I don't buy the argument. When France increased the price of gas, they got nationwide "yellow vest" protests that left 11 people dead. In other words, politicians are stalling on the climate change because actually tackling it is a widely unpopular move.
If people say they want a cleaner Earth, but qualify it with "as long as fuel prices don't rise," then they have made their priorities known. Politicians are merely following it.
Regressive consumer fuel taxes are a terrible way to fight climate change. Fairly obvious that wasn't it. That was a lie they went to to try get these unpopular taxes though because they know climate change is in fact quite a popular cause.
The reality is it's just more of the same governments telling you they're desperately trying to fight climate change and sadly being thwarted at the last minute by these violent racist nazis. You really have to stop believing that claptrap and start holding your failed politicians to account. They are the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
While some commentators have claimed that the movement was a backlash to policies meant to combat climate change,[115][116] a communique released by the movement calls for a "real ecological policy", including fuel and kerosene taxes for ships and airplanes, but objects to policies like the gas tax that hit the poor and working class most heavily.[117][118]
Why? A fuel tax is not inherently regressive - it gives the correct incentive, because a gallon of gas not burned is a gallon of gas not burned. It's "regressive" in the sense that poor people are hit harder, and I agree that the French government could have handled it better (well, obvious in hindsight), but there are other policies to help the poor while maintaining the fuel tax.
Honestly, I find these "we're actually for the environment" argument suspicious - isn't it rather convenient that the things they want taxed are exactly what they aren't (directly) buying?
As it stands now, addressing the climate will require radical policies. Some of them will hit the rich. Many of them will hit the poor harder, simply because they are the most vulnerable, whenever anything changes. There's no such thing as a painless easy fix, held back by evil politicians.
Look, you can believe the powerful ruling class who have a long and celebrated tradition of implementing terrible, costly, unpopular agenda that helps them and their wealthy owners when they say they can't possibly do anything about climate change because in this one particular instance they suddenly care about the slightest bit of disagreement and oh what a shame the big energy companies won't have to pay for externalities from the product they profit from, this is all the fault of your violent nazi terrorist neighbor go get mad at him.
But that's just denial of evidence and reality on par with denial of climate science, and I assure you that will not help things get done about it.
"Your team" is not acting in your interests. I know this is incredibly difficult to come to terms with and accept. It feels much better to be valiantly side by side with the smooth talkers and celebrities and wonderful people battling the nazi Russians. But that's just not what's really going on here.
Right, but that's going to do far more to signal support than people collectively answering "strongly agree" on surveys. I also think that "aggressive action on climate change" means different things to different people, so 69% answering "yes" doesn't mean there's 69% would support a particular policy. See also: brexit vote.
>There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.
Whether there was actually an imminent threat is irrelevant, only whether if there were perceived imminent threat. According to wikipedia the afghan was had 88% backing in the US[1] and the iraq war had 59% backing[2].
>Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change.
1. please quantify "lots of people".
2. If al-qaeda pulls off another attack you can easily blame them for it, whereas having one more hurricane in a year is far more ambiguous.
3. a war can plausibly stop the terrorist threat, whereas the same can't be said for implementing climate policies
>Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?
"This same poll showed that a majority believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but did not expect UN inspectors to find them"[2]
>That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.
It was widely supported by economists: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/bailouts-banks-and-automa...
>And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.
unpopular? the bailouts had 57% public support
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2008/09/23/57-of-public...
>Well it's common knowledge.
Sorry but it's impossible to take someone's "common claim" at face value, due to the presence of filter bubbles. Looking at the subsequent paragraphs, it doesn't even look like you had a different idea of "Immigration policies" than I did, so it was a good idea to get clarification before arguing.
>But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google
The first article you quoted is just a claim from another paper, which I can't be bothered to retrieve. It also has some case studies, but they were for morocco and tunisia, so applying that to the US is tenuous. The second is much better, so I'll grant that unpopular measures do sometimes get passed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United_S...
The rest of this again is really getting bogged down into details that aren't important. My examples are valid ones of costly and/or unpopular agenda being enacted. Politicians and media/propaganda corporations have a common bully word to attack people who disagree with their bad unpopular agendas - "populist". Surely you've heard that frequently.
