Choices and Consequences

It is befuddling reading the sentiment for the majority of the comments on this post.

Having a chief executive in office in 2000 who was super concerned about climate change would have made a big difference.

But hey that's just like my opinion man

Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say "Yeah but Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same" really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.
It would literally have changed the world. At this point we're scrabbling around from the outside desperately trying to get the leaders to care, when it's already too late for a lot of the semi-good outcomes. We missed a chance to have a guy in charge who understood the science, and cared a lot about it, back when there was some time to change the trajectory.
Edit: Now a bunch of different users have independently come to the conclusion that it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because the Republicans would have defeated anything he did in congress, and now they all want to share that message with all of us, as their current explanation for why it is that elections don't matter anyway.
(Edit 2: Guys. You get to vote for congress in elections, too.)
IDK, maybe I am reading too much into it and it really is a bunch of people who are motivated to post about politics, but whose brains are also just wired to search for defeatism wherever they can find it, and that's the message they want to share. Maybe.
- Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
  All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it's true, saying "x is useless" is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
- I get the same message that people think capitalism under Biden is the same as capitalism under Trump. It's honestly bizarre.
As someone who's guilty of thinking 'both sides are the same' I think you're definitely right.
For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.
- Australia has ranked choice voting, does it not? I'd vote for the farthest left option too if the US had RCV.
Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.
Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they'd probably have impeached Gore for it.
Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.
- The EPA is part of the executive branch. They could have regulated carbon emissions like they regulate other emissions.
- My first thought. Oh no! The oil industry had to double its lobbying budget while still making record profits.
Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn't do already. You're massively overrating the impact one president has. It's not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn't pull that schtick until after he lost the election.
There's no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I'm actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.
- Especially considering it's a GLOBAL phenomenon lol.
- Progress is cumulative, and it happens slowly.
  Even if he didn't accomplish anything other than preventing the regression that happened under Bush, it would have allowed Obama and Biden to make more progress than they did.
  If he did manage to accomplish anything, no matter how small, then Obama and Biden could have made even more progress.
- Here’s something that just came up in another thread, that shows Al Gore’s climate bona fides
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory

Gore won, but lost to a judicial coup.

One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.
Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.
- And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
- as a non american, I learned that from how I met your mother
Supposedly he lost because he asked for recounts only in counties where he was polling well, but then they should have ordered a general recount.
- He shouldn’t have to ask for recounts when the initial counts are suspect. Was never a real democracy to begin with.
- SYSK just did an episode
  [Stuff You Should Know] The 2000 Presidential Election: A Real Cluster https://podcastaddict.com/stuff-you-should-know/episode/169274063
I'd also like to complain about the electoral college again. Anything but going by popular vote is anti-democratic. The American system is so damn infuriating to me and it's not even my country. But it affects us globally.

In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women's reproductive rights, and now in 24 they're angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can't see.

If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn't really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
- If only being told that were enough to finally get the idjits to pull their heads out of their asses.
Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.
- The dems are definitely consistently better for the economy though.

Centrist Democrats will always blame progressive discontent for their losses, even if their losses are caused by the Supreme Court undermining democracy itself.

Quit moving to the right, and we'll quit pointing it out.

There would also not have been an invasion of Iraq, things like Isis would have probably remained an unkicked hornet's nest.
License to torture at will would not have been granted to government goons.

The threat of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into iconic buildings would have been taken seriously. Which opens up the possibility that 9/11 could have been averted. Then maybe the mouth-breathers at TSA would not have been given the power to profile and harass at airports.

The list goes on: Katrina and New Orleans; the neutralizing of the Consumer Protection Bureau; the typically republican financial free-for-all that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.

Then there are Supreme Court appointments, which we get to keep for life, like goddamned herpes.

But since so many ignorant and smug lazy assholes stayed home on Election Day bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe, everybody got a succession of utterly preventable shit sandwiches.

I keep comparing Casablanca to New York City. One reason is that they're both the biggest cities in their respective country without being the capital, and that they suck, but also because before 2001, they both had twin towers (the ones in Casablanca are still standing btw).

Yeah so what about Gore and climate crisis? We got a sweet ass pointless Iraq war with Bush. We got to do the most American thing ever, bully a small country for natural resources and stage a regime change. Would have Gore given us that? Pft no. We would have a serious conversation about climate and taken some steps to mitigate everything.

