Opinion: clueless voters risk returning Donald Trump to the White House
Opinion: clueless voters risk returning Donald Trump to the White House
US climate voters need an accurate accounting of Joe Biden’s record ahead of the November 2024 US presidential election.
Any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5˚C rests on Joe Biden being elected to a second term. Voters need an accurate accounting of Biden’s climate record ahead of the November 2024 election.
If you're in the US and want to get involved, you can volunteer or give to the Biden Victory Fund
Wow, wrong from the first sentence of the subtitle. I'll concede that a democrat will do less damage than a republican in the white house, but beyond that I take issue with this opinion piece.
The Willow project. The Biden administration approved this expansion of oil production, against the outcry of millions of people, most notably the Native Village of Nuiqsut and City of Nuiqsut. This opinion piece focusses on the fact that this project will directly release hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 through the burning of fossil fuels. What is not mentioned is the habitat destruction, poisoning of fish, harm to caribou, air and water pollution, and blatant disrespect to the Native people who are directly affected (I'm not even going to get into how resource extraction causes much of the crisis of MMIWG2S).
As the author concedes in the article's conclusion, the specifics do matter. So how, specifically, does his opinion piece counter the fact the Biden administration took deliberate action to increase fossil fuel production? With a proposal they made to increase water heater efficiency, backed by a statistic that looks at the cumulative effect nearly 40 years from now. Unstated are the assumptions that this will pass, not get repealed in the future, and that industrial civilization will exist in 2060. There is a similar statistic involving automobiles and fuel efficiency, again involving a future date (2050 this time) and many assumptions, like that people will be using cars for their daily transportation 30 years from now.
These things are not comparable to the immediate harm of the Willow project, taken together they paint a grim picture, one in which fossil fuel production continues to expand while politicians push the problem down the road with reforms that assume society does not need to fundamentally change. We need action now, and the Biden administration is actively making things worse in the present while selling us an unrealistic future.
Electing Joe Biden to be President of the United States of America for a second term in 2024 will not limit global warming to 1.5⁰C. If we actually want any chance of limiting the warming of Earth to 1.5⁰C, we need nothing short of global revolution. Fossil fuel production has to stop, agriculture has to drastically change to regenerate the land, ecosystems must be healed. None of this is workable under global Capitalism, and States will never be an effective method for organizing the kind of human labor necessary to save ourselves and our home. This is a scary idea, it requires us taking personal and collective responsibility for the fate of humanity, going out of our comfort zones, and genuinely caring for one another.
Go ahead and vote for Joe, but don't kid yourself, he isn't a solution.
*"Clueless voters"... *
When you think this way you've already lost.
Voters vote based on the needs they see in front of them and the solutions being offered. If one doesn't like how voters vote, do not blame them, blame their circumstances and options. They have so little power relative to political, business, and media elites. Instead of criticizing them for using that modicum of power in a way you don't like, demand that the people with the power give voters a reason to vote otherwise. Doing otherwise is not only disrespectful, but pointless. It's like wishing away rain instead of weatherproofing your roof.
In other words, chastise the media for failing to explain this, and politicians for failing to convince voters that they're serious. This least-worst-option thing only works for people who have anything to lose. Me? Yeah, I'm the petite bourgeoisie, so it's compelling. But I don't blame people in, say, East Palestine for saying, 'no, electing Biden will not save 'the environment'. You want me to vote to save YOUR environment, but you won't vote to save MY environment.'
Any chance
Gotta disagree, we could for example elect someone who is an actual leftist and won’t drop build back better’s agenda because of some senate parliamentarian nonsense, or who won’t hand Joe Manchin a new gas pipeline during record heatwaves.
But yeah sure, Biden is our only hope 🙄
"But we have to pick someone more moderate so we can compromise with the Republicans!"
Fuck no we don't. If they field their most extreme and we field our most moderate only one thing happens. I yearn for a future where Bernie was elected instead and even he's too damn old for this shit.
Shout out to Cornell West.
And before anyone picks a fight: I would vote for Biden if my vote made the difference between him and Trump, but we won't get anything from Biden unless we apply demands and pressure. We would not have any of Biden's climate legislation if he wasn't afraid of losing Bernie's voters. We absolutely need West running, or electing Biden will accomplish very little.
How do you propose to elect somebody like that? Somebody well to the left of Biden would lose the center, and hence the election.
Elect the progressives in Congress, where they stand a chance and can influence legislation. Put a moderate in the White House because we can.
We need to foster a much larger, and longer scale ambition: democratic reforms.
Ranked choice voting, an end to the electoral college, greater participation in local elections, and campaign finance reform are the primary avenues that come to mind.
I don't disagree that we should elect progressives to congress, but if the problem is structural, the solutions must be too. And they must be things that can overcome the current structural barriers. So obviously electing a third party candidate can't be a solution to the barriers to that prevent third party candidates, for instance.
But direct democracy ballot measures, for instance, can be used to institute ranked choice voting, and state legislatures can be used to compel more democratic measures on local elections, which can then foster the generation of politicians who built a populist base and are more likely to expand the franchise to the state level once they rise in their careers.
Don't forget: overturning Roe was believed impossible, but the people who wanted to do it spent 50 years building the tools to build the tools to build the tools to do the impossible.
The structure of the US electoral system means that we're not going to get some third party to the left of the Democrats winning the Presidency any time soon.
Biden's about as good as we can get right now.
If you still believe in voting you are driving us off the cliff. You are actively destroying our planet. Yes, you specifically are guilty too. Biden is not going to save anybody without civil resistance either. There is a lot better than Biden and if you don't want to argue for that then you are dooming the world to catastrophe. We have to get better than Biden, otherwise we might as well just lie down and give up right now.
The point is: Biden might be all we (or you, I'm German) get, but he is not enough. You MUST see that, right? If the US electoral system is incapable of avoiding climate catastrophe, are you really going to look back, satisfied you tried everything, or do you consider means outside of just voting every couple of years?