alt Hacker News> I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested
You make it sound like you proved I was wrong... somehow? I never said "0% of the world is informed and votes accordingly". I said that the majority isn't and doesn't.
Sure, once you realise you personally aren't able to change that, you can move to the next thing that makes you feel good (in this case working on "green tech", if I understand correctly). Some people go live in a hut in the woods.
Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government, and can generally vote for change. But they don't, for many reasons, including "they actually spend very little time thinking about those things". I would argue that most people spend vastly more time saying that the government is stupid than actually getting informed on problems and what it would take to solve them.
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"Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government"
That is not true in large parts of the world. Now even the most absolute monarchy has to listen to the people sometimes, but they absolutely can and do choose to do whatevery the small power circle on top wants, as long as the situation is somewhat under control for them.
> Doesn't change the fact that the people is the government
That completely ignores realities of society, power and influence, even in democratic societies.
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35% of greenhouse gases are released by China and Russia. These are not democracies. They have killed their people to remain in power.
Another 8-9% is from India which while still classified as a flawed democracy is borderline.
And 11% is in the US which I guess we will find out if it is a flawed democracy or hybrid regime over the next few months. But at best it is paralyzed by polarization on the issue. And also due to lobbying/bribery from oil producing nations and states. The electoral system enforces two party rule which caused this problem in many nations, most of which are no longer classified as democracies.
These are also incidentally the nations best poised to solve the engineering issue of maintaining modern QOL while reducing emissions. The US has certainly contributed and China is working the issue very aggressively, largely out of a need for energy independence. But both of those contributions are fragile. The polarization is affecting it in the US and if China secured sources of energy that were cheaper but emitted, they would not hesitate.