No sir.
I even mentioned one group in America that never adopted petroleum...Amish...and I would counter your assertion with the fact that most people on earth don't live using oil, they're too poor, not too fortunate. 20-30 years ago, most Chinese had never been in a car or a commercial store bigger than a local vegetable stand.

Both customers and non customers are the victims.
Using (or selling) a product that clearly pollutes the air, land, and sea is immoral.

Yes, it's like our business is predicated on rebuilding wrecked cars overnight which we do by using massive amounts of meth. Sure, our products are death traps, sure, we lied about both our business practices and the safety of our product, sure, our teeth and brains are mush....but our business has been successful and allowed us to have 10 kids (8 on welfare, two adopted out), and if we quit using meth they'll starve and fight over scraps. That's proof meth is good and moral and you're mistaken to think otherwise. Duh.

Yes, we overpopulated, outpacing the planet's ability to support us by far...but instead of coming to terms with that and changing, many think we should just wring the juice out of the planet harder and have more kids. I think those people are narcissistic morons, we don't need more little yous. Sadly, we are well beyond the tipping point, even if no more people are ever born, those alive are enough to finish the biosphere's destruction. Guaranteed if they think like you seem to.

Um, really? Complete collapse of the food web isn't catastrophic?
Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees aren't catastrophic? (odd because the same people who think that are incensed over thousands of Syrians, Africans, and or South and Central American refugees migrating)
Massive food shortage isn't catastrophic?
Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea isn't catastrophic?
Loss of corals, where >25% of ocean species live, and other miniscule organisms that are the base of the ocean food web isn't catastrophic?
Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2, and organisms that capture carbon, isn't catastrophic?
Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land, poisoning 99%+ of all life isn't catastrophic?
Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years isn't catastrophic?
Loss of access to water for billions of people isn't catastrophic?
I think you aren't paying attention to the outcomes here, and may be thinking only of the scenarios estimated for 2030-2050 which themselves are pretty scary, not the unavoidable planetary disaster that comes after the feedback loops are all fully in play. Try looking more long term....and note that every estimate of how fast the cycles collapse/reverse has been vastly under estimated....as two out of hundreds of examples, Greenland is melting faster than it was estimated to melt in 2075....far worse, frozen methane too.

You can reject the science, that doesn't make it wrong. It only makes you the ass who knowingly gambles with the planet's ability to support humans or other higher life forms based on nothing more than denial.

Edit: We are at approximately 1C rise from pre industrial records today, expected to be 1.5C in as little as 11 years. Even the IPCC (typically extremely conservative in their estimates) states that a 2C rise will trigger feedbacks that could exceed 12C. Many are already in full effect, like glacial melting, methane hydrate melting, peat burning, diatom collapse, coral collapse, forest fires, etc. It takes an average of 25 years for what we emit today to be absorbed (assuming the historical absorption cycles remain intact, which they aren't). That means we are likely well past the tipping point where natural cycles take over no matter what we do, and what we're doing is increasing emissions.

You asked at least 3 questions and all fo them very much leading questions.

To the first 2, my response is that it's only the extremely fortunate few that have the kind of financial security and freedom to make those adjustments, so lucky for them.

Your last question is:
do those companies get to continue to abdicate their responsibility, pawning it off on their customers?

Your question demands as part of it's base assumption that fossil fuels are inherently immoral or something and customers are clearly the victims. I reject that.

The entirety of the modern western world stands atop the usage of fossil fuels. If we cut ALL fossil fuel usage out tomorrow, mass global starvation would follow within a year, very nasty wars would rapidly follow that.

The massive gains in agricultural production we've seen over the last 100 years is extremely dependent on fossil fuels. Most importantly for efficiency in equipment run on fossil fuels, but also importantly on fertilizers produced by fossil fuels. Alternatives to that over the last 100 years did not exist. If you think Stalin and Mao's mass starvations were ugly, just know that the disruptions they made to agriculture were less severe than the gain/loss represented by fossil fuels.

All that is to state that simply saying don't use them because the future consequences are bad is extremely naive. The amount of future harm you must prove is coming is enormous, and the scientific community as represented by the IPCC hasn't even painted a worst case scenario so catastrophic.

1. Even though I definitively know the world is beyond fucked at this point, I still think the scientists are not doing themselves any favours by making these "probably" scenarios rather than almost definite ones. As said, even though in some ways I'm looking forward to when the shit starts hitting the fan, I've lost faith in knowing when it'll actually start happening. It seems like every other week I'm told that "soon it'll really start to go all to shit". And it never really does, especially for 1st world countries.

2. Great Filter, Humanity. Humanity, Great Filter. Nice to meet you.

3. I'm beginning to want to start a pot of which terrible thing will happen first to 1st world countries (sadly, the beginning will be poor countries getting fucked and 1st world countries complaining that it now costs $30 for a single banana). Super bugs and catastrophic pandemics (maybe measles!)? Climate change? Nuclear war? Massive migrations of refugees who can't live where they are due to climate change or war? Water shortages? Wealth inequality that will implode on itself? There are so many terrible things on the precipice of happening that I don't even know what I'd bet on, honestly.

