It’s absolutely very important I agree, and a long term goal (decades of work), but I’m talking about recovery for individuals and families struggling to hold things together right now, today. The kind of recovery that needs to happen within the next 5 years at the absolute maximum, lest it be too late.
While such impoverished groups have always existed, never before in post WWII have they grown in such numbers and continue to grow terrifyingly rapidly due to the bottom falling out of every service and institution the nation relies on. The general public don’t seem to fully realise just how bad things are.
If we lose multiple back to back generations of people to poverty, lack of education, opportunities, bad health and misery, if we completely break that chain, there won’t be a first world nation capable of prioritising the environment, period.
We will be a third world nation, only capable of being in triage mode forever, just trying to hold itself together through its slow, many decades long collapse.
Other nations won’t come to our aid to build us back up into a first world nation, if we can’t do that ourselves, it won’t happen. This is the reality for many countries, we just think it can’t happen to us because we’re special. We’re not.
We need to repair our broken institutions and face the core reasons for those failures today, so that we can focus more heavily on climate and environmental issues tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
Just to reiterate, I’m not saying we shift focus away from those very important issues entirely, or that we do so for decades and decades, pushing them far away as Boomers did to become someone else’s problem, just that - as the title of this post asks - this election (and the next 5 years of major national focus) aren’t focusing as heavily on climate issues because we’ve got far more immediate, unprecedentedly serious crises (multiple) that simply can’t wait any longer.
What we do in the next few years will decide the fate of this country.
It’s sad that it’s come to this I wholeheartedly agree, but we must play the cards we are dealt, and triage the problem, one disaster at a time, until we’re back on our feet and can handle more.
I don’t really agree; part of how the US achieved a post-COVID recovery was targeting spending at bringing the manufacture of decarbonization infrastructure back home from China. This is a case where you can achieve both objectives at the same time, using the same money. That’s incredibly valuable for building electoral coalitions which make action possible.
Thing is, the spending on decarbonization can be a way to achieve recovery. It’s not the only thing that needs doing, but it’s a big one.
It’s absolutely very important I agree, and a long term goal (decades of work), but I’m talking about recovery for individuals and families struggling to hold things together right now, today. The kind of recovery that needs to happen within the next 5 years at the absolute maximum, lest it be too late.
While such impoverished groups have always existed, never before in post WWII have they grown in such numbers and continue to grow terrifyingly rapidly due to the bottom falling out of every service and institution the nation relies on. The general public don’t seem to fully realise just how bad things are.
If we lose multiple back to back generations of people to poverty, lack of education, opportunities, bad health and misery, if we completely break that chain, there won’t be a first world nation capable of prioritising the environment, period.
We will be a third world nation, only capable of being in triage mode forever, just trying to hold itself together through its slow, many decades long collapse.
Other nations won’t come to our aid to build us back up into a first world nation, if we can’t do that ourselves, it won’t happen. This is the reality for many countries, we just think it can’t happen to us because we’re special. We’re not.
We need to repair our broken institutions and face the core reasons for those failures today, so that we can focus more heavily on climate and environmental issues tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
Just to reiterate, I’m not saying we shift focus away from those very important issues entirely, or that we do so for decades and decades, pushing them far away as Boomers did to become someone else’s problem, just that - as the title of this post asks - this election (and the next 5 years of major national focus) aren’t focusing as heavily on climate issues because we’ve got far more immediate, unprecedentedly serious crises (multiple) that simply can’t wait any longer.
What we do in the next few years will decide the fate of this country.
It’s sad that it’s come to this I wholeheartedly agree, but we must play the cards we are dealt, and triage the problem, one disaster at a time, until we’re back on our feet and can handle more.
I don’t really agree; part of how the US achieved a post-COVID recovery was targeting spending at bringing the manufacture of decarbonization infrastructure back home from China. This is a case where you can achieve both objectives at the same time, using the same money. That’s incredibly valuable for building electoral coalitions which make action possible.