Tens of thousands of people in New York City have kicked off a week of demonstrations seeking to end the use of coal, oil and natural gas blamed for climate change.
I wonder how many people screaming it will take for politicians to be able to hear them over the sound the campaign money they’re getting from fossil fuel companies and lobbyists.
I genuinely believe that instead of doing marches, they should all just pool money they would’ve spent doing this march, and then just send that money to the politician’s fundraiser and hire lobbyists. All these marches are super inefficient use of your money.
If you look at the company lobbying budgets, it’s honestly not even that much money. It’s way smaller than most people think. It’s often in like 10s of thousands to 100s of thousands for large ones. Very few exceptional ones reach tens of millions. These people in the march probably spent like 100 dollars to drive out there (and spend gas…), buy lunch, print signs, etc. Almost any notable marches are like 10K people. Huge ones have literally millions of people. If they just pooled 100 dollars from each of them, they’d single handedly create the biggest and largest lobbying force ever created by ridiculous margins. Just imagine how much policies that much money could move. Yet we don’t do that. We just scream at them and hope they listen. Then realize the march did jack shit, and we repeat hoping they might listen the next time. And repeat…
I wonder how many people screaming it will take for politicians to be able to hear them over the sound the campaign money they’re getting from fossil fuel companies and lobbyists.
Only a few when it is the right people screaming.
I genuinely believe that instead of doing marches, they should all just pool money they would’ve spent doing this march, and then just send that money to the politician’s fundraiser and hire lobbyists. All these marches are super inefficient use of your money.
If you look at the company lobbying budgets, it’s honestly not even that much money. It’s way smaller than most people think. It’s often in like 10s of thousands to 100s of thousands for large ones. Very few exceptional ones reach tens of millions. These people in the march probably spent like 100 dollars to drive out there (and spend gas…), buy lunch, print signs, etc. Almost any notable marches are like 10K people. Huge ones have literally millions of people. If they just pooled 100 dollars from each of them, they’d single handedly create the biggest and largest lobbying force ever created by ridiculous margins. Just imagine how much policies that much money could move. Yet we don’t do that. We just scream at them and hope they listen. Then realize the march did jack shit, and we repeat hoping they might listen the next time. And repeat…
You think they could out bribe Exxon, BP, etc?
Absofuckinglutely yes.
Exxon spent $6.8 million dollars in lobbying in 2021. BP spent $4.27 million.