with the numerous scandals in both auditing, energy production, manufacturing and shipping, people might have started to question if there might not be something fundamentally wrong with the way we do corporate governance and more generally how we have organised our society and economy. But apparently no, it’s really going to be denial up to and over the edge of the cliff.
I remember as a kid being fascinated by the idea that while decline was felt throughout the Roman Empire, something which once stood so powerful had then become powerless and was rendered unable by its own structure to restore what used to be and prevent what was to come. I kept wondering how it was even possible. Now I know.
Indeed, that was my point: it's not an isolated incident, but a pattern.
The people in charge (in politics or business) are in charge due to the current system, so they have very little incentive to change it and have a lot of incentive to keep it as it is. Why doesn't Labour push for a fairer electoral system even though the current system is generally biased towards the Tories (and has for many decades)? Because when they are in power they are in power due to the current system.
This also works through to the middle class: if you're having a good life then you're having that due to the current system. Why change it? It's not a coincidence that people who are least established (the underclass, students, oppressed groups) tend to be the ones advocating for change, but they're also the worst positioned to actually enact such change.
So change happens through drastic events such revolutions, which brings their own risks and often don't change things for the better. You'd expect that people are familiar enough with history to pre-empt this, but it seems not. "Ah, I'm sure it'll work out in the end" seems to be the prevailing attitude. Maybe, or ... maybe not?
At least in my country, the poor usually vote for conservative policy, and it's usually rich leftists trying to push communism and welfare while those receiving said welfare vote against them.
The poor know best there are no free meals. It's the rich elitist that can afford to virtue signal with ideas of dumb policies, because they aren't close to the edge of economical ruin if those policies go sideways. And they mostly go sideways.
When policies take money from the poor to give to the poorer, it just reduces social mobility further and creates dependence on the government.
By the way, all this climate religion hurts the weakest in society the most. They can't buy a Tesla or afford heating when "carbon taxed" or when renewable energies who rely on the weather (which we all knew is going to be unreliable) freeze and result in them freezing to death in winter.
Oh and by the way, it's also a scientific consensus that global warming is going to result in net lives saved because people die from cold much more than from warming. It's just a narrative you'll never hear. And because those dying from cold are usually the weaker parts of society. And those owning real estate close to the coast usually have much more money.
And there has never been a scientific consensus. Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.
You should be less certain about this: proposals going back decades had this working as a rebate mechanism — take the total collected, divide it by the number of citizens, and send them a check. The idea is that if you hit people with the cost up front they'll be incentivized to use less because they see the true cost of their decisions up front and if you use less energy you'll be getting free money from the people who use more.
It's also important to remember that in almost every country energy usage scales with income so this is less regressive than it might seem — poor people aren't commuting to work in Escalades or heating their 4,000 square foot houses to 75℉. See point number five here:
> And there has never been a scientific consensus.
There has been a consensus among qualified scientists since roughly 1980, and the predictions climate scientists were making that decade have held up quite well. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which were accurate:
Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:
If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences had to say in 1979:
> We believe, therefore, that the equilibrium surface global warming due to doubled CO2 will be in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with the most probable value near 3°C.
(Note that in both of the previous two cases there's a confound because some conservation efforts and especially the Montreal Protocol were effective enough to shift us to the lower end of those ranges. We do have the power to stop this.)
> Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.
Freeman Dyson was smart but he had no training or expertise in climate science — he even admitted that his position was largely emotional. Given that the people he was attacking made testable predictions which turned out to be correct, it's a regrettable tarnish on his legacy that he embarrassed himself acting unscientifically but it's hardly uncommon for famous elder scientists to start commenting well outside their area of expertise and expecting normal scientific standards not to apply to them.
> My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.
