Comment by tasty_freeze
3 years ago
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the source of funding does implicitly bias research results.
But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.
We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.
We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).
That is a very recent phenomenon. From 1958 until 2019 the US imported more than it exported, including during the Iraq War (both of them).
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...
That could flip at any moment based on the price of imported oil vs the cost of domestic production. The US is still very much "investing" in the military to ensure a stable source of energy (as well as other national interests).
You think the US bush and Bush senior administration would of given a thought about Iraq if it wasn’t an oil producing resource?
I didn’t back in 2003 when I was in the anti-war minority. But seeing how many of those same people just became democrats in the last 20 years, and are now talking about how we need to stay in Afghanistan or intervene in Ukraine, I was wrong. We never got any oil from Iraq because it was never about the oil. It was about remaking the world in America’s image. We were in Iraq for the same reason ISIS was in Syria. We are trying to establish our version of the Caliphate, except with liberal democracy and capitalism instead of Islam.