There was no way Dems were going to be able to pass a law protecting the right to abortion in the last Congress; not without doing away with the filibuster first. And Manchin and Sinema weren't going to sign on to that. Just an unfortunate fact. In the meantime, blue states (and some red ones) are codifying the abortion rights in their constitutions. South Carolina's Supreme Court recently ruled that the privacy language in their constitution guarantees abortion rights to the women of that red state.

Currently, bans on natural gas cook stoves are happening at the local level. The federal government is only offering subsidies to help that process along where it is popular. And with good reason. Climate change poses an existential threat to our national security in the short term, to our civilization in the medium term, and to our species in the long term. Seen in this light, it's a much bigger issue than abortion rights.

I am not at all in favor of silencing people who want to talk about the urgent issues that confront us. Your impulse to censor is not at all helpful or welcome. But if you absolutely have to lose your shit, I'll send you a pack of Depends.

@Flyingsaucesir
I was given the impression that the big issue with gas stoves that's gotten everyone's panties in a twist was the "indoor pollution" and the recent findings of links to childhood asthma. The fact that a majority of electricity in the US comes from fossil fuels means that a push to ban gas stoves won't really do much in terms of climate change, especially considering it's only one tiny step in one country.

I'm not trying to censor anyone.

The problem with the big cat ownership laws and similar petty shit is that it loses votes, not that the specific item is bad or wrong. Even if they couldn't accomplish the task of guaranteeing rights for women, seeing it at the top of the priority list for Democrats instead of an issue that pertains to a handful of people out of the third of a billion people that live here would go a long way. They look out of touch and useless to the giant chunk of voters in the middle that are sick of the extremes and nonsense. "Why should I bother to leave my house to vote Democrat? They'll just waste the time in office again worrying about recycling their sandals or some shit."
You seem as out of touch as the Democrats in Congress. Virtue signaling about climate change with non-solutions that put the onus on individuals (like they tried to do with recycling) not massive corporations that pollute the fuck out of the planet instead of worrying about issues that could completely devastate families (like an unwanted child they can't afford or even a death related to an inability to get necessary reproductive healthcare).

@ChestRockfield that was kind of my take on straw paranoia. Everyone up in arms over straws in the US! Meanwhile third world countries are using their estuaries and rivers as garbage dumps for everything from plastic to shit. The tsunami that wiped out the nuclear plant in Japan and the big one in Thailand put more plastic and pollutants in the ocean than Western countries contribute in a decade. Yes, we should recycle, yes we should dispose of trash and sewage properly. But playing the blame card on everyone that wants to use a straw or a plastic shopping bag just alienates a lot of people who are needed to protect our decent into fascism. IMO

@Flyingsaucesir
And another thing... climate change and its effects on humans are problems that are not going to be suffered starting at the same time or equally in every location. In order to look to any point in the future, you need to see a path to surviving up til then. You know who doesn't have the luxury of giving a fuck about global warming's disastrous effects in the future? People that can't even afford their medications or put food on the table today. Furthermore, reversing climate change (which is likely not even possible without some seemingly magical technology in light of the newest reports on the positive feedback loop of the amount of carbon being released by the thawing permafrost, but that's for another discussion) is an everyone-needs-to-be-on-board-to-solve-it kind of problem. You're never going to get people to make sacrifices at least while rich people's beach-front summer homes are still above water when they can't even afford to live as is. You have a wage gap that's been growing at an exponential rate and a bunch of other market forces that have us on the brink of a massive depression, with inflation so high that some actually can't afford to work. Child care, transportation, and all other costs associated with employment are more than they'd earn. It's ludacris to think that these people can afford to take any real, meaningful steps in the fight against climate change. I'd be surprised if people in the lower and middle class even have climate change cross their minds on a day to day basis.

Oh, and keep those Depends for when you learn about the permafrost; sounds like you're going to need them.

@ChestRockfield It's true that indoor air pollution is a concern. It's also a good way to convince people to get off gas. The issue is less abstract, easier to compass than climate change. Will doing away with gas water heaters and gas stoves solve the climate problem? Of course not. Are gas appliances a significant source of greenhouse gases? They are when we take into account the innumerable methane leaks that occur between the well head and the home. But we still have to close down all the coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, and replace the entire fossil fuel-driven transportation fleet with green-powered vehicles. It's an enormous task.

