(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Our Fatal Addiction (Voting for Oblivion) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-09-03 I am thinking of all the poor choices American voters have made, that collectively brought us to the brink. This year, voters are presented with a choice more important than any in the nation's history. At stake is our Constitution, women's and minority rights, America's debt, the middle-class tax burden - all important, but far from the most important. None of them will matter if we do not address rapid climate change. We rejected science and fact, instead voting for populists and promises, beginning with Ronald Reagan. Our beloved 40th president restored America's confidence, but he was an oil man, like every president since. In his first week in office, Reagan ordered removal of the solar collectors President Carter had installed on the White House, setting a trend that continues today. We have voted for corporatocracy, a form of oligarchy. Corporations and capitalism have several potentially fatal flaws. First, corporations have no compassion or charity, except for tax purposes, and their only loyalty is to their owners. Second, their short-term goal is to maximize profits; their long-term goal is to repeat the short-term goal. Third, corporations are expected to make a greater profit with each passing year. All major corporations rose on the back of an oil economy, and none accept any responsibility for the "unanticipated consequences" of the global warming it has caused. Big Oil leads us, and Citizens United effectively ended any opposition. Now disinformation and "green washing" have unlimited budgets, outspending all ecology groups combined by 20:1. Naturally, Big Oil wants to continue selling us oil products; they don't want to give up any of their huge profits. They are trapped on a treadmill to extinction, and they don't know what to do. They invented "green washing" to lull us into a false sense of security, though conditions are worsening and nothing is being done to correct them. Now Oil companies are floating the idea of carbon removal with unknown or unproven technology. Essentially, they want to be paid to clean up the mess they created. We ran out of air, water and earth to pollute and ignore long ago. Instead of correcting course, we doubled down and increased our output of pollutants. We have dumped a trillion tons of CO2 into the earth's atmosphere, half since 1980, and the yearly output has increased steadily. We have upset the balance of nature and rushed past critical tipping points from which there is no recovery. Much of the world is equally greedy and short-sighted, overly reliant on hydrocarbons. Brazil burned the Amazon, the world's "lungs," turning it from a carbon sink into a net emitter of CO2. Hard times are upon us, and we must do much more to prevent worse. The consequences of our hubris now include inevitable massive suffering and, if we continue on our present course, the extinction of all life on earth. The evidence mounts daily, but still, as a nation, we are deniers. Today, we are still heavily subsidizing coal, gas and oil for no reason, when every scientist worth his salt is clamoring for developing alternate forms of energy and ending our dependence on coal,. oil and gas. At this late date we have to remove 400 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere to stop the atmosphere's degradation, and soon. There is hope - a growing movement to change our suicidal course, but it arrives late and remains the underdog, far behind Big Oil's $28 trillion annual footprint. Correcting our headlong rush to extinction would be a landmark change for man's character, but if it is to happen, it must be very soon. At this point, if we are to survive, draconian measures are required to correct our fatal oversights. There will be historically high costs - $trillions - and whatever we do will take generations for full effect. During that time, we will sustain $trillions in damages and billions of early deaths. A brilliant article by Rslack in Daily KOS (2019) reminded me of the many missed opportunities to do the right thing, and the consistently poor choices American voters have made: "America Owes Al Gore An Apology I’ve been thinking about Al Gore lately. I remember when Gore stood before Congress and gaveled in the proceedings that certified his election loss. He was repeatedly forced to overrule the objections from fellow Democrats incensed at the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Broward County. He had won the popular vote by over 500,000–yet there he stood, stoically presiding over his own defeat. It must have been the longest 90 minutes of Gore’s life. The Bush campaign had relentlessly tagged Gore as a pathological liar, most famously accusing him of claiming to have invented the internet. The label stuck. The ever-compliant media was happy to play along, filling the airwaves with parodies of Gore’s supposed fibbing. Rarely discussed was the reality that Gore never even remotely claimed any such thing. This is the quote that the Bush campaign managed to transform into “I invented the internet:” "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." It was quite the trick telling whopping lies to