> Politics is just a proxy for people’s desires and motivations and willingness to make trade offs.
It is not people as in "a democratic majority" which want to destroy the habitable state of the Earths atmosphere, ecosystems and our own food chain for very little short-term gain. People have children and younger relatives, and we do care about 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.
> 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?
It is not people as in "a democratic majority" which want to destroy the habitable state of the Earths atmosphere, ecosystems and our own food chain for very little short-term gain. People have children and younger relatives, and we do care about 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.