> If this were the case, most Republican politicians would be running on a carbon emissions reduction platform, but that's manifestly not the case. The vast majority are either silent on the issue or openly mock the idea of its existence.
It is the case. Look at the numbers, the data doesn't lie. I'm not talking about corrupt politicians, I'm talking about the people. Look up the numbers. Far worse policies, laws, wars, etc have been rammed through on negative popularity. Far slimmer margins are hailed as a "mandate" and "bipartisan" when it suits them.
It's not the people who need convincing at this point, it's the politicians. What the people need convincing of is something else, which is that it's now up to the politicians. They are the ones responsible, not some lunatic fringe or imaginary boogyman they've invented. Politicians. All politicians, and especially their politicians.
Don't let them keep fooling you into believing it's the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia who is to blame for them not taking action on climate change. It's the politicians. Both sides -- what are the Democrats doing about it right now that they control the executive and congress and have a decent position in the senate? The gravest and most important problem ever to have faced humanity. Must be that all-powerful hillbilly somehow stopping them from doing anything about it, eh?
Not only are the vast majority of Americans in favor of more climate action, actually the majority of Republican voters are in favor of significant policies. 55% in favor of taxing corporations based on their carbon emissions!!
So please stop spreading misinformation about this and don't let your corrupt politicians continue to fool you, continue to divide people, and continue to get away with their inaction on climate change. It's not some lunatic fringe of hated "others" who are preventing action, it's your damn lying, divisive, hatemongering, corrupt politicians.
> Climate change yes, but climate change is a bipartisan issue, despite what corrupt politicians and media corporations would have you think.
If this were the case, most Republican politicians would be running on a carbon emissions reduction platform, but that's manifestly not the case. The vast majority are either silent on the issue or openly mock the idea of its existence.
The only other explanation is that there is a tacit understanding between them and their voters that they privately take climate change seriously but just don't want to discuss it openly, which is an extremely far fetched explanation.
It's not impossible for conservatives to take climate change seriously and confront it openly - look at the current UK government for example. Likewise, it's not a given that a far-left leader takes climate change seriously - look at Venezuela. It matters where the bread is buttered.
> Now what would be great is if he had proactively spoken out against war, coups, etc., and admitted he was wrong and those wars were failures
Agreed, but as the Ukraine war has again shown us, fossil fuels are the glue that binds climate change and wars of aggression, so I'm not so sure that we can separate the two so easily.
This is a strange misconception about climate change, even among many of what should be the better educated and informed section of the population, at least on the issues of the science. The misconception is that more people need to be convinced about climate change and the need to take action.
Many climate change topics that come up even on here get well received comments about problem of the greedy selfish uneducated rednecks who are preventing climate change action, and the subsequent hand wringing about how to educate or scare or convince them into changing their minds.
The facts just don't support this outlandish idea though. Even in the country with the most climate deniers in the world, Indonesia, they number just about 21% of the population. In the USA, deniers are under 20% and a staggering two thirds of people and more than half of Republicans think the government should take more action on climate change. This is an overwhelming political mandate, it's not even a question.
The ruling class enacts far less popular policies and legislation all the time and doesn't bat an eye. You're telling me they'll go on expeditionary wars on flimsy pretexts that last decades and cost trillions of dollars and kill thousands of Americans, but they won't implement overhwelmingly popular policy that has bipartisan support of voters to address what they keep telling us they believe is the biggest and most important problem facing humanity? This is clearly utter bullshit.
And that's the way they like it. Their divisive propaganda (which includes seeding distrust in science) has worked extremely well. The facts show that they never had any intention to more about climate change, that they routinely lie about the political reasons for not doing more, and they're happy that the commoners are blaming one another for it instead of the robber barons who own them.
> It is a very small minority of very greedy individuals, and there are also massive amounts of disinformation going on so that the democratic majority confounds the interests of these with their own.
