I think that both collective action (politics) and individual action are necessary. Both feed on each other in a positive spiral. Neither one is less important than the other. And arguments that dismiss either harm the cause as a whole.

For one, because every choice you make to support a cause or goal makes you more likely to continue supporting it. Action builds commitment. The more you think about the environment, the more actions you take because of the environment, the more dedicated you become and the more actions you take in future. Trying to live a environmentally sustainable lifestyle gives a lot of people the motivation to engage in collective action in support of that lifestyle.

For another, because when people live in an environmentally sustainable way, and are less likely to be personally harmed by environmental legislation, it makes it easier for them to vote for it. It’s a lot easier to vote for a gasoline tax if you don’t drive. Or for regulations on factory farms if you don’t eat meat. If you already replaced all your old light bulbs with LEDs, a government mandate on energy efficient light bulbs won’t affect you, and you can vote for it without worrying about how much it’ll cost you personally. In California, an attempt to phase out gas stoves was opposed by people who had gas stoves and liked them - if those people had been convinced to take individual action, and replace their old gas stoves with induction, they would have had no reason to oppose the phaseout.

Moreover, there’s the issue of credibility. When you live your values, and your friends and family and neighbors see you living your values, your words in support of those values gain greater weight. Politics is the art of persuasion. If you want to convince other people to support collective action, your individual actions matter, because they show you believe what you say.

And finally, and to me most importantly - we should take individual action to live more sustainably and less wastefully because it’s the morally right thing to do.

Yes, write your congressperson. And also, drive less, fly less, insulate your home properly, and eat more plants. And tell the people around you what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.

Collective action and individual action are not separate. Like a previous generation said, the personal is political.

I will admit my two-for-one claim is at the very lowest end of estimates - possibly slightly lower than the lowest end estimate - for corn ethanol efficiency. Though it’s a snappy line and easier to remember than “1.6 gallons per gallon” or whatever.

But as the Wikipedia notes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance :

Depending on the ethanol study you read, net energy returns vary from .7-1.5 units of ethanol per unit of fossil fuel energy consumed.

Bluntly, there’s a lot of bad science around ethanol, for the obvious reason that both Big Ag and the US government are highly motivated to make corn subsidies look good and keep the money flowing.

But oil propaganda? Fucking lol. We need to phase out fossil fuels entirely. If anything, US ethanol production benefits oil companies - because ethanol is an additive to gasoline, Big Ag and Big Oil both benefit from keeping internal combustion engines on the road and slowing the transition to EVs.

So on the negative end: this 2005 study estimated corn ethanol consumed 29% more energy than it produced:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070809024158/http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/NRRethanol.2005.pdf

And though that study is old, and the Wikipedia page on ethanol energy balance goes out of its way to claim it’s been discredited (gosh, I wonder who added that content), here’s an article about a 2022 study finding similarly that corn based ethanol produces at least 24% more greenhouse gases than gasoline when all the impacts - including the expansion of farmland into previously undeveloped land, funded by ethanol subsidies - are taken into account:

https://grist.org/agriculture/despite-what-you-may-think-ethanol-isnt-dead-yet/

And then there’s all the other negative externalities of expanding fucking cornfields.

Ethanol is the biggest environmental disaster in the United States. It takes two gallons of fossil fuels (counting fertilizer, transportation, and all other inputs) to make one gallon of ethanol - plus all the herbicides, pesticides, toxic fertilizer runoff, and all the other negative externalities of monocrop industrial agriculture - so a handful of Big Ag megacorps can get fat off subsidies at taxpayer expense.

51 million acres of farmland - an area the size of Nebraska - wasted turning fuel into less efficient fuel.

Of fucking course Trump and Biden found some way to make it worse.

Yes. Exactly. Harris lost, and it is her fault, and her responsibility.

The average American is not a political expert. (Duh.) They rely on information, and persuasion, from the actual political experts, to decide whose policies fit their values and who their best choices as political representatives are.

If a political party has the best policies, but fails to make the case for those policies to the American people, the fault is not with the American people, but with the party that failed to make its case.

In this case, Trump waged a vicious propaganda campaign based on blatant fucking lies. And the Harris campaign was too incompetent or cowardly to effectively call out those blatant fucking lies - partially because Trump was so much better at social media than Harris, and partially because Harris was afraid to stand up for the trans people and immigrants and other marginalized groups Trump was attacking.

(Biden shit the bed so badly nobody in his administration could have won by running on his record, of course, but that doesn’t absolve Harris for her own failures.)

