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by datsci_est_2015 3 days ago
You can read the profiles of people who run in the circles of those who have decision-making powers.

Take for example the Wikipedia article for Liz Peek[1]:

> Peek spent more than 20 years on Wall Street as a research analyst focused on the oil industry. She began working for Wertheim & Company in 1975 and in 1983, was one of the first women to become partner at a Wall Street investment firm.

> Peek was the first woman elected president of the National Association of Petroleum Investment Analysts and was also a member of Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts.

> She has written for The Fiscal Times, Fox News, the New York Sun, The Wall Street Journal, Alternate Universe, the Motley Fool, and Women on the Web and has appeared on Fox Business with Neil Cavuto and Fox & Friends. Peek contributes opinion pieces to The Hill.

> Their son, Andrew Peek, studied at Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas at Austin, is a veteran of the US Army, and has worked for the Heritage Foundation and for two Republican US Senators and one Republican Congressman. He briefly served in each of the Trump administrations; as part of the State Department during Trump's first term, and as an advisor at the NSC during Trump's second term.

Just read her opinion pieces and you’ll experience her worldview firsthand, which I can only presume comes from a foolish sense of self-righteousness for making a career out of enabling and exacerbating the fossil fuel crisis. Don’t think she would be able to sleep at night if she actually gave a shit about even learning about the potential impacts of climate change.

And she’s a drop in the bucket - all of these people are like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Peek

1 comments

I'm thinking..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Often phrased as "science progresses one funeral at a time"

..applies here. Each time a Big Oil executive or one of their conspirators eats it, green tech progresses.

They worked to build today's fossil-dependent world. 20-somethings work to build a world that does without fossils (and imho they're doing ok there).

Yeah, with the added factor that the US has large swaths of wealth that were accumulated from exploitation of the commons. In this case, natural resources with negative externalities tied to their extraction and consumption.

It creates a sense of entitlement, as well as enforces a certain type of world view that justifies their actions. How would you feel if your entire career was being invalidated by those who you consider intellectually and culturally inferior political enemies?