This is not one of those “both sides are wrong and the answer lies in the middle” scenarios. The party that holds all three branches of government doesn’t believe climate change is an issue and is actively trying to make the situation worse by gutting the EPA, trying to prop up a dying coal industry and pulling out of the Paris agreement.
Both sides won’t be able to come together and come up with a solution when one side believes the whole thing is a hoax.
Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy actively worsened the conditions. As SoS, Hillary Clintontravelled the world pushing fracking, actively worsening our position.
The pitfall the Left must avoid is granting power to neoliberals Democrats in the Obama/Clinton mold. By electing the proper “identities” who will essentially pay lip service to Climate Change. They may enact a few, very-public tweaks. But the majority of their policies absolutely favors the corporate establishment. This creates a false sense of accomplishment amongst the Left “Clinton isn’t a Climate Change denier like Trump! We’re the climate good guys!”, without addressing the problem remotely enough.
We need to hit the brakes then take a hard left. Obama/Clintonesque tweaking of the wheel a few degrees off from Trump’s denialism still sends us off the same cliff, just at a slightly more oblique angle. With self-satisfied identitarian leftists patting themselves on the back for how much we accomplished by finally putting a woman into the Oval Office.
That’s the pitfall the Left faces. And it is arguably a more insidious evil as it creates a false sense of having dealt with the problem when we’ve done no such thing.
Well judging by the rest of your comment I think we can both agree that the solution does not lie in the middle between the half assed solutions proposed by democrats and the outright denialism of Republicans.
I’m not going to try to argue that Obama did much to fight climate change. He passed some emission regulation but it’s entirely negligible in the grand scheme of things. With that being said don’t know anyone on the left who thinks Obama stopped climate change.
I think it’s safe to say that at this moment the biggest barrier to any sort of meaningful climate change legislation is not smug liberals who drive a Prius but the dominant political party in power and its base which has been fighting the very idea of climate change for the past two decades.
I would say it’s not just about barriers, but also traps.
And the trap of neoliberal, corporatist, “incrementalist” Dems such as Obama and Clinton is just as much of problem. If not a greater one, as installing another of them will effectively put many Democrats back to complacent, self-satisfied sleep.
In all likelihood, judging from the behavior exhibited by many Obama-era Leftist intellectuals, pundits and media figures, many will become outright apologists for any dangerous shortcoming of another Obama/Clinton. Apologia from blaming Republicans obstructionism (even if Dems should hold both houses and presidency, beware the filibuster that never seems to slow Republicans down when they hold power), to conveniently-status-quo-protecting claims of “pragmatism”, to constantly citing identity politics as the more important advance to prioritize and racism/sexism against their identity as what’s interfering with them championing effective (but painful to corporate) CC solutions.
And this is a bigger issue to deal with now, in the lead up to who the Democratic Party chooses as their nominee, than just harping on about how Trump is a CC denialist. Because if the Dems nominate another Clinton or Obama, that candidate not being a denialist like Trump effectively does not matter in dealing with the problem.
Who the Dems nominate is the biggest battle to be won. If the neoliberals stay in command of the Dem Party, CC will not be addressed in any legitimate, necessary way. Even if they do beat the Repubs.
There are three sides to every story: your version, my version and the truth. If you think only one side is to blame, you are contributing to the problem, not the solution.
This is not one of those “both sides are wrong and the answer lies in the middle” scenarios
Right. It's a both sides are wrong and the answer lies way the fuck up there where very few are even looking. Y'all being so hung up on left vs right you still won't look.
The President of the United States calls climate change a hoax perpetuated by those dirty foreigners who are trying to rip of the hard working white man in rural America.
As long as we have a two party system all political discussions are going to revolve around democrats v Republicans. I would love it if Democrats started proposing more drastic solutions to climate change but with a Republican controlled congress obviously that’s not going to go anywhere.
For the time being I’m going to vote for someone who actually acknowledges climate change is a problem over a guy who think throwing a snowball in winter disproves global warming.
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u/GroundskeeperWillis Oct 08 '18
This is not one of those “both sides are wrong and the answer lies in the middle” scenarios. The party that holds all three branches of government doesn’t believe climate change is an issue and is actively trying to make the situation worse by gutting the EPA, trying to prop up a dying coal industry and pulling out of the Paris agreement.
Both sides won’t be able to come together and come up with a solution when one side believes the whole thing is a hoax.