It is befuddling reading the sentiment for the majority of the comments on this post.
Having a chief executive in office in 2000 who was super concerned about climate change would have made a big difference.
But hey that’s just like my opinion man
Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say “Yeah but Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same” really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.
It would literally have changed the world. At this point we’re scrabbling around from the outside desperately trying to get the leaders to care, when it’s already too late for a lot of the semi-good outcomes. We missed a chance to have a guy in charge who understood the science, and cared a lot about it, back when there was some time to change the trajectory.
Edit: Now a bunch of different users have independently come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because the Republicans would have defeated anything he did in congress, and now they all want to share that message with all of us, as their current explanation for why it is that elections don’t matter anyway.
(Edit 2: Guys. You get to vote for congress in elections, too.)
IDK, maybe I am reading too much into it and it really is a bunch of people who are motivated to post about politics, but whose brains are also just wired to search for defeatism wherever they can find it, and that’s the message they want to share. Maybe.
Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it’s true, saying “x is useless” is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
As someone who’s guilty of thinking ‘both sides are the same’ I think you’re definitely right.
For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.
Australia has ranked choice voting, does it not? I’d vote for the farthest left option too if the US had RCV.
It works pretty well, too. Sure there’s still a two party situation going on, but recently the amount of votes not going to either is making it clear they’re slowly losing voter confidence as the older generation fade out.
I think younger voters actually understand how important the senate is too and how powerful ranking it with some detail can be.
Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.
Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn’t do already. You’re massively overrating the impact one president has. It’s not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn’t pull that schtick until after he lost the election.
There’s no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I’m actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.
Progress is cumulative, and it happens slowly.
Even if he didn’t accomplish anything other than preventing the regression that happened under Bush, it would have allowed Obama and Biden to make more progress than they did.
If he did manage to accomplish anything, no matter how small, then Obama and Biden could have made even more progress.
Here’s something that just came up in another thread, that shows Al Gore’s climate bona fides
Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they’d probably have impeached Gore for it.
Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.
The EPA is part of the executive branch. They could have regulated carbon emissions like they regulate other emissions.
They could have done that under Obama or Biden too then. So why haven’t they?
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that? Do you think industry won’t tie the change up in the courts for decades?
Yes, the executive can attempt these things but with two coequal branches, one of which swings between the parties pretty regularly every couple years, it wouldn’t stick.
Gore won, but lost to a judicial coup.
One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.
Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.
Supposedly he lost because he asked for recounts only in counties where he was polling well, but then they should have ordered a general recount.
He shouldn’t have to ask for recounts when the initial counts are suspect. Was never a real democracy to begin with.
SYSK just did an episode
[Stuff You Should Know] The 2000 Presidential Election: A Real Cluster https://podcastaddict.com/stuff-you-should-know/episode/169274063
In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women’s reproductive rights, and now in 24 they’re angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can’t see.
If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn’t really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
If only being told that were enough to finally get the idjits to pull their heads out of their asses.
Honestly, at least on Lemmy, I think a lot of the ass-headers are just a mixture of shills and edgelords. In what proportion, I have no idea.
The ratio of beliefs on the issue is very different among the people who are genuinely engaged with it, than among the people who quick post a punchy message or two and then scuttle away. There’s just a lot of people coming in for a moment to do the second activity; that’s the only thing that makes it seem like the opinion poll is as mixed as it looks like at first.
(I’ve been spending way too much time paying attention to this today.)
Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.
Centrist Democrats will always blame progressive discontent for their losses, even if their losses are caused by the Supreme Court undermining democracy itself.
Quit moving to the right, and we’ll quit pointing it out.
Yeah so what about Gore and climate crisis? We got a sweet ass pointless Iraq war with Bush. We got to do the most American thing ever, bully a small country for natural resources and stage a regime change. Would have Gore given us that? Pft no. We would have a serious conversation about climate and taken some steps to mitigate everything.
Hey now, killing all those people in the Middle East was worth it, wasn’t it? I mean, if the US hadn’t invaded Afghanistan, it would probably still be controlled by the Taliban to this very day! Good thing we avoided that scenario, right?
Humans are some of the worst polluters, so killing all those Middle Easterners saved thousands of tons of CO2 emissions! /s
I’ve read that Ghengis Khan, while he was responsible for the killing of 20–40 million people, that actually resulted in the lowering of global CO2 levels and led to reforestation in many parts of the world. So maybe a little genocide every now and then helps… (I’m not seriously suggesting this)
A calm and rational discussion and response to 9/11 instead of making up lies, going on the war path, and telling allies that they’re either with us or against us? Lame. Pass. (/s)
I honestly don’t think Gore could kept the country out of Afghanistan. The public wanted justice for 9/11, by justice they wanted blood. The public would have forced Gore to do something about 9/11.
It would have been very easy for Gore to get sucked into Afghanistan even after trying to put forth rational explanations of why we shouldn’t have occupied the country. The end result of would have been somewhat similar, 20 years of war, and nothing really accomplished.
The Iraq war on the other hand would have never happened on Gore.
