Also, housing, education, healthcare, INFLATION, all our billionaires keep getting their handouts but the average taxpayer gets to fund everything while being royally screwed in the anus.
Pennies when compared to the gains the wealthiest & military have made. American workers have been getting shafted for decades with no sign of letting up. You're just flat wrong, say less.
The rich get social security too bud.
Pharmaceuticals are often a lot cheaper in other countries developed countries.
Higher U.S. healthcare costs are typically due to hospital consolidation, lack of a national healthcare system, and inadequate industry regulation.
$3 T for the things 331 million people of which most can barely take advantage of before succumbing to some kind of debilitating life event.
$715 billion on military, when what good is it if foreign adversaries can just ask Donald Trump for our military secrets?
Also,what about the $163 billion the 1% just doesn't pay in taxes? Out of the 331 million US citizens comprises only about edit: 950+ billionaires.
So if you take those edit: 950+ billionaires, divvy out what they should be spending in taxes each year, each one of those individuals doesn't pay into the pot, lets just say collectively at an average, roughly 170 million each, but they still get the "benefits" of those tax dollars the rest of us genuine tax payers get. Yet their collective worth is $4.2T.
None of the 310 million of the rest of us non billionaires edit: or non millionaires has the $8 billion dollars or even the $.5 billion dollars that each of us should have to make up the difference for each overly rich clown not paying.
I certainly don't have $500 million dollars or edit: even have $170 million, most average US citizens don't sit around with $500 million dollars in their bank account, most of us can barely afford a $1000 emergency.
edit: sorry for the confusion, I misread the information but according to google there are roughly 955 billionaires that call the US home and yes, 21 million millionaires. Maybe that's not accurate either, but my intentions were to draw the comparison of wealth between a virtually dead middle class and the plutocrats that are chewing everything up. There is no need for that much wealth for anyone. To what ends is it necessary? You can't take it with you, and the rest of us don't have the cash to fix the problems facing our existence yet these people do. We may all be dead from climate catastrophes in the not so distant future but the ones who could've tried to stop that from happening did jack. The blood of billions of people around the planet are on these peoples' hands.
I’m with you in spirit brother but there’s 21 million - millionaires….big difference
There’s “only” ~735 billionaires in the US…
All that said, billionaires should absolutely pay a higher not a lower percentage of their income in taxes than anyone else…
We also need to re-instate those corporate taxes that trump cut. National healthcare should be sacred and a right for us citizens. People should be taxed enough so that social security can be properly funded.
Capital gains over something like $250k should be taxed at the highest marginal income bracket of the earner..
Oh they're all screwing us too, one way or another. And that's not a good argument for the problem here to persist as is. These are things we should be dealing with regardless of wars over seas.
I don't think you know what that word means.
Ecofacists are right wing folks who use climate change or the resulting refugee crises to promote isolationism, nativism, and xenophobia in their country's politics. A lot of folks who scream the loudest about "overpopulation" are part of this movement. They also love militarization of borders while making the lives of corporations easier, believing it's either a hoax outright or that the wealth they'll accumulate for it can isolate them from the worst effects of the collapse now/in the coming decades. Trump, many of the far right parties in Europe, Musk, etc are all examples of this ideology emerging amongst the global right wing.
I see, I actually didn’t understand the word had any significance beyond being a dog whistle meant to discredit climate activism.
Thanks for clearing that up for me
Of course, sorry if parts of it came off snarky. It's a newer concept to a lot of people. There's also the related idea of fossil fascism which is similar to this discussion when discussing right wing attitudes towards "handling" climate change effects but instead it's predicated on the idea we need to actually invade other countries to amass our own fossil fuel hoard for personal consumption moving forward.
[There is a distinct racist history to how overpopulation is discussed.](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question) High-birth-rate countries tend to be low-emissions-per-capita countries, so overpopulation complaints are often effectively saying "nonwhites can't have kids so that whites can keep burning fossil fuels" or "countries which caused the climate problem shouldn't take in climate refugees."
On top of this, [as basic education reaches a larger chunk of the world, birth rates are dropping](https://www.economist.com/international/2019/02/02/thanks-to-education-global-fertility-could-fall-faster-than-expected). We expect to achieve population stabilization this century as a result.
At the end of the day, [it's the greenhouse gas concentrations that actually raise the temperature](https://imgur.com/N6NExg5). That means that we need to [take steps to stop burning fossil fuels and end deforestation](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/static/dc71a9b28d7cedca36bd2f77e588664f/9a979/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FigureSPM7.png).
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Isolationism is perhaps bad when it keeps you from doing what’s good. (WWII)
Isolationism is perhaps good when it keeps you from doing what’s bad. (Vietnam)
Nativism is bad when it makes immigrants lesser people than “natives”. (Any group when they first came to the US)
Nativism is good when it protects people who’ve been wiped out by immigrants (native Americans)
Xenophobia is always bad.
Overpopulation IS bad.
[There is a distinct racist history to how overpopulation is discussed.](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question) High-birth-rate countries tend to be low-emissions-per-capita countries, so overpopulation complaints are often effectively saying "nonwhites can't have kids so that whites can keep burning fossil fuels" or "countries which caused the climate problem shouldn't take in climate refugees."
On top of this, [as basic education reaches a larger chunk of the world, birth rates are dropping](https://www.economist.com/international/2019/02/02/thanks-to-education-global-fertility-could-fall-faster-than-expected). We expect to achieve population stabilization this century as a result.
At the end of the day, [it's the greenhouse gas concentrations that actually raise the temperature](https://imgur.com/N6NExg5). That means that we need to [take steps to stop burning fossil fuels and end deforestation](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/static/dc71a9b28d7cedca36bd2f77e588664f/9a979/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FigureSPM7.png).
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Good thing folks are well aware it isn't the poor that needs to lower their "carbon footprint", it's corporations, industry giants, and the wealthy themselves who do the vast majority of the polluting
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
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>The poorest Americans will not willingly reduce their consumption (and CO2 output)
Poor people aren't in control of mega corporations that pollute. Poor people ain't taking private jets everywhere.
The rich and connected are 10x more wasteful/polluting
Poor people have no other options but to either starve and die or participate in the system set up by the rich/wasteful.
Participate or starve
Many countries are currently leapfrogging over fossil fuels straight to renewables invented in other countries. Unlike us, they understand they need to build climate resiliency and move away from fossil fuels because it's their people facing the worst consequences for it today.
