Let's be fair, if we only get this, $10k in loan forgiveness and $1,400 Biden will be a better president than Obama, for folks in the US, anyways.
Yeah, I'll believe it when I actually see it
Odds are likely this is another one of those "plans" of his that just get "leaked" to make him look good
Conservatives are hitting the roof. So, if its his plan to "look good", it is at least indicative that he isn't going to be asking Lindsey Graham for permission to be an LBJ Democrat going forward.
Oil and Gas is like the coal industry 40 years ago. It's dead and gone. We sucked up all the cheap easy stuff long ago, and the demand simply isn't there long-term to justify massive fracking operations or expensive shit like the Alberta tar sands. Conservatives bread and butter is fighting for obsolete industries. This is all theatre to make it look like Biden is "tough on climate". I guaran fucking tee people like AOC and the Sunrise Movement will be coming out absolutely GUSHING over his bold actions to make you think that everything is smooth sailing.
Don't fall for the kayfabe. The most recent "climate actions" are all just like every other "progressive" imperialist project - excuses to further put the boot on the neck of the global South in the name of making the world a better place.
This is all theatre to make it look like Biden is “tough on climate”. I guaran fucking tee people like AOC and the Sunrise Movement will be coming out absolutely GUSHING over his bold actions to make you think that everything is smooth sailing.
I doubt it. But AOC and other succ orgs have become lightening rods and punching bags for the terminally online. Americans love self-induced apathy. So much easier to heckle from the sidelines than do anything of substance.
Climate activism is for people who are 15-25 in 2020 what LGBT rights were for people who were 15-25 in 2008. It's an issue the Left has been agitating for years, that Democrats have ignored or merely paid lip service to for years, and has reached a tipping point of popular support, especially with young people. Now that it's overwhelmingly popular and the "political calculus" makes sense, the Dems will make sweeping gestures that actually fall massively short, and then they'll tell you to shut up and go away. Those activist groups will applaud the moves and just be absorbed into the Democratic Party.
Makes you wonder what happened to all of those gay advocacy groups once they got bought off by the Democratic Party
I, a Lib, gave Human Rights Campaign $25 one time NINE YEARS AGO, and to this day I still get mail with those bumper stickers asking for money. They've tracked me across multiple addresses and send me letters every 3 months or so.
So many of these orgs are "make work" programs for people living in D.C.
Charity for the children of the rich so that they can recycle 1% of the wealth of the rich into the problem caused by the existence of the rich.
oh noes please don't go to the capitol again patriots please no you'll trigger me no please did I mention I'm a Marxist oh noes you'd trigger an actual Marxist no please no stop
They kinda went away when same-sex marriage was legalized (which, to be fair, was not just a small gesture).
Climate activism is for people who are 15-25 in 2020 what LGBT rights were for people who were 15-25 in 2008.
The US underwent significant improvements in LGBT civil rights in the '00s, so I'd take this as a good sign.
Now that it’s overwhelmingly popular and the “political calculus” makes sense, the Dems will make sweeping gestures that actually fall massively short, and then they’ll tell you to shut up and go away.
The US is moving on climate change in the wake of nearly every other country on earth, and the Dems will likely fall far short of what's necessary. But good news! We've outsources so much of our industrial capital to other countries that our policies are fading in terms of relevance.
It also depends on what else is happening along with this. If it's a "close this pipeline and use the funding to overthrow a country and take their oil instead" then it's not that good
Oil is on the way down. Attacking a pipeline is a good way for progressive Capitalists to win brownie points with naive Leftists
The new colonialism is going to be selling "carbon credits" to the third-world (aka paying Western NGOs and Green tech companies to plant trees and build methane capture plants) so that we can keep on keepin' on while poorer nations are forced to sell-off their right to development in order to cover our excess.
Biden wants to re-enter the Paris Accrods on Day one, so naturally I started looking into what exactly that entails. It ain't good folks. Think IMF loans sponsered by oil companies.