Hey now, killing all those people in the Middle East was worth it, wasn't it? I mean, if the US hadn't invaded Afghanistan, it would probably still be controlled by the Taliban to this very day! Good thing we avoided that scenario, right?
- Humans are some of the worst polluters, so killing all those Middle Easterners saved thousands of tons of CO2 emissions! /s
A calm and rational discussion and response to 9/11 instead of making up lies, going on the war path, and telling allies that they're either with us or against us? Lame. Pass. (/s)
- I honestly don't think Gore could kept the country out of Afghanistan. The public wanted justice for 9/11, by justice they wanted blood. The public would have forced Gore to do something about 9/11.
  It would have been very easy for Gore to get sucked into Afghanistan even after trying to put forth rational explanations of why we shouldn't have occupied the country. The end result of would have been somewhat similar, 20 years of war, and nothing really accomplished.
  The Iraq war on the other hand would have never happened on Gore.

We can also imagine a reality where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were collectively not elected and global neoliberalism failed to crystallize.

But this is just day dreaming. The reality is those things didn't happen and here we are.

It's also the old story, the same that many governments faced during COVID, if you do a lot and actually stop something from happening, people say it was a waste of time, nothing happened, you over reacted etc.
If you don't do anything and it all goes badly, people say you didn't do enough etc.
So theoretically even if Gore did start to fix climate change, if he had real impact, there's a chance the world would've turned against climate change as a hoax and waste of time.
The sad part is, we'd still probably be better off overall.

Bush appointed Roberts and Alito.

I wonder if Citizens United would have come about to cause such damage had Gore been able to appoint two different justices.

I know that's not climate related, but it's a pretty big deal result of the 2000 election shenanigans.

Citizens United and Voting Rights Act both. Even with Trump's nominees we would currently have a 5-4 Liberal court.
We would still have Roe Vs. Wade.
- Liberals would have "played it fair" and been all "across the isle" and appointed on "conservative" (reactionary corporatist) judge together with the corporatist judge they appoint.
  Democrats could add more supreme court judges and run with that but they don't want to. They can not just run on "not trump" and win.
- Yet another fuck up by the Boomers. Interesting how it always come back to them being a piece of shit generation.

Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it's not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.

were basically trying to out-center the other
I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.
- Oh for sure, he was following Clinton's lead, so that's why it's somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn't the case, or it at least isn't how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process... or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn't he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a "modern" politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden's "then you ain't black" comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
- Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore's actual statement (which, of course, was not that he "invented the internet") was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he'd accomplished and the value of it. It's the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider "the curve").
  If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you're not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians' words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.
- He never said he invented the Internet. You saying that kinda shows how much you know.
- didn’t he say that he invented the internet?
  No, he didn't say he invented the Internet. What he did say was that as a young congressman he took the initiative to create the Internet, by providing the funding to expand the military's Arpanet for civilian usage - a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make since that is actually what he did. Literally months after Gore made this perfectly true and unremarkable statement, Bush advisor Karl Rove twisted it into "I invented the Internet". There is no "supposedly" about this.
  that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do
  Gore simply talked about one of his biggest accomplishments (perhaps the biggest accomplishment) of his long career as a politician. It is not reasonable to expect a Democrat to never mention the best parts of his record out of fear that the Republicans will twist his words - that will happen regardless.
- a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him
  The problem is he didn’t. Go back and look. Republican Party twisted his words and successfully made the twisted version into the popular narrative. That’s also a time tested political trick, but when it’s not what you actually said, you have no control over it.
  The only thing that would have worked then was out-blustering his opponents, turn something else into the meme of the day..it’s a very powerful trick for getting elected, but really not one we should reward in a national leader
At the time you didn't have to be major disruptor like we need major disruption now. What you needed to do was move the needle, which could be done. Moving the needle early on drastically changes the path decades later.
There's also what you say during the election and what you do. I'm pretty sure Bush played it up (I'm amazed at what I see him say in old videos). Gore played down what he intended to do, or didn't make a big deal about it, because that's not what got votes at the time. So they may sound similar but not actually be similar.

Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they'll be able to actually do anything about it. The US government, and all governments to a greater or lesser extent, fundamentally serve capital and are beholden to the interests of capitalists.

No president, no matter how far to the left, could possibly save us. They will always delay action as long as possible, when not actively accelerating climate change. We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.

Voting does help, because a hostile government will systematically murder people who resist climate change while a "friendly" one will only imprison some of them. Voting is helpful, but not sufficient. We don't have any more time to waste begging for our lives.

Edit: also, he did win and then there was a coup. This was at least the third right wing coup in the last 60 years. So... Yeah...

