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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.
I get the same message that people think capitalism under Biden is the same as capitalism under Trump. It’s honestly bizarre.
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.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t understand people voting labor here.
I’m voting every single far left party before I even hit labour. If you have ranked choice voting may as well use it.
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.
Especially considering it’s a GLOBAL phenomenon lol.
Here’s something that just came up in another thread, that shows Al Gore’s climate bona fides
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.
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.
My first thought. Oh no! The oil industry had to double its lobbying budget while still making record profits.
The EPA is part of the executive branch. They could have regulated carbon emissions like they regulate other emissions.
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.
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that?
Trick question! It’s not up to the legislative branch to decide the limits of Executive authority. That’s up to the supreme Court. Speaking of which, president Gore would have gotten TWO SEATS appointed.
They could have done that under Obama or Biden too then. So why haven’t they?
There were things like this
And it di pd go forward, until repealed by Trump
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.
And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
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.
Everyone makes mistakes, even election officials who are trying their best. It’s good that it’s possible to ask for a recount
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.
The dems are definitely consistently better for the economy though.
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
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.
Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it’s not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.
were basically trying to out-center the other
I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.
Oh for sure, he was following Clinton’s lead, so that’s why it’s somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn’t the case, or it at least isn’t how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yes, I agree. I’m also not sure that running as a super environmental progressive would have been possible at the time. We were just coming out of the timber wars, where the timber industry had spent millions convincing the US that a few hippies chained to trees trying to prevent the last bits of old-growth redwoods from destruction were the problem.
It was a different time and we were very desensitized to the concept of hippy punching etc.
How high do you have to be to erase everything al gore did to prove he wanted to do something about climate change? Why are you rewriting history like this? It’s preposterous
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process… or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn’t he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden’s “then you ain’t black” comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore’s actual statement (which, of course, was not that he “invented the internet”) was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he’d accomplished and the value of it. It’s the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider “the curve”).
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians’ words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.
I think Obama’s approach was to bypass the media, and reach out directly to the people themselves, even if through them. That way, the media dared not make fun of him. Ofc they did anyway, but quite often, it did not stick as a result.
Here I have to ignore Faux News b/c they just ruthlessly tried to tear him apart - e.g. a black kid dies by violence, and Obama sheds a tear in sympathy, and they accuse him of it being faked. Which even if so, so what? We should have, and demonstrate, sympathy to people - imagine if that were a competition, and he was winning it, rather than the exact opposite of that which is the reality that we had:-(.
So the more mainstream media made fun of Obama’s pauses, and how white his hair had turned while in office. Obama himself played along, especially in the White House Correspondents speeches. Those were great relations:-D.
Somehow Gore never managed to do that. I imagine him more like an engineer (which I am myself), who might be technically quite proficient, but struggle at the more “people” aspects of the job. Nixon too in a fashion. The people want a JFK/Bill Clinton/Obama/Trump, they don’t want someone who will actually get the job done, more’s the pity:-(.
And now we have Biden, who similarly is quietly getting things done, though the media is eating him alive whenever/however they can. After that, whether in this upcoming election or the one after that, it’ll be a GQP member - you just know that, b/c of Dems never winning successive elections in history. Rinse & Repeat.
UNLESS libs learn this lesson, finally, and put forward someone who is electable? It very much IS a popularity contest, no matter how much we may wish, demand, expect, or hope otherwise:-|.
The attitude of the Greek Stoics impresses me: we cannot impose our views upon the entire world, we can only change what WE can manage to change ourselves. Maybe that means skirting the government at the federal level - like individual states right now could pass protections against future anti-abortion laws, so why don’t they? Or coalitions among cities could accomplish a lot - e.g. we can’t force people to take vaccines, but we can work to make them cheap, effective, and available to anyone that will.
Navel-gazing back into the past does serve a purpose, but only to the extent that we learn from our mistakes as we move forward.
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed.
You’re not going to succeed, nor will you ever care about anything that matters
He never said he invented the Internet. You saying that kinda shows how much you know.
At the time you didn’t have to be major disruptor like we need major disruption now. What you needed to do was move the needle, which could be done. Moving the needle early on drastically changes the path decades later.
There’s also what you say during the election and what you do. I’m pretty sure Bush played it up (I’m amazed at what I see him say in old videos). Gore played down what he intended to do, or didn’t make a big deal about it, because that’s not what got votes at the time. So they may sound similar but not actually be similar.
Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could’ve been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn’t have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might’ve had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.
I was so disappointed as a Canadian to see Gore lose. That stolen election was stolen from all of us not just America.
Imagine how different the entire world would be now if Bush/Chaney had never happened.
suck my balls
He did put effort into fighting it, Jeb blocked the recount after it was found Gore had negative votes and Bush had more votes than people in a county then when it got to the Supreme Court they ruled that it took too long to get to them for them to allow a recount
suck my balls
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, it’s nice to think what could have been, but still feels like a long shot at best.
Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral college, and while a staged right-wing riot caused significant confusion, and ultimately the Democratic party decided that ‘decorum’ was more important than stopping the conservative movement.
History isn’t inevitable, but nothing has fundementally changed about how Liberals and Democrats view strategy and politics; this should cause to to strongly consider the value or wisdom of statements like Blue No Matter Who, if even when victorious, they refuse to take it.
Its not a long shot. It actually is the timeline we should be on and Gore was *impeccably clear about climate change being his priority. He won, by both the electoral college final count and the popular vote. The election was stolen from the American people but is relegated to a modern folk tale, in-spite of it actually being reality.
Gore absolutely did not make climate change his priority in 2000. That’s just a straight up lie. He campaigned almost entirely on the economy and reforming social security and Medicare. Climate change was NOT a top issue for voters or for Gore in 2000.
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Mmm yes but Gore winning wouldn’t provide Cheney with lots of lucrative no-bid Halliburton contracts.
Oh c’mon it’s not like they passed a law making it okay to profiteer off of war so they could gouge the taxpayers for - checks earpeice ohhh. That’s right, they did.
The resolution to illegally attack Iraq purposefully left out the war profiteering.
Still though. Both sides bad, let’s all listen to the FSB and not vote.
We can also imagine a reality where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were collectively not elected and global neoliberalism failed to crystallize.
But this is just day dreaming. The reality is those things didn’t happen and here we are.
It’s also the old story, the same that many governments faced during COVID, if you do a lot and actually stop something from happening, people say it was a waste of time, nothing happened, you over reacted etc.
If you don’t do anything and it all goes badly, people say you didn’t do enough etc.
So theoretically even if Gore did start to fix climate change, if he had real impact, there’s a chance the world would’ve turned against climate change as a hoax and waste of time.
The sad part is, we’d still probably be better off overall.
Climate Commitment. We’ve been screwed since the ‘90’s. Gore may have mitigated the warming, but a certain amount of warming would have occurred regardless, and will continue even if we achieve net-zero emissions. There is an amount of latent heat already trapped in the atmosphere. The warming we are experiencing now is from the early 2000’s.
I know. I suck. But the science is clear. We done screwed up. Much love to all.
Honestly doubt it. Money talks. Also the president doesn’t make the laws.
america’s been fucking its education system in the ass (unconsentingly) since 1980, and now you’re a country of redneck morons, exactly per the plan you made. Good job!
