I suppose the difference is that a country doesn’t just get conquered by force if it stops polluting.
Even if the US suddenly lost all its fighter jets, naval force, missiles and bombs. How likely would an invasion be in the next 10 to 50 years?
It is quite a big country with a big population, with a practically uninhabited and difficult to cross country in the north, and a poor drug war ridden country with significant amount of jungle in the south. To the west and east are oceans with some thousands of kilometres until the next sizable and properly inhabitated landmass.
So purely in geographics terms, invading and conquering the US is a huge pain.
Now add to it all the issues of the US dominance in global trade and the ramifications such an invasion would have.
The US doesnt need that army or MIC for defense. It is offense focused and it needs to keep murdering people all over the world to keep its wheels turning.
I don’t disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)
I’m going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith’s. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China’s factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world’s factories were on our side.
CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We’ll see how that goes.
Almost all pollution is by industries and not your parents, so…
If anything you could criticize them if they voted to keep the pollution going.
Buying a big SUV, shopping at h&m, eating red meat multiple times a week, and flying to the other side of the world during summer, are all worse than voting for climate change. Companies don’t pollute for the sake of it.
Check out the EPA’s stats on ghg emissions at this LINK. 28% of emissions total are from non-agriculture/shipping transportation, and if you break that down then 57% of the 28% are light duty vehicles, all larger road vehicles are 23%, and aircraft are 9%.
Since 2005 emissions carbon-equivalent total of the USA has fallen about a billion metric tons thanks to awareness and federal programs to reduce and eliminate emissions, almost exclusively in the Electrical Power sector.
So even if you cut out all consumer non-business transport you’re left with 72% of emissions. A person who votes to curttail polution does more good than a person who drives a hybrid.
yeah this is a really stupid argument
“It’s not like Israël is gonna stop killing Palestinians if I refuse to kill Palestinians”
I mean
That’s true tho, pretty much nobody else murders Palestiniains but Israel still does.
Change on all of these scales has to come from societies around the world, not from individuals.
pretty much nobody else murders Palestiniains but Israel still does.
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
Shortly after Oct. 7, the U.S. government started transferring massive amounts of weapons to Israel. By Dec. 25, Israel received more than 10,000 tons of weapons in 244 cargo planes and 20 ships from the U.S. These transfers included more than 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells within just the first month and a half. These transfers have been deliberately shrouded in secrecy to avoid public scrutiny and prevent Congress from exercising any meaningful oversight. Between October and the beginning of March, the U.S. approved more than 100 military sales to Israel, but publicly disclosed only two sales. A list of known U.S. arms transfers is maintained by the Forum on the Arms Trade.
Much of these weapons were purchased using U.S. taxpayers’ money through the Foreign Military Sales program, while some were direct commercial sales purchased through Israel’s own budget. An undisclosed amount of weapons was also transferred from U.S. military stockpiles already stored in Israel, known as War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I). The use of WRSA-I to provide Israel with weapons serves to further obfuscate the full picture of U.S. arms transfers, as there is no public record of these stockpiles’ inventory.
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This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota (see below).
