What Do We Do with Power?
Perhaps the saddest single feature of our world today, and the United States in particular, is what we do with power.
We look at our billionaires, those who could be putting an end to world hunger and climate change, but who are simply enriching themselves further, and further consolidating their power, e.g., Elon Musk (see below).
What does Donald Trump do with his power? Takes over an entire political party, and dares fellow Republicans to stand against him in order to force him to comply with rule of law.
What does ExxonMobil do with its roughly $10 billion in earnings each quarter? Reward investors, expand operations, and make it impossible for those who care about the environment to make any real progress.
Almost all Americans have a passionate interest in the outcome of today’s presidential election, but how many of us see these results as something that will be meticulously studied by historians over the coming decades?
It’s true that Trump supporters don’t care about morality, legality, or the truth. But almost half of these American voters do have things they care about very deeply: White Nationalism, the rejection of science, and the end of women’s rights.
At left is another good example of a “straw man fallacy,” one that occurs “when someone misrepresents an opponent’s argument in order to make it easier to attack and refute. The person using the fallacy pretends to be arguing against their opponent’s original position, but instead creates a distorted version of it that is easy to rebuke.”
As pointed out here, if Trump wins re-election, there will be no voices of reason and civility to prevent him from becoming just one more authoritarian dictator in our already-troubled world.
As shown here, American women have made great progress over the last century in terms of establishing their basic rights as human beings. One may think, as a consequence, women would be virtually uniform in their disgust with the Republican party as it exists today.
The cartoon here has many societal implications surrounding the idea that our planet is actually a small island on which everyone is affected by the vast damage we’re doing to our environment.
When 2GreenEnergy was launched in 2009, one of its most important claims was the one Pete Buttigieg makes here, i.e., that a nation’s commitment to cleantech is perhaps the single most determining point to its future economic prosperity.
When my childhood friends came to learn that I’d become an author of materials of environmental sustainability, they sometimes asked for my opinions on climate change. I explain that because climate change is a science, it’s inappropriate to apply the term “opinion” or “belief” to the subject. We have opinions on things like politics, art, sports figures, justice, literature, and philosophy–but not chemistry, physics, or math.
I had to laugh when I saw this.