There's also the fact that there's no enforcement mechanism on what it means to pay for those credits. You can have companies like Shell just convert their oil fields to have carbon capture stacks and that counts as reducing and offsetting emissions. Maybe they give a little money to an NGO to do "sustainable development" (which turns out about as well as any other NGO-sponsered "development")
Tree planting only has a long term carbon-negative effect if you can ensure that a previously unforested area is permanently converted into woodland. Otherwise you’re just temporarily stashing some carbon in a tree, and when that tree is inevitably cut down for more development the carbon goes right back into the air
Ding ding ding. The number one thing we could do for the planet is move everyone into "traditional cities". They don't have to be megalopolises, you can still have villages and towns of all sizes.
There just needs to be a very clear distinction between "people live, shop, go to school, go to places here" and "people don't live here, this is farmland/forest/nature or designated for nasty things we need", and the "people live here" areas need to be very dense.
That might mean a town of 10,000 that fits into 1 square mile (so you can walk everywhere in town and even into the countryside!), or dense cities with trains.
I've been wondering about this since it seems like a great opportunity for grifters to scam people. Like you start a company that plants treats to provide carbon vouchers or wtf to companies who do a lot of pollutin still. Then you also start a company that builds forests for people who just want a forest for whatever reason, like for landscraping or for a rich guy to have a maze in front of their castle to keep the peasants out. Then you charge the carbon-write-off guy, and you charge the forest-maze guy, but you only end up constructing one forest, and billing both of them for it. I have no idea if thats very legal and very cool, if its one of those things like insider trading that Capitalism has decided lifts away too much of the curtain so they have to make it illegal... It sure feels like the latter. I can't really think of any historical analolgues to this situation either, so I'm double-stumped (much like the forest probably will be in a couple years, when the grifter sells it to a third company as a lumber source)
They own the NGOs. If they don't own them now, they own them as soon as they give them a project. Ask Greenpeace.
Attacking a pipeline is a good way for progressive Capitalists to win brownie points with naive Leftists
I read this and pictured the monopoly man doing direct action and thought, "capitalists would never attack the infrastructure"
What would be the point of that right now, way after the election and before his term starts?
You ever notice how when he starts getting heavy criticism about one particular issue, something suddenly shows up in the news as a "insider report"?
When he shit on M4A, all of sudden he's in favor of eliminating student debt
When he shot down $2000 relief checks, all of a sudden he's in favor of stopping the pipeline
It's basic distraction
But why would these kind of distractions be a priority at this moment, during the transition? I would guess sorting out whatever it is they actually want to do and appointing people to the various cabinet positions would be their focus just now. During a campaign I could totally see claims being made only to distract from bad news
Can’t wait for the keystone xxl pipeline that zigzags through every reservation on the continent to replace it
I'm not too sure about this "Obama" guy, but he says he'll close Guantanamo so maybe he's alright!
Oh shit I forgot that all the metacanada chuds went to start their own site lol
To turn a place into chud land is all you need really resource extraction?
cant wait for the post in 2 weeks where Biden claims he never said that.
I mean libs will point to this
And, in so far as he delivers, they'll be right. Biden will be marginally better than Trump. Schumer will be marginally better than McConnell. Pelosi will be marginally better than McCarthy.
The leftist point is that all of this is Too-Little, Too-Late. And holy hell, I hope we're wrong.
In the middle ages I’m sure people were happy to get a nice doddering old king after their previous wailing nutso king was deposed. But they still lived under a king.
Biden isn't making Capitalism go away. It is possible he'll loosen the boot off our necks long enough for us to catch some breath, though. I will take a Louis XV over a Louis XIV any day. And maybe, if we play our cards right and get really lucky, we'll be storming the Bastille sooner than later.
But the primary reason (60%) most people voted Biden was because "not Trump." I think you're overglorifying blue checkmarks when the pulse of most people was, "Yeah, lesser evil and all, I'll take any incremental change."
Really show how low the bar is that just doing this and a bit of student debt relief makes him the best president in a generation. The bar is really that fucking low.
Let’s be fair, if we only get this, $10k in loan forgiveness and $1,400 Biden will be a better president than Obama, for folks in the US, anyways.
The rest still gets drone strikes and regime changes.
