1y ago

Biden’s Record Is Full of Climate Wins — So Why Don’t Voters Know It? Environmental groups are making a concerted effort to educate voters about President Joe Biden’s climate policies before election

www.notus.org

Biden’s Record Is Full of Climate Wins — So Why Don’t Voters Know It?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/10900954

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics. @slrpnk.net

silence7 @slrpnk.net

1y ago

Biden’s Record Is Full of Climate Wins — So Why Don’t Voters Know It? Environmental groups are making a concerted effort to educate voters about President Joe Biden’s climate policies before election

www.notus.org /biden-2024/voters-climate-record-biden

41 comments

People are scared of saying good things about Biden because it makes them a target for tankies and republicans.
- I see you’re new - welcome to Lemmy! If you see any tankies or republiQans you don’t want to see, block them. It’s pretty easy.
  
  All that does is make them more powerful because there are fewer voices pushing back against them.
- You don't see any irony in re-using Nixon's "silent majority" like trump did in 2016?
  For that to be true, you have to disregard all polling, which is sadly something I've seen people doing.
  Because you don't just have to explain his lack of support on social media and real life, you have to explain away his lack.of support in anonymous polling and why "he's not trump" is consistently the most popular reason for voting Biden.
  He just doesn't have support, people just want to stop trump.
  
  The Biden aquarians live in a constant state of denialism about Biden, and it is what cost us this election.
A good government is a boring government. I don't want SLAMS in a congressional meeting. I want boring questions about tiny little details on spreadsheets nobody reads except for interns and wonks.
Because, like a lot of Biden policies, they are wins on paper but have little to no impact on voters daily lives.
Example:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-biden-administration-has-taken-more-climate-action-than-any-other-in-history
"The Biden administration is the first to embrace the goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury in order to stabilize global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.* That means that the Biden administration’s interim target—cutting U.S. carbon pollution to half of peak levels by 2030—requires reducing annual carbon pollution nearly four times faster than the Obama administration’s interim target did.** Ambitious policy goals drive ambitious policy change."
Sounds great, right? But all he did was set a goal. Are we making progress to that goal? 🤷‍♂️ Is that goal even achievable? 🤷‍♂️ 2030 is only 6 years away, how are we doing right now? 🤷‍♂️
It's meaningless babble to claim this as an achievement if you can't point to a tangible change in the numbers.
No matter who wins in 2024, they aren't going to be President in 2030. If Trump wins in '24, or another Republican wins in '28, this goal is out the window.
- Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit, created a 13 million acre federal petroleum reserve for Alaskan wildlife, greatly increased oil site lease cost, signed $7B in solar subsidies, enacted the Inflation Reduction act to support clean energy…
  
  Yes, but you see, if you ignore all of that... Then Biden hasn't done anything and it's all just "meaningless babble!"
  
  Exactly. How dare he set goals and then take incremental steps to achieve them? The nerve!
  
  And how much of that matters to the average voter, sitting around with no air conditioning, reading reports about the "hottest year on record" 4 years in a row?
  None of that means anything to the average voter.
  
  Increased efficiency standards on cars, home appliances, industry. Created new permitting rules to streamline new transmission lines. Huge investment in rail
- That’s how these efforts work - they start as a goal. It gets announced after enough support signs on, and they get the policies and money together, then they start spinning up the agencies and addressing the problems and . . . it’s how big things work.
  If you want to declare something and have it immediately be so, you have to do it in a videogame.
  If you’re worried that we won’t get far before idiot christofascist qultists fuck it up, well. Welcome to the party pal.jpg. Don’t boo - vote!
  
  What I'm saying is, if you want the voters to notice, you have to actually do something. Setting a goal is nothing. Then they go "look at what we did!" yeah, you haven't done ANYTHING yet.
  Another example, all the EV chargers...
  https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-chargers-billions-00129996
  It's great to have a goal to build charging stations. It's not a WIN until you can point to tangible progress.
  How many built? Last I checked it was around 9? How many are in permitting? 🤷‍♂️ How many are actively being constructed? 🤷‍♂️
  Don't tout all the things you've "done" when you haven't actually done anything yet.
  "Look at me! I set a goal to lose 175 pounds by August!"
  "Can you actually lose 5 pounds a day every day for 36 days?"
  "🤷‍♂️ But hey! I set the goal! That's just as good!"
- Because, like a lot of Biden policies, they are wins on paper but have little to no impact on voters daily lives.
  It's not new either.
  Biden makes big promises, fails miserably, makes a token gesture, and then people claim he's the best ever...
  At a Glasgow climate summit in 2021, the Biden administration offered a commitment to the world: The United States would stop the public financing of oil and gas projects. There would be no more American tax dollars for new natural gas pipelines or wells, the White House said
  The pledge drew praise from climate change activists. But there was one big problem—it was an empty promise.
  In the years since Glasgow, the US has continued to finance fossil fuel projects around the world. The latest example came Thursday, when the US Export-Import Bank finalized a plan to guarantee part of the financing for a $4.2 billion revitalization of natural gas production in the nation of Bahrain. The move—which comes just weeks after the Biden administration triumphantly announced a freeze on the domestic development of new projects designed to export liquified natural gas—will include the construction of dozens of gas wells and 450 new oil wells. It will bring online as much as 5.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or about five years of additional gas production at Bahrain’s current levels.
  https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2024/03/biden-promised-not-to-finance-fossil-fuels-so-why-is-the-us-backing-a-huge-gas-project/
  To quote Kendrick:
  The audience not dumb
  Shape the stories how you want, hey, Drake, they're not slow
  Biden, his campaign, and his supporters don't realize people can just fact check this shit from their phones in two seconds. Voters aren't as stupid as they keep acting we are.
  If we were, we'd probably be voting Republican...
  
