"Let them eat cake."
We aren't ready for the future.
Democrats will pay a huge political price until they acknowledge the bitter and inconvenient truth that we still depend on fossil fuels. Americans may be ready to rise to the occasion of the end of fossil fuels--but only if there are realistic, affordable alternatives in place.
Not everyone can afford a Tesla. Most Americans who work need a car. Democrats who talk about switching to electric cars, using mass transit to commute, and bicycling for errands--or who minimize the sticker shock of five dollar gasoline--come across as out-of-touch elitists with luxury tastes and opinions. Drive less? Sure. Our nanny will do the driving. Or the Uber driver. Not me. I am saving the planet.
Try riding a bicycle to shop for a two-pack of paper towels and a small watermelon, or better yet, groceries for a family. We live in suburbs, not villages. Americans own cars. We need them to live our lives.
I presume climate activist progressive Democrats are in the ballpark on the science. We are burning fossil fuels and we can measure that we are changing the greenhouse gases in the air. Climate activists call it an existential threat. Maybe so. It is certainly unknown territory and we should err on the side of caution. I see myself that small changes in the ocean temperature in the western Pacific create el Nina and el Niño events that make the difference between floods and droughts in Oregon.
Americans--Democrats especially--did not prepare for this political moment. We aren't practically and technologically ready to get off fossil fuels. Democrats urge university endowments and public pension funds divest from oil companies for the good of the planet. Democrats celebrate stopping pipelines, banning drilling on federal lands, and decommissioning nuclear power plants. They know what they don't like. But now many Americans find themselves angry that oil is in short supply, that refineries are inadequate, and that prices are up because demand exceeds supply. Not you? OK. Other people. Lots of other people.
I often write about political hypocrisy. I describe Republicans who defend “all-American” patriotic values but tolerate Trump overthrowing an election. I see it in people who are “pro life” for fetuses, but stingy when it comes to caring for infants and toddlers in poverty. But it is also hypocritical for climate activists to pretend pollution and fossil fuels are OK, if the dirty work is done in Saudi Arabia, not here. Democrats condemn energy companies and call them price gougers when they are reluctant to make the very capital investments we condemned them for making last year. Democrats scoff at coal and condemn Joe Manchin. "Clean coal. Ha!" But Democrats subsidize electric cars fueled with electricity generated with that coal. People who cook food and heat their homes with natural gas want to ban fracked natural gas. Democrats need to face looking in the mirror.
Scarce fossil fuels are not an accident. Democrats have proudly owned this issue--until now. High prices were supposed to be good, a market signal that would nudge Americans toward conservation, alternative fuels, and bicycles. It is a win--except that Americans feel trapped and hate them.
Progressive Democrats want to be seen as the defenders of working people, but it rings hollow. One huge group of working people are those who produce coal, oil, and natural gas. Most jobs lost from fossil fuels move people from family-wage jobs into something much less. Democrats talk about "retraining" and modern new industries for the 21st century. Is that real, or just wishful thinking? Notice that West Virginia is not a prosperous satellite of Silicon Valley technology, staffed by happy retrained miners. Democrats can pretend nobody is badly hurt by the intended energy transition, but it is willful blindness. The reality is evident in poverty, population decline, and addictions of despair. Voters there vote Republican. Energy company employees in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming do as well. That affects a lot of U.S senators.
The perfect is not simply the enemy of the good. It is the enemy of the politically possible. The solution to the hypocrisy is to admit that we did not do what we needed to do to be ready to divest in fossil fuels. Shame on us. If climate is indeed an existential threat, then Democrats needed to have treated development of alternative energy as an emergency, not an experimental pilot program. I believe most Americans would have risen to the occasion of using less fossil fuel had the groundwork been laid. It wasn't. Wind turbines were hard to site. They wreck the view. They kill birds. Solar panels are made in China; that's no good. Nuclear plants have risks and no state wants to store the waste. Hydropower dams destroy rivers and hurt fisheries. OK. But what that means is that Democrats are in no position to tell Americans to use less fossil fuel. We aren't ready. Apparently it wasn't an existential threat, after all. There is no cake, not at a price people will willingly pay.
Why are you blaming it ALL on democrats? Surely republican obstructionism doesn’t help either.
This comment might have been appropriate 30 or 40 years ago. Climate change in the late 1970s and early 1980s ("global warming," as it was then called) was pretty well-established in the scientific community, but less so out in the world populated by your audience. But positive steps, similar to those you describe today, were being introduced and even (in some places) starting to be implemented. Then came what I call "The Tobacco Strategy," a multi-pronged resistance to the warnings and the growing consensus, headed up by the fossil fuel industry itself. Prostitutes (er, scientists) who had already made a living selling their souls to Big Tobacco jumped into the fray to create the illusion that there was scientific uncertainty (which, of course, there was ... that's the way science works) about climate change, even if their arguments were never peer-reviewed (or, if they were, were rejected) but instead appeared in the popular, mainstream media. Influencers across the social and political spectrum joined the team with the goal of generating uncertainty, confusion, doubt and growing skepticism. Flat out climate-change deniers were an anomaly in the late 1980s, but they grew increasingly more common and prevalant, and then took over an entire political party.
Sorry, but the "woe is us" crowd has it coming. The deniers now want "time" to solve the problem that they have perpetuated. Well, the time was 1980 (or even 1990) and possibly something might have been done to address the concerns you claim are so widespread. Unfortunately ... it is not rewarding or beneficial to say "I told you so." We ... that is, those of us who have been driving hybrid or electric vehicles since the end of the 20th century, who have been designing instructional curriculum to educate those in denial, those who have been pushing for mass public transit and changing how we structure work and our communities ... are ALL going to suffer the consequences brought about by the deniers.
Personally, I think we all need to start filing lawsuits for damage against ExxonMobil, and make them pay for the damage their sneaky, nasty, anti-social behaviors have created.