(well, once a week or so, but I'm a drama queen ok let me have my moment) I sit through academic conferences and commercial talks in my field of research, green energy storage and generation, like I am right now as I angry-thumb this post out. It's basically a constant flow of insanely cool and high-tech research which has the potential to seriously reduce climate change impacts (though not fully of course, that's imperial core degrowth, baby), and peppered throughout every talk are discussions on cost. Without fail everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is presented as too "expensive" for large-scale uptake. It is fucking MADDENING to see all this cool shit presented week-in week-out by libs just happily declaring there's nothing we can do but wait until climate change is cheap enough to do something about.
Perhaps even worse, though, is the fact that these people are used to reading academic work every single day, and choose not to develop their understanding of green economics outside of neoliberal frameworks. They sit around patting each other over how much we're doing to save the planet by making the upcoming metric FUCKTONNE of EVs marginally greener to manufacture, which will mean absolutely fuck all given the established research showing that the strategy of green growth won't work even with fairytale-esque policy. (The author of that paper ^ Jason Hickel did two VERY good citations needed eps, one on corruption and one on "the neoliberal optimism industry", and one episode on the podcast Upstream on degrowth and the way capitalism co-opts its own critique, and his blog and books on degrowth and wealth inequality are awesome. He's also ridiculously handsome and has a lovely voice that makes my imaginary ovaries sing.)
Anyway I'm trying to very slowly and delicately shift the perspective on this kind of work in my social circles to incorporate recognition that this research, given its purpose to mitigate climate change, should always be accompanied by an economic analysis of its use toward that goal i.e. it's all fucking useless unless we abandon capitalism and transition to commodity-sharing models of ownership. I'm tired though, so to energize myself through anger I thought I'd whine about it to you bunch of fucking :LIB:s.
Thanks for coming folks. I intend on doing a sickeningly nice and hopeful bloomer write up for you soon on the modern scientific understanding on human nature, using recent developments in evolutionary anthropology and ethanographic research from recent disasters like hurricane Katrina and the Australian wildfires, to basically trash the "veneer theory" shit that without society humans are selfish and feral and we'd eat each other's parents. Turns out we really fucking love helping each other, and science fucking says so, and it's what science says we'll be doing when everything goes to shit.
Much love my pretties, thanks for making this space what it is :screm-pretty:
I second this, really interested to hear about it.