Chernobyl is hardly the only environmental disaster in the USSR.
There are enough examples of man made disasters in countries with weak governments, and powerful governments without a history of these kinds of disasters.
Sadly this has little to do with 'conservatives' or 'the left' and a lot more to do with our apolitical global oligarchy who own the politicians in power and many lobbying groups including 'climate change' and environmentalists who are strangely silent on this major disaster as they were when the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed.
Instead of focusing so much on CO2, it would benefit humanity to adopt a more well rounded approach that addresses all pollutants, prioritizing the safe handling of extremely toxic chemicals & reducing the amount of toxic waste emitted by industry. Also, it would be helpful to take the approach that novel substances should be proven safe instead of assuming these substances are safe until proven unsafe.
There is a real danger of the $$ cult of climate change $$ undermining important environmental issues.
Be more mindful of where trillions of tax payer money is 'invested' would be my advice and try to see both sides of the religious divide.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11653723/How-Al-Gor...
There are different types of criticism re: the claim of Anthropogenic Global Warming (which I'll refer to as APGW) & it's impacts. Mainly b/c APGW is a composition of claims, many of which are criticized to varying degrees.
My perspective is that throughout Earth's history, the climate has always been under a perpetual state of change, sometimes to far more drastic degrees than what we are witnessing today. About 200 years ago, we left a mini ice age (i.e. "the year without a summer"), which means that this point in the natural cycles is one of warming. I'm far more concerned about events coming from outer space & Sun, the current Geomagnetic excursion, & pollution than APGW. Other planets in our solar system are going through intensifying climate change right now.
I'm not confident that the state of climate science accounts for all inputs into the cycle...looking at the Sun's cycles, our changing position within the cosmos, cycles external to our solar system and the impacts on Earth's climate. Climate models have a terrible track record with predicting future trends. This complex system, where all of the inputs are not yet properly modeled, is not modeled in a way which gives predictive value. The media & politicians tend to sensationalize the most extreme "doomsday" models (i.e. Al Gore stating that snow will be a thing of the past & the glaciers will all melt by 2020).
The natural cycles (there are many factors) are also not properly modeled, as we have only had precise measurements & can only date ice core samples, for a period that does not incorporate a single period for each of the cycles.
The oceans are also a large reservoir of CO2 & CO2 escapes a liquid as the temperature rises. Given we have geologically recently left an ice age, CO2 will naturally escape from the oceans. I wonder if a large portion of the rise of CO2 comes from global warming (with CO2 escaping the oceans) and not the other way around.
There have been experiments that show that CO2 does increase the temperature of a system to some extent, but the warming has upper-bound limits & it is not a runaway phenomenon. I confirmed this by doing a PV=nRT & CO2 delta calculation on Venus & found that if CO2 is a runaway phenomenon, the temperature on Venus would be significantly higher than it is now.
That being said, experiments show that an increase of CO2 does increase the temperature of a system, but not in a runaway hockey stick graph sense, but in a logrithmic upper-bound sense.
My experience with many people is that they want to simplify their understanding of complex systems in a lossy manner. I feel like many of the fears around APGW is a lossy simplification that attracts people to make sense of nature's complexities. It is psychologically difficult to admit & consciously regard there is much that we don't yet know & are not accounting for..even more difficult to admit that Earth has had numerous widespread natural catastrophes that we would not be able to control. We want to be able to predict the future with our models, the simpler the model the better. The problem is sometimes the system being modeled is very complex & we have not yet recorded all of the cycles involved or accounted for all of the inputs. It is psychologically attractive & consistent with history for cultures to create a scape goat which must be sacrificed to appease the Gods & forestall impending doom.
You think "global oligarchy" is "apolitical", at a time when the right wing is pushing harder and harder for the very wealthy to, essentially, be able to do anything they want, while the left wing (such as it is in this country) is pushing to restrict their power and tax their wealthy?
The unelected bureaucrats actually run everything in the US and at a state level. In California where I live we currently have a supermajority Dem state government, but regardless of this a handful of unelected bureaucrats from the Gray Davis era run everything in Sacramento behind the scenes.
The idea the DNC 'left wing' is pushing to restrict the local elite's power and tax them is laughable. They just have a few noisy straw men to placate voters and fill their air waves. (I'm a registered Dem FWIW. I loathe the party these days).
We need a big parochial political shake up!
Unfortunately, at least in the English-speaking world, many nominal workers' parties have largely bought into worker-hostile policies under Blair, Starmer, Clinton, Albanese, and so on.
The wealthy—y'know, people like Elon Musk?—vote R.
You can see how structural faults in US government could produce the tinder. The threefold and interdependent issue of the US Senate and subsequently Electoral College resulting in Presidential and Legislative and ultimately Judicial representation by a smaller and smaller group of constituents. The reason we have legitimacy narratives today stems from this very structural fault.
But tinder alone does not produce a fire. An unforeseen event poised to exploit the flaws of the fault and uniquely incompetent leadership conspire to make régime ancien.
Enron was a weak company, nowhere near the escape reality velocity: at peak, in 2000, they had a market capitalization of $60 billion, at the same time Microsoft was at $600 billion [1].
Also, any company worth their capital knows very well that "competition is for losers" [2] and dreams of the ultimate consolidation [3].
[1] The Largest Public Companies by Market Cap (2000–2022), https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/largest-companies-from-2...
[2] Competition Is for Losers, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k
[3] The Consolidation Curve, https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve