this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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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.
Foresight is often mistaken for cycicism by those that lack it.
Who said cynical opinions are always factually incorrect? You're making up an argument.
Thank you for illustrating my point brilliantly; you have contributed nothing of worth, but your feeling of superiority.
It's just a simple piece of advice, no need to get spikey.
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.
I'm voting every single far left party before I even hit labour. If you have ranked choice voting may as well use it.
Yeah, that's why I don't understand people voting labor here.
It works pretty well, too. Sure there's still a two party situation going on, but recently the amount of votes not going to either is making it clear they're slowly losing voter confidence as the older generation fade out.
I think younger voters actually understand how important the senate is too and how powerful ranking it with some detail can be.
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.
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
Yeah, but we did get the War on Terror, so... That was fun /s
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.
They could have done that under Obama or Biden too then. So why haven't they?
There were things like this
And it di pd go forward, until repealed by Trump
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that? Do you think industry won’t tie the change up in the courts for decades?
Yes, the executive can attempt these things but with two coequal branches, one of which swings between the parties pretty regularly every couple years, it wouldn’t stick.
Trick question! It's not up to the legislative branch to decide the limits of Executive authority. That's up to the supreme Court. Speaking of which, president Gore would have gotten TWO SEATS appointed.
My first thought. Oh no! The oil industry had to double its lobbying budget while still making record profits.