No, it’s my mom, my siblings, probably your mom, the guy who does my tile work, etc. You’re framing this in your head as a “good versus evil” problem, which forces you to then assign blame to a “small minority of very greedy individuals.” But instead it’s a problem of humans putting short term individual comfort ahead of long term collective interests.
My brother and my sister in law have STEM degrees from Yale and MIT. They’re well-meaning democrats. But they take several international trips every year, each of which emits about as much CO2 as driving an SUV around all year. Most people I know don’t do that—but only because they don’t have the money.
Heck, I have progressive activists friends who don’t really care about climate change because their particular focus is racial issues or abortion. They obviously don’t want to affirmatively destroy anything, they’re just the same people who wouldn’t pay more than $10/month to address it. They assume there will be some deus ex machina that resolves the problem. (Get to work CO2 capture nerds!)
Look—people eat like crap and don’t exercise, taking years off their own lives. They take drugs that could kill them. People still smoke. They know better but they do it anyway. You think those same people are going to make non-trivial sacrifices for environmental problems that might affect their kids or grandkids?
> Policies touted by a lot of left leaning politicians aren’t practical and many of them know it but they say it anyway.
Your point stands, Democrat solutions addressing climate change are definitely pretty bad. That being said, at least they have some climate change policies they're pushing for right now instead of kicking the can down the road. Can you honestly say the same about Republicans?
> The messaging coming from Republican politicians is either that climate change is not happening, or that it is a natural cycle and nothing to do with humans. Both of these hypothesis are objectively false.
Climate change is a shibboleth and people largely appear to recognize it as such. For example, in Ware County, GA (to pick somewhere at random), 70% of folks voted for Trump but 2/3 answered "yes" to "global warming is happening."
> I honestly think climate change is the most important issue in the world right now, and I would love to know what we can do to get you on our side.
Supporting diplomatic efforts to combat climate change are virtue signaling. I'm an environmentalist and I agree that climate change is probably an impending disaster. But diplomats aren't going to fix it. The Kyoto protocol, for example, accomplished almost nothing: http://www.circularecology.com/news/the-kyoto-protocol-clima.... The only thing that can save us (if we can be saved) is technological breakthrough, and the prospects of that happening won't change based on U.S. participation in international climate change protocols.
> From my perspective, the bigger problem by far is that everyone to the right of our skewed American political center (this includes some Democrats, particularly those I named) do not believe that it is critical to take any action at all on climate change.
I would rather have the 50% who believe climate change is an existential threat behave accordingly rather than have 80% pay empty lip service and rally around token legislation or trojan horses (reconciliation bill, green new deal, etc).
> Or, to put it another way: If the Republicans weren't being obstructionist, the Democrats wouldn't need a strategy to overcome them. They'd be able to put their energy toward coming up with actual policy solutions.
Republican obstructionism is a real thing, but the idea that Republicans are obstructing Democrats from crafting a reasonable agenda is patently absurd, especially when carbon pricing has been the obvious solution for more than a decade, and it even enjoys some Republican support. But Democrats can't be bothered to make it part of their own agenda because of Republican obstructionism? Come on.
> Biden put out a fairly clear set of legislative goals to push for in order to combat climate change
What are these goals? Are they serious? Or are they some variation on the budget reconciliation bill (i.e., largely symbolic gestures that are bundled haphazardly into a bunch of other spending)?
> What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit
The left != the party (by which I assume you mean the Democrats)
A sizeable fraction of the population understands that climate change is an enormous problem and when polled has said solving it should be a priority (no numbers or poll link offhand, sorry). They are also routinely told that they are terrible people if they don't support the party that at least acknowledges climate change in their rhetoric over the one that for all I can tell is 100% committed to turning the planet into one big oil spill.
Don't confuse the actions of the politicians with what the populace actually cares about. Something like 70% wants universal government-run healthcare (yeah, even the people who watch Fox news[1]) but even with Democratic majorities in congress the politicians can't seem to scrounge the two craps to even pretend like they want to make it happen.
> I think that all these politicians that deny climate change actually do know perfectly well that it's true. They just keep saying it because it turns the minds of liberals to emotional mush.
