This topic and framing has been on my mind for a long time, but the recent news story about Vermont is relevant.

Our oceans have piled up a disproportionate share of heat. It takes an unfathomable amount of energy to have bumped ocean heat as much as we have, and it's not stopping. Amazing the land hasn't long ago cooked, but, speaking metaphorically, there is starting to be no more place for all that trapped heat to go.

Meanwhile an unfathomable ocean of money has piled up from years of rewarding oil companies for the service of putting fossil fuels into play, never for a moment considering or charging for the environmental externality of climate change. No accident that. They knew the consequence. They pumped tons of money, enough to control media empires, enough to corrupt and outright buy politicians, into distracting and denying and defrauding.

Buying public image and buying politicians in this way was reasoned cheaper than what any sane person would ask if they new the truth about the naked greed, about the willingness to knowingly stoke an existential risk to humanity.

Vermont is not being extreme here, though much corrupt money will go into focus groups and A/B testing and AI bots designed to help us think so. What Vermont asks is a drop in the bucket of their wealth. Probably they, and all of us, should pro-actively take back every dime. In that light, it's hard to see Vermont as being at all extreme. They have, even now, responded modestly.

A modern equivalent of pitchforks at the castle gates, though far more poiite. The castle will fight back. It's well motivated and very well capitalized. But its ethical position is the inverse. We must remember that as we see that retaliation play out. The oil companies have no moral authority here, but will tell us they are victims and faithful public servants. That will be lies. We need to say that out loud and frequently to remind ourselves and inform others.

It's not just an issue of penalizing oil companies. There is evil here that needs punishment, but we are not doing that yet. We probably should, but such vengeance would detract and we don't have the luxury of time.

For now the key thing is this, and we must not lose focus: Money is how we set priority. We need to set the collective compass to right, recalibrating for survival.

There needs to be ZERO priority to mining oil. The vast wealth, the ocean of prioritization chits, of individual dollars, that represent represent our colective and ill-informed giving of public priority and permission need to be taken back and redirected immediately from the hucksters who knowingly misled us. A fraud was perpetrated, but that's water under the bridge. The priority and permission that this ocean of money represents must be applied as fully and immediately as possible toward the endeavor of human survival.

Even that may not be enough. But we cannot as an allegedly intelligent species indulge any tolerance of leaving them any control of society's priority if we want to survive at all.

There is no greater urgency nor higher priority.

What Vermont has done is minimal and appropriate. Responses to problems must be proportionate. To do less would not be conservative, THAT would be radical, as it would be meeting an existential threat with a shrug. The other states, the ones doing nothing, are the ones acting radically, by letting these hucksters continue to operate and profit on making the problem worse.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/climate-vermont-big-oil-pay-damage-new-york-1235033292/