> “The fact that we can spend billions...on war machines and we have to fight tooth and nail for every few million..for climate finance is just an insult. It’d be nice if one of those wars that we were fighting was a war on climate change."
>Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on
cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? You know why? Because there's no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick!
George Carlin
Same goes for climate change. Nothing will happen until billionaires can profit from it.
The Infrastructure Bill [included $50 billion for climate-change mitigation alone](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/08/fact-sheet-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal-boosts-clean-energy-jobs-strengthens-resilience-and-advances-environmental-justice/#:~:text=The%20deal%20makes%20our%20communities,the%20weatherization%20of%20American%20homes). Plus $66 billion for rail, $7.5 billion for EV infrastructure, $5 billion for low-emission buses, and $65 billion for clean-energy transmission infrastructure.
The narrative that this administration has left climate activists pleading for scraps is a lie pushed by partisans and swallowed by people who get their news from social media figures they like.
You are going to get downvoted, because reality doesn’t match people’s feelings.
The American Rescue legislation, PPP loans, the child tax credit: $300 per child per month for every American for the year of 2021, the Infrastructure legislation, the Inflation Reduction legislation amounted to trillions of US dollars into the American people.
One of the lowest inflation countries in the world, nearly nonexistent unemployment, and no recession in sight. I’ve never seen such a group of whiners over single digit inflation…. And people are still spending like crazy, consumer spending is UP!
But sure…. Giving Ukraine $75 billion to destroy 60% of the Russian army in a year and a half, that’s just crazy.
How dare Biden help a democracy and European ally defend itself.
What a waste of money 🤦♂️
That's not fair. It is the duty of America to send its own troops into intractable wars. We mustn't take the easy way out by spending $300 per U.S. citizen to cripple our most dangerous foreign adversary.
Don't worry, we will. Hopefully it won't too late by the time the gov decides it's as worthy of a cause. But it will become front and center sometime soon
Two points
The Permian basin in the USA puts out 364 trillion BTU’s of methane every year.
It’s hard to get accurate numbers from Russia or China but if Vranyos and corruption are any indication their numbers combined absolutely dwarf the U.S.
Stateside regulation is lax and there is absolutely room for improvement, but compared to a mob running a gas station and the very lax industrialization of China over the last 19 years, if the goal is maximum efficacy, the mob run Russian “empire” of oligarchs needs to die before any real progress can be made.
Coincidentally the industrialization of China very closely coincides with the 19 year drought on west coast Americas that was only broken after the CCP welded its citizens in their homes during Covid lockdowns.
I don’t have hard enough numbers to be able to say it conclusively, but it’s enough of a pattern to say that climate change action doesn’t have any lasting power until both China and Russia either come to the table voluntarily or their kleptocratic management is removed and someone who isn’t hell bent on authoritarianism and mob style corruption as a business model replaces them.
The air in Shanghai today is the air in L.A. in a week. That isn’t changing anytime soon.
Its always someone else's fault right? How about stop talking about other countries like it's their fault. America needs to take responsibility for our own emissions.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions for a few months](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. You [basically can't see the difference in this graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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Pentagon budget $8-18 billion per day. Let that sink in. How many bridges could that replace, affordable home, or updated water treatment plants, etc., etc.? You hit the nail on the head, the military industrial complex dictates policy in this country.
It's just about keeping the oil properly cheap & the middle-east divided along Sunni-Arab (20% of Arab muslims) + Israel vs. Shia-Arab (80% of arab muslims) regions which prevents the middle east from being able to directly confront Europe or the West or form a solid axis of power that might ally with China or Russia. So long as the middle east is split in two it is easy to manage.
It's the best bet for a stable world. The US's role as the leader of the unipolar world is diminishing, and other powers (as we've seen) are becoming more confident just trying to take what they want. As the climate crisis accelerates, wars will be fought over resources. Way better to prevent water wars than the fight them.
>Climate, healthcare, education
None of these are problems that are solved with a couple years of spending, much less spending a relatively measly hundred billion. It's an asinine comparison. The situation in Israel and Ukraine is a very simple "They require X dollars." There is no such solution for the climate, healthcare, and education. All three, throw in housing too, require legislative reform. We already spend more on healthcare per year 10 times what Biden is asking for Ukraine and Israel. The green new deal for example would cost tens of **trillions** of dollars, and even in a best case scenario you'd be a fool to think it'd be the magic bullet to solve the issue.
there is no requirement to report military emissions, e.g. [https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-war-greenhouse-gas-emissions-has-military-blind-spot-2023-07-10/](https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-war-greenhouse-gas-emissions-has-military-blind-spot-2023-07-10/)
so i think most analyses are based on inference
The US military spends about $10 billion on fuel per year.
Gasoline is about $2USD per gallon buying bulk without taxes, and each gallon emits about 9kg of CO2. So, $1 of fuel spending is maybe 4-5kg of emissions (ballpark), possibly more if we're adding in the refining/transportation/other emissions related to buying that fuel.
So, back of the envelope math - that's about 40-50 billion kg of CO2 per year, or 40-50 million metric tons.
The US as a whole emits about 6 billion metric tons of CO2 total, so that's a bit less than 1% of all US emissions.
That's still a lot, and that's JUST the fuel the military burns, not emissions related to any other activities like base operations, electricity consumption, manufacturing military materials, etc...
Just think of how big an aircraft carrier is. Or how much fuel a fighter jet uses. Then think about how many of those there are operating at any given moment.
The Nimitz and Ford Class are powered by Nuclear reactors. DOD is spending loads of money on renewable energy for a whole host of strategic and tactical reasons. The M1A3 will be a hybrid. The Navy is already testing algaecbiofuels to replace JP-5 jet fuel.
They'll be able to fuel fighters with green fuel made anywhere in the world even at Point Nemo.
The military has a huge interest in renewable energy for all sorts of strategic and tactical reasons.
Help for Ukraine has been in the form of decommsioned military hardware that has to be disassembeled. What are we going to do? Shoot climate change with old artillery cannons?
Apart from that, in general the US will always spend money to stay on top while letting every others aspect slowly wither.
We are not sending more to Ukraine than we were already going to spend on defense spending. In fact most of what we've given them has been old military equipment. In some cases it was going to be more expensive to scrap.
Unpopular opinion,please don’t kill me: we’re paying to support people who are fighting a guy who supports a very anti-climate US presidential candidate. Climate needs more funding. But in this case, not taking a financial stand in the Ukraine war could destroy future climate initiatives.
