6 ms·

Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in the United States and let out a deep sigh. Had CFC propellants emerged today, I highly doubt the U.S

Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in the United States and let out a deep sigh. Had CFC propellants emerged today, I highly doubt the U.S. would have been a signatory to the Montreal Protocol — just to own the libs or avoid hindering the market by a boogeyman of 0.0001% overhead or some other form of contrarian political identity differentiation.

slownews45 5y ago
Yeah - even where I am there has been a pull back on stuff. We've got a ban on plastic straws (ie, you can't use one then throw it in the trash in the resteraunt) to help save nature. But you go outside and the amount of trash just blowing into the water from various encampments near the water is just nuts. Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas. I followed the attempted development of a solar install closely in a rich / white area (hard left otherwise). It was fought tooth and nail. the erosion underneath, the shading of a creek, this and that. Really - they didn't want to look at it. Full stop. So yes, even my early passion for some things have moderated a bit. It seems to be the left telling other people how to live. Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US, instead we are on china for their emissions (likely half per capita of US?) I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things. Can't we tax plastic straws 1 cent per straw or do a carbon tax or something that's a bit less nanny state style or so random and arbitrary?
- erhk 5y ago
  Trash from encampments is negligible when you realize how many plastics are just dumped into the ocean
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Not where I live. The trash from encampments is pulled up and down the shoreline (tons of bird and other life) with every tide. It's noticeable. Tons of plastic in ocean for sure, but less noticeable unless you are in asia where the rivers and coastal areas are crushed with trash at times. It's just weird our focus is on a plastic straw being disposed of in a restaurant. I mean, the amount of plastic bags in the shipping boxes I see on my street each trash day - mindboggling (airbags amazon and others use).
    - emn13 5y ago
      Apparently the type of plastic is quite relevant; but whether straws are worse than air-bags for shipping... who knows. But perhaps more relevantly, however unsightly this whole plastic soup is, I kind of doubt the impact is anywhere near that of climate change, and I'm concerned these kind of issues serve as a kind of feel-good distraction. Maybe that's too pessimistic; maybe the world can deal with plastic soup and climate change and forever chemicals and animal welfare and whatever at once. I'm just not very confident of that.
  - lumost 5y ago
    If you consider how much refuse you generate per day per household member - and then consider that an encampment has next to no sanitization infrastructure, It becomes obvious that the encampment will generate orders of magnitude more waste in the ocean per capita vs. ordinary households. I wouldn't be surprised if the litter ratio was 10,000:1 or more.
    - alexilliamson 5y ago
      What? People in houses are probably using more plastic than people who don't have money for a house. They have more money to spend, and a large % will go to plastic, on average.
- matttproud 5y ago
  The performative stuff has to stop. On the one vacation I am doing since this pandemic began, I saw a place in Northern Italy give out paper straws enclosed in plastic wrapping. You have to be kidding me. It’s missing the point and greenwashing at its finest (unrelated to climate). You’ll meet plenty on the left, especially scientists, who are in favor of nuclear. Where I live (Switzerland[0]), the biggest NIMBY against nuclear are the provincial nationalists who are going nuts about installation of a subterranean disposal site in their area (proposed because it is the most suitable site due to geological properties). My turning point with nuclear was about 15 years ago when learning about thorium. Very eye-opening. [0] - To the grandparent comment, natural born American who spent most of the adult life and all of childhood in the States. Emigrated a decade ago and still keep close tabs. This post is giving me serious flashbacks to the 1992, when Bush called Gore “Ozone Man”. Was that a genesis of the contrarian political differentiation?
  - samuli 5y ago
    Are you sure it was a plastic wrapper and not e.g. cellophane?
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      Things I learned from Wikipedia as a result of reading your comment: Cellophane is not plastic. Cellophane is biodegradable. Rayon is the same substance as cellophane, but in a different shape. Cellophane and Rayon are often made using the "viscose process", which requires the use of carbon disulfide, which is toxic, and the process has toxic byproducts. I wasn't able to figure out if this process has more or less toxic byproducts than processes for making plastic films. I wasn't able to figure out if this process is more carbon-intensive than processes for making plastic films. Harvesting plant matter, pumping water around, etc. sounds energy-intensive. Is it better or worse than digging carbon sludge up out of the ground?
  - beebmam 5y ago
    It's important to remember that plastic waste is virtually unrelated to climate change. They both might be "green" issues, but plastic straws in our oceans aren't going to have any significant effect on warming the planet. They'll just end up causing ecological changes/damage. Malicious actors try to conflate the two. Carbon gas emissions pose an existential threat to the future of human society; plastic straws do not.
- Johnny555 5y ago
  Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas. It's a lot easier to find fault in a point-source danger in your back yard (even if the actual risk is low) than to be afraid of a much more diffuse danger will likely kill more people, but probably not you.
- cogman10 5y ago
  > Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas. While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much faster and at a lower cost. > I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things. I'd humbly submit you aren't listening the left arguments if you think they aren't putting out solutions. Most people I know on the left deride paper straws just as much as you do. The serious solutions that have been proposed are things like carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable installation and electric vehicles, ending subsidies on the fossil fuel industry. Regulations decreasing allowable fuel consumption from vehicles. These are serious solutions that would have major positive impacts. And, as you can imagine, they've all been met with total opposition from the Republicans. Ranging anywhere from outright denying that climate change is real to lying about the impacts of renewable tech or fear mongering over things like "How can we recycle every part of the solar panel! Guess we better just burn oil instead". Nuclear is a fine solution, it isn't the only solution and it is absolutely more of a long term solution until regulations around new plants ease up. In the mean time, the best actions we can take today are making it more expensive to release greenhouse gasses in the first place through taxation and subsidizing greenhouse gas free power generation.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    > While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much faster and at a lower cost. I've heard this exact same thing said for 20 years. I expect I'll be hearing it for another 20 at least.
    - VintageCool 5y ago
      You will be continuing to hear about wind and solar for the next 20 years for good reason: they're finally taking off. Wind production in the US has grown from about 2 million megawatt-hours / month in 2005 to 33 million megawatt-hours / month today. Solar production in the US has grown from 1.5 million megawatt-hours / month in 2014 to 17 million megawatt-hours today. Building new wind and solar is now cost-competitive with continuing to run existing coal power plants. With a friendly federal government (if our government actually does anything), I expect wind and solar to grow immensely in the next 10 years. Wind especially looks strong right now. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/ The EIA expects 10% growth in wind and solar this summer compared to a year ago. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47936 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47936
- snarf21 5y ago
  I don't see it as political at all. It is simply NIMBYism. Everyone wants trash pick-up but not a landfill near them. They want sewer that always flushes but no water treatment near them. They don't want new malls because of traffic. They don't want new apartments because they are afraid of who may move in and their property values. The only reason straws caught on is because no one cared. We are all absolutely willing to give up straws since they don't require any real change in our behavior. Most stores offer reusable bags but people (and lobbyists) would fight back if disposable bags were outlawed. We could charge for them but people would rather pay an extra $0.50 at the grocery store than change behavior. We are addicted to convenience. People hate change, more than the pieces of change, more than anything else. There is a lot of awful in this world driven specifically by people's fear of change.
- potatolicious 5y ago
  > It seems to be the left telling other people how to live. Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US This doesn't seem like an exclusively left-wing ideology - anti-housing sentiment is strong across the board across US politics. Try building an apartment building in a conservative part of town and you'll get much of the same bad faith opposition as anywhere else (and more often than not, apocalyptic caterwauling). NIMBYism is sadly a scourge that knows few political boundaries.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  According to a friend that works with utility companies to plan out future capacity, nuclear's problem is the high upfront cost. Companies don't want to invest in building one for this reason alone. Building a new one puts a lot of capital at risk.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Nuclear plants in America are old enough that many need to be upgraded. Turns out upgrading is so expensive that many choose to close instead. Just this week two in Illinois closed when the state refused to subsidize the upgrade. It's a pretty bad look, because people see these huge subsidies and balk, thinking that nuclear is a continually expensive form of energy, even though these are one time costs.
felipellrocha 5y ago
Yeah, man. I'm often wondering where did this "own the libs" thing even began. It provides republicans with such a strong connection to their base, that if something gets even remotely attached to that idea, there is no budging
- qzw 5y ago
  Decades of orchestrated efforts to turn political discourse into a culture war. Ever wonder why there are so many political “think tanks”? That’s what they’ve been working on.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Newt Gingrich holds that honour. He turned politics into a partisan bloodsport in the mid-to-late '90s. It stopped being about whether proposed policies would help or hurt Americans and more about whether such and such would defeat the godless liberals. The efforts to repeal the ACA show this in its most blatant form. The emotional heft of the argument laid entirely on the basis of one word: "Obamacare". It's no wonder that they failed to pass an alternative despite complaining about the ACA for the 10 years prior. But going back to the '90s, it didn't help that '96 saw the passage of the Telecommunications Act. This led to rapid consolidation of local radio and TV news stations under one large corporate umbrella (Clear Channel). Independent stations can provide a variety of viewpoints. If they're all owned by the same parent, they start providing the parents' viewpoint.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Take the election fraud things, for example. They know it's bullshit, they know you know it's bullshit, but they do it anyway. The incentives are wrong, and I don't see them getting better any time soon.