And? Whet exactly is the point of this post? You might not get EVERYTHING you want, but you'll get SOMETHING, VS voting for assholes who'll actually be working AGAINST fixing the problem.
From civil rights, to healthcare, to climate, to pretty much any issue that matters Republicans will ONLY make it worse.
In my decades of living I have not seen Republicans offer a solution to a single issue. It's always just fear mongering and hate.
- That's basically what I said. The important thing here, that most liberals fail to understand, is that there will be no government solution. Ever. No matter who you vote for.
  You have to actually organize and take direct action, not just beg for some authority to do something. Liberals tend to miss this. They just invest energy in getting people to vote, then they go to brunch. If you only focus on voting, you're not actively moving towards survival you're just delaying death. That's my point.
- Tell us "something" we got. Everything continues to get worse under Biden. Just more slowly.
also, he did win and then there was a coup
Brett Kavanaugh helped with that coup and now sits on the supreme court.
We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Great! Lemme just let the trans folks in my life know that alls we gotta do is elect the fuck who threatens to erase their existence entirely!
Bc the untenable systems at play in Russia, S Arabia, DPRK, RSA, etc. have done wonders towards the citizenry in those countries rising up and rebelling... oh... wait... thats right... its damn near impossible to rise up the closer your state is to the fascist mark. Congrats, ur right that the liberal system blows. Replacing it with something worse will only make things worse.
How successful have you been at bringing ur fellow comrades together to organize for direct action? And thats going to go better after we go full fascist?! After our minority allies are straight up outlawed?
- You have the same level of comprehension for nuance as maga cultists. We are on the brink of fascism because liberals are useless.
  But me? Oh, I organized an antifascist groups that organized one of the largest antifascist protests in the US the day after the murder of Heather Heyer, helped organize an antifascist self defence training group, I organized a police oversight group that de-anonomized thousands of complaints about police allowing for the identification of highly problematic officers, one of whom was fired after our efforts. I helped get the data for SPD.watch. I organized several public records request trainings. I started a food security committee that helped a bunch of people get food when they didn't have money, which expanded to canning food for houseless folks and supporting camps. oh, I also organized the protest where I was shot by a fascist. That and about a hundred other things, all of which I did with my trans comrades who were organizing for their own survival because they knew that liberals would not ultimately protect them.
  What the fuck have you done?
  Edit: your vote against murdering the trans folks is great, but you know what would help the people in your life when the voting eventually fails to stop fascism? Why don't you talk to them about what hormones they need and work on figuring out a plan to smuggle it in. As a cis person, you're the right person to risk yourself for them. Even today you could work with them to organize a safety group that they could call for support if they don't feel safe walking home or end up in an unexpected sketchy situation. You could organize a hate watch group to track fascist activities. You could do a ton of shit RIGHT FUCKING NOW instead of waiting to vote and then just seeing what happens.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they'll be able to actually do anything about it.
Having someone who doesn’t understand (or, more likely does but doesn’t give a shit) IS a guarantee that nothing is done about it.
- Great, but I literally said voting helps. Pointing to where I start saying "voting is not sufficient" and repeating something I said later doesn't add anything.
  Can you explain to me why you felt this was necessary to say?

I was so disappointed as a Canadian to see Gore lose. That stolen election was stolen from all of us not just America.

Imagine how different the entire world would be now if Bush/Chaney had never happened.

Climate Commitment. We’ve been screwed since the ‘90’s. Gore may have mitigated the warming, but a certain amount of warming would have occurred regardless, and will continue even if we achieve net-zero emissions. There is an amount of latent heat already trapped in the atmosphere. The warming we are experiencing now is from the early 2000’s.

I know. I suck. But the science is clear. We done screwed up. Much love to all.

Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could've been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn't have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might've had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.

Tell that to SCOTUS. The people voting or debating each other didn't decide 2000.

- Gore received 540+k more individual votes than Bush did, but he lost in the electoral vote.
- People's votes are not weighed equally for the presidency, so that 'more' has a lot of work to do, unfortunately. Given the electoral college system for presidential elections that sentiment has to be qualified with "in the right places/districts".
  Which is exemplary of the case that led to Bush v Gore deciding the election.

suck my balls

He did put effort into fighting it, Jeb blocked the recount after it was found Gore had negative votes and Bush had more votes than people in a county then when it got to the Supreme Court they ruled that it took too long to get to them for them to allow a recount
- suck my balls

america's been fucking its education system in the ass (unconsentingly) since 1980, and now you're a country of redneck morons, exactly per the plan you made. Good job!

Another thing that might have been different with a Gore win: when Bill Clinton left office, the federal government did not have a balanced budget - it had an actual budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. With a continuation of that type of fiscal "conservatism", we could today have been debt-free as a nation. Instead, we have a debt of $34 fucking trillion.