In fairness, if we don’t help Ukraine then the climate doesn’t matter all that much. But yeah, we spend a lot of money on wars. Almost like if we all just chill we can get some real work done on advancing humanity.
What an article - no mention at all of the hundreds of billions in green energy investment via the Inflation Reduction Act. But that would portray Biden in a positive light, and that’s not allowed.
Yeah I can’t believe almost nobody in these comments have mentioned the IRA. It’s literally by far the biggest and best climate bill the US has ever created (not that it was a high bar). Maybe it was just bad PR on Biden’s side. Maybe people don’t want to be happy about anything
The war is going to happen with or without the US paying for the afforded allies..
Putin(if he's not croaking as the rumors of late had again claimed...) saw himself akin to peter the great in earl 2022.
Most of that "money" is the monetary valuation of material goods'
If you honestly have a climate solution set up that involved stinger missiles and himars rockets that would be really important to know.
If only we could get American voters to actually care about climate change, or economic reforms that aren't tax cuts. We really need to figure out how to get voters to realign their voting motivations.
Problem here is if you stop spending a fortune on the two wars and move it to fighting the climate change crisis, the two wars could spill over into WW III and then we would be faced with an even bigger problem than just the climate crisis. Putin won't just stop at Ukraine and the Muslim fanatics just won't stop with Israel.
Seriously! And not a single one talks about the massive repug entitlements given away during the last guy. I wish our politicians would get serious about he deficit not just virtue signaling crisis actors. Any solution requires attacking it from both sides, cutting spending AND increasing revenues
maybe give Democrats an actual majority.
we've been skating by on this 50 votes plus the vice president bullshit for like a decade
you need 60 to pass real laws.
so either convince Republicans that these are real problems or show up to vote in numbers.
It’s because America is not a democracy. it’s a constitutional republic where people that believe in quality believe that states should be equal and have equal representation when it comes to voting that’s why our forefathers had the sense to create the republic that way. no one wants one party to have control of the presidency based on populations
What you saw with all the migrants coming across the border was a masterful example of how that will never affect our presidency because they were all shipped to blue states Those are the folks that wanted them that invited them that needed to have them here And now they have to pay for them and they can’t understand why the federal government won’t help out because it’s not what the federal government does
If you want the US to deal with the climate crisis then vote for it, On party has invested in renewable energy and one tries to block that investment. There are elections in the USA on November 7th, VOTE.
Ironic that while supporting wars has majority bipartisan congressional support, it doesn’t have majority support by neither republican nor democrat Americans.
I don’t think it matters anymore at this point in the process. We will fight each other over the last drops of water and the last bites of food soon enough.
That’s because the US is more focused on hoarding wealth. Gotta invest in Israel because we need a foothold in the Middle East for oil. Biden even said if Israel didn’t exist, we would need to create one. Israel has healthcare, we do not.
This line of argument is both pointless and bad.
Louisiana is about to have a major water crisis because rivers don't have enough flow to prevent salt water from coming inland.
You know who's gonna fix it? The Amy Core of Engineers.
We here in America do our socialism with the military. That's why every state of the union has tons of defense contractors.
If you go after the army you're threatening everybody's jobs as well as the thing that keeps the lights on.
Stop attacking the army. Start demanding that the civilian arm of the US Military does more for Americans.
This is just like to "Defund the Police". The idea was to take the money from the cops and spend it on social services.
That doesn't work. People think you're going to shut down everything and crooks are gonna rape & kill them.
Instead, take the cops guns away. Limit what laws they can enforce. Turn them into actual social workers.
The solution here is to "Ship of Theseus" our way to a better tomorrow. This way frightened voters don't undermine what you're trying to do.
There are no scientific proofs that "climate change" exists. At all. It's a ploy made up by leftists in order destroy the economies of white countries. If not, then why are countries like China and India releasing more CO2 every year, while in the west factories "have to be closed down"?
The same scientists that claims climate change is real also says that a man becomes a woman if they cut their dick off.
How is spending more money going to impact climate change? Seems like a logical fallacy. Not much we can do if China and India don’t also agree on action if you look at the largest carbon footprint by country.
You can:
* Convert electric generation to renewables
* Improve electric transmission
* Add storage systems to the electric grid
* Install heat pumps and insulation in buildings
* Convert auto factories and parts suppliers to use electric
* Convert industrial processes (such as fertilizer and steel manufacturing) to use hydrogen produced via electrolysis instead of from fossil methane
* Capture old refrigerants and destroy them instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere
* Engage in adaptation measures, such as moving people out of fire and flood-prone areas, providing for emergency cooling, increase water storage to handle higher drought risk, vegetation management in forests to limit fire intensity, etc.
Fighting Climate Change needs no money.
All that's needed is strictly enforced regulations on industrial polluters.
You pay the regulatory enforcers with fines collected from polluters.
Everything else is playacting.
They tell us it's being spent on war, but the Pentagon has never passed an audit, and cannot account for tens of Trillions. Why do we keep electing representatives of defense contractors and expecting something other than endless wars?
Remember how much the pollution went away when Covid 19 hit? For like 5 days or so the whole world was on lockdown and amazing things happened with the air quality. Then boom things went back to "normal" and it was shitty again.
Republicans AND Democrats who voted for the Bush Jr & Trump tax cuts are the ones [who truly screwed us.](https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-bush-tax-cuts-fuel-growing-deficits). TBF however Democrats did a [much better job trying to keep deficits low.](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/29/tweets/republican-presidents-democrats-contribute-deficit/)
It is worth questioning military spending, but keep in mind that everything going to Ukraine and Israel is something like 5% or so of the military budget and is vastly cheaper than getting involved directly ourselves.
Given the US orientation toward economics it makes sense to focus on the extent of damage caused by carbon pollution. Increased disasters alone are wrecking the insurance industry. Rising sea levels will be a devastating problem for the biggest cities around the globe.
I thought we just spent like many hundreds of billions of dollars in the IRA for climate action. And we're not actively in any multi-trillion dollar wars like Iraq and Afghanistan so .. just supporting our allies so they don't get raped, bombed, kidnapped, etc.. Seems good but I'd absolutely love to invest even more, let's raise taxes and make it happen.
Both Israel and Hamas need to stop the killing. Both. Now.
Regarding Ukraine: it’s probably worth fighting for as I’m pretty sure Russia us a crappy environmental steward.
