Re:U.S. Gas Prices Have Fallen for 50 Straight Days
by toomuchtodo on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:41PM
(#32338726)
Indeed, your entire comment is accurate, in broad strokes, across the electorate. Luckily, adoption is ramping quickly enough that we're already passed an inflection point in the US (per Bloomberg): https://archive.ph/wPQ9B
I still argue politics is broken if people don't care about climate change; that apathy flows to their representatives. C'est la vie, we'll clean it up on the backend with tech and clean energy's version of Moore's Law.
Re:U.S. Gas Prices Have Fallen for 50 Straight Days
by throwaway0a5e on Thursday August 04, 2022 @06:03AM
(#32341093)
"People don't care enough about my pet issue" does not make politics broken for any value of pet issue no matter how legitimate said value is.
"Politics is broken" is right up there with the. "people are bad at X" family infantile assertions always boil down to the old Principal Skinner "everyone else is wrong and I'm right" argument. Said argument is inherently wrong for issues of social norms or consensus where the "average man" is always tautologically correct.
Re:U.S. Gas Prices Have Fallen for 50 Straight Days
by random314 on Thursday August 04, 2022 @03:34AM
(#32340225)
Makes perfect sense as carbon emissions is the kind of "commons" problem that needs to be solved by carbon tax, not individual action.
Repositioning it as an individual problem is a very old PR technique.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
US politics isn’t “broken” most voters just don’t care enough about climate change to actually do anything more than support mitigation efforts in the abstract as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.
My parents, for example, are core democrat voters: older minorities who vote straight ticket democrat not only in presidential elections, but random local ones. My parents didn’t even vote for Larry Hogan, who won our Biden-leaning county by 38 points.
And they don’t care at all about climate change! They have a car and aren’t going to buy an EV. Their biggest concern right now is inflation and gas prices. (My dad blames Biden for not strong arming Ukraine into quickly capitulating so the Russian gas can keep flowing.) If you polled them they would say that we should do something about climate change, because they know republicans are climate change deniers and don’t want to come across as being Republican, but it’s a purely symbolic belief that doesn’t affect their voting patterns at all.