• WannabeRoach [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    The climate change shit in particular bothers me because of Chomsky's line on it making Trump "The most dangerous man in history!". Obama's climate policy was virtually non-existent. In fact, the thing he gets picked on all the time for, shepherding the natural gas industry, is exactly where all of his emissions reductions came from! Third party analysis of Trumps carbon emissions projections put him at roughly the same spot Obama was leading us towards, and this was after Trump dismantled Obama's federal policy that targeted emissions reduction. Because of COVID, we are actually trending towards Obama's best case scenario if he had managed to implement all of the policies he said he wanted to implement (which he never did, it was just a wishlist he kept for years and barely moved on).

    Of course, Trump didn't create COVID, so you can't credit him personally for the extra reduction in carbon emissions, but either way we are in the best scenario of Obama's administration, and yet Trump is leading us towards apocalypse. Then what the fuck was Obama doing? Why is it acceptable for politicians to SAY they care about something and then do nothing about it, but when a politician tells you that they don't give a shit he is Hitler? Why isn't the other guy Hitler?

    • OhWell [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Chomsky tried to say that Trump was more dangerous than Hitler....

      I'm glad that people can now realize that he is just a lib and a reactionary one at best. Chomsky is pretty much the baby's first leftist, but the more you get into an ideology like Marxism and look at dialectics, you begin to see how full of shit he is. He's pretty much an acceptable "leftist" for the mainstream media to parade around and uphold. He's not too radical and in the end, he always sides with the government when it comes to foreign policy and thinks that change comes through voting reforms.

      Oil BOOMED under Obama's administration. He even bragged that he had pushed the fossil fuel industries further than Republicans. Of course, he had a D besides his name and was part of the blue party, so they aren't going to talk about this. Kinda like how the ICE concentration camps used to have a politically correct name in "immigrant detention centers" (which still sounds fucking cruel as hell).

    • shitstorm [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Obama's first term had a very low average carbon impact because there was a global depression. During depressions, emissions always drop because of less economic activity. Capitalism literally killing the earth, but w/e.

      • WannabeRoach [none/use name]
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        4 years ago

        You're right, and the economic boom under Trump boosted his carbon emission for a year. Unfortunately, both presidents have been entirely coasting on emissions reductions that were from transition to natural gas. Liberal publications were actually ridiculing Trump not that long ago for his failure to "revitalize coal", because the industry has just been moving to natural gas for years due to cost savings and aging coal plants. The trend is expected to continue up to like, 2030. I remember reading some report back in Obama's second term that remarked that the emissions targets of his Clean Power Plan were a virtual match to the trend the energy market was already on. As far as I know the CPP was his signature executive policy, and the Climate Action Plan was his broader wish list of policies (he failed to ever pass a climate bill, which Hillary mentioned in her campaign as a reason for not pursuing a bill to enact her policy. She was going to attempt to make it all executive policy. Biden claims he is going to pass a bill, which I can guarantee you is not going to happen unless the bill is an abortion). It also took him his ENTIRE TERM to even finalize the CPP, which as I said was tantamount to doing nothing, allowing the market for natural gas to replace coal and taking some vague credit for it.

        According to projections I saw of if the Climate Action Plan had actually been implemented, which did have more substantial initiatives to actively pursue emissions targets, we'd be sitting around where Trump is heading now due to COVID, at least if the assumptions in those analyses hold. This is simply because of the economic depression we entered when everything started shutting down. So we are in Obama's dream zone right now, something he was generally commended for promoting but never doing, and now it is treated as though it is a sure-fire path to nuclear apocalypse. I don't even deny it is a path to disaster, I just get a fucking headache when I see people acting like Trump is the most dangerous US president on climate when he has barely done anything. He mostly sat there with his thumb up his ass, and we are sailing to the promised land of the Climate Action Plan. I feel like that fact is more significant than the fact that Trump is an aggressive dipshit.