So, after months of issues including plastics both leaving the capture area through the entrance and just going directly under the "curtain", the device has broken catastrophically and was returned to port for repairs today, barely 3 months after deployment. Disappointing.

I'm glad they're trying something, but in reality even working perfectly this device could only clean the ocean surface like a single parking lot vacuum truck could clean and decontaminate the entire mid West. We would need hundreds of thousands of these working 24/7 to make a significant difference, and that would undoubtedly cause new insurmountable problems.

Besides, enormous amounts of plastics have degraded enough that they no longer float at the surface. These devices could never harvest that plastic, and that's the plastic entering the food web at the base, contaminating everything from phytoplankton up.

Forget elevators, the videos of escalator failures are terrifying.

You expect to laugh at the out of order escalator sign because oh no, now they are normal stairways, then the reality is that catastrophic escalator failure is human cheese grater mode..

Good point, and of course, you know, the whole cold war thing that went on with Russia for some 60 years...sure they didn't actually fight, but that's only because it would have had catastrophic results, but they nearly did, which is why everything was designed to fight a soviet military.

Typical regressive leftist history revision to suit their own virtual signaling. "if we don't count any of the white people wars, then we're only fighting brown people" lol

MAGA isn't anything. It's as vague as "Hope and Change". It's a slogan.

Starting trade wars that wreck the economy is a bad thing. Deregulation that harms the economy is a bad thing. A lot of his policies are bad things.

And before you say, "well, the economy is doing great!" or "black unemployment is at an all time low", or whatever fact that completely ignores the macroeconomic phenomenon known as the business cycle, remember that national economic policy takes time to take effect. Instituted properly, it keeps the economic dips at recession level lows and duration, not 2008 level catastrophes. Aside from emergency measures such as those instituted during 2009, the federal government can't generally have immediate impacts. It'll take awhile.

I'll even go on record as saying that a recession under Trump is virtually inevitable even if he conducted good policy. The measure of his policies will turn into how bad the recession ends up being, and how well the damage is contained.

And that's the problem. Because of his tax cuts, he's put us into larger deficit spending mode in a time that we didn't need it. Macroeconomically, it was time to run surpluses. But he didn't care. In fact, he cared so little, he didn't even just keep deficit spending at where it was. He made it worse.

So when the other shoe drops, there won't be many mechanisms left to do other than lower interest rates when they're already low aside from sacrifice future economic growth when we have to deficit spend out the ass to stimulate the economy.

And the worst part is his poor decisions, when it's evident they were poor, reversing them won't help end a recession. If you realize a trade war screwed us, removing the tariffs doesn't in the short run increase consumer spending because people won't have jobs to buy those goods, and if the recession is globally felt (which it will be), Chinese people will have less money to buy American goods.

Taxing the rich more in the short run doesn't put more money into consumers' hands who would actually spend it. In fact, that reduces capital at a time when capital would help build new businesses to hire more people.

Not that any of this is surprising. Trump has no idea how macroeconomics work. He talks like he does, but he doesn't. Just says stuff that sounds obvious and easy to understand, and too many people fell for it.

But the reckoning is coming. It always does.

Although I'm against the stupid applause for every event in life, once you've touched down the chance of anything catastrophic happening is near zero.

My only hope is that the creators know they're portraying two very sad, middle aged men who have no other way of proving their value, and catastrophe will strike in either a funny or poignant way.

That seems like a relatively mild and controlled impact for such a catastrophic break of a big bone.

Ed: Oh yeah, also. Ew, gross.

Yeah, in Japan both people would have been at fault. They're really strict about that stuff. Even if you have the right of way, if an accident could have been avoided just by you being a more cautious driver, you'll wind up getting ticketed too.

Happened to my boss a month ago--he got hit at a light while making a turn during a green turn arrow (driver coming from opposite direction gunned it on the yellow but didn't beat the red). The police ruled that even though my boss had the right of way, a cautious driver should anticipate people trying to beat the light and check to make sure traffic coming from the opposite direction is fully stopped before initiating a turn, so both parties were at fault (though not equally of course).

Basically as a driver in Japan you are supposed to assume that everyone around you is an unsafe driver and take any necessary precautions to avoid accidents. The only time you'll 100% not be at fault for an accident is if you're rear-ended while fully stopped or if the car experiences a catastrophic mechanical failure (i.e. blowing a tire on the freeway causing you to temporarily lose control of the vehicle).

I would like to think "punch a nazi" isn't especially extreme though, certainly not extremely leftist. You can certainly pickup a large number of right leaning people who are on board for punching nazis.

It's other things from the left that I fear are needlessly driving away right leaning folks.

Calls for halting parts of the economy to save the world from catastrophic climate change, be that banning coal or oil or to a lesser extent carbon taxes. Instead taking the positive approach of promoting non-fossil fuels on the power grid and electric vehicles accomplishes more and doesn't directly attack the industry and livelihood of a large part of middle America.

