Diary

I disowned my brother because my emotion about climate change made him uncomfortable. My mother took that personally. My aunt claimed to observe patterns in my behavior. I'm no Buddhist; I don't put my comfort above my awareness of reality, but I do use coffee and streaming to deaden my emotions. Whether that is because of climate change or not, I don't know. I minimize my fossil fuel use, but have given up trying to reduce the fossil fuel use of other individuals. My only hope is to convince others to join me in reducing the production of fossil fuel. Individuals have emergent properties, and collectives have emergent properties, but the relation between the two is unknown. To assume the reality of such a relation is blind faith. To assume corporate speech is the same as individual speech is insanity; the law is insane, there is no hope there. To assume a desire to survive will translate into less fossil fuel purchases, and fewer fossil fuel purchase will result in less fossil fuel produced, is insane blind faith squared. Religion is harmless, but some blind faiths, such as market fundamentalism, are harmful. The closest to conformity I will admit is that fear of change is one individual emergent property that exacerbates climate change, and politics is a collective emergent property that exacerbates climate change. Those are among my blind faiths; another is blind faith in democracy. I'm not convinced that my non-conformist lack of faith in corporations is blind faith. I think the assumption that a delicense of an oil major will stop climate change is less of a reach than the assumption that it can be stopped, or even slowed, with regulation or consumer manipulation. The most thoughtful climate deniers point out that startups, surviving corporations, or extra-national corporations could take up the slack of an oil major voters chose to eliminate. I think that is less plausible than that oil majors would thrive from regulation and consumer manipulation. The consensus is very much in disagreement with me there. Since the consensus there is not scientific, it is more susceptible to corporate persons. Assuming corporations influence non-scientific consensus to preserve their existence, the consensus on what would harm corporations is likely wrong. The hope is that enough think for themselves, and realize the only way to stop climate change is to go after the most singular causes of climate change, the oil majors, and stop wasting time assuming we understand markets better than oil majors do, or that our understanding of markets is less compromised than my conviction of the link between the existence of oil majors and climate change.