this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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[–] [email protected] 26 points 20 hours ago (15 children)

Owning class don't like free solutions. Simple enough.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 19 hours ago (14 children)

I never understood why the owner class didn’t transition to renewable energy, especially solar.

If you corner that market you will make trillions, especially if you can push the fossil competitors out of the market. You already have the capital to fully research everything from materials science to construction/deployment techniques. You have the petroleum resources for manufacturing (of which some, at least these days, are still needed). And unless the sun stops shining you just take in money as long as you maintain the product, far cheaper and messier than the mass scale of oil refinement and fuel these days. It’s more infinite money than leveraging unrealized gains for rolling loans.

Why are they so obsessed with the current status quo? Too much work? Too much risk? Someday the oil will run out…

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

The thinking probably goes along the lines of:

  1. The oil will run out "long" after current oligarchs are dead so they don't care
  2. Even if it is diminishing sooner than anticipated, would you want to be the one to tell oligarch #236311 that his oil fields and money are about to run dry, pissing him off? They're surrounded with sycophants and suck ups who have their own money wells to run dry
  3. Solar and other renewables have just enough real problems with them that aforementioned sycophants can blow it out of proportion and frame them as bad investments.

Systematic capitalism plus human greed heavily incentives short term thinking

[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Thankfully you're overestimating the actual number of oligarchs. There are only just over 2500 billionaires, not almost 250,000.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Still just over 2500 too many

[–] MajorMajormajormajor 3 points 15 hours ago

Any number greater than zero is too many billionaires.

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