throw0101a 5y ago
> Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in the United States and let out a deep sigh. George H.W. Bush ("Bush 41") actually had a decent track record on the environment and climate change: * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-understood-that-markets-and-the-environment-werent-enemies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-underst... The craziness with the GOP started more recently (post-1990s).
- matttproud 5y ago
  1992, Bush utters “Ozone Man” into the lexicon as a pejorative against Al Gore. There is a difference between campaign rhetoric and policy, to be sure, but the country lost clarity of focus rapidly as a nation after the Gulf War and began to let trivial things divide it. (I remember the 1990s culture wars, and I’d like to forget.) Bush senior may have been one of the last decent human Republicans outside of his periodic populist gestures. I’d say Nixon (modulo corruption) or Ford (ineptitude) or Eisenhower was probably the last. I’ll never forgive the Bush son for pissing away my generations’ future and Rove’s mobilization of the demos into this gerrymandered hellscape.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    And yet Reagan (with Bush as VP) signed the Montreal Protocol. And Bush 41 created the acid rain pact with Canada (PM Mulroney). A lot of blame goes to Bush 43 ("Dubya") for a lot of things, but I generally view him as a patsy for those around him that actually made the decisions and pushed them through.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      When in doubt, always blame Congress and not the president. Newt Gingrich is a bigger player here than either Bush.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
lettergram 5y ago
I’m frankly less concerned about climate change - in reality we don’t have enough data for super definitive answers. Further, we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable. In contrast, insect populations are dropping like a stone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_population... We’re going to have serious problems within the next 5-10 years if that continues. We also have declining water availability and increasing water usage in the western US. And we have a potentially massive issue with solar weather (which can theoretically wipe out all electronics).
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  >A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable. No it's not.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    It’s already happened. The last 100 years.
    - sammalloy 5y ago
      What the science says: > Human-caused climate change is occurring too rapidly for species to be able to adapt. Plants and animals are currently dying off at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the average rate of extinction over geological timescales. Because of this, there is mounting evidence that we are heading towards a mass extinction event. https://skepticalscience.com/Can-animals-and-plants-adapt-to-global-warming.htm https://skepticalscience.com/Can-animals-and-plants-adapt-to...
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > Further, we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable. Adapt? Yes. Easily adapt? Not in the slightest. Higher average temperatures are leading to changes in rainfall patterns. Some regions see more torrential rain while others see aridification. Increased rainfall means regions that previously saw floods once a century will see them once a decade. Similarly regions facing aridification will see more and longer heat waves and less water availability. While those situations are survivable they're destructive and thus expensive. Even if no one died during such events they will still cause significant economic impact. People can't just pack up and migrate en mass to avoid flood zones or arid regions. Changes in rainfall also affect farming. A region with good soil may need increased irrigation to deal with aridification. Irrigation has its own set of problems it introduces even if there's some ready source of water to feed into the irrigation system. Even small increases in temperature also affect atmospheric and oceanic conveyors. Even single degree increases can change the thermal gradients enough to break them down for portions of the year. If money was infinite and humans acted without prejudice a lot of coming environmental issues would have some technological mitigation. Neither of those things are true so conditions in some places are going to get very bad.
rayiner 5y ago
C’mon, man, be forthright. It’s not a “boogeyman of 0.0001% overhead.” I agree that conservative aversion to addressing climate change is a problem. But the other side isn’t proposing minor tax increases here. A very vocal front sees this as an opportunity to do all the things the socialists and central planners wanted anyway, while spending tens of trillions of dollars. When climate change is tied together with everything from labor laws to racial issues, it’s very hard for conservatives to trust the real motivation behind the measures. And that’s a choice the left makes to do that.
- cloudfifty 5y ago
  > A very vocal front sees this as an opportunity to do all the things the socialists and central planners wanted anyway What if they're right? Should we all go down with the ship just to maintain some sort of dogmatic pride in our preferred economic system?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    That’s backward. The fact that they want to shovel union labor requirements into a bill dealing with climate change indicates that the climate change part isn’t a serious threat.
    - cloudfifty 5y ago
      Why is it backward? Unions enable general strikes which enable wide-ranging policy changes.
      - rayiner 5y ago
        The union aspect is being pitched for things like a living wage, not strikes in favor of climate change.
        cloudfifty 5y ago
        A higher wage can also break bad cycles like always choosing the cheapest produce etc. I assume the general message is that it's possible for people to get a better life by other means than just ruthless, unsustainable, growth.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

slownews45 5y ago

Yeah - even where I am there has been a pull back on stuff. We've got a ban on plastic straws (ie, you can't use one then throw it in the trash in the resteraunt) to help save nature. But you go outside and the amount of trash just blowing into the water from various encampments near the water is just nuts. Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas. I followed the attempted development of a solar install closely in a rich / white area (hard left otherwise). It was fought tooth and nail. the erosion underneath, the shading of a creek, this and that. Really - they didn't want to look at it. Full stop. So yes, even my early passion for some things have moderated a bit. It seems to be the left telling other people how to live. Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US, instead we are on china for their emissions (likely half per capita of US?) I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things. Can't we tax plastic straws 1 cent per straw or do a carbon tax or something that's a bit less nanny state style or so random and arbitrary?

erhk 5y ago
Trash from encampments is negligible when you realize how many plastics are just dumped into the ocean
- slownews45 5y ago
  Not where I live. The trash from encampments is pulled up and down the shoreline (tons of bird and other life) with every tide. It's noticeable. Tons of plastic in ocean for sure, but less noticeable unless you are in asia where the rivers and coastal areas are crushed with trash at times. It's just weird our focus is on a plastic straw being disposed of in a restaurant. I mean, the amount of plastic bags in the shipping boxes I see on my street each trash day - mindboggling (airbags amazon and others use).
  - emn13 5y ago
    Apparently the type of plastic is quite relevant; but whether straws are worse than air-bags for shipping... who knows. But perhaps more relevantly, however unsightly this whole plastic soup is, I kind of doubt the impact is anywhere near that of climate change, and I'm concerned these kind of issues serve as a kind of feel-good distraction. Maybe that's too pessimistic; maybe the world can deal with plastic soup and climate change and forever chemicals and animal welfare and whatever at once. I'm just not very confident of that.
- lumost 5y ago
  If you consider how much refuse you generate per day per household member - and then consider that an encampment has next to no sanitization infrastructure, It becomes obvious that the encampment will generate orders of magnitude more waste in the ocean per capita vs. ordinary households. I wouldn't be surprised if the litter ratio was 10,000:1 or more.
  - alexilliamson 5y ago
    What? People in houses are probably using more plastic than people who don't have money for a house. They have more money to spend, and a large % will go to plastic, on average.
matttproud 5y ago
The performative stuff has to stop. On the one vacation I am doing since this pandemic began, I saw a place in Northern Italy give out paper straws enclosed in plastic wrapping. You have to be kidding me. It’s missing the point and greenwashing at its finest (unrelated to climate). You’ll meet plenty on the left, especially scientists, who are in favor of nuclear. Where I live (Switzerland[0]), the biggest NIMBY against nuclear are the provincial nationalists who are going nuts about installation of a subterranean disposal site in their area (proposed because it is the most suitable site due to geological properties). My turning point with nuclear was about 15 years ago when learning about thorium. Very eye-opening. [0] - To the grandparent comment, natural born American who spent most of the adult life and all of childhood in the States. Emigrated a decade ago and still keep close tabs. This post is giving me serious flashbacks to the 1992, when Bush called Gore “Ozone Man”. Was that a genesis of the contrarian political differentiation?
- samuli 5y ago
  Are you sure it was a plastic wrapper and not e.g. cellophane?
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Things I learned from Wikipedia as a result of reading your comment: Cellophane is not plastic. Cellophane is biodegradable. Rayon is the same substance as cellophane, but in a different shape. Cellophane and Rayon are often made using the "viscose process", which requires the use of carbon disulfide, which is toxic, and the process has toxic byproducts. I wasn't able to figure out if this process has more or less toxic byproducts than processes for making plastic films. I wasn't able to figure out if this process is more carbon-intensive than processes for making plastic films. Harvesting plant matter, pumping water around, etc. sounds energy-intensive. Is it better or worse than digging carbon sludge up out of the ground?
- beebmam 5y ago
  It's important to remember that plastic waste is virtually unrelated to climate change. They both might be "green" issues, but plastic straws in our oceans aren't going to have any significant effect on warming the planet. They'll just end up causing ecological changes/damage. Malicious actors try to conflate the two. Carbon gas emissions pose an existential threat to the future of human society; plastic straws do not.