No, I think they say it because climate change is very inconvenient in the short term if you represent a state that depends on fossil fuels, which many do. Why try to solve the unpopular problem when you have leave it for the next representative to deal with in 4/8 years time?
>"because the idea of a carbon tax is toxically unpopular".
Nice blame the voters....The solution for every problem (especially in the West) is a new tax. Why not just make some changes to existing laws to save the planet. Where you don't even need the voters. Firm up the building codes to create better and more efficient houses/condos/commercial properties. Encourage more work from home to cut down on the amount of traffic, outlaw coal power, no new drilling for oil unless you can capture the flare off, etc. I could think of 100 things that would make a bigger difference than a Bullshit Carbon Tax that our kakistocracy wants so they can get rich off of it. Do folks actually understand how little changes/tweaks to the stupid way most Americans live could make massive real world differences. Just discouraging lawns in places where they shouldn't be growing would reduce Carbon (mowing/care) and save 100's of billions of gallons of water (Texas, Arizona and any other hot dry state).
The arrogance of the following statement. Shifting the blame on us and constantly creating this Left vs Right bullshit.
>All of this leads to a difficult truth: The problem here lies not with the politicians, or even with the billionaires or oil companies. It lies with voters themselves, who recognize that climate change is a real problem but are not necessarily willing to sacrifice much of anything to tackle it.
> half of which group votes Republican (i.e., against reforms designed to prevent or slow climate change).
That’s a very cynical statement. Goes to show why both sides will never meet in the middle of the road with thinking that way.
Voting republicans doesn’t mean I am against climate change reforms. The issue at hand is how practically we deal with it and reduce demands on fossil fuel and transition to clean energy. Policies touted by a lot of left leaning politicians aren’t practical and many of them know it but they say it anyway. Look at California and its recent outages to any demand spike of utilities as an example.
> You should be happy with your representation, not forced to rationalize how they're less awful than the alternative.
Welcome to politics. The hard fact is that the Republican right-wing of the US is the roadblock to the US tackling emissions and climate change. The reality is that if the Democrats don't appease the center-right of the US with low gas prices and other climate change causing policies, the Republicans will win the votes and usher in an even worse destructive policy. The Democrats are trying to make as much progress as they can without losing the ball; pulling towards what you want while Republicans are pulling the opposite. If you don't balance as much as you can, it gets worse. Such is uninformed democracy.
> I repeat, the enemy is not your redneck boogyman somehow orchestrating everything you think is going wrong with the world, it is your politicians who have repeatedly promised you just need to elect them to solve your problems while never having the slightest intention of doing so.
I don't buy the argument. When France increased the price of gas, they got nationwide "yellow vest" protests that left 11 people dead. In other words, politicians are stalling on the climate change because actually tackling it is a widely unpopular move.
If people say they want a cleaner Earth, but qualify it with "as long as fuel prices don't rise," then they have made their priorities known. Politicians are merely following it.
> Its pretty easy to see that any form of mitigation is irrelevant until it becomes a real problem because getting large groups to agree on things isn't a scientific thing but a problem for society. Usually that only occurs when its pretty apparent that they have to do something to mitigate it.
Many countries have agreed climate change is a serious problem and have acted on it, and for a long time. The U.S. is a major exception. It's doable; the Republican Party in the U.S. is the problem.
>you can have a politician with major donations from Coal/Fossil Fuels try to legitimately discredit a trend that 98% of the scientists in this field have agreed is proven by data
Which politician? What data?
>98% of experts in a field have empirically demonstrated with data that trends are occurring
I would think those experts would have better things to do, but any source?
What is hilarious to me is to see ignorant pseudo intellectuals who believe in political propaganda without even considering what the implications are. So, yeah, climate is changing, it always has and yes human activities affects it too. So what do your politicians do about it? Collect money from people who have no other alternative but to use the same fuel and give it to their friends, move manufacturing to different parts of the world causing more resource usage in transportation instead and pushing inferior, impractical and just as environmentally taxing technologies by subsidising them. How is any of it helping the cause again?