I'm not saying that solving climate change should be left up to individuals. Far from it. This will take a collective effort, with government nudging citizens to make reasonable behavior changes while imposing increasingly strict regulations on corporations. None of this is optional. It must be done.

I don't think the Dems look out of touch at all. The Dems were able to buck the historical midterm trend and keep the Senate while limiting the Republicans to a razor-thin House majority because a lot of people recognize Democrats' accomplishments if the last two years.

There are lots of behavioral changes we can make as individuals. Like not drive 30 miles for that special burger. Like not spending a half hour in under the hot shower. Like ride a bicycle to the store, instead of driving a 3-ton SUV. Like turn the lights off when you leave the room. You get the idea.

We should all remember that throughout the 20th century the United States was the number one emitter of greenhouse gases, producing, with only 5% of the world's human population, 25% of the emissions. We have developed a lot of very bad habits. We are a profligate, wasteful country on many levels. (Our emissions have only recently been surpassed by China.) We have a moral obligation to do all we can to be better.

And as for soda straws and other plastic trash, we can certainly do better in that score as well. If restaurants will not take the initiative and use recyclable paper/cardboard takeout containers, then it should be mandated by law. Will there ever be an ideal time to discuss this in Congress? Probably not.

PS: I was onto melting permafrost and its methane emissions before you got your first driver's license.

@Barnie2years @ChestRockfield I hear whay you guys are saying. You don't like to see valuable time (and political capital) wasted on petty shit. I totally agree! But I just not seeing/hearing much of that coming from the Dems. Okay, at the tail end of this Congress, after they had an impressive pile of important legislation signed into law, they let in the big cats. Not a big deal.

@Flyingsaucesir
I'm talking about the study that just came out a year or so ago that basically said the carbon production of humans is irrelevant now that there's enough carbon escaping the permafrost to create a positive feedback loop. Humans could go carbon neutral tomorrow and global warming will continue to get worse. We. Are. Doomed. Well, not me, I'll be dead and I have no children, so I don't give a shit. I used to care. I used to care a lot. But the people in power, the only people that could actually do something about it, squandered their resources and political capital, and succumbed to petty infighting and nonsensical global sabotage. They wanted to let their rich friends get richer at the cost of destroying the planet, and they were unquestionably successful. For fuck's sake we haven't even banned single-use EPS packaging yet as a country.

And I'm not saying the 117th didn't do great things. But branding and public opinion is very important. Republicans are out here playing three dimensional chess while the Dems are playing Chutes and Ladders. How much better would it have been to try to force a vote to protect women and then plastering the fuck out of the people that prevented it from happening or voted against it all over political ads until they lost? There's a 24 point gap on reproductive rights in this country. But you got Dems opening themselves up to attacks based on big cats, bathrooms, plastic straws, and gas stoves instead of just taking the lay-up. Republicans can't run attack ads saying you support something that a vast majority of Americans are in favor of... that would just be a free advertisement.

So no, the tiny amount of good we could do on the gas stoves, plastic straws, and big cats doesn't do anything but load and cock a gun and hand it to Republicans.

@ChestRockfield You write persuasively, I'll give you that. But hopelessness will get us nowhere. The melting permafrost is not the only positive feedback loop that we have unleashed. There's the disappearing Arctic sea ice too. That just means we'll have to go carbon negative. I'm never going to descend into defeatist thinking. Saying "we are doomed" and just giving up is just another form of denial. Climate change mitigation must remain our number one long-term priority. And I'm not going to do victim blaming either. The Dems are not the bad guys here. It's the fossil fuel industry execs, their lobbyists, ad agents, and think tank wonks who should be lined up and shot.

@Flyingsaucesir I am not blaming the Dems at all for where we're at on climate change. If a party is to blame, it's the one that has forced through deregulation administration after administration so that their cronies could have more profitable businesses.

I'm hopeless on climate change because I'm hopeless on everything. That is not an endorsement of hopelessness. I wish I liked life and wanted to be alive, but I don't. 100% the people that have reason to be alive should be very concerned about climate change and they should do whatever they can to slow it down, regardless if it's mathematically impossible to stop it. But I disagree I'm in denial. I may be one of the only people that's not. There are people that are actively trying to get pregnant who don't even know what the Thwaites Glacier is. Talk about not looking into the future. And while we're talking about important things people and governments can do to combat climate change, I think any single thing anyone says or does that doesn't include a conversation about how having one less child is 6x more impactful than the next 10 behaviors COMBINED (including getting rid of your car, becoming a vegetarian, and not even using a clothes dryer) is just disingenuous lip service.
I mean, with giving up the love of my life to not have children, I've already made more sacrifices and done more for the environment than a huge number of people, even with my 600hp-Cobra-driving, steak-eating, gas-stove-having, plastic-straw-using lifestyle in a city that doesn't have recycling.

