• for: fossil capitalism, progress trap, intersectionality, social norms, social norms - waste, externalization, capitalism

• title

  • Waves of Abandonment
    • The Permian Basin is ground zero for a billion-dollar surge of zombie oil wells

• summary

  • a story that illustrates the intersectionality of fossil capitalism
    • progress trap
    • exploitation
    • tragedy of the commons
    • fossil fuel industry
    • gold rush
    • externalization
    • fossil capitalism

• Comment

  • Yet another example of capitalism's tendency to externalize manifests at the most basic level.
  • The tendency to treat nature as an inexhaustable garbage dumping ground seems to be built into our culture's economic norms taught to us by most parents and society at large.
  • There are not enough parents that teach their children to love, respect and feel that they are an intrinsic part of nature.
  • The externalization our society teaches us in the form of destructive, widely-accepted social norms of waste such as::
    • having the concept of waste and garbage
    • garbage taken out once a week
    • waste bins everywhere
    • keep our backyard clean, but at the expense of trucking out our garbage to some unknown place
  • has been enculturated into us from early age

!- tragedy of the commons : DSG example - A Deep Humanity analysis can add insight to unpack the problem - When I read this sentence, it triggers the following words to emerge from my salience landscape: - self / other dualism - different levels of othering - at each level, the self is competing to maximize sales - the other is alien, nebulous, unknown and this helps reinforce competition and not caring for the other, dominating the other - in ALL cases, each self-centered business entity views regulations as reducing competitive price advantage - this view is myopic because it does not consider the bigger picture of how the production is impacting nature and people - the normal view is habitually NOT a circular WEconomy view - manufacturing products that create environmental externalities present in the manufacturing process, in its usage and end of life is based on an assumption of negligible impact on nature. Total net impacts were far from planetary boundaries. - however, due to the exponential increase in the scale of production due to population pressures, this assumption has become obsolete a long time ago - Producers of products that continue environmental damage are enabled by current policies so will not change on their own because they all need the short term benefits the jobs provide - as an example, the fossil fuel industry and its millions of direct employees are knowingly destroying the life support system of the planet - when externalization exists, it is a policy reflecting collective disconnection from nature because it we are deeply connected to nature and externalization on this scale destroys our life support system - regulations are constraints that are needed for our own good. Instead of seeing it as anti-competition, the bigger picture is that it is pro-civilization - when each business looks out for itself for its own wellbeing and competing against others within an externalizing economic system, a tragedy of the commons occurs

Indeed memory is being atrophied as a result of easy to access externalization, the temptation to just offload it onto the computer makes the forgetting curve even sharper. The concepts don't present to the mind when needed because since we didn't commit to our memory we can hardly perceive correlations to what we previously read. Simply we miss our chances to recall & connect new concepts and knowledge because we don't commit them to our memory.