Crazy Conspiracy Month: Enviromentalists Secretly Hate Women, Gays, and Aborigines.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

To me the choice is simple, we can prop up a cabal of brutal dictatorships that kill homosexuals, keep women as second class citizens, and don't care if they destroy the environment.

Or we can by our oil from Canada.

To be explicit, if you object to harvesting the Alberta oil sands you are an objectively misogynist, gay bashing, Gaia raping hypocrite.

;P

Comments

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

So they're certainly well-positioned with the means to do something like that. Now how about the motive?

Can you imagine how their incumbency, combined with their status as the beneficiaries of massive gasoline-centric infrastructure investment and subsidy, might make their priorities differ from those of someone concerned foremost with sustainability and environmentalism?

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

hint: keeping a dominant market share in a smaller, more stagnant market might, in certain circumstances, be more profitable than expanding the market via innovation.

( Extremely relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/teradyne/clay.html )

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

The motive is not wanting to go out of business when the oil runs out.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

but we both know that's not really how it works; what happens is the oil gets progressively scarcer and its price starts to soar, and then the infrastructure which depended on it gets abandoned, and the incumbent oil companies, if they're going to transition to a new energy technology, are incentivized to bring that product to market as late as they can manage without getting undercut by some other startup. The best way to achieve that, would be to artificially raise the barriers to entry in the green-energy biz, discourage government subsidy of R&D (since the only people they want bringing products to market already have the capital to do it), and hold their innovations back for as long as they can keep monopolizing on the scarcity of energy.

Someone who cared about making the world good for consumers would not time things in that fashion.