@ChestRockfield You have a 600-hp Cobra? In another world, I would say "Cool!" Aw hell, Cool! I have a 3-liter BMW, and it sits in my garage all week. I only drive it on Sundays, to visit my mother who lives 50 miles away, and to go to my boat, which is docked 15 miles away. (It's a sailboat.) Sorry to hear you don't like life. Perhaps you expect too much from it? I am not exactly happy all the time; in fact, I rate myself as fairly pessimistic. I cuss a lot, and that seems to make me feel better. And being out on the water has a salubrious effect. I don't have kids either. At a very young age I concluded that the world is just too fucked up to be bringing another human into it. Later, I learned about global warming, and now I'm sure I made the right decision. But I do harbor a sliver of hope. I can recommend it.

@Flyingsaucesir Yeah, it's been getting modified for almost 25 years now and this is what it became. It's super fun, but I don't get to drive it much because the weather up here sucks. It's so powerful and geared up that it's not really even safe to drive in the rain, so I only take it out when it's really nice.
The rest of my driving is done in a Mitsubishi Lancer, so if you average the two cars and respective amounts is driving, even one of my "bad things" isn't as harmful as the soccer moms who drive their giant SUVs year round to cart their litters around.
I don't regret not having kids. My mom told me that even when I was really young I said I never wanted any, so. I've never liked them. Not even when I was one. It has caused me to be unbearably lonely, but if I had to do it over again, I think I'd make the same decision. This world is so fucked up. I just don't know how I'd sit down with my kid and explain that I knew the Earth was on fire, but I was so narcissistic, that I needed to have more of my DNA running around anyway. It's like this patient we had a long time ago with Darier's disease. His son hated him because even though it's a dominant trait and had a 50% chance to pass it on (which he did), he still had kids anyway. To be honest, I'm not even sure how he got laid. Which is another reason to hate this world. I'm rambling now. TL;DR if everyone does the responsible thing and stops having children, we don't have to worry about climate change anymore!

@ChestRockfield Re soccer moms, I dated one who told me she put 100 miles on her SUV every day...ballet classes, soccer practice, baseball games, shopping, etc., etc. If I drive 150 miles in a week that's a lot. Anyway, not to digress, soccer mom behavior can change. I think of it like slack in the system: wasteful whims that can be whittled down. It's all about priorities. And I think that as climate change bites harder and harder, more and more people will make it a priority. And people who don't will become pariahs. Attitudes and behaviors will definitely change. And I'm not even going to speculate on whether the change will happen in time to save us from bad things, because it's too late for that. The cost of climate-related disasters in the US has already gone from $20 billion in the 1980s to over $150 billion today, on average. Some single years lately it's been over $350 billion. People are starting to wake up to this.

@ChestRockfield This used to he my favorite sport, but it got so I couldn't justify hauling it around 100s of miles in my pickup truck to places where we could ride So I sold the bike and now the truck only goes to Home Depot a few times a year.

@Flyingsaucesir Are they aware, or are they actually doing something about it? And if they have moved to cold water washing and LED lights as their "doing their part" does it really matter?

Isn't it bad to have gas sit for a year? I put treatment in my Cobra's tank just from it sitting for the winter.

@ChestRockfield My boat uses diesel fuel, and yes, it can go bad over time. Microbes actually feed on the fuel, and as they multiply they form a gunk that can clog your fuel lines and filters. That's why we add an anti-biologic. It's expensive stuff, but a little bit goes a long way. The stuff you put in your Cobra is probably designed to remove water from the system; not the same stuff.

@ChestRockfield Of course our electrical power generation will have to go entirely green if we are going to reach net zero CO2 emissions. If we don't do that, then all the cold washes and LEDs won't matter. But they will help make it possible to get by with less energy, which will probably be a necessity. We'll also have to learn how to make cement and fertilizer without burning fossil fuels. Progress is being made in all these areas.