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Originally Posted by Colorado Rambler
You must still be young and idealistic. 
Local politics will continue to impact people in all sorts of ways and that old saying that you can't fight city hall is not always true. Just as an example, many federally funded programs are left for local governments to administer. That often means that mayors and city councils can make all sorts of changes if only they are prodded hard enough and long enough by even just one determined citizen. I know because in the past, I have been that determined citizen.
I don't pretend to know much about Wall Street or financial markets or fractional banking. My background is in the sciences and I studied biology and climatology in college. Global warming is here to stay. Plus we are losing species of both plants and animals at an alarming rate. Scientists tell us that we are in the middle of the 6th great extinction and they are correct. Making matters even worse, all over the world we are losing valuable cropland to droughts, flooding and fires. Much of the agricultural land we are losing may not be productive again for hundreds of years - maybe more.
In the face of this man made existential crisis which is now upon us, Wall Street as it is now organized becomes irrelevant. The climate crisis is one of the most important reasons for getting rid of Trump. If we wait to do anything to start tackling the problem, that much more damage and that much more suffering we be hardwired into our undeniably gloomy future.
You can rescue our financial system and I'll do what I can to save Colorado's mountains and forests. Hows that? |
Read the first line of my post again.
If local politics is all that concerns you then you shouldn't care if Biden or Trump wins.
You say you studied biology (I don't know what that has to do with climate science) but it doesn't make you an expert on global warming.
If you believe that national politics is just an excuse to tackle the one issue and nothing else matters then you would be surprised to know how much of the technological shift has ben handled by the private industry. The whole point of cap and trade is to get investors on board with lowering emissions.
And since 1990 that has more or less been seen as a market opportunity for lithium ion and natural gas. The most serious form of energy replacement for fossil fuels is nuclear/thorium power plants, but private investors don't want to pull the money together and revamp the 1950s model that exist today.
The whole reason the automobile industry switched to leaded gasoline over fermented ethanol was because Dow Chemicals, GM, Standard Oil, and all the rest did not want consumers to be able to create their own fuel.
Its not about profits, its about dependency. If the market place in the only way consumers can survive, then the entire social behavior of a country is controlled by the government and the private industry.
If you care about fires and flooding, then it comes down to forest management and water management.
Extreme flooding comes from the build up of sediment walls which protects from minor floods but builds up water pressure after long periods of rain and runoff until something like Katrina happens.
The forest or mountain preservation handled on a local level you seem to care so much about could be greatly improved by a lack of visitation, but then the parks wouldn't have the funds to increase their management.
You can't hate Trump for funding the national park system as its going to need subsidies in the long term. I work in Yosemite and the biggest problem wasn't global warming, it was litter and trash and dead trees being left all over the forest floor.
Since you're a biologist then you should know how important biodiversity is for forest management, as well as animal diversity. Biodiversity helps control erosion, while animals control the consumption of forest over growth. Elks can eat the plant life and keep them from entangling with one another, and predators keep the elk population in line.
There was an easy solution, and that was to manually set off forest fires to clear overgrowth from time to time. The natives did it as well as the settlers, but by the 19th century too many settlements extended out into the forest depths and citizens didn't feel safe setting off wild fires.
It stopped and now you have the issue you have today. Helping promote Tesla is not going to fix that problem, and as long as people like you are disengaged with national politics, that is what people like Biden are going to assume is correct policy.
Your apathy towards the direction America has been headed for the last forty years are your desire to return to decency just means a desire to return to total obliviousness that lets good men like Biden, Clinton, or Obama do terrible things.
And why shouldn't they? Civil engagement is what upheld Roman society, but falling into the trap of thinking DC being given free reigns to decide our future will better anyone is delusional.
Saying global warming is bad and trusting Biden and his experts to handle it is the same logic by which people entrusted Obama to fix the financial crisis.
There are plenty of touch points, but its a very simple thing to understand that increasing costs of public goods and decreasing costs of consumer goods does two things.
1. It makes buyers economically handicapped to the point they can't engage in local politics (like you).
2. It destroys smaller competitors and local businesses that are a product of the community.
Its not a wonder why someone who purports to care about 'Scranton' would spend his career supporting off-shoring. Its not because he's evil, its because the unions and people that matter in DC where the only ones knocking at his door, and they all supported the same policies.
If you're sick of political squabbles turn off cable news and stopping listening to people that tell you we have a fascist in the white house and that everything is doom and gloom unless we elect Biden.
Whichever one of the wins will win, but they have won if they convinced you to stop caring about politics. Not one of these cable news hosts are threatened by Trump or fear for 'democracy'. Not a one.
But they would love to exhaust your engagement so people like yourself go back to the passive stance of letting DC handle matters in a 'professional' way. That is how Obama was able to destroy homebuyers and protect AIG executives (and I'm not just talking about TARP). It wasn't because he was a bad man, it was because people were not political engaged, wall street was.
The worst lie in politics is that we all want the same thing, we just have different ways of going about it. But their are plenty of people across the country who want to reverse the trend of complete globalization, they just don't have any sway in DC.
Turning politics back into a well oiled machine that the public is not a part of just means more terrible policies that will continue to quash local political power as has been happening for the past forty years.
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