I think it's easy to blame our inaction or weak policy on our political structures. While the American system certainly isn't perfect, we must work within it to address climate change urgently. Concluding that change cannot happen without replacing the system is nearly as bad as just ignoring the issue in the first place. There are plenty of examples of radical change in the American political history (suffrage, civil rights, slavery - although that one caused a war ;-) and that's what we need badly again today.

Sure but if the half or more believe this is all bullshit and lies, how?

Well, a lot of that half live in places that have been massively impacted by drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other things that are made much worse by climate change.

This year is the first year I’ve personally been impacted by wildfires (4000+ hectare fire on the edge of my town), and it made climate change 10x more real for me than it was before, and I was fully on board before! How long can the right stay on the wrong side of history with respect to climate change when they are losing their homes and farms and dealing with one thing after another?

To butcher a perfectly good quote: It is hard to get a man to understand something when his personality and all of his social connections depend on his not understanding it.

In other words, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Conservatives make up ~30% of the population. The so called "independents" fall for Conservative propaganda because that's all of our media and here we are.

Obama got punked big time by Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel. Biggest wasted opportunity in modern political history. Thank goodness COVID gave us a second at-bit, shit would be really fucked if that hadn't happened.

Can you expand on this Summers / Emmanuel thing?

Sure https://twitter.com/mcopelov/status/1332224336728649729 is screen caps form his own biography. Maybe I can find the passage elsewhere if it's blocked without sign in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/opinion/us-economy-covid-... also

See the part at the end about Krugman "tearing his head out", and also

> It was also obvious to me, although apparently not to Obama officials, that they had only one shot at getting it right — that if the plan failed to produce a vigorous recovery, Republicans would say, “See, stimulus doesn’t work,” and nothing more would be done.

No, “the left” did not. They had upper 50s in terms of number of votes that would probably go along with the party, but they were shy of the 60 votes needed, hence the various compromises such as grandfathering old non ACA compliant plans, lack of public option, and “religious” exemptions for plans that do not insure anything.

And they only had that for 6 months in latter half of 2009.

Also it is important to note is that Democrats are the left but they're a center-right party. They're not leftist at all. They're merely to the left of the ultra-conservative party.

The days of Democrats being progressive are over if they existed like we pretend. The President that was most left in this country was FDR and he pulled us out of the Great Depression and set us up for an era of excellence. Democrats ran on left-adjacent policies and held Congress for decades.

Modern Democrats, 1970s forward really, keep rushing to the "center" that doesn't exist to capture imaginary voters as a result of Right-Wing propaganda (Intentional Overton-Window shifting, Two Santa Claus Theory, PR games).

Republicans, and most other morons, think that Democrats had a functional majority starting in 2009. However, Republicans intentionally held up the 60th seat for months. Then Kennedy died not long after Al Frankin was seated. That broke the supermajority.

Democrats have several conservative members (who I think should be expelled from the party but whatever) which resulted in us getting right wing healthcare policy and nothing meaningful being done. You can tell the people who fell for the RNC/Fox News PR campaign as they think Democrats had a supermajority for years rather than weeks.

I agree. But conservatives/right are often actively and openly against human life. That’s, I would say, worse.

One of Obamas many weaknesses as president was that he was incredibly way too open to letting republicans gut the democrat agenda just to appear bipartisan.

Keep in mind that somehow, it’s fascism for democrats to ignore republican input, but when republicans steal Supreme Court appointments, it’s just “how the government works”.

At that point, democrats were still very much playing “if we take the high road, people will see republicans for what they are”, but the problem is that this didn’t happen at all, and it fact, all it took was reinvigorating public displays of racism to fire up their base.

It was democratic/independent Sen. Joe Lieberman who killed the public option.[0]

Party is an abstract to these people, it's all about interests. In Lieberman's case, one of his interests was to protect the health insurance industry which contributed more than $1M to his campaigns over the years. [1]

[0]https://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/27/health.care/inde...

[1]https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2009/1211/Healthcare-holdouts-...

Al Franken was sworn in July, 2009. Ted Kennedy died in August 2009. That narrow window intersecting with the August recess was the first leg of the super majority and then again from the end of September to January 2010 with Ted Kenney’s temp replacement.

The Democrats did mess up by not taking that 3-4 month window more seriously, but they thought they had Massachusetts in the bag.

There's a page on Wikipedia about what the Obama administration did on energy. A few examples:

- $3.4 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), which would affect 49 states and has the potential to reduce electricity use by more than 4% by 2033

- The recovery act included more than $70 billion in tax credits and direct spending for programs involving clean energy and transportation.

- The launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) project under the Department of Energy

- New efficiency standards for home appliances

- Extending the investment tax credit for solar energy

- Extending the production tax credit for wind energy,

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