If you look at the histories of nations, regimes, dictatorships (both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia come to mind) these collectives engage in policies and activities that everyone working to bring them about know perfectly well are suicidal, but no one wants to rock the boat, everybody wants that paycheck, and everyone is afraid of the boss. And the boss has to answer to the stockholders. The only buck that ever stops is the commercial one, all other responsibility and morality and even common sense is shunted aside in its favor.

Corporations are no different. They develop a mind of their own. Like HAL 9000, they exceed their programming. Even though we have an example here of a great corporation that deliberately changed its own policy and embarked on questionable behavior, no doubt for the power and wealth it pursued. Like an addict or a drunkard, it engaged in what it knew perfectly well to be self-destructive behavior.

I’ve always been interested in corporate (or perhaps I should say collective) consciousness or behavior or personality. A collection of humans is definitely more than the sum of its parts, (look at mobs!)and adding a collective goal, such as conquest or profit, only makes it worse.

Someone should study this phenomenon.

The devastation will last many millennia, and humans won’t likely get a second chance at greatness.

But TB and the other shills are cool with that- as long as the lefties lose it doesn’t matter. They will deny anthropogenic climate change is real to the end…

Meanwhile the corporations that use the useful idiots to sell disinformation to the public knew the truth DECADES ago:

‘Shell knew’: oil giant’s 1991 film warned of climate change danger
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/28/shell-knew-oil-giants-1991-film-warned-climate-change-danger

The oil giant Shell issued a stark warning of the catastrophic risks of climate change more than a quarter of century ago in a prescient 1991 film that has been rediscovered.

However, since then the company has invested heavily in highly polluting oil reserves and helped lobby against climate action, leading to accusations that Shell knew the grave risks of global warming but did not act accordingly.

Shell’s 28-minute film, called Climate of Concern, was made for public viewing, particularly in schools and universities. It warned of extreme weather, floods, famines and climate refugees as fossil fuel burning warmed the world. The serious warning was “endorsed by a uniquely broad consensus of scientists in their report to the United Nations at the end of 1990”, the film noted.

“If the weather machine were to be wound up to such new levels of energy, no country would remain unaffected,” it says. “Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.”

Shell’s 1991 warning: climate changing ‘at faster rate than at any time since end of ice age’
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A separate 1986 report, marked “confidential” and also seen by the Guardian, notes the large uncertainties in climate science at the time but nonetheless states: “The changes may be the greatest in recorded history.”

The predictions in the 1991 film for temperature and sea level rises and their impacts were remarkably accurate, according to scientists, and Shell was one of the first major oil companies to accept the reality and dangers of climate change.
…

Shell has also been a member of industry lobby groups that have fought climate action, including the so-called Global Climate Coalition until 1998; the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) until 2015; and remains a member of the Business Roundtable and the American Petroleum Institute today.

Another oil giant, Exxon Mobil, is under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and state attorney generals for allegedly misleading investors about the risks climate change posed to its business. The company said they are confident they are compliant. In early 2016, a group of congressmen asked the Department of Justice to also “investigate whether Shell’s actions around climate change violated federal law”.

These cuts are motivated by a disdain for commercially useless science and research in general, which makes cuts in these areas (along with social welfare spending) simply a new and productive revenue source. But there is a specific payoff in gutting the hated environmental sciences, particularly those which maintain public interest in the environment (particularly AGW) which threatens commercial activity through regulation, taxation and potentially encouraging an economy based on renewable resources and reduced resource consumption.

I think there is also a growing realization among the financial elites that the damage generated by pollution and other man-made environmental degradation will open up lucrative new business opportunities for them. Any bad effects will be of little concern for those with the financial resources to adjust to them. They won’t need to believe their own propaganda about the environment because they’ll feel perfectly equipped to survive whatever happens to it. In fact, they intend to profit from it.

This creates an environment where the dismissal of environmental concerns will be felt as good for business. Even if they do not personally articulate it this way, or even think of it in those specific terms, the resulting conditions will select for, in a Darwinian sense, even more policies and strategies which will tend to make the situation worse.

The Trump Presidency and Conservative legacy will be profound. It might even affect the fossil and geological record. In the far future, when no historical evidence may survive, geologists will still be able to see abrupt changes in the strata when the earth suffered a great catastrophe. They will see evidence of mass extinctions and climate change, alterations in erosion and deposition, sea level changes, alterations in sea and atmospheric chemistry, and the like. Even after all artifacts and evidence of our works vanish, the earth will still bear the scars left by our presence.

Normally, I might resist the urge to engage in a political rant on Science/Space. But this election may well have consequences on a geological scale, extending into Deep Time. Mankind has become a geological force, an Era all its own.

“…research that drew the ire of Republicans in Congress.” Wow.

Well, Zoners, you can kiss the exploration and colonization of the solar system, and the leap into interstellar space, goodbye. I hope you enjoy your tax cut.

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to slash one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.

The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.

NOAA is part of the Commerce Department budget, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent reduction from its current funding level.

OMB also asked the Commerce Department to provide information about how much it would cost to lay off employees, while saying those employees who do remain with the department should get a 1.9 percent pay increase in January 2018. It requested for estimates for terminating leases and “property disposal.”

The Office of Management and Budget outline for Commerce for fiscal year 2018 proposed sharp reductions in specific areas within NOAA, such as spending on education, grants, and research. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would lose $126 million, or 26 percent, of the funds it has under the current budget. Its satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the proposal.

…

The biggest single cut comes from NOAA’s satellite division, known as the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which includes a key repository of climate and environmental information, the National Centers for Environmental Information. Researchers there were behind a recent study suggesting that there has been no recent slowdown in the rate of climate change — research that drew the ire of Republicans in Congress.