> That’s a very cynical statement. Goes to show why both sides will never meet in the middle of the road with thinking that way.
I really meant only to reflect the reality that by voting for a Republican you are voting for someone who will use their power to prevent climate change reform. Is this actually controversial at all? I'd like to see the counterexample.
Sure, some voters may have other things in mind when they vote Republican (for instance, taxes, or abortion) but the end effect of that vote is that if the person they vote for is elected, reforms to prevent or slow climate change will be less likely to be implemented. Do you disagree with this as a factual matter?
> Voting republicans doesn’t mean I am against climate change reforms. The issue at hand is how practically we deal with it and reduce demands on fossil fuel and transition to clean energy.
I am incredulous that you actually believe that today there is any kind of Republican plan to "reduce demands on fossil fuel and transition to clean energy" that has any chance of doing anything in any way to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change.
Even if there were such a plan proposed by a small clique of Republican politicians, it would never be implemented by any Republican-controlled legislature or executive because, as a whole, the party still sees fossil fuel energy as a moral good (see: rolling coal), rejects pollution regulation (dismantling it at every opportunity), and dismisses climate change science as a fiction promulgated by their political enemies in order to further a diabolical agenda.
Even if you can assuage your own guilt by telling yourself that the individual politician you are voting for supports some kind of "Republican climate change plan", your vote for that politician will make any reform less likely to be implemented than if you had voted for their opponent. As a factual matter, no Republican-controlled legislature will ever enact climate change reforms into law, and no Republican executive will ever implement any climate change plan—not even a Republican-authored plan—within the next 10 years, unless we see a sea change in sentiment broadly within the party.
> Goes to show why both sides will never meet in the middle of the road with thinking that way.
If there was a reasonable prospect of a "middle of the road" plan to slow climate change that the Republican party would actually support—meaning, would actually help push through Congress—then the Biden administration and the current Congress would pass it in a minute and immediately begin implementing it.
The reason that this is not happening is because there is no plan whatsoever that the Republican party will put any support behind. I wish there was such a plan.
> At least in the USA, neither of the two big political parties are interested in solving the climate issue. It's way to good for getting votes to ever be solved.
The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate change. Imperfectly, but orders of magnitude more than Republicans.
> It's not the people who need convincing at this point, it's the politicians.
I don’t think it’s that simple. “The people” want action on climate change, but they also want to get better of, or at least not get worse of. They want to keep their big cars, holidays far away, cheap electronics, they want to keep eating lots of meat, etc.
Nobody can give them all they want, so I don’t think it’s fair to blame the politicians for that.
It is the case. Look at the numbers, the data doesn't lie. I'm not talking about corrupt politicians, I'm talking about the people. Look up the numbers. Far worse policies, laws, wars, etc have been rammed through on negative popularity. Far slimmer margins are hailed as a "mandate" and "bipartisan" when it suits them.
It's not the people who need convincing at this point, it's the politicians. What the people need convincing of is something else, which is that it's now up to the politicians. They are the ones responsible, not some lunatic fringe or imaginary boogyman they've invented. Politicians. All politicians, and especially their politicians.
Don't let them keep fooling you into believing it's the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia who is to blame for them not taking action on climate change. It's the politicians. Both sides -- what are the Democrats doing about it right now that they control the executive and congress and have a decent position in the senate? The gravest and most important problem ever to have faced humanity. Must be that all-powerful hillbilly somehow stopping them from doing anything about it, eh?
EDIT: Take a look at this for example, https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...
Not only are the vast majority of Americans in favor of more climate action, actually the majority of Republican voters are in favor of significant policies. 55% in favor of taxing corporations based on their carbon emissions!!
So please stop spreading misinformation about this and don't let your corrupt politicians continue to fool you, continue to divide people, and continue to get away with their inaction on climate change. It's not some lunatic fringe of hated "others" who are preventing action, it's your damn lying, divisive, hatemongering, corrupt politicians.
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