Any political party that starts blaming voters for not agreeing with it, instead of accepting its own responsibility to convince voters, is headed to permanent minority party status. And as happy as I’d be to see the Democrats permanently marginalize themselves and make room for an actual progressive party, right now they’re the only roadblock in Congress against Project 2025.

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Is Craigslist shit now? What happened to it?

Yes, and, if you’re grilling meat, do you do less harm grilling it on an electric grill or a fossil fuel grill?

Every change for the better - even a tiny marginal change like replacing a fossil fuel grill with an electric grill - is worth doing. Every time someone makes a decision based on the environment, they become more likely to make future decisions based on the environment. Especially if they get positive reinforcement for their decision instead of discouraging “this doesn’t matter” or “you should do something else instead” responses.

(Yes, it would be better for the environment, and for people’s health, and be the morally correct thing to do, to grill veggies instead of meat. But cultural dietary changes are a lot harder to make stick than swapping out a piece of equipment. And any change is better than none.)

I imagine dead trees were flammable, even back then. And oxygen levels were 15% higher. Can you imagine the forest fires?

I don’t.

I remember when American conservatives in the ‘60s claimed to support states’ rights. But what they actually supported was segregation and Jim Crow. They used “states’ rights” as a rhetorical tool to hide their racism behind a facade of principle, just like the Confederacy had a hundred years prior.

Among the American right, only useful idiots (like libertarians) actually believed in states’ rights - or small government rhetoric in general - as a principle. It was always empty rhetoric. And now that Republicans are openly supporting Trump’s big government authoritarian conservatism, it’s become obvious how badly the Ron Paul types were used.

I’ll take wildfires over wet bulb temperatures any day.

That makes a certain amount of sense. Cartels go after the families of snitches, so I imagine this guy wanted them safe in the US before he cooperated.

Wouldn’t a law that exempts a law enforcement agency from constitutional limits be an unconstitutional law - and therefore an illegal law - and therefore not lawful?

Which is why groups that aren’t targeted should be out there being supportive IRL and making it safer for targeted groups. Strength in numbers.

I’m a big fan of IRL, personally.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/ikaria-wariootia-fossil

The plan is to argue that only two consecutive terms bar someone from running for a third term, and have the Supreme Court’s Republican majority rubber stamp it, so Trump can run and Obama can’t.

• has a podcast where he fawns over conservative guests like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk
• borrowing talking points from Jordan Peterson about “bro culture” and a “crisis of masculinity”
• wants to “solve” California’s housing crisis by jailing unhoused people
• thinks “social issues” like transgender rights and due process for immigrants are distractions from the real issues (like tariffs)

Newsom has generally been pivoting conservative over the last few years, most commenters think in preparation for a 2028 presidential run, and has turned it up since Trump was elected.

The American people aren’t stupid. They’re poorly educated and brainwashed by propaganda.

When a kid without developmental disabilities gets to 12th grade and still can’t read or write his own name, we don’t blame the kid for being stupid - or at least we shouldn’t - we blame the parents and teachers. The kid was failed by the people who had the responsibility to teach him.

Same with politics. Voters don’t have degrees in political science. They make the best decisions they can based on the information they have. Biden presided over the worst economy for the poor and middle class and the biggest wealth transfer to the ultra rich in my lifetime, Harris told voters “I’m not going to do anything different from Biden but Trump will destroy America so vote for me”, Trump told voters “I know you’re hurting, Biden and Harris failed you, and my policies will help you”, and voters made the best decision they knew how to make.

Which was a stupid fucking decision. Granted. But the lion’s share of the blame has to go to Biden, Harris, and their enablers. They were the experts. It was their job to keep America from making that stupid fucking decision. And they failed America.

Immigration law is based on the idea that deportation is not a punishment. So people in immigration court don’t get the same protections people in criminal court do - lower standards for evidence, no right to an attorney, guilty until proven innocent instead of the reverse, etc.

Because technically (coughbullshitcough) we’re not convicting or sentencing them, we’re just sending them back to their home country.

Which has always been offensive and cruel, but with the goal of this administration being to hurt as many immigrants as possible as badly as possible, the cruelty is turned up to 11.

It is weird. Except, thinking about it, it’s not.

All sides of American politics have been encouraged to hate and fear other Americans who disagree with them politically.

So when liberals have a choice between blaming their own political leaders for fucking up, or blaming the conservative Americans they hate anyway, a lot of them will make the wrong choice. Just like conservatives do when their leaders fuck up.