Should be very clear that both parties are very equal in the growth of the debt.
- No they're not. Deficits like this are from not taxing the rich and corporations. Trump alone is like 40% of the deficit because of this.
You realise that debt of the government is equal to wealth in the private sector? Being debt-free would mean that there is no central bank money in circulation. How would this help the actual economy?
- That's not how it works at all.

Nope it's your job to vote for dems for no reason other than "not republican" and if you don't vote for dems for no reason other than "not republican" you're a bigger enemy to dems than republicans.

Mmm yes but Gore winning wouldn't provide Cheney with lots of lucrative no-bid Halliburton contracts.

Oh c’mon it’s not like they passed a law making it okay to profiteer off of war so they could gouge the taxpayers for - checks earpeice ohhh. That’s right, they did.
The resolution to illegally attack Iraq purposefully left out the war profiteering.
Still though. Both sides bad, let’s all listen to the FSB and not vote.

"choices" when the Supreme Court stepped in and decided a winner

Yeah, it's nice to think what could have been, but still feels like a long shot at best.

Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral college, and while a staged right-wing riot caused significant confusion, and ultimately the Democratic party decided that 'decorum' was more important than stopping the conservative movement.
History isn't inevitable, but nothing has fundementally changed about how Liberals and Democrats view strategy and politics; this should cause to to strongly consider the value or wisdom of statements like Blue No Matter Who, if even when victorious, they refuse to take it.
Its not a long shot. It actually is the timeline we should be on and Gore was *impeccably clear about climate change being his priority. He won, by both the electoral college final count and the popular vote. The election was stolen from the American people but is relegated to a modern folk tale, in-spite of it actually being reality.
- Gore absolutely did not make climate change his priority in 2000. That's just a straight up lie. He campaigned almost entirely on the economy and reforming social security and Medicare. Climate change was NOT a top issue for voters or for Gore in 2000.

Biden is president and emissions are even worse since he started

We're also drilling more oil than ever before.
- Almost like a war broke out that cut America's allies off from their usual stocks of oil and raising prices globally including on non-oil-product goods or something!
  Wanna gripe? Gripe in context.
That's pretty disingenuous given his term started in the middle of covid. US carbon emissions are still well below what they were in 2019.
You do understand things take time right?
- Its like watching a train speeding towards a barrier, steadily accelerating faster and faster, full throttle, and saying well it takes time to come to a full stop. No brakes applied, no taking the foot off the gas. Im not even accusing him of doing nothing, he's actively worsening climate change.

Honestly doubt it. Money talks. Also the president doesn't make the laws.

Thanks tankie

There would still be a problem because while the USA have a big responsibility in the fight against climate change, they are far from the only country that needs to do something about it. It's an us problem, not just a U.S. problem.

As the world's financial powerhouse, the United States has both an outsized effect on climate change relative to our population, but also power to do something about it that extends far beyond our borders. Both treaties and commercial agreements can be used to lever other nations into responsible climate policies; we've been doing this with just about everything else for our entire existence. You ever wonder why weed is illegal everywhere in the world at about the same time? Or copyright laws that destroy the public domain? We did that. We could use that power for good, as well.
It seems like most other developed countries have been taking it more seriously. We could have been part of that group
In developing world, think of all the energy projects since then, that could have leapfrogged the technology directly to renewables. Heck, the extra decade or two of “free” energy could well have altered their economies
The thing is this is China too. I do buy their point that in many ways they have still been a developing country, they still have had so much population to bring forward, so much progress to make, while also being the worlds manufacturer. And when they’re in, they’re all in. Yeah they’ve continued to build coal, and maybe the US being serious about climate change could have influenced that for the last few decades, but everyone needs to remember that while they continued to build coal, they also were taking the worlds biggest steps in Renewables. This could have happened earlier.
Of course, but a country with the means the US have should lead by example. They don't have a "big" responsibility, they have the greatest.

And then Obama won and he fixed the climate crisis and didn't start any wars. Good thing we finally learned to vote for Democrat! Both sides schmoth sides!

And Genocide Joe of course is fixing every single issue right now. Such as killing all Palestinians which is the most important issue as all the Democrats focus goes to keeping israel's Genocide going.

Assuming that all democrats across the last 24 years are all the same is utterly unreasonable.
- Assuming that anything would have been fixed if people voted for the Democrat guy in one single election is utterly delusional. Imperialism has been a thing under Democrats as much as under Republicans
  If a Democrat would not do imperialism he would quite literally get killed by the CIA

This is bullshit. Climate change wasn't a thing for Gore until he went looking for another job. If he had been president everything would still be the same....militaristic and corporate. And remember that he is a Southern conservative whose wife wanted music banned but had to settle for warning stickers.

