I don’t know of any candidates (except a few outliers who have my support) who are pledging to reduce the footprint of the largest polluters. All anyone is willing to do is offer “feel-good” initiatives that make life harder for average people, building popular resistance to addressing climate issues, without actually taking the substantial, difficult steps that are needed. Meanwhile they work together on tightening the social control grid that is being rushed to completion before shit finally hits the fan.

> Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.

Now you’re getting it. But they are stupid for a reason. The people are stupid because they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment; they are poorly educated and distracted by entertainment because policy makers prefer passive consumers to active citizens; despite the long-term downsides, policy makers choose to create passive consumers because they are easier to control and unable to contest their power.

One of Reagan’s advisors warned that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat”, and he was right! The response to this danger was to end state funding of college tuition, to strip out funding for the humanities, and to gradually turn colleges into job prep centers rather than centers of higher learning. (This process started in earnest with Reagan, but you’ll notice that it was never rolled back.)

People did try to fight this, but we lost. And now here we are.

I went from voting to electoral campaigns to the kind of activism that gets you arrested to working in climate as an engineer. I landed here because the first three were insufficient. I still support and encourage all of it, but the best you can get from voting is creating a better regulatory and funding environment for the necessary engineering and implementation work.

I think you hit the root causes dead centre there but there's an unfortunate consequence to your argument that you didn't call out.

The only way this changes is if there is real political/government leadership on the issue. That leadership can direct national resources. It can legislate. It can even tax - if necessarily to a very high degree - less useful ways of spending available resources in the private sector to deter waste.

We can't get that kind of leadership in many countries at the moment because too many people will just vote for whichever party they always have or whichever populist nutter has the most convincing sound bites. So before the political problem can be resolved there needs to be much more public education on the realities of the issue.

This is unfortunately a circular argument because the public information campaigns that are needed to fix the education problem are only going to be run by political/government leadership of the required calibre. If anything the populist lightweights will push the other way because dumbing down the voting population helps to sustain their own control and importance.

My hope is that before it's too late there will be enough politicians who are both capable of dealing with the real issues here and capable of taking on the populists convincingly enough to get elected to start moving the needle. Unfortunately I don't really see any other way this gets fixed instead of spiralling downwards.

“ When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.”

Yep, George Carlin said this best when he was still alive. Bad Government is simply garbage in, garbage out, if the people are stupid, they will elect stupid people

What is your reaction to credentialed physical scientists who accept that climate changes and that human greenhouse-gas emissions have an effect, but reject or dispute important parts of the mainstream assessment? They do have a Ph.D. and one of them has a Nobel Prize in Physics so it's difficult to ignore them. This is not to take a position but to point out that they can hardly be idiots; if you think they are, this needs to be made plain.

>1. Get a little bit informed

These viewpoints are exhausting.

A little informed about what? That we are destroying the planet slowly? Yeah, we know.

What is your actual solution? That we tell people they can't have plastic straws? That we need to install solar and wind farms (which is already happening at mass scale in the West, by the way. That includes the US)?

What are you actually proposing? That we "vote"? Do you want to de-industrialize your corner of the world, like Europe is doing, while the rest of the world plows ahead unabated?

Until you're ready to go to war for this, it's unrealistic. And good luck trying to force any country to do anything you want without a well equipped war-machine. You think Russia, India or China care what Europe thinks about their climate policies?

So, yeah, go ahead and vote in your green parties.

Indeed and don't underestimate the influence you can have by participating in candidate selection (depending on your electoral system). For example in the UK the replacement candidate for a safe seat [i.e. almost guaranteed to be won by the party of the sitting representative] upon retirement of the incumbent may be decided by just a room full of people. Be in that room.

> 1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.

The problem is that as soon as you start digging into it, you're essentially walking in a guilt trip.

The kind of "eating an hamburger pollutes more than driving an SUV for 50 miles" guilt trip.

And you realize most of the focus should be on materialism, consumerism and how/what you eat, not just cleaner transport.

But who really wants to do so? I myself am aware that me eating a beef steak per week has a gigantic impact on environment and resources. That switching to pork > chicken > eggs in that same meal would be better.

But I just don't want to enter the guilt trip. So I do a bit, but not as much as I could.

A carbon tax should help there. Make it so me eating a steak is not incentivized. But then good luck with farmers, the easiest like and empathy grabbing category of workers on the planet.

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Extremists, as in lumping trump together left wing folks who want a green new deal and to actually do something about the problem?

No socialist/lefty has been elected in the US despite their ideas being super popular. Don't act like voting for a centrist dem like Biden would do anything but ever so slightly slow the climate change scenario we're in. We absolutely need and FDR new deal scope of attack on this problem.