No, they aren't - not even them. We all are not. The people trying to prevent bad things are not as responsible as the people actively promoting them. The people who drive to work after their attempts to get working light rail failed at the polls are not in the same category as those who defeated the light rail at the polls, for example. Except, of course, that neither statement is meaningless, mine is accurate and fact based, and yours is false. More falsehood. 1) An accurate description of the Republican voter does not divide the world into black and white. It assigns blame to the specifically and identifiably blameworthy. 2) Because you missed that, you overlooked the obvious: the Republican voter is a minority, as emphasized repeatedly on this forum. Your glib dismissal of simple fact has led you to post something very silly, as a personal accusation that happens to be false. There is, in my world, no such black and white division - what I referred to as "the rest of us" is a solid majority of the nonblack. That's not the same as white. There are not two sides, here, in my world. There is an identifiable body of Republican voters, who are simply and unrecoverably and nonnegotiably bad, and there is the wide range of everybody else with all their differences. You apparently need to bothsides the politics involved here - there can't be any actual bad guys, and anyone who says there is must be hypocritical and projecting and so forth. That is a state of denial. There are bad guys, and they have to be defeated politically if any good response to AGW is to be forthcoming from US governments. There is a "them". It's just a fact. That's what happens with a fascist takeover of a political Party. They do not outnumber "us". "We" outnumber them, by a large margin. But if they are not opposed, firmly, with no waffling around about how everybody is to blame for whatever, they will win anyway. W was re-elected, remember?
It's a whole lot more complicated than that. It's not simply determined by what people want or work for or vote for. There are different degrees on each scale, as well as different scales of empowerment. In a profligate industrial nation, even the unemployed and homeless have a bigger environmental footprint than a small landowner in what is called a "developing" country. Neither one has any political or economic power to effect change. Meanwhile, in an enlightened developed country, where economic and political disparity have been kept to a minimum, each voter has relatively far more power to direct the amount of material waste, the sources and distribution or energy, government regulation of business, etc.: a Swedish janitor has a lot more control over the size of his ecological footprint than does an American middle manager. By 'developing', we generally mean they're trying to catch up to our "standard" of doing things - because we're in charge of the world economy and anybody who wants to do differently gets steamrolled. So, the expectation has been (and a lot of people still haven't caught on that this is impossible) that the developing world will keep demanding more and more energy, industry, resources, etc. There is no good reason why uncommitted nations should not go a completely different way - except coercion by the most power three dozen people in the most power five countries. "We" are a very, very long way from equal - in anything - including "we-ness".
Definitely. As you mentioned, in a first world nation, nearly everyone has a bigger environmental footprint due to the services they use. Agreed. However, the one thing they have in common is that their footprints are much larger than that family in Sandire.
But not the same size as each other's, nowhere near the same size as the elites and industries of the profligate nations. But that's by the way. The political point is 1. the difference in how much individuals can effect government decisions and 2. that the profligate industrial elites are pressuring the poor nations to - - allow unregulated exploitation and despoiling of their environment - suppress any resistance or alternate policy - unsafe, uncontrolled industrial practice by foreign-owned enterprise, using their people to carry it out - consumerist propaganda and the dumping of surplus consumer items on their population - proliferation of destructive western agriculture - unnecessary food production (on formerly wild land) for export to rich countries - keep up military and economic hostilities with their neighbours, and thus continued dependency of their governments on foreign support So that, while the footprint of each local peasant and worker remains small, the industrial nation is stomping all over those countries just the same, and thus increasing local demand for energy, transport, infrastructure and production capability --- expanding and exporting their insatiable greed.
Right. And what's enabling those elites to do that? Our consumer economy, driven by us, the consumers. Those elites would be gone tomorrow if we decided to never purchase cheap plastic stuff at Wal-Mart and instead buy local stuff from people we knew and respected. But people don't want to do that, because then they'd be less well off than their neighbors; they'd spend more and get less. Last time I was in Africa, a lot of the families in the smaller towns wore clothing that was almost exclusively US surplus, often with big and oddly inappropriate English logos. (i.e. Marston's Sport Fishing Paradise on a kid who lived in a desert.) However, it's hard to see that as a bad thing overall. And again, it's because those "local peasants" (which most of them are not, by the way) want that money. (And shirts, and solar panels, and satellite receivers.) Do we tell them "no, you can't have them, and it's for your own good?"
What makes you think they're driving? Exceptin, they don't pay us enough. The culture of self-limitation has not been a feature of America from its inception. Wanna stop the British? Go buy a gun and a slave! Wanna stop the terrists? Go shopping! I have no problem seeing it that way. Nothing wrong with the solar panels. But it wasn't strictly necessary to destroy their original nations and livelihoods. Now that a huge amount of damage has been done, dumping surplus, or refusing to, are is not necessarily the only options in foreign policy.
Our economy is not "driven" by "us, the consumers". That is a libertarian or freemarketer's delusion, apparently derived from the first few chapters of some economics textbook. For something driven by consumer demand, as you describe, it's a bit of a mystery why it involves international corruption of local governments and heavy use of military force. The people "we" would be "telling" things would be those international bankers and arms dealers and paramilitary forces and the like. What the folks nobody here has called "peasants" would choose if they had a freemarket choice is currently unknown. Who are these "people" you talk about? I know many people who boycott Walmart as much as they can, and "consume" as you describe only when coerced. The advent of a Walmart in a town is often opposed, by people contributing effort without being paid. These people have been defeated, politically, by the power of the capitalist elites, but that does not make them complicit in their own coercion. The US is not populated by Republican voters only. They are a minority.
The bothsides meme brings us another entry, oddly familiar: http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2019/05/david-brooks-tried-yoda-thing-out-for.html .
