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>When vision was available (Jimmy Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) ...

The panels installed on the White House were not photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater panels.

>...(Regan tearing them down...).

The panels had to be removed due to roof repairs that had to be made. Solar water heaters were probably never a good match for the needs of the west wing. I think the Bush administration added solar water heaters for a pool, which seems more reasonable.

This article[1] is like a bit biased, but I think it adds the right context with quotes from those involved. The key paragraph here:

Curiously — and this may say it all — the Reagan administration also allowed Carter’s financial incentives promoting renewables to expire around the time that the panels were removed. Tax credits established in 1977 for homeowners installing solar water heaters ended Dec. 31, 1985, just months before the White House roof coup d’état.

[1] https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-sto...

Campaign finance reform: Lessig's "Lesterland" springs to mind.

I think ideas like campaign finance reform are in the right direction, but how do we actually accomplish that? The people that can do it are the people blocking it because it isn't in their interests. How do you get the country to a place where this is possible? My top 'if only' (after you remove campaign finance reform) are: - Some form of ranked choice voting. - Fixing gerrymandering. Of those I think ranked choice has some momentum and could lead to positive change. Gerrymandering is, again, an issue with the people that can change it won't because it is against their interests.

How does a corrupt society become less corrupt?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200428230447/https://northatla...

I used to work on failed states for a living.

This is what I had to say. It absolutely applies to America today too.

If you really want to scare yourself, read this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7748252/

We are out of the flight envelope for civilisation on a number of fronts right now.

> If you really want to scare yourself, read this.

That kind of alarmism (in this case about the CDC failing during the pandemic) is scary, but needlessly so, and best avoided. In contrast, according to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

The US death rate, at 3500 per million, was not much worse than the UK (3400 per million) or EU (2800 per million).

If America had the same covid death rate as Canada, nearly 700,000 less Americans would have died of covid.

Alarm by the Epidemic Intelligence Service officers is not "alarmism." It was an accurate forecast that the system was going to fail, which it did, then killing roughly 10 times as many Americans as the Vietnam War did.

There’s only one answer:

Every single person has to start taking as much responsibility and ownership for the communities that they live and work in as they can and support others who are doing the same

It’s exceptionally simple and it’s exceptionally difficult to the same time. It’s up to you and your mental state and how you view the world, and your ability to overcome your own fears

The question of "how do we deal with lobbying from people whose preferences are reactionary / opposed to human progress", cannot be answered by telling those same people to "take responsibility." In their minds, they are taking responsibility — their vision of a perfect world is just antithetical to ours.

The answer to such a question, needs necessarily to be an answer for what we, the people who prefer to have nice things, can do — to work around these people, or to achieve in spite of them, etc.

No, what I’m trying to say is that in fact, the majority of the population is disengaged politically, to the point where they do not even engage in their local civic processes

So they are not creating their own lobby groups, putting additional effort into countering these other groups, preventing them from forming in the first place, or any number of things that a community who is engaged does

But listen, there’s any number of excuses or reasons why people can’t - despite example, after example of poor uneducated or otherwise downtrodden people becoming community leaders.

again that’s why I say it is a matter of whether you have the fortitude to deal with what seems like an insurmountable problem, which is the alignment of human action within a semi closed political system

I would have half-agreed with you if you didn't use a such a victim-blaming expression like "excuses".

Nobody is "excusing" themselves. People are busy, life is not easy for most of them and they are VERY "excused" to just want to have some chill and relax after their work is done. That's all there is to it, the rest is you trying to paint stuff as black-and-white.

I also have to remind you that plenty of countries photograph and make dossiers of people who protest.

Clearly, modern forms of protest are needed. "Taking responsibility" is such a hand-wavy thing to say that offers zero courses of action.

At the end of the day, people make whatever choice they’re gonna make for how they spend their time

If they spend their time entertaining themselves, then they’re not going to spend their time shaping the world into what they think it should be

So the people who are going to shape it the way that they want it, are going to continue to do what they want and you’re gonna have to deal with that

So you can take it however you like, but the functional fact is that people are choosing not to spend their time shaping the environmental regulations, the types of social structures that are going to prevent these anthropogenic traps like we’re starting to see

So the only thing I would say is, great do whatever you gotta do but then don’t complain when things aren’t the way you want them at the macro scale and you’ve got testicles full of plastics, live in ongoing genocide, and have no clean drinking water

But don’t worry, there’s always Hans Rosling and his soothing balm of misleading statistics and folk “science” to make you feel like everything‘s going just fine

Yeah sure, so people should not raise kids or have any leisure ever. OK.