  we were, we’d probably be voting Republican…
  Its clear from how Biden has managed his 2024 campaign he'd rather Republicans as supporters, so that tracks.
  
  That's probably why they don't seem interested in advertising Biden's "accomplishments"... Instead just beating that Trump bad drum all day everyday
- It should be because, like a lot of Biden policies, the on paper win is actually shoveling tons of taxpayer money to the individuals and institutions who have caused the underlying problem he claims to be solving (see also; basically everything Biden has done with police accountability), money fossil fuel companies are going to plow right into lobbying and PR work to further ensure nobody can have a rational conversation about what our country is doing, but, yeah, you're probably right that for the vast majority of voters it's just that they don't see it in their daily lives at all
I genuinely feel like the climate is just a no win situation from a political perspective. Any real solution has pretty serious tradeoffs so either you take small low impact steps which are panned as being too little too late, or you take bold steps that hurt some significant group economically.
- YEt so far, climate efforts in Biden years has been all give, to everyone. While there’s been some efficiency standards increased, that always takes years to phase in and even that is a push to new technologies, which is a great opportunity should someone take it.
  Consider efforts in intercity rail. This is fantastic to finally see this investment after all these years,but is only the beginning. It needs sustained investment over a couple decades. Even if it didn’t, it needs a couple decades to build out. That’s great for investment in business, great for our jobs now to build our future, and will be an excellent Biden legacy, but we’re not going to see real benefits during Biden’s term. This is all give, all investment, all jobs, but there is not yet the corresponding”take”, to encourage Americans to step out of their cars (maybe if congestion pricing takes off but the President should get neither credit nor blame for that)
Because the Democratic tent is filled with lazy cynics who actively sabotage outreach efforts, because mindlessly parroting propaganda is way easier than actual civic engagement.
- Oh right. Ok then.
  You’re either really new to online interaction, or possibly some version of a libertarian-don’t-call-me-a-tankie,-tankie, or a troll who just likes to fight. Either way, good bye and good luck.
How much climate damage is being caused by the 2 US proxy wars, an ever expanding military which is the world's largest individual polluter?
- Weak bait.
  
  Liberals need to decide if they are in support of measures to mitigate climate change or the US military because you sure as fuck cant have both
I'd say because Dems have been spending so much time telling everyone how horrible Trump is, that they forgot to mention why anyone might also consider Biden good
Because reading any news headlines is like drinking from a firehose of liquid shit.
Reading climate change news is like drinking from a firehose of liquid misery and hopelessness.
High odds people skip all that to go play games or read a book. Or even to go outside and enjoy it while it lasts.
Edit: Not endorsing it as cool, just stating basic human behavior.
- Uh huh.
Biden's 2030 projections are not aggressive enough and are at-odds with trade relations with the largest green energy manufacturer on the planet and with the multiple large-scale military conflicts we are actively fanning. I'm assuming their 2030 projections do not account for the millions of pounds of explosives being set off in the ME and in Ukraine.
It's like a pack-a-day smoker whining about their doctor not praising them for loosing weight from dieting, even though their diet is one of those cayenne pepper and lemon juice cleanses. Like, good job with loosing 50 pounds, but if you don't stop smoking like a chimney you're still gonna die of a heart attack.
I get that we want to feel good about our political outlook but holy fuck now is not the time to be celebrating.
- It is complicated, because the largest green energy manufacturer on the planet also has the largest CO2 emissions on the planet by far, three times that of the US - one could bring up the fact that they also have a lot of people, but how much of China's emissions are driven by export vs domestic consumption?
  Also, the shenanigans Russia pulled with Germany has the collective West wary of becoming dependent on a hostile authoritarian country for any staple import.
  I'm not saying Biden's perfect, far from it, but a strategy of "let's go chummy with this big authoritarian country, they can't attack us if our economies become codependent" has been tried here in the EU, and the results so far are hundreds of thousands dead and a nearly crashed economy.
They brag about massive oil production, and we hear them.

41 comments