Johnny555 5y ago
Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas. It's a lot easier to find fault in a point-source danger in your back yard (even if the actual risk is low) than to be afraid of a much more diffuse danger will likely kill more people, but probably not you.
cogman10 5y ago
> Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas. While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much faster and at a lower cost. > I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things. I'd humbly submit you aren't listening the left arguments if you think they aren't putting out solutions. Most people I know on the left deride paper straws just as much as you do. The serious solutions that have been proposed are things like carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable installation and electric vehicles, ending subsidies on the fossil fuel industry. Regulations decreasing allowable fuel consumption from vehicles. These are serious solutions that would have major positive impacts. And, as you can imagine, they've all been met with total opposition from the Republicans. Ranging anywhere from outright denying that climate change is real to lying about the impacts of renewable tech or fear mongering over things like "How can we recycle every part of the solar panel! Guess we better just burn oil instead". Nuclear is a fine solution, it isn't the only solution and it is absolutely more of a long term solution until regulations around new plants ease up. In the mean time, the best actions we can take today are making it more expensive to release greenhouse gasses in the first place through taxation and subsidizing greenhouse gas free power generation.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much faster and at a lower cost. I've heard this exact same thing said for 20 years. I expect I'll be hearing it for another 20 at least.
  - VintageCool 5y ago
    You will be continuing to hear about wind and solar for the next 20 years for good reason: they're finally taking off. Wind production in the US has grown from about 2 million megawatt-hours / month in 2005 to 33 million megawatt-hours / month today. Solar production in the US has grown from 1.5 million megawatt-hours / month in 2014 to 17 million megawatt-hours today. Building new wind and solar is now cost-competitive with continuing to run existing coal power plants. With a friendly federal government (if our government actually does anything), I expect wind and solar to grow immensely in the next 10 years. Wind especially looks strong right now. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/ The EIA expects 10% growth in wind and solar this summer compared to a year ago. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47936 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47936
snarf21 5y ago
I don't see it as political at all. It is simply NIMBYism. Everyone wants trash pick-up but not a landfill near them. They want sewer that always flushes but no water treatment near them. They don't want new malls because of traffic. They don't want new apartments because they are afraid of who may move in and their property values. The only reason straws caught on is because no one cared. We are all absolutely willing to give up straws since they don't require any real change in our behavior. Most stores offer reusable bags but people (and lobbyists) would fight back if disposable bags were outlawed. We could charge for them but people would rather pay an extra $0.50 at the grocery store than change behavior. We are addicted to convenience. People hate change, more than the pieces of change, more than anything else. There is a lot of awful in this world driven specifically by people's fear of change.
potatolicious 5y ago
> It seems to be the left telling other people how to live. Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US This doesn't seem like an exclusively left-wing ideology - anti-housing sentiment is strong across the board across US politics. Try building an apartment building in a conservative part of town and you'll get much of the same bad faith opposition as anywhere else (and more often than not, apocalyptic caterwauling). NIMBYism is sadly a scourge that knows few political boundaries.
bcrosby95 5y ago
According to a friend that works with utility companies to plan out future capacity, nuclear's problem is the high upfront cost. Companies don't want to invest in building one for this reason alone. Building a new one puts a lot of capital at risk.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Nuclear plants in America are old enough that many need to be upgraded. Turns out upgrading is so expensive that many choose to close instead. Just this week two in Illinois closed when the state refused to subsidize the upgrade. It's a pretty bad look, because people see these huge subsidies and balk, thinking that nuclear is a continually expensive form of energy, even though these are one time costs.

