At his speech to the Democratic National Convention last night, Bernie Sanders played the usual hits — and also called for a cease-fire in Gaza. But his righteous populist anger felt out of place before a party still dominated by corporate interests.
  • mozz
    4•3 months ago

    Oh look, it’s a bunch of crap

    Eventually the administration did pass climate-investment-related provisions of BBB in scaled-down form in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), mostly in the form of tax credits for private investment and eco-friendly consumer choices.

    That’s one hell of a way to gloss over and minimize more than a trillion dollars of corporate-tax-increase money getting spent on climate change (and also working class jobs in addition)

    But those investments fall far short of what climate experts say is required to rapidly decarbonize

    This part is true 😢. We need 10 times more and we needed it 20 years ago. On the other hand, Biden started working on it instantly and managed to get something passed which is almost 10 times more than any other US president has done.

    and even on optimistic estimates, the bill will produce only a 6 to 10 percent reduction in emissions relative to a non-IRA scenario.

    6 to 10 percentage points, not 6 to 10 percent. Measuring percent is a little weird but you could say the reduction in emissions compared with 2005 levels is about 33% more than it was pre IRA. We save about 500 million tons of CO2 per year with the IRA, 10% of our total 2005 emissions. (I also don’t know of any optimistic scenario that has the impact as small as 6 percentage points, let alone 6 percent)

    Perhaps most important, for all the celebration of the Biden administration’s progressivism by Sanders, Biden’s policies have not meaningfully raised living standards for many working Americans

    This is an incredibly artful construction. Not having COVID happen at all would not have meaningfully changed living or dying standards of many alive Americans. There are many Palestinians who have not been killed by the war in Gaza. See how that works?

    Hey ozma pop quiz - what happened to working class wages (inflation adjusted) between 2019 and 2024? I feel like we’ve talked enough about it that you should know the numbers. We could say that “working class” means 10th percentile or 20th or really any percentile you want to pick.