What percentage of fossil fuel consumption do you think is related to keeping people from freezing vs maintaining materialistic lifestyles at the expense of the planet and sustainability?
> necessary to sustain society
We as a society have abdicated nearly all critical judgement about this and instead worship the market as the arbiter of truth, the "one true algorithm" that decides what everything and everyone is worth and what everyone must do. We've been doing this so long that we don't realize that the algorithm has transformed our world in its image, so deeply that what is now needed to sustain society in indistinguishable from what is needed to maintain the functioning of the algorithm.
>What percentage of fossil fuel consumption do you think is related to keeping people from freezing vs maintaining materialistic lifestyles at the expense of the planet and sustainability?
It seems you took my comment out of context. Global energy policy is not relevant to 99.9% of the people employed in the energy industry, who must make decisions about whether their participation is ethical.
Joe or Jane Schmoe who is a project manager at Exxon-Mobil is not making global policy choices or even oil-company-CEO choices.
They are contributing a tiny bit to whatever good and bad things the company is doing, but it's likely to be very small and indirect.
There is no choice on a daily basis when developing an Excel spreadsheet "should this spreadsheet help people who are cold or instead the greedy materialists?"
The granularity of the choice that is made is, should I continue working for, say, Chevron? Should I go work for Exxon-Mobil if they are slightly more ethical by some metric? Should I go work for some company that has a much lower carbon intensity because it isn't in the same industry? Or one that has more ethical leadership according to some public opinion of someone?
It sounds to me as though you have made statements about ethical responsibility that aren't consistent with the limited choices ordinary people can make.
> necessary to sustain society
We as a society have abdicated nearly all critical judgement about this and instead worship the market as the arbiter of truth, the "one true algorithm" that decides what everything and everyone is worth and what everyone must do. We've been doing this so long that we don't realize that the algorithm has transformed our world in its image, so deeply that what is now needed to sustain society in indistinguishable from what is needed to maintain the functioning of the algorithm.