felipellrocha 5y ago

Yeah, man. I'm often wondering where did this "own the libs" thing even began. It provides republicans with such a strong connection to their base, that if something gets even remotely attached to that idea, there is no budging

qzw 5y ago
Decades of orchestrated efforts to turn political discourse into a culture war. Ever wonder why there are so many political “think tanks”? That’s what they’ve been working on.
rchaud 5y ago
Newt Gingrich holds that honour. He turned politics into a partisan bloodsport in the mid-to-late '90s. It stopped being about whether proposed policies would help or hurt Americans and more about whether such and such would defeat the godless liberals. The efforts to repeal the ACA show this in its most blatant form. The emotional heft of the argument laid entirely on the basis of one word: "Obamacare". It's no wonder that they failed to pass an alternative despite complaining about the ACA for the 10 years prior. But going back to the '90s, it didn't help that '96 saw the passage of the Telecommunications Act. This led to rapid consolidation of local radio and TV news stations under one large corporate umbrella (Clear Channel). Independent stations can provide a variety of viewpoints. If they're all owned by the same parent, they start providing the parents' viewpoint.
mhh__ 5y ago
Take the election fraud things, for example. They know it's bullshit, they know you know it's bullshit, but they do it anyway. The incentives are wrong, and I don't see them getting better any time soon.

throw0101a 5y ago

> Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in the United States and let out a deep sigh. George H.W. Bush ("Bush 41") actually had a decent track record on the environment and climate change: * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-understood-that-markets-and-the-environment-werent-enemies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-underst... The craziness with the GOP started more recently (post-1990s).