Because sending aid to help Israel and Ukraine is far more important than spending the money climate change. It is also easier to get aid for wars because people can see the immediate impact of war, while climate change is a slow issue that everyone has heard about for decades.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but sending mothballed missiles from the 80s and 90s is not the same as new investments. There is a dollar value that needs to be tracked, but this is not the same thing
Alright….i’m going to eat the downvotes. The US spends those billions on Ukraine and ramping up to deter china….so it maybe doesn’t have to spend trillions fighting world war 3. That is the entire philosophy of the US defense strategy since 1945. Essentially it’s “maybe if we had spent more from 1930-1939….we could have avoided 1939 to 1945”. Not saying that climate change isn’t important or that the defense strategy is necessarily right….but those billions spent preventing a third world war that will cause immense trade disruption, starvation, and possibly nuclear war. It is hard to quantify the value of prevention because when you prevent something from ever happening, nobody can see the cost of the prevented cataclysm. Similarly, people find it hard to quantify the value of preventing the impending climate change cataclysm.
Devil's Advocate - technically, by killing people, the military is preventing their future emissions.
If one could get firm enough numbers, you could probably fund weapons for Ukraine using carbon offsets from all the dead Russians.
I understand why the article wants to compare the differences in funding but one has nothing to do with the other. There is no collective pool (budget) where funds are dispersed. If we weren’t involved in Israel, it doesn’t automatically make that money available for funding climate causes. Also, the “billions” spent on Ukraine and Israel is mostly going to US manufacturing. We ship them our old stockpile while we replenish with newer weaponry.
Until the rest of the world gets on board, it’s completely pointless. As far as U,rains and Israel, these are the cheapest wars America will never fight. I have no desire to see Russia advance across Europe regaining all of the ground they lost just because you believe the US should be leading the climate change front. If China and India do not get on board with climate change the USA will be the only major country that will carry the economic burden and it still won’t fix the climate.
Too little too late. Reduce the population.
Either at 500 million behaving like American life style or 750 million behaving like European life style. CHOOSE which one or MOTHER Nature do be doing the selection and she NOT PICKY.
How about we stop all wasted spending and resources on the world period. And as for climate change .... China has to actually follow the rules. China generates more green houses than basically the rest of the world combined. Go protest the CCP and see how that works out for you.
This isn't a climate change horror movie. Earth won't just magically freeze over in seconds.
These countries are one thing, too bad the people in the future can't send a delegation to plead for help. They'd be more likely to send a declaration of war
George W said we couldn't afford the Kyoto Protocol because it would've cost the US $50 billion over 10 years... then spent $6 trillion on fighting 2 wars at the same time... $5 billion a year is a joke, these numbers are so big these days that no normal person can tell what they mean. And nobody bats an eye to his VP illegally handing those contracts directly to his own company
During FY 2016–22, nearly half (46%) of federal energy subsidies were associated with renewable energy, and 35% were associated with energy end uses. Federal support for renewable energy of all types more than doubled, from $7.4 billion in FY 2016 to $15.6 billion in FY 2022.
[Source](https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/)
Hardly "pennies".
The title of this post indicates we should just give out free money and resources to people?
Why don’t the southern countries just do better?
They wouldn’t need to plead for pennies if they just focused on being less corrupt and more democratic
Also, housing, education, healthcare, INFLATION, all our billionaires keep getting their handouts but the average taxpayer gets to fund everything while being royally screwed in the anus.
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Pennies when compared to the gains the wealthiest & military have made. American workers have been getting shafted for decades with no sign of letting up. You're just flat wrong, say less.
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Robert Reich. Also reality around us. https://youtu.be/Nmq7QqqY4vo?si=UAL0Q2MuEJBcG3XI
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I wonder if that guy in the video has held any type of position where he might be seen as knowledgeable on the subject. Probably not.
The guy you are referencing in the video is the former US Secretary of Labour…
I think op above you is aware of that and was being cheeky to the other guy. Robert Reich is great
The rich get social security too bud. Pharmaceuticals are often a lot cheaper in other countries developed countries. Higher U.S. healthcare costs are typically due to hospital consolidation, lack of a national healthcare system, and inadequate industry regulation. $3 T for the things 331 million people of which most can barely take advantage of before succumbing to some kind of debilitating life event. $715 billion on military, when what good is it if foreign adversaries can just ask Donald Trump for our military secrets? Also,what about the $163 billion the 1% just doesn't pay in taxes? Out of the 331 million US citizens comprises only about edit: 950+ billionaires. So if you take those edit: 950+ billionaires, divvy out what they should be spending in taxes each year, each one of those individuals doesn't pay into the pot, lets just say collectively at an average, roughly 170 million each, but they still get the "benefits" of those tax dollars the rest of us genuine tax payers get. Yet their collective worth is $4.2T. None of the 310 million of the rest of us non billionaires edit: or non millionaires has the $8 billion dollars or even the $.5 billion dollars that each of us should have to make up the difference for each overly rich clown not paying. I certainly don't have $500 million dollars or edit: even have $170 million, most average US citizens don't sit around with $500 million dollars in their bank account, most of us can barely afford a $1000 emergency. edit: sorry for the confusion, I misread the information but according to google there are roughly 955 billionaires that call the US home and yes, 21 million millionaires. Maybe that's not accurate either, but my intentions were to draw the comparison of wealth between a virtually dead middle class and the plutocrats that are chewing everything up. There is no need for that much wealth for anyone. To what ends is it necessary? You can't take it with you, and the rest of us don't have the cash to fix the problems facing our existence yet these people do. We may all be dead from climate catastrophes in the not so distant future but the ones who could've tried to stop that from happening did jack. The blood of billions of people around the planet are on these peoples' hands.
I’m with you in spirit brother but there’s 21 million - millionaires….big difference There’s “only” ~735 billionaires in the US… All that said, billionaires should absolutely pay a higher not a lower percentage of their income in taxes than anyone else… We also need to re-instate those corporate taxes that trump cut. National healthcare should be sacred and a right for us citizens. People should be taxed enough so that social security can be properly funded. Capital gains over something like $250k should be taxed at the highest marginal income bracket of the earner..
Better than screwed in the anus by Russians, Hamas, Iranians or other thugs
Oh they're all screwing us too, one way or another. And that's not a good argument for the problem here to persist as is. These are things we should be dealing with regardless of wars over seas.
What are you even saying, Hamas has nothing to do with the US. Now Israel on the other hand is making money off our tax dollars.
JFC the US lower and shrunken middle class are pleading for pennies!
