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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

Climate change yes, but climate change is a bipartisan issue, despite what corrupt politicians and media corporations would have you think. The majority of all voters want more action on climate change. It is presented as a partisan issue to give politicians an excuse for their inaction on behalf of their owners, while laying the blame on the common people -- privatize profit and socialize responsibility, as usual.

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. Who knows, he may even have got a few people across the aisle to reconsider their pro intervention stance and prevented much horror and tragedy and further destruction of the west's moral standing caused by subsequent administrations.

Although I guess he's just as deep in it with the war industry too.

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If climate change were a bipartisan issue, I'd expect more diversity in the sorts of bumper stickers I see on trucks coal rolling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

It is, regardless of what you expect about bumper stickers.

> 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.

Republicans are happy to reduce emissions as long as the energy is not more expensive, while Democrats are willing to allows prices to rise to accomplish that goal.

This has second order effects: Republicans will say if your new energy source is cheaper, people will automatically use it, no need for government to do anything. While Democrats want the government to mandate it, because that's the only way it will work if it's more expensive.

You might also consider if I've reversed 1st order and 2nd order here, that's up to you to decide.

> Republicans are happy to reduce emissions as long as the energy is not more expensive, while Democrats are willing to allows prices to rise to accomplish that goal.

Fossil fuels are only less expensive when you ignore the real health and climate change costs, which is precisely what politicians aligned with fossil fuel interests do on both sides of the political aisle.

Near as I can tell, at least right now the real health and climate costs are hard to quantity and very diffuse across a huge number of people. Also prone to exaggeration or undercounting.

Price at the pump/wellhead is easy, and impossible to ignore.

This comparison completely ignores a glaring counterpoint: corn.

It's not the Democrats shoving through corn subsidies, then cramming ethanol requirements into the system. It's not Republicans either. It's universally bipartisan, despite ethanol being a terrible fuel source.

One small thing corn-sourced ethanol has going for it is that it’s using current carbon rather than ancient carbon.

AFAIK making the ethanol involves more fossil fuel use than you save by burning the ethanol instead of using petrol directly.

Bottom of page 2 suggests that’s not the case: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/news/archives/do...

As someone who has changed or disassembled and cleaned many a carb from crappy ethanol-polluted gasoline, I’m not pro-ethanol, but I think there’s a slice of science in favor of it on lifecycle emissions basis.

> 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?

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.

> 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's exactly that simple. Stop making excuses for your terrible corrupt lying politicians. People didn't want to spend trillions of dollars on war, yet the politicians somehow made it happen. And they can't enact popular measures for what they tell you they consider to be the greatest problem ever faced by humanity? Get out of here.

When polled abstractly, a majority of people are in favor of fixing climate change. When asked if they’d personally cut back on beef, private car usage, HVAC, house size, and flyaway vacations, support is considerably lower.

When polled abstractly if people support spending trillions of dollars on war they don't. When asked if they would personally spend $6000 for every man woman and child in their house and send their son to die for just one war (of many), they also don't.

Yet decades worth of corrupt politicians on both sides have gleefully supported these criminal wars.

Again, how are they so unable to do anything when it comes to what they allege is the biggest problem ever to face humanity?

And a carbon tax on corporations which has bipartisan supprot does not mean everybody suddenly has to noticeably cut back on all those things. That sounds like the kind of fear mongering lying-by-polling that these crooked politicians love to use to shift the blame from themselves on to the people who in fact do want change.

> what are the Democrats doing about it right now

Democrats have been trying to do a lot.

The original Build Back Better was a cornucopia of climate policies (mostly clean energy tax credits) that was neutered to please Manchin and then he refused to support it anyways.

Biden also used the EPA's authority on pollution to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants. However, the courts have stalled this and the stacked Supreme Court will likely nix it.

The third major plank is the regulations on vehicles (50% of vehicles EV by 2030 and much more). That's still being drawn up, but Biden's union base is stalling it internally.

IOW, Biden was trying and failed. Since the war on Ukraine he's given up, or at least has tabled it.

No, they really haven't been doing much at all. They've been pretending to try and pretending to fail, then blaming "the evil rednecks". Unfortunately their base falls for it hook line and sinker.

If republican voters think other issues are more important that their representative's opinion on climate change, then there is no need for the politician to reflect the popular opinion. You only have two parties in the US. If one party does something you absolutely can not stand whatever the other guys say is not very important.

And it's usually cheaper, if you have no morals, to invent something they're doing that is terrible, to win their vote than actually govern.

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