I genuinely feel like the climate is just a no win situation from a political perspective. Any real solution has pretty serious tradeoffs so either you take small low impact steps which are panned as being too little too late, or you take bold steps that hurt some significant group economically.
YEt so far, climate efforts in Biden years has been all give, to everyone. While there’s been some efficiency standards increased, that always takes years to phase in and even that is a push to new technologies, which is a great opportunity should someone take it.
Consider efforts in intercity rail. This is fantastic to finally see this investment after all these years,but is only the beginning. It needs sustained investment over a couple decades. Even if it didn’t, it needs a couple decades to build out. That’s great for investment in business, great for our jobs now to build our future, and will be an excellent Biden legacy, but we’re not going to see real benefits during Biden’s term. This is all give, all investment, all jobs, but there is not yet the corresponding”take”, to encourage Americans to step out of their cars (maybe if congestion pricing takes off but the President should get neither credit nor blame for that)
It’s not… but what is needed isn’t the “piss off normies” neolib things like “hey buy an electric car, poor person” stuff, but like 10 trillion dollar high speed rail between every major city and light rail between every minor city, that needs to be paid for by the billionaires being made into millionaires again.
So we have to pretend “all solutions are not going to work” because the real solutions are ones the Rs would never do, and ones the neolibs running the D party would pretend that they’d love to do but will never push for.
I genuinely feel like the climate is just a no win situation from a political perspective. Any real solution has pretty serious tradeoffs so either you take small low impact steps which are panned as being too little too late, or you take bold steps that hurt some significant group economically.
YEt so far, climate efforts in Biden years has been all give, to everyone. While there’s been some efficiency standards increased, that always takes years to phase in and even that is a push to new technologies, which is a great opportunity should someone take it.
Consider efforts in intercity rail. This is fantastic to finally see this investment after all these years,but is only the beginning. It needs sustained investment over a couple decades. Even if it didn’t, it needs a couple decades to build out. That’s great for investment in business, great for our jobs now to build our future, and will be an excellent Biden legacy, but we’re not going to see real benefits during Biden’s term. This is all give, all investment, all jobs, but there is not yet the corresponding”take”, to encourage Americans to step out of their cars (maybe if congestion pricing takes off but the President should get neither credit nor blame for that)
It’s not… but what is needed isn’t the “piss off normies” neolib things like “hey buy an electric car, poor person” stuff, but like 10 trillion dollar high speed rail between every major city and light rail between every minor city, that needs to be paid for by the billionaires being made into millionaires again.
So we have to pretend “all solutions are not going to work” because the real solutions are ones the Rs would never do, and ones the neolibs running the D party would pretend that they’d love to do but will never push for.