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?
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...