11.2 million. That’s the number of American citizens who rank climate change as their top issue but didn’t vote in the 2024 election, according to research by the Environmental Voter Project. For context, Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 by less than 2.3 million votes. For a little over a decade, EVP has been [...]Read More... from If So Many Americans Care About Climate, Why Don’t They Vote Like It?
Because no current system has offered a viable path. Sustainability, which includes climate and all the other factors, will require everyone to live with less to ensure everyone has enough of what matters.
Our politics, our economics our sociology consider asking the rights questions as radical, precicely because it threatens the wealth, power and prestige of those who have it. The elite would rather the poor who can’t cope, die in order to bring consumption to sustainable levels. Case in point, Bill Gates will write a book on what other people should do about climate change, yet live the hipocrisy of owning a small private fleet of jets and helicopters amd a leasing company for his slightly less elite customers.
Ecological economics calls this malinvestment. Not misallocation (suboptimal) but malallocation (actively hurts our goals) The resources of those jets could have built passivehouses, sustainable farms, sufficiency across countless domains. His communications could have been virtual. I think he is smart enough to know how to use Teams. But hypocrisy is not a mistake for these people.
The democratic choices of bad and worse don’t reflect viable paths. Worse will build autocracy that means profligacy for the ingroup, then doom for the vile and faster doom for everyone else. Cutting the outgroups down as the definition of sustainable shrinks and then cutting potential in group rivals.
The bad choice is to do the same thing, but instead of an in group and outgroups, we’ll have an in, an out and a middle class. The 2/3 will make the same decisions, but trim with a few select sacrifices across the three groups as the pie shrinks.
Bad and worse is not a viable choice. Even the greens where they exist, haven’t communicated a viable return to sustainable for all. They only hint at a portion of the changes required.
Because no current system has offered a viable path. Sustainability, which includes climate and all the other factors, will require everyone to live with less to ensure everyone has enough of what matters.
Our politics, our economics our sociology consider asking the rights questions as radical, precicely because it threatens the wealth, power and prestige of those who have it. The elite would rather the poor who can’t cope, die in order to bring consumption to sustainable levels. Case in point, Bill Gates will write a book on what other people should do about climate change, yet live the hipocrisy of owning a small private fleet of jets and helicopters amd a leasing company for his slightly less elite customers.
Ecological economics calls this malinvestment. Not misallocation (suboptimal) but malallocation (actively hurts our goals) The resources of those jets could have built passivehouses, sustainable farms, sufficiency across countless domains. His communications could have been virtual. I think he is smart enough to know how to use Teams. But hypocrisy is not a mistake for these people.
The democratic choices of bad and worse don’t reflect viable paths. Worse will build autocracy that means profligacy for the ingroup, then doom for the vile and faster doom for everyone else. Cutting the outgroups down as the definition of sustainable shrinks and then cutting potential in group rivals.
The bad choice is to do the same thing, but instead of an in group and outgroups, we’ll have an in, an out and a middle class. The 2/3 will make the same decisions, but trim with a few select sacrifices across the three groups as the pie shrinks.
Bad and worse is not a viable choice. Even the greens where they exist, haven’t communicated a viable return to sustainable for all. They only hint at a portion of the changes required.