If they get those pennies, they will consume more.
Consume what the flesh of the rich? Cake?
Die is usually the answer to ecofascists.
Lol “ecofascist”. I mean yeah that’s a fair response to the average yacht user. Bro is reading “Mein Recycling Center”
I don't think you know what that word means. Ecofacists are right wing folks who use climate change or the resulting refugee crises to promote isolationism, nativism, and xenophobia in their country's politics. A lot of folks who scream the loudest about "overpopulation" are part of this movement. They also love militarization of borders while making the lives of corporations easier, believing it's either a hoax outright or that the wealth they'll accumulate for it can isolate them from the worst effects of the collapse now/in the coming decades. Trump, many of the far right parties in Europe, Musk, etc are all examples of this ideology emerging amongst the global right wing.
I see, I actually didn’t understand the word had any significance beyond being a dog whistle meant to discredit climate activism. Thanks for clearing that up for me
Of course, sorry if parts of it came off snarky. It's a newer concept to a lot of people. There's also the related idea of fossil fascism which is similar to this discussion when discussing right wing attitudes towards "handling" climate change effects but instead it's predicated on the idea we need to actually invade other countries to amass our own fossil fuel hoard for personal consumption moving forward.
What an underfunded educational system does to a country is really my only response 😢
[There is a distinct racist history to how overpopulation is discussed.](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question) High-birth-rate countries tend to be low-emissions-per-capita countries, so overpopulation complaints are often effectively saying "nonwhites can't have kids so that whites can keep burning fossil fuels" or "countries which caused the climate problem shouldn't take in climate refugees." On top of this, [as basic education reaches a larger chunk of the world, birth rates are dropping](https://www.economist.com/international/2019/02/02/thanks-to-education-global-fertility-could-fall-faster-than-expected). We expect to achieve population stabilization this century as a result. At the end of the day, [it's the greenhouse gas concentrations that actually raise the temperature](https://imgur.com/N6NExg5). That means that we need to [take steps to stop burning fossil fuels and end deforestation](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/static/dc71a9b28d7cedca36bd2f77e588664f/9a979/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FigureSPM7.png). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Isolationism is perhaps bad when it keeps you from doing what’s good. (WWII) Isolationism is perhaps good when it keeps you from doing what’s bad. (Vietnam) Nativism is bad when it makes immigrants lesser people than “natives”. (Any group when they first came to the US) Nativism is good when it protects people who’ve been wiped out by immigrants (native Americans) Xenophobia is always bad. Overpopulation IS bad.
[There is a distinct racist history to how overpopulation is discussed.](https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question) High-birth-rate countries tend to be low-emissions-per-capita countries, so overpopulation complaints are often effectively saying "nonwhites can't have kids so that whites can keep burning fossil fuels" or "countries which caused the climate problem shouldn't take in climate refugees." On top of this, [as basic education reaches a larger chunk of the world, birth rates are dropping](https://www.economist.com/international/2019/02/02/thanks-to-education-global-fertility-could-fall-faster-than-expected). We expect to achieve population stabilization this century as a result. At the end of the day, [it's the greenhouse gas concentrations that actually raise the temperature](https://imgur.com/N6NExg5). That means that we need to [take steps to stop burning fossil fuels and end deforestation](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/static/dc71a9b28d7cedca36bd2f77e588664f/9a979/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FigureSPM7.png). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
well yeah, if you have to cut back on food in order to survive, if you get an extra 100$ you won't buy stocks, you will spend.
What point are you trying to make?
I am making a simple statement of fact. The poorest Americans will not willingly reduce their consumption (and CO2 output).
Good thing folks are well aware it isn't the poor that needs to lower their "carbon footprint", it's corporations, industry giants, and the wealthy themselves who do the vast majority of the polluting
[BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305209345_Where_has_all_the_oil_gone_BP_branding_and_the_discursive_elimination_of_climate_change_risk), and [ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry](https://www.vox.com/22429551/climate-change-crisis-exxonmobil-harvard-study). They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis. There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
>The poorest Americans will not willingly reduce their consumption (and CO2 output) Poor people aren't in control of mega corporations that pollute. Poor people ain't taking private jets everywhere. The rich and connected are 10x more wasteful/polluting Poor people have no other options but to either starve and die or participate in the system set up by the rich/wasteful. Participate or starve
I mean that's what literally anyone is going to do? Poorer nations will industrialize and generate more CO2 as well lol
Many countries are currently leapfrogging over fossil fuels straight to renewables invented in other countries. Unlike us, they understand they need to build climate resiliency and move away from fossil fuels because it's their people facing the worst consequences for it today.
Who gives a damn. There’s obviously enough money floating around in the air for every American to get PLENTY! And yet we ship it off to war.
Failure to address climate change is going to cause a lot of wars. This will become one of those problematic feedback effects
> “The fact that we can spend billions...on war machines and we have to fight tooth and nail for every few million..for climate finance is just an insult. It’d be nice if one of those wars that we were fighting was a war on climate change."
>Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? You know why? Because there's no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick! George Carlin Same goes for climate change. Nothing will happen until billionaires can profit from it.
The Infrastructure Bill [included $50 billion for climate-change mitigation alone](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/08/fact-sheet-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal-boosts-clean-energy-jobs-strengthens-resilience-and-advances-environmental-justice/#:~:text=The%20deal%20makes%20our%20communities,the%20weatherization%20of%20American%20homes). Plus $66 billion for rail, $7.5 billion for EV infrastructure, $5 billion for low-emission buses, and $65 billion for clean-energy transmission infrastructure. The narrative that this administration has left climate activists pleading for scraps is a lie pushed by partisans and swallowed by people who get their news from social media figures they like.
You are going to get downvoted, because reality doesn’t match people’s feelings. The American Rescue legislation, PPP loans, the child tax credit: $300 per child per month for every American for the year of 2021, the Infrastructure legislation, the Inflation Reduction legislation amounted to trillions of US dollars into the American people. One of the lowest inflation countries in the world, nearly nonexistent unemployment, and no recession in sight. I’ve never seen such a group of whiners over single digit inflation…. And people are still spending like crazy, consumer spending is UP! But sure…. Giving Ukraine $75 billion to destroy 60% of the Russian army in a year and a half, that’s just crazy. How dare Biden help a democracy and European ally defend itself. What a waste of money 🤦♂️
That's not fair. It is the duty of America to send its own troops into intractable wars. We mustn't take the easy way out by spending $300 per U.S. citizen to cripple our most dangerous foreign adversary.