Is it that hard to to imagine that most people are much more afraid of terrorists than slowly rising sea levels/temperatures? This isn't supposed to be an argument that terrorists are actually more dangerous than global warming, just that the combination of public fear and/or potential fallout from the refusal to act is far greater.
As for numbers, I'll present the "top issues", from 2002: https://news.gallup.com/poll/6586/issues-2002-election-terro.... In july 30% "terrorism" was the "most important" issue. The month before it was at 46%. Let's see what the voter priorties are like in 2020: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/important-is.... Even though climate change was an "very important" issue to 42% of the people, it's also at the bottom of the list. If we rephrased the question to "what's the most important", I suspect that climate change will be under 10%. I'm going to conclude from this that voters care about climate change far less than terrorism.
>Support for action on climate change is above 60% and you seem to call that unpopular, so I'm not sure what your bar is for it.
We're talking in circles here. You keep on bringing up how many people support it, but fail to address:
* conflating "support" with willing to make sacrifices. Saying you "support" something costs you literally nothing. I'm sure the vast majority of americans also oppose inhumane conditions at animal farms (at least in principle), but how many americans are willing to give up meat, or at least buy free range eggs? Even though they support it, their support is so weak that it evaporates the moment the prospect of costs come up. We see this in the public surveys. Sure, people support doing something about climate change, but what do they want if they think economy is even more important? Will a carbon kill jobs? Will it make it harder for me to make ends meet?
* conflating "support" for something with support for a specific policy proposal. see: brexit where it meant something different to everyone, so if the vote was on a specific proposal it wouldn't have a chance of passing.
>My examples are valid ones of costly and/or unpopular agenda being enacted
The only one you really proved was immigration. The bailouts were widely supported by both economists and the public.
>Politicians and media/propaganda corporations have a common bully word to attack people who disagree with their bad unpopular agendas - "populist".
I'm not sure how this is relevant here. This is literally the first time in the entire thread the word "populist" was brought up.
So you really can't turn around and come up with similar numbers and say those are popular but that climate change action is not.
It comes down to the same thing: your politicians are lying to you. They absolutely can do much more about climate change, and they choose not to. Again, I know it's hard for you to accept you've been had by these smooth talking crooks you voted for, but that's the reality.
They are not being held back by a small minority of the population who don't like it. Continuing to believe this with all the evidence against it is like believing the earth is flat or global warming is a hoax.
>So you really can't turn around and come up with similar numbers and say those are popular but that climate change action is not.
I'm not denying that people actually "support" it (in the boolean sense). I'm just saying that they don't really support it that much. From the polls I've provided last comment, it's clear that terrorism (and therefore the war) was near the top of voter priorities, whereas global warming is at the bottom of the list. Is it that surprising that congress doesn't want to address hard-to-tackle issues that people don't feel too strongly about?
A "social movement", going to "rallies" with the correct signs, is not going to tackle climate change. There is more than enough will for significant political action and has been for a some time. I repeat, the enemy is not your redneck boogyman somehow orchestrating everything you think is going wrong with the world, it is your politicians who have repeatedly promised you just need to elect them to solve your problems while never having the slightest intention of doing so.
> imminent threat of terrorism is a powerful motivator.
There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.
> abstract threat of lifestyle change in a few decades isn't.
Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change. Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?
> 1. the alternative would be an even worse recession, so it was the lesser of two evils.
That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.
And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.
> source?
Well it's common knowledge. Again this is missing the point, don't worry if you don't know the exact details of all the examples or they don't match 100% exactly with climate change. They're just examples of unpoular costly things politicians do all the time. It's not hard to come up with them.
But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google
https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/article...
"Over the past three decades, research on immigration policy-making has flourished. To explain why so-called ‘Western liberal democracies’ have liberalized immigration despite popular demands for restriction, scholars have pointed at the democratic character of these states. Freeman (1995) argued that immigration policy-making in democracies follows the pattern of ‘client politics’ because the costs of immigration are diffused among the entire electorate, while benefits are concentrated within a small pool of entrepreneurs."
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publicat...
"To begin with, the very fact of immigration creates a central puzzle for democratic theory: For several decades, most Western countries have had high and rising levels of immigration even though a majority of their populations consistently want immigration to stabilize or decrease. This public sentiment has been apparent since the early 1960s, when survey researchers first began to investigate the question of immigration. " [and actual survey numbers follow in table 1]