convince voters that your opponent was a whopping liar, and yet the Republican Party pulled it off effortlessly. This was my first realization that the American media was irremediably broken. All it took was 537 votes in Florida and one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history to vanquish Gore to the island of failed contenders. Imagine how different would America be were it not for those votes. Remember that Bill Clinton’s 2000 budget actually posted a $236B surplus, which Al Gore proposed using to shore up Social Security. Our deficit is now running at over $1 TRILLION a year and Donald Trump is threatening on gutting Social Security if re-elected. Those 537 votes enabled a tragically wasteful war in Iraq, one of the most boneheaded foreign policy blunders in American history. That war cost $2.4 trillion and counting, resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people–including 4,424 Americans. The Iraq war destabilized the entire region. And it was entirely a war of choice, a bad choice. And what about the global financial crisis of 2007? Would it have occurred were it not for Bush’s penchant for bringing industry hacks into government to take a machete to financial regulations? It’s even possible that nerdy ole’ Gore would have asked some hard questions when presented with hints that Bin Laden was planning on hijacking airplanes and using them as weapons against the United States. How many votes in Florida was the “I invented the internet” lie worth? Almost certainly more than 537. The galling irony is that the internet does indeed owe a tremendous debt to Al Gore’s legislative work. Gore had closely followed developments in information technology since the 1970s. His High Performance Computing Act of 1991 funded research that, among other things, led to the development of MOSAIC, the first world-wide web browser–as well as bringing together researchers with the purpose of accelerating the development of the “Information Superhighway,” which was Gore’s characteristically clunky name for a publicly accessible internet. Even as late-night comedians mocked Gore for his supposed mendacity, the actual progenitors of the internet gave him serious props for his advocacy. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, computer scientists who developed the communications protocols that made networked digital communications possible, praised Gore for his contributions: "As far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship … the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1993. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication." This statement was published at the height of the 2000 presidential campaign, back when Trent Lott joked that Al Gore claimed to have invented the paper clip. It was published around the time that Dan Quayle quipped: “If Gore invented the internet, I invented the spell-check.” After the election, Gore went on to grow a paunch and a scraggly beard, taking on the bedraggled look typical of failed presidential candidates. He then reinvented himself as a ecological prophet warning of the calamities of global climate change. [His investments in alternate energy made him rich.] His Inconvenient Truth brought abstruse scientific issues such as carbon dioxide concentrations and Antarctic ice core samples into the public conversation. Scientists were impressed at the accuracy of his scientific understanding. They shouldn’t have been; Gore had been following the link between CO 2 and climate change since the late 1960s. While Gore presented the harsh environmental facts to the world public, the Bush Administration reneged on a campaign promise to combat global climate change, walking away from the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, Bush gutted environmental regulations after Dick Cheney convened a secretive energy task force composed primarily of oil and gas executives. In 2006, CO 2 concentrations were 380ppm. They are now around 418ppm. The hottest seven years in recorded history have all occurred since the release of an Inconvenient Truth. The hottest five are the last five. Al Gore, the poor bastard–poor eggheaded, wooden, sad sack Al Gore. Gore didn’t know how to play the saxophone[ like Clinton]. Americans didn’t want to have a beer with him [like Bush], even though he was the candidate not in recovery. He was the petty fabulist who managed the tremendous feat of telling outlandish lies that actually made him seem more boring. For such an inveterate liar, however, it’s amazing just how often Gore has been not just right but downright prescient. Gore has seen farther than any other politician on the most transformational issues of our age: climate change and the digital revolution. He explored these issues decades before his fellow lawmakers would even give them a passing thought. The problem with Gore wasn’t that he was a nerd with negative charisma points. The inconvenient truth is that Gore was always a serious grownup hoping to lead a nation trained to prefer childish fantasy. He preferred being truthful to being entertaining, and that was his downfall. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/3/2267684/-Our-Fatal-Addiction-Voting-for-Oblivion?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/