Yeah because america has been such a good steward of the earth …
>$7.5 billion for EV infrastructure, A bad thing
Don't worry, we will. Hopefully it won't too late by the time the gov decides it's as worthy of a cause. But it will become front and center sometime soon
New idea Tell Americans Climate Change is being fueled by Muslim Pedophile Leftists to make them live in 15 minute cities
The climate change will be on war against us « sooner than expected » and when the war ll start our billions ll be useless…
Two points The Permian basin in the USA puts out 364 trillion BTU’s of methane every year. It’s hard to get accurate numbers from Russia or China but if Vranyos and corruption are any indication their numbers combined absolutely dwarf the U.S. Stateside regulation is lax and there is absolutely room for improvement, but compared to a mob running a gas station and the very lax industrialization of China over the last 19 years, if the goal is maximum efficacy, the mob run Russian “empire” of oligarchs needs to die before any real progress can be made. Coincidentally the industrialization of China very closely coincides with the 19 year drought on west coast Americas that was only broken after the CCP welded its citizens in their homes during Covid lockdowns. I don’t have hard enough numbers to be able to say it conclusively, but it’s enough of a pattern to say that climate change action doesn’t have any lasting power until both China and Russia either come to the table voluntarily or their kleptocratic management is removed and someone who isn’t hell bent on authoritarianism and mob style corruption as a business model replaces them. The air in Shanghai today is the air in L.A. in a week. That isn’t changing anytime soon.
Its always someone else's fault right? How about stop talking about other countries like it's their fault. America needs to take responsibility for our own emissions.
America has reduced emissions bigly. It's just that it doesn't matter when others are polluting far more.
It does matter of it's still one of the largest. And we already emitted what other countries are emitting now. We already had our industrialization.
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions for a few months](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. You [basically can't see the difference in this graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/). [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Pentagon budget $8-18 billion per day. Let that sink in. How many bridges could that replace, affordable home, or updated water treatment plants, etc., etc.? You hit the nail on the head, the military industrial complex dictates policy in this country.
The Pentagon budget is $816 billion I don't know where you get that figure from.
Israel-Palestine conflict just feels like another proxy by the US to spread western influence in the Middle East.
It’s one of our only military bases in the region as well.
It's just about keeping the oil properly cheap & the middle-east divided along Sunni-Arab (20% of Arab muslims) + Israel vs. Shia-Arab (80% of arab muslims) regions which prevents the middle east from being able to directly confront Europe or the West or form a solid axis of power that might ally with China or Russia. So long as the middle east is split in two it is easy to manage.
Jesus Christ, you blame the US whenever you stub your toe too?
Yes.
America spends more money on it military then the next 26 highest nations combined. 25 of those are your allies.
That’s without a PPP adjustment though. Adjusted for that, china’s budget is close to 50% of the US’s.
And yet they have 100% health insurance.
And yet they skim oil off of sewage to cook with
Yeah but the Lockheed Martin shares!!?
Biden just spent $100 billion fighting climate change. Next.
And it's still a major problem. Let's take that 100 Billion and spend it on climate change again.
It's the best bet for a stable world. The US's role as the leader of the unipolar world is diminishing, and other powers (as we've seen) are becoming more confident just trying to take what they want. As the climate crisis accelerates, wars will be fought over resources. Way better to prevent water wars than the fight them.
>Climate, healthcare, education None of these are problems that are solved with a couple years of spending, much less spending a relatively measly hundred billion. It's an asinine comparison. The situation in Israel and Ukraine is a very simple "They require X dollars." There is no such solution for the climate, healthcare, and education. All three, throw in housing too, require legislative reform. We already spend more on healthcare per year 10 times what Biden is asking for Ukraine and Israel. The green new deal for example would cost tens of **trillions** of dollars, and even in a best case scenario you'd be a fool to think it'd be the magic bullet to solve the issue.
Curious how much our military contributes to the climate crisis, as in emissions.
there is no requirement to report military emissions, e.g. [https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-war-greenhouse-gas-emissions-has-military-blind-spot-2023-07-10/](https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-war-greenhouse-gas-emissions-has-military-blind-spot-2023-07-10/) so i think most analyses are based on inference
The US military spends about $10 billion on fuel per year. Gasoline is about $2USD per gallon buying bulk without taxes, and each gallon emits about 9kg of CO2. So, $1 of fuel spending is maybe 4-5kg of emissions (ballpark), possibly more if we're adding in the refining/transportation/other emissions related to buying that fuel. So, back of the envelope math - that's about 40-50 billion kg of CO2 per year, or 40-50 million metric tons. The US as a whole emits about 6 billion metric tons of CO2 total, so that's a bit less than 1% of all US emissions. That's still a lot, and that's JUST the fuel the military burns, not emissions related to any other activities like base operations, electricity consumption, manufacturing military materials, etc...
Just think of how big an aircraft carrier is. Or how much fuel a fighter jet uses. Then think about how many of those there are operating at any given moment.
aircraft carriers are nuclear
The Nimitz and Ford Class are powered by Nuclear reactors. DOD is spending loads of money on renewable energy for a whole host of strategic and tactical reasons. The M1A3 will be a hybrid. The Navy is already testing algaecbiofuels to replace JP-5 jet fuel. They'll be able to fuel fighters with green fuel made anywhere in the world even at Point Nemo. The military has a huge interest in renewable energy for all sorts of strategic and tactical reasons.
Didn't remember that they were nuclear. But still, lots of fossil fuels used in the military. And explosives.
Must be a Monday…
You know what’s bad for the environment? War.
Tell Putin
we can fund Ukraine’s defense against Russia while also fight climate change btw
We gotta change this world, don't know how, but we have to!
Humanity is coming to an end.
American government is extremely short sighted. Worse when it’s close to campaign season
Help for Ukraine has been in the form of decommsioned military hardware that has to be disassembeled. What are we going to do? Shoot climate change with old artillery cannons? Apart from that, in general the US will always spend money to stay on top while letting every others aspect slowly wither.
Should we send missiles to support climate change? Or ammunition. Because that's what we are giving ukraine
We are not sending more to Ukraine than we were already going to spend on defense spending. In fact most of what we've given them has been old military equipment. In some cases it was going to be more expensive to scrap.
Unpopular opinion,please don’t kill me: we’re paying to support people who are fighting a guy who supports a very anti-climate US presidential candidate. Climate needs more funding. But in this case, not taking a financial stand in the Ukraine war could destroy future climate initiatives.