You Enlightened Centrists sure do love selective glorification of the past

Al Gore was a new runner for president after serving vice president for the two immediately previous terms, and was 52 at time of running.

Biden is an incumbent who served two vice president terms which he finished 8 years ago, and he is currently 81.

Now tbf, the orange definitely made Bush look like a competent and coherent president in comparison. But comparing Al Gore to Biden is kinda dumb. I expect Biden's huge train plan to go about as well as Obama's huge train plan of which he was also a part of.

It's not that both sides are the same, it's that they're both corporately backed which means nothing substantial will actually be achieved besides not shooting yourself in the foot like what Republicans like to do.

Also keep in mind the 2000 election was stolen by the supreme court because that power is totally valid against actual votes.

Biden is president right now and is doing nothing the people need, so no, there's no difference.

Both sides are equally bad, but one side is more equal than the other.

- It's a quote from george orwell - animal farm i believe.

The oldest millennials in 2000 were 19 years old.

OP are you trying to finger wag us for decisions made by Boomers?

Horseshit

Al Gore is fine, it's Tipper I don't care for.

is so fucked up that the future of the world depends on one single country, and more exactly, one single person in that country

This is an extreme exaggeration. Supposing you could wave a magic wand and zero out all US emissions and waste beginning in the year 2000, we'd still be just as fucked due to China and India's emissions. And guess what, neither of those nations give a fuck about sticking to climate treaties. China manipulates its stats on virtually every useful metric, and India has a position that they deserve to finish industrializing.

I’m not convinced one president of one country 24 years ago would make any difference today. This seems very America-pilled

Do you think George W. Bush did any amount of damage to the world?
- I agree that GB did an insane amount of damage to our country and Trump is the same way. But for all the damage that has been done, it doesn't feel like democrats have been able to achieve a comparable amount of good. I understand the mechanics on "why" they are unable to (a big tent coalition up against a unified party of fanatics) but it's for that reason that I might agree that Al Gore, despite his best intentions, may have been railroaded in his efforts to establish the US as a climate leader.
Forget the world, do you not think US has had an outsized affect on the environment and climate change specifically?
But yes, having lived through that, so many times other countries had no need to take the environment seriously because the US didn’t. Sometimes there was influence. Sometimes it was merely the biggest polluter

You all honestly deserve it. Even if I burn too.

What, are you a fucking alien that lives outside the earth?
- I am someone who knows how you all act and am completely fed up with it.
  You need to fucking grow up before it's too late.
  I am going to just leave the U.S. when the shit hits the fan. You are the only ones who are going to suffer. And even if I do, it won't matter, because you brought this upon yourselves.

I would rather have 50 states that agree on a plan of action than one guy fighting against the entirety of the federal government.

is there anyone at all concerned about climate change in 2024?

Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?

I’d like to think that in that timeline, we never got past the point of TFG sticking to his shitty ass TV shows.

Doubt.

It absolutely, 100% no-doubt, are-you-even-joking would have been better. But my idiot friends all voted Nader to register their displeasure. Stupid fucks.
- I disagree. There’s only so much one man would have been able to do. After 9/11, he would have lost all buy-in from the public as the War on Terror started. Who would care about saving the planet if they are worried about terrorist attacks?
Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?
I mean, this is just kinda dummy thiccc reasoning. Looks good from the outside, but vapid and lacking substance.
No Iraq War, "No Child Left Behind" never becomes a thing, Bin Laden gets caught in Afghanistan if the 9/11 plot even manages to happen since Bush is known to have ignored a report containing a warning about the attacks being planned.
You really wanna tell me that a world without the war on terror would be exactly as bad as the one we live in today? Especially one without the war on terror where the century kicks off with a president who takes the climate crisis seriously?
- You’re taking quite a bit of a leap there about 9/11 being foiled because Gore was in office. I really don’t think that it would have been sunshine and lollipops like what has been suggested. He’s one man. I have a hard time believing one man would have made the difference in terms of 9/11.
  I was 17 during that election, otherwise I would have voted for him. I think he could have done some great things, but I’m not so sure those great things would have made massive waves that would change today.
  🤷🏻‍♀️
  Edit: format more better next time.

Congress existed at the time

And was controlled entirely by Republicans.

Yes he would know, no it wouldn’t have helped. It’s a global thing, not a local thing.

PFFFFFT Yeah OK. Al Gore is not the messiah, and "being aware" and acting on it are two very different things.

And being aware of a problem and flatly denying that it exists are also two very different things. OPs greater point holds; 'both sides' arguments are fallacies.

Consequences: 2030

Not there will be anyone left to suffer the proof.