Pretty telling how change happens in the blink of an eye as soon as it’s financially convenient.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
502 points (99.6% liked)
World News
46049 readers
3455 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It becoming financially convenient was a result of decades of intentional policy. It's now snowballing once it got there
It would have taken far longer to get here without government involvement if applications like space travel were the only reasons for earlier research and manufacturing
Oh I’m aware. I fully expect the same thing will happen to meat once we have cheaper meat substitutes. Yes, a ton of research money went into it but in the end, price is what matters for global adoption.
It is worth noting that you can already beat meat on price with things like beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc. Plant-based meats specifically are just more expensive because they're building the economies of scale and putting some of their research costs into the price. Plant-based meats are also already cheaper than animal meats in some parts of the world
But yes, once that becomes much prevalent, sales will likely increase substantially
As a related note: this is also encouraging that a number of coffee chains are now dropping their non-dairy milk up charges after pressure from activists. Once they got Starbucks to do so, it's spread to tons of chains. Even the worst plant milks are way better across all environmental metrics compared to dairy (yes even water weighted by scarcity), so it's going to be good for the environment
In my case it’s just easier to work towards not eating meat as the plant substitutes are almost immediately rejected. The impossible burger I ate went through my system in a span that was so quick my gastroenterologist figured my body went “nope”
Same. I just wanna work towards requiring less of it and enjoying real plants that aren't masquerading as something else.
Black bean burger patty? Let's go!
Molded soy isolate thing engineered to seem like beef or shrimp or cheese or whatever? Gut rebellion.
It’s pea protein isolates for me. I went from “I need to poop” to “JESUSCHRIST GET OUTTA MY WAY NOW” in seconds from that fake meat.
Yeah, it’s hard to convince most Americans to replace meat with plant based protein. Once a 1:1 replacement exists, it’ll consume (ha) the meat industry rapidly like we’re seeing with energy.
most Americans
I’d argue “many people” is more appropriate
I was just talking about that same comparison yesterday! There are some big business interests in keeping older industries going. Whether it's oil and gas, meat, or whatever. It takes a ton of political pressure over time to make change, but the truly biggest driver is cost. Once the alternative becomes cheaper, it will snowball.
That's quite the understandment.
Non renewables have been subsidized for a century but now that renewables have become so cheap, the protection racket could no longer hold the technology back.
That's.. that's how change.. works?
The observation is that capitalism isn't any good at efficiently allocating resources
I'm not sure how that's true since we wouldn't be here in the first place without capitalism. Its the only known system efficient enough to get this far, that we know of anyway.
Nevertheless, going back to my original point.. Moving on to better technology only works once its feasible enough, no matter what the economic system is. Ideology doesn't negate the reality of resources.
We need to be moving before technology becomes profitable. This is one of the major downsides of capitalism. We temper it somewhat with government investment and regulation, but buy-in-large, the profit motive is what drives practically all economic questions.
We simply do not have time.
We need to building more energy storage, like yesterday.
It just hasn't made much financial sense to build it, because fossil fuels were cheap, now we're slowly getting started.
If the profit motive wasn't the motive above all else, we could get a whole bunch more done in the fight on climate change.
We can't wait for capitalism. It's just not fundamentally aligned with our preservation, it's aligned with profit motive.
We're lucky it's becoming more profitable. But we're still massively reliant on fossil fuels. It's way, way, way, way not fast enough.
And yes, capitalism is the problem. If governments weren't so afraid of being criticised for how they run something we'd bring back more state run organisations and just start building, even if it runs at a "loss".
Or at the very, very least, we should be directly contracting private companies to build and maintain the infrastructure, but WE own it. Not them.
Conclusion, capitalism isn't the only economic system we can imagine. We already temper it. We used to even temper it more than we do now (post-world war II in the anglosphere, as an example, until the neo-libs privatised practically everything).
The neo-liberal experiment has been a colossal failure.
Capitalism isn't the end of history.
A recent study performed by actuaries, not environmental scientists, predicted a possible 50% global drop in GDP by 2070-2090. 50%! Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, but you know it’s bad when actuaries are doing the same thing. When the alternative is certain collapse, the alternatives become priceless. No matter what happens at this point, global society cannot exist in its current form in the future.
Shame that AI and data centers are offsetting all that good.
For the moment in the current AI boom, but not expected to in the long run. Just make the progress less fast. Still not ideal, of course, but don't get into the mindset that we can't make any progress at all when we still can and are doing so
From the article
Ember’s report shows that clean generation growth is set to outpace faster-rising demand in the coming years, marking the start of a permanent decline in fossil fuel generation. The current expected growth in clean generation would be sufficient to meet a demand increase of 4.1% per year to 2030, which is above expectations for demand growth.
Hopefully AI means more investment into renewables, as well.
Not Merica, drill baby drill. Roll dem coal
Just in time for Trump to try and reignite coal! 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
More than half of the increase in solar generation in 2024 was in China
thanks for heavily investing in solar, based china.
Bad time to be trying to sell a lot of power I guess
Good! More oil for us to burn! /S