matttproud 5y ago
1992, Bush utters “Ozone Man” into the lexicon as a pejorative against Al Gore. There is a difference between campaign rhetoric and policy, to be sure, but the country lost clarity of focus rapidly as a nation after the Gulf War and began to let trivial things divide it. (I remember the 1990s culture wars, and I’d like to forget.) Bush senior may have been one of the last decent human Republicans outside of his periodic populist gestures. I’d say Nixon (modulo corruption) or Ford (ineptitude) or Eisenhower was probably the last. I’ll never forgive the Bush son for pissing away my generations’ future and Rove’s mobilization of the demos into this gerrymandered hellscape.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  And yet Reagan (with Bush as VP) signed the Montreal Protocol. And Bush 41 created the acid rain pact with Canada (PM Mulroney). A lot of blame goes to Bush 43 ("Dubya") for a lot of things, but I generally view him as a patsy for those around him that actually made the decisions and pushed them through.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    When in doubt, always blame Congress and not the president. Newt Gingrich is a bigger player here than either Bush.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

lettergram 5y ago

I’m frankly less concerned about climate change - in reality we don’t have enough data for super definitive answers. Further, we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable. In contrast, insect populations are dropping like a stone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_population... We’re going to have serious problems within the next 5-10 years if that continues. We also have declining water availability and increasing water usage in the western US. And we have a potentially massive issue with solar weather (which can theoretically wipe out all electronics).

cool_dude85 5y ago
>A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable. No it's not.
- lettergram 5y ago
  It’s already happened. The last 100 years.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    What the science says: > Human-caused climate change is occurring too rapidly for species to be able to adapt. Plants and animals are currently dying off at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the average rate of extinction over geological timescales. Because of this, there is mounting evidence that we are heading towards a mass extinction event. https://skepticalscience.com/Can-animals-and-plants-adapt-to-global-warming.htm https://skepticalscience.com/Can-animals-and-plants-adapt-to...
giantrobot 5y ago
> Further, we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable. Adapt? Yes. Easily adapt? Not in the slightest. Higher average temperatures are leading to changes in rainfall patterns. Some regions see more torrential rain while others see aridification. Increased rainfall means regions that previously saw floods once a century will see them once a decade. Similarly regions facing aridification will see more and longer heat waves and less water availability. While those situations are survivable they're destructive and thus expensive. Even if no one died during such events they will still cause significant economic impact. People can't just pack up and migrate en mass to avoid flood zones or arid regions. Changes in rainfall also affect farming. A region with good soil may need increased irrigation to deal with aridification. Irrigation has its own set of problems it introduces even if there's some ready source of water to feed into the irrigation system. Even small increases in temperature also affect atmospheric and oceanic conveyors. Even single degree increases can change the thermal gradients enough to break them down for portions of the year. If money was infinite and humans acted without prejudice a lot of coming environmental issues would have some technological mitigation. Neither of those things are true so conditions in some places are going to get very bad.

rayiner 5y ago

C’mon, man, be forthright. It’s not a “boogeyman of 0.0001% overhead.” I agree that conservative aversion to addressing climate change is a problem. But the other side isn’t proposing minor tax increases here. A very vocal front sees this as an opportunity to do all the things the socialists and central planners wanted anyway, while spending tens of trillions of dollars. When climate change is tied together with everything from labor laws to racial issues, it’s very hard for conservatives to trust the real motivation behind the measures. And that’s a choice the left makes to do that.

cloudfifty 5y ago
> A very vocal front sees this as an opportunity to do all the things the socialists and central planners wanted anyway What if they're right? Should we all go down with the ship just to maintain some sort of dogmatic pride in our preferred economic system?
- rayiner 5y ago
  That’s backward. The fact that they want to shovel union labor requirements into a bill dealing with climate change indicates that the climate change part isn’t a serious threat.
  - cloudfifty 5y ago
    Why is it backward? Unions enable general strikes which enable wide-ranging policy changes.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      The union aspect is being pitched for things like a living wage, not strikes in favor of climate change.
      - cloudfifty 5y ago
        A higher wage can also break bad cycles like always choosing the cheapest produce etc. I assume the general message is that it's possible for people to get a better life by other means than just ruthless, unsustainable, growth.

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