Anything that amounts to calling it immoral to define a man as a human with a penis and a woman as a human with a vagina. How many voters do you really need to alienate over semantics?

Anything that amounts to demanding everybody accept and encourage your life choices, sexual or otherwise. The notion of judging one another based on our decisions and behaviours is a big deal to right leaning people, telling them that certain behaviours or choices are not only unquestionable but must be approved of is again pointless and needlessly drives away voters. There is common ground in love and let live, pushing beyond that to get back at the old guard is driving away potential allies at a time that can't be afforded.

Labelling any criticism of Islam as Islamaphobia. For that matter, use of pretty much all the morality-a-phobias should be done away with. Go back to demanding people live and let live without the requirement everyone embrace or endorse other people's decisions without being shouted down as immoral.

BLM

Refusing to allow rational discussion of statistically factual trends or differences between populations because it's racist or sexist. Those differences are a part of our reality and just demanding everyone put their heads in the sand drives many people unwilling to do so away. It also is damaging because many problems in society that we need to fix are informed by that data.

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?

There are some that suggest May or the tories in general are trying to lose the election so that Labour WILL take the backlash. Ultimately no way to know how that will go, but right now there is severe backlash towards the tories and the narrative is swiftly changing towards Labour. I see an election win as the start of a very, very long conversation. Activists will have to continue the fight, press standards will have to be changed either through public pressure or through legislature. And in Britain that might happen because the press here are the most distrusted in europe (52% disapproval, or 52% considered biased/corrupt, or something).

I said in the past that the UK was ready to change. Essentially, the narrative was there to be taken right back, but I didn't know if Corbyn's team had the skill to do it. I have to say that I am blown away by Labour's campaign, it has been almost flawless. I say that because i think the narrative is there to be taken on Brexit. The tories called the referendum to hold onto power. They arrogantly called the general election to consolidate power, with Brexit talks imminent, only to whine about being too busy to do interviews because they're thinking about Brexit! They have then made a catastrophic hash of their campaign, u-turned 5 or 6 times, contradicted themselves, and generally shown themselves to be weak, without answers, and bullies. In 10 years time, who knows what we will think? But in the short term at least, this can be framed as a "they fucked it up, but we'll take over in a crisis and try to fix it."

At the end of the day, a Corbyn government has always been so out of the question that i don't know what to expect if that were to happen. Is another referendum on leaving out of the question?

At the very least, for now, i would say Brits prefer the idea of Labour sorting out Brexit than the Tories, and the average attitude towards Brexit in the country is rather one of resigned acceptance - we know it's bad, but we did it, so now we better get on with it. But we're very suspicious, and don't want to get shafted by irresponsible or reckless politicians. True for the left and right, but obviously for different reasons.

So this is relevant because of a recent surge in support for "radical left" (i.e. democratic socialist, centre-left) Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who has had a huge surge in popularity in recent weeks in a general election campaign he was expected to catastrophically lose by all mainstream sources.

Since winning two Labour party leadership elections in 2015, voted in by historic margins by ordinary members having their say for the first time, he has faced hostile criticism from all mainstream media sources and most politicians including his own party.

The grass roots, which helped drive his earlier victories, appears to be doing the same thing for him in this general election campaign. The grass roots involvement has included youth musicians, artists and activists coming together from multiple campaigns (Save The NHS, WASPI, most unions, including teachers, fire, police and transport, and far too many other interest groups to mention, including multiple disability campaigners). As well as individuals, parents, elderly, and Momentum - a group formed in the afterglow of his leadership win.

On the other hand, Theresa May's and the Tory party's campaign has gone from disaster to disaster. After claiming to be the party of economic security, they released an entirely uncosted manifesto (Labour's was fully costed, other party's included some costings). After trying to make it a match of personalities, she has gone from robotic gaffe to robotic gaffe, dodging questions whilst Corbyn's easy charm and honesty has gone quite a way to show those weaknesses up. She has claimed to be stable and strong, and the best hand to negotiate Brexit, but performed u-turn after u-turn and is now avoiding all but mandatory press contact because her and her brand have become toxic, thanks to things like the "Dementia Tax" and a promise to vote again on allowing barbaric fox hunting. She has been caught out, and regardless of the results of the general election, Theresa May is finished as Conservative leader. Potentially, the back of austerity has been broken and exposed. A movement has been started and even if the Tory's win, watch out for a mass people power'd intervention over their heinous plans.

God i could go on, this has been amazing to watch. Obviously i'm biased towards Labour, and whilst a centre-right opponent might describe things differently, the facts are the same.

Significant things are happening in the UK right now, not wholly dissimilar from the rise of Sanders, only this time it's for the actual prime minister position - Corbyn managed to outmaneuver the corruption of his party. If the election was 2 weeks longer i would predict a huge Labour landslide. After being so ridiculed by a hostile media for so long, election bias rules have forced the press into giving Corbyn a fair hearing and the more people see, the more they appear to like. The question is, have people already cast their vote by post? Will people turn up and vote? A big turnout is expected to favour Labour. A strong youth turnout will be hugely beneficial to Labour.