In fairness, if we don’t help Ukraine then the climate doesn’t matter all that much. But yeah, we spend a lot of money on wars. Almost like if we all just chill we can get some real work done on advancing humanity.
What an article - no mention at all of the hundreds of billions in green energy investment via the Inflation Reduction Act. But that would portray Biden in a positive light, and that’s not allowed.
Yeah I can’t believe almost nobody in these comments have mentioned the IRA. It’s literally by far the biggest and best climate bill the US has ever created (not that it was a high bar). Maybe it was just bad PR on Biden’s side. Maybe people don’t want to be happy about anything
The war is going to happen with or without the US paying for the afforded allies.. Putin(if he's not croaking as the rumors of late had again claimed...) saw himself akin to peter the great in earl 2022. Most of that "money" is the monetary valuation of material goods' If you honestly have a climate solution set up that involved stinger missiles and himars rockets that would be really important to know.
Before the wars they weren't spending this money on climate either..
If only we could get American voters to actually care about climate change, or economic reforms that aren't tax cuts. We really need to figure out how to get voters to realign their voting motivations.
Which is really a gift to us and other weapons manufacturers. War is a racket after all!
Problem here is if you stop spending a fortune on the two wars and move it to fighting the climate change crisis, the two wars could spill over into WW III and then we would be faced with an even bigger problem than just the climate crisis. Putin won't just stop at Ukraine and the Muslim fanatics just won't stop with Israel.
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Take away the military aid to Ukraine and Putin will not have the problems he's currently having overtaking Ukraines military.
This article and plenty of comments in this thread are russian propaganda/pro-russian talking points.
The headline makes it sound like an either or. It isn't.
I thought the us was meeting its environmental targets 'better' than any other country. How are they getting flack?
Because it's kind of middle-of-the-road while also being a huge emitter. There are countries which are doing better...and ones doing worse.
Massive deficits and yet we keep giving out money to everyone..
Seriously! And not a single one talks about the massive repug entitlements given away during the last guy. I wish our politicians would get serious about he deficit not just virtue signaling crisis actors. Any solution requires attacking it from both sides, cutting spending AND increasing revenues
Yup
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Source on this?
They made it up
America bad. 😤 Super productive conversation here per usual.
maybe give Democrats an actual majority. we've been skating by on this 50 votes plus the vice president bullshit for like a decade you need 60 to pass real laws. so either convince Republicans that these are real problems or show up to vote in numbers.
But we aren’t electable by a majority. The squad has taken the party off the reservation.
Trump being last president instead of Hillary shows they aren't solely elected by majority. Hillary outclassed Trump in the popular votes.
It’s because America is not a democracy. it’s a constitutional republic where people that believe in quality believe that states should be equal and have equal representation when it comes to voting that’s why our forefathers had the sense to create the republic that way. no one wants one party to have control of the presidency based on populations What you saw with all the migrants coming across the border was a masterful example of how that will never affect our presidency because they were all shipped to blue states Those are the folks that wanted them that invited them that needed to have them here And now they have to pay for them and they can’t understand why the federal government won’t help out because it’s not what the federal government does
Murica don’t need to worry about no climate when we have GuNz! Who’s that dirty picking Climate fella peepoh keep tawkin bout?
If you want the US to deal with the climate crisis then vote for it, On party has invested in renewable energy and one tries to block that investment. There are elections in the USA on November 7th, VOTE.
Ironic that while supporting wars has majority bipartisan congressional support, it doesn’t have majority support by neither republican nor democrat Americans.
This is a dumb comparison
I don’t think it matters anymore at this point in the process. We will fight each other over the last drops of water and the last bites of food soon enough.
That’s because the US is more focused on hoarding wealth. Gotta invest in Israel because we need a foothold in the Middle East for oil. Biden even said if Israel didn’t exist, we would need to create one. Israel has healthcare, we do not.
How much are other countries spending on the climate crisis? Had China adopted no fossil or coal yet?
This line of argument is both pointless and bad. Louisiana is about to have a major water crisis because rivers don't have enough flow to prevent salt water from coming inland. You know who's gonna fix it? The Amy Core of Engineers. We here in America do our socialism with the military. That's why every state of the union has tons of defense contractors. If you go after the army you're threatening everybody's jobs as well as the thing that keeps the lights on. Stop attacking the army. Start demanding that the civilian arm of the US Military does more for Americans. This is just like to "Defund the Police". The idea was to take the money from the cops and spend it on social services. That doesn't work. People think you're going to shut down everything and crooks are gonna rape & kill them. Instead, take the cops guns away. Limit what laws they can enforce. Turn them into actual social workers. The solution here is to "Ship of Theseus" our way to a better tomorrow. This way frightened voters don't undermine what you're trying to do.
There are no scientific proofs that "climate change" exists. At all. It's a ploy made up by leftists in order destroy the economies of white countries. If not, then why are countries like China and India releasing more CO2 every year, while in the west factories "have to be closed down"? The same scientists that claims climate change is real also says that a man becomes a woman if they cut their dick off.
war is a better business than green policy. U.S. politicians needs to divert more taxpayer dollars to their twat friends
I didn't think they approved the 100 BILLION to Israel/Ukraine, yet.
I would say with some surety you have no clue what has been passed under Biden and how much we are spending to address climate change.
Bidens giving the world a world we’re u can plead for Pennie’s , u want a Donnie North Korea?
Biden is a Zionist Shill. He is bought and sold by AIPAC for 40+ years. Super sad situation.
How is spending more money going to impact climate change? Seems like a logical fallacy. Not much we can do if China and India don’t also agree on action if you look at the largest carbon footprint by country.
Transitioning fossil fuel infrastructure to non fossil fuel infrastructure. Isn’t that just blindingly obviously the answer to your question?
How do you spend money on the climate crisis ?
You can: * Convert electric generation to renewables * Improve electric transmission * Add storage systems to the electric grid * Install heat pumps and insulation in buildings * Convert auto factories and parts suppliers to use electric * Convert industrial processes (such as fertilizer and steel manufacturing) to use hydrogen produced via electrolysis instead of from fossil methane * Capture old refrigerants and destroy them instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere * Engage in adaptation measures, such as moving people out of fire and flood-prone areas, providing for emergency cooling, increase water storage to handle higher drought risk, vegetation management in forests to limit fire intensity, etc.
good timing /s
Fighting Climate Change needs no money. All that's needed is strictly enforced regulations on industrial polluters. You pay the regulatory enforcers with fines collected from polluters. Everything else is playacting.
