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by makomk 1542 days ago
It's probably worth thinking about how ugly this is going to get politically. Right now, we basically have a bunch of wealthy people jetting around the world on private planes pushing for changes to society that will make ordinary people worse off in ways visible to them every single day. Not the super-wealthy, of course; why, the very idea that they should change their lifestyles first is an evil right-wing plot to undermine necessary measures against climate change for the benefit of evil big businesses, according to the accepted mainstream media prespective. We have the banking industry and the super-wealthy using their control of funding to slowly starve and dismantle the energy infrastructure that supports people's current lifestyles; most of the cost of this will fall on ordinary people who effectively have no say, but the media coverage sytematically lies and says it's big businesses and the wealthy who benefit from it and will pay the price. (They do things like counting all CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use as being caused by the companies that extracted them, and spin this to make it sound like those companies are the ones benefitting.)

Now, according to the media coverage, this will have the exact opposite effect - think about all the articles about "green jobs" and the "green economy", all the column inches claiming that ordinary people will be better off and rich right wingers are just trying to trick them into thinking otherwise to protect themselves. The propaganda can't go on forever though. Sooner or later, the true social costs of all this and who is actually losing out will become undeniable, and at that point a lot of people are going to be very angry.