I'll complain as much as I like, thank you very much, because your rhetoric does not work -- you are outraged and that's visible in your comments, which robs them of objectivity.

Paying taxes should lead to my interests being protected. That's the social contract. If that's not happening then history knows of many examples where the leaders were completely blind of the interests of their subjects and received a rough wake-up call (often lynching resulting in death even). It will happen again, it seems.

Also nobody thinks everything's going just fine. That's your faulty assumption. It's just that most of us haven't gotten to the point of starting to curse and grab a shotgun to make ourselves heard... yet.

How does me taking responsibility and ownership for my neighborhood spur investment in alternative energy sources?

Specifically, I mean, is this a is this a real question?

Are you unaware of the processes of community organization and lobbying?

Do you know how canvassing and petitioning work?

This is precisely my point, is that these are all thoroughly documented, easy to understand and easy to implement technically, things that you do in order to be part of the community as a group of people who have a voice

The key thing lacking is people who give a shit about results that don’t only benefit them and take a lot of work and coordination to do

So as a result, people throw their hands up and say it’s too hard. It takes too long. It’s too complicated. The results are too obscure. It’s too unlikely… whatever whatever you can continue to come up with whatever excuses you want to not engage in your community but at the end of the day, it’s up to whether or not you care.

Lobbying congress is so far beyond the remit of "taking responsibility for your neighborhood" it's hard to believe your not being factitious.

Like this is literally the first step in the process.

You’re supposed to be able to go to your congressional representative and local councils for your specific input. They have a entire staff and they have a process to do this. I have regularly engaged with my elected congressional representatives and my local city Council members at every step along my life to lobby them for things I want.

When I was in high school, I lobbied the Webster, TX city Council to build a skate park because we didn’t have one in the 90s. Now there’s a Webster skate park

I was elected to the planning board for the city of Cheverly, Maryland where we took citizen input every month and then at our quarterly review meeting so that we could determine what kind of new development would happen in our town

I did all of this while raising three kids and having a full-time job, including getting up at night to change diapers and all of that and I even ran ultramarathons in there too, and started a business

The fact that you think that it takes some huge effort shows how broken our system is

I'd argue you are both right and wrong here. What are constructive ways to get people to join in the process. Telling them to do it doesn't work, so how do we influence them to increase that participation? I have a kid, telling him X, Y or Z is the fastest way to get him to avoid those solutions. The only thing I have found that works is to get the real world to tell him or to have his piers tell him. It sounds ridiculous but what about a reality tv show where the contestants try to rally their neighborhoods to effect the most positive change and along the way they show how they did it. A big part of throwing your hands up is not knowing where to put them.

Yes, think globally, act locally.

Not to be a complete pessimist, but there was an active disinformation campaign, not dissimilar to the tobacco companies lying about cancer rates going on. Mix in useful idiots and as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," and you've got decades of outright denial and obstruction.

The only choice is out organize and take direct action, because elections simply aren't enough.

https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_repo...

>fossil fuels...the massive subsidies they get.

This is basically a fiction put out by green types who aren't good at accounting, if by subsidy you mean money going from the government of the country to the fuel industries.

I mean you can argue they are undertaxed and don't pay enough to cover their externalities but still the cash flows from oil companies to the government, not the other way.

Oil industries are popular with politicians because they fill their coffers with cash. Solar electric on the other hand usually requires money to go the other way to subsidise your roof panels or what have you.

Hence the popularity of oil and gas with some politicians and voters who pay the taxes.

Avoid?

A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified.

Whatever kind of big mess we create in the future I guarantee we will find ways to make it worse rather than better. The US is preparing to elect a climate denialist to its highest office.

This can't be fixed. It's not just some big corporate culprit. It's us. It's not all of us, but it's enough.

well said.

"A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified."

I laughed far too hard at this, in the context of the upcoming bird flu pandemic.