Comment by tw04
2 days ago
You do us all a disservice by saying “the politicians”. The REPUBLICANS are attempting to ignore reality and burn more fossil fuels. Nobody else in America. Name the problem, otherwise you’re implying it’s a bipartisan effort.
To be fair, looking from the outside, democrats don't seem to be very eager to do anything about it either, most politicians in the US seems to be playing for the same team; the rich and wealthy.
Huh??? Did you just miss Biden's entire term? Democrats literally passed a massive bill that included $783 billion in funds for renewable energy to fight greenhouse gas emissions. Exactly what else do you want them to do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
Obama takes credit for U.S. oil-and-gas boom: ‘That was me, people’ https://apnews.com/article/business-5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caa...
You have to be born yesterday to believe that Democratic leaders haven't merely hand-waved and virtue-signaled about global warming for decades. I realized this back in the 1990s.
Democrats have superior rhetoric, and they are less openly hostile, but their long record of doing nothing to help is unsurpassed. They will fiddle while Republicans burn Rome. And don't forget that Joe Manchin for example was a Democrat, one who dominated Democratic policy during the Biden administration.
We need to push for clean tech obviously. I disagree with Republicans blocking wind farm construction and rolling back regulations, but American energy independence is important for national security, which is a shorter term issue than climate change. And developing more domestic clean energy helps with that as well.
Exactly. As a Democrat my eyes were opened when I saw the senior leadership do absolutely nothing to impede Trump other than form a strongly worded tweet.
You do the people causing this problem a great service with false equivocations like this. It is clear one group would prefer us to ignore the problem and do nothing at all - in fact encourage the problematic behavior - and the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
> the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power.
They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration.
Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the President?
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You’re talking badly about the people who actually crafted real industrial policy for clean energy. It was dismantled by Trump and Republicans - even when the output was going to be a factory making batteries on US soil, wind and solar farms, etc.
Like the Republicans are absolutely embarrassing on this issue, the idea that they’re “two wings of the same bird” is nuts.
I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries.
Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal.
> don't forget that Joe Manchin
No one on the left ever will.
That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) coalition is wicked hard to hold together.
Have you read Caro's (epic) biographies of LBJ? It's amazing how much skill, subterfuge, and manipulation was required to pass progressive legislation over the objections of the die-hard reactionaries.
Everything about politics sucks. Chaos, apathy, nihilism, grifting are the default. It's absolutely amazing that anything gets done at all. So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success.
What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. This was never a problem that we could wait on for "the occasional success."
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