Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in the United States and let out a deep sigh. Had CFC propellants emerged today, I highly doubt the U.S. would have been a signatory to the Montreal Protocol — just to own the libs or avoid hindering the market by a boogeyman of 0.0001% overhead or some other form of contrarian political identity differentiation.
Yeah - even where I am there has been a pull back on stuff. We've got a ban on plastic straws (ie, you can't use one then throw it in the trash in the resteraunt) to help save nature. But you go outside and the amount of trash just blowing into the water from various encampments near the water is just nuts. Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If car…
While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much faster and at a lower cost.
> I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things.
I'd humbly submit you aren't listening the left arguments if you think they aren't putting out solutions.
Most people I know on the left deride paper straws just as much as you do.
The serious solutions that have been proposed are things like carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable installation and electric vehicles, ending subsidies on the fossil fuel industry. Regulations decreasing allowable fuel consumption from vehicles.
These are serious solutions that would have major positive impacts.
And, as you can imagine, they've all been met with total opposition from the Republicans. Ranging anywhere from outright denying that climate change is real to lying about the impacts of renewable tech or fear mongering over things like "How can we recycle every part of the solar panel! Guess we better just burn oil instead".
Nuclear is a fine solution, it isn't the only solution and it is absolutely more of a long term solution until regulations around new plants ease up.
In the mean time, the best actions we can take today are making it more expensive to release greenhouse gasses in the first place through taxation and subsidizing greenhouse gas free power generation.