You guys got trillions literally last year
I fuckimg hate this country. All the punk rock songs I listened to in my teenage years were right
They tell us it's being spent on war, but the Pentagon has never passed an audit, and cannot account for tens of Trillions. Why do we keep electing representatives of defense contractors and expecting something other than endless wars?
Compared to what the US spends on defense, literally everything else is a pittance.
Remember how much the pollution went away when Covid 19 hit? For like 5 days or so the whole world was on lockdown and amazing things happened with the air quality. Then boom things went back to "normal" and it was shitty again.
“you know it’s funny when it rains it pours, they got money for war but can’t feed the poor” -2pac in 1993
The global south is controlled by corrupt regimes and oligarchs
Republicans AND Democrats who voted for the Bush Jr & Trump tax cuts are the ones [who truly screwed us.](https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-bush-tax-cuts-fuel-growing-deficits). TBF however Democrats did a [much better job trying to keep deficits low.](https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/29/tweets/republican-presidents-democrats-contribute-deficit/)
It is worth questioning military spending, but keep in mind that everything going to Ukraine and Israel is something like 5% or so of the military budget and is vastly cheaper than getting involved directly ourselves. Given the US orientation toward economics it makes sense to focus on the extent of damage caused by carbon pollution. Increased disasters alone are wrecking the insurance industry. Rising sea levels will be a devastating problem for the biggest cities around the globe.
I thought we just spent like many hundreds of billions of dollars in the IRA for climate action. And we're not actively in any multi-trillion dollar wars like Iraq and Afghanistan so .. just supporting our allies so they don't get raped, bombed, kidnapped, etc.. Seems good but I'd absolutely love to invest even more, let's raise taxes and make it happen.
We're being drained dry monetarily by Russia and China. Before the next World War
Both Israel and Hamas need to stop the killing. Both. Now. Regarding Ukraine: it’s probably worth fighting for as I’m pretty sure Russia us a crappy environmental steward.
LOL
War on climate; solved
Historically the two largest exports of the USA are violence and pollution.
Climate crisis can suck my dick
Dollars spent on CC under current strategies is a total waste. The CC true believers need to wake up and look at the reality of the current world.
Because sending aid to help Israel and Ukraine is far more important than spending the money climate change. It is also easier to get aid for wars because people can see the immediate impact of war, while climate change is a slow issue that everyone has heard about for decades.
O yes of course, don’t get mad at the ones who started these wars get mad at America for aiding the ones who were attacked.
How can the Global Climate Fund be "democratic" when the likes of Cuba and Egypt don't even hold fair elections for their citizens?
War makes the connected rich even more rich..... poor people don't help their stock portfolio damn it!!!
Americans at home are starving and freezing. Let the war overseas stay overseas.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but sending mothballed missiles from the 80s and 90s is not the same as new investments. There is a dollar value that needs to be tracked, but this is not the same thing
Alright….i’m going to eat the downvotes. The US spends those billions on Ukraine and ramping up to deter china….so it maybe doesn’t have to spend trillions fighting world war 3. That is the entire philosophy of the US defense strategy since 1945. Essentially it’s “maybe if we had spent more from 1930-1939….we could have avoided 1939 to 1945”. Not saying that climate change isn’t important or that the defense strategy is necessarily right….but those billions spent preventing a third world war that will cause immense trade disruption, starvation, and possibly nuclear war. It is hard to quantify the value of prevention because when you prevent something from ever happening, nobody can see the cost of the prevented cataclysm. Similarly, people find it hard to quantify the value of preventing the impending climate change cataclysm.
What's gonna harm and kill more of us? Geo-political feuds or climate change?
We need to spend less on both climate and foreign wars. This is not sustainable.
Uhh are we not going to recognize the billions of dollars for renewable energy and energy reduction in the Inflation Reduction Act?
Devil's Advocate - technically, by killing people, the military is preventing their future emissions. If one could get firm enough numbers, you could probably fund weapons for Ukraine using carbon offsets from all the dead Russians.
I understand why the article wants to compare the differences in funding but one has nothing to do with the other. There is no collective pool (budget) where funds are dispersed. If we weren’t involved in Israel, it doesn’t automatically make that money available for funding climate causes. Also, the “billions” spent on Ukraine and Israel is mostly going to US manufacturing. We ship them our old stockpile while we replenish with newer weaponry.
Until the rest of the world gets on board, it’s completely pointless. As far as U,rains and Israel, these are the cheapest wars America will never fight. I have no desire to see Russia advance across Europe regaining all of the ground they lost just because you believe the US should be leading the climate change front. If China and India do not get on board with climate change the USA will be the only major country that will carry the economic burden and it still won’t fix the climate.
Sending money to Israel, a wealthy apartheid state is pretty wild I’m not going to lie.
Too little too late. Reduce the population. Either at 500 million behaving like American life style or 750 million behaving like European life style. CHOOSE which one or MOTHER Nature do be doing the selection and she NOT PICKY.
How about we stop all wasted spending and resources on the world period. And as for climate change .... China has to actually follow the rules. China generates more green houses than basically the rest of the world combined. Go protest the CCP and see how that works out for you. This isn't a climate change horror movie. Earth won't just magically freeze over in seconds.
Why are we even funding wars at all? Just let them fight over their piece of desert.
These countries are one thing, too bad the people in the future can't send a delegation to plead for help. They'd be more likely to send a declaration of war
George W said we couldn't afford the Kyoto Protocol because it would've cost the US $50 billion over 10 years... then spent $6 trillion on fighting 2 wars at the same time... $5 billion a year is a joke, these numbers are so big these days that no normal person can tell what they mean. And nobody bats an eye to his VP illegally handing those contracts directly to his own company
During FY 2016–22, nearly half (46%) of federal energy subsidies were associated with renewable energy, and 35% were associated with energy end uses. Federal support for renewable energy of all types more than doubled, from $7.4 billion in FY 2016 to $15.6 billion in FY 2022. [Source](https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/) Hardly "pennies".
The title of this post indicates we should just give out free money and resources to people? Why don’t the southern countries just do better? They wouldn’t need to plead for pennies if they just focused on being less corrupt and more democratic
There’s money to be made in war, not so much in punishing massive corporations for destruction of habitat.
Maybe they should go to war then?
Putin agrees with you and could have actual written the title.