Well yeah, but we don’t even need to get rid of oil completely; plastic is too useful. But we need to stop relying on oil for everything.

They only continue at the scale they do through corruption.

Dogmatism goes all ways. The Soviets temporarily threw out evolutionary biology for Lysenkoism because they believed there was an ideological connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism and thus thought it was an ideology used to justify capitalism, and the adoption of Lysenkoism was devastating to their agriculture and wasn’t abandoned until 1948.

The main lesson that China learned from the Cold War is that countries should be less dogmatic and more pragmatic. That does not mean an abandonment of ideology because you still need ideology to even tell you what constitutes a pragmatic decision or not and what guides the overall direction, but you should not adopt policies that will unambiguously harm your society and work against your own goals just out of a pure ideological/moralistic justification.

Americans seemed to have gone this pragmatic direction under FDR, who responded to the Great Depression by recognizing that one should not take a dogmatic approach to liberalism either, and expanded public programs, state-owned enterprises, and economic planning in the economy. But when the USSR started to fall apart, if you read Chinese vs US texts on the subject, the Americans took literally the opposite lesson from it that China did.

The Americans used the USSR’s collapse as “proof” that we have reached the “end of history” and that their liberal ideology is absolutely perfect and, in fact, we are not dogmatic enough. It is not a coincidence that the decline of the USSR throughout the 1980s directly corresponded with the rise of the neoliberal Reagan era. The USSR’s collapse was used by Americans to justify becoming hyperdogmatioids.

You can just read any text from any western economists on China’s “opening up” to private markets, and you will see that every single western economist universally will refuse to acknowledge that any of the state-owned enterprises, public ownership of land, or economic planning plays any positive role in the economy. They all credit the economic growth solely to them introducing private enterprise and nothing else alone, and thus they always criticize China from the angle of “they have not privatized enough” and insist their economy would be even better off if they abolished the rest of the public sector.

I wrote an article before defending the public sector in China as being important to its rapid development, and never in the article do I attack the role the private sector played, I simply defended the notion that the public sector also played a crucial role by giving economic papers from China as well as quotes from books from top Chinese economists.

My article was reposted in /r/badeconomics and the person who reposted it went through every single one of my claims regarding the public sector playing an important role and tried to “debunk” every single one of them. They could not acknowledge that the public sector played ANY beneficial role at all. This is what I mean by the west has become hyperdogmatoids. They went from FDR era to believing that it’s literally impossible for the public sector to play any positive role at all, and this has led to Reaganite era in the USA as well as waves of austerity throughout western Europe as they have been cutting back on public programs and public policy.

In my opinion, the decline of the western world we have been seeing as of late is very much a result of westerners taking the exact opposite lessons from the Cold War and becoming hyperdogmatoids, adopting the same mistakes the USSR made but in the opposite direction. In most of the western world these days, expanding public control in the economy is not even a tenable economic position. Just about every western country the “left” political parties want to just maintain the current level of public control, and the “right” want austerity to shrink it, but parties which want to increase it are viewed as unelectable.

Any economics or sociology which suggests maybe it is a good thing in certain caes to expand public control in certain areas is denounced as “flat-earth economics” and not taken seriously, and this refusal to grapple with an objective science of human socioeconomic development is harming the west as their public programs crumble, wealth inequality skyrockets, their infrastructure is falling apart, and they cannot self-criticize their own dogmatism.

That can shift very quickly

He has already pivoted his family’s wealth empire into fusion and when his cronies also pivot to renewables (which they are and will) he will too

They probably just want to crash the markets more to buy in cheap