I don't think anyone is for dirty air and dirty water. But CA wants to stop selling gas cars in 15 years. Why? Cars are cleaner now than they have ever been. Give people an option, but don't force it on them. Coal is cheap and cleaner than it's ever been. Other sources are fine too, but they're more expensive. So given that, is there really a need for drastic change? No. Incremental changes are fine, and that's where he's coming from.
At some point I need to wrap this kind of commentary up, as we're all here for the enjoyment of pinball and related games, and not to disrespect each other or to tear in to each others' belief systems.
There's also the fact that I became a staff member some years after this thread was started, and it's not a real good look to be arguing politics / belief as someone whose biggest responsibility is to be professional and impartial.
That said, it's childishly, depressingly easy to refute the nonsensical assertions above.
Indeed, I'm continually shocked and amazed by the sheer number of people who believe the above rubbish, plus similar nonsense. Until of course I remind myself that people tend to form their belief systems based on comfort, and not facts & reality.
This is pretty-much a theme of the human condition, one might say. I.e., belief over feel-good fact. Unfortunately or not.
All that tiresomely said, I'll try to add some coherent fact-checking to the above:
it's Capitalism vs Socialism
It's really not. Drop Biden in just about any other first-world county, and he's a complete centrist, maybe even with right-wing leanings. Drop Trump in those same countries, and they'd pretty-instantly identify him as a complete pawn of various global interests, starting with Putin and Trump's own debt collectors. This kind of thing was crystal clear years before 2016, but if there was any real doubt left, it's in Trump's tax returns. In other words, this is not just a cronyist candidate bought lock, stock and barrel, but far worse than that. Hopefully people can investigate themselves, and I don't need to proceed with more details. And yet many obviously don't, which is why people still support him and still vote for him. On the surface, one more baffling example of why people enthusiastically vote against their own interests.
I don't think anyone is for dirty air and dirty water.
While nominally true, in fact we keep doing it by our real-world actions, while pretending that it's not a big deal. And that is the problem, Tim.
Still, if you're unsure about that kind of thing, maybe ask yourself how we got to such an amazingly diverse, complicated, natural feedback loop of sustainability after a couple billion years (I'm talking about the state of life on Earth), only for a mere century or two of the industrial age threatening to knock out all the supporting structure, all the while pretending it isn't there.
Give people an option, but don't force it on them.
This right here is a huge problem with our country (the USA).
For example, as an experiment, would you place a bunch of hungry rats in a cage, only interested in their rewards (treats, i.e. money), letting them work it out? How do you think that's going to go? Do you think the rats would form a relatively equitable living situation, or do you figure it'll be moreso 'the most vicious, wealthy rat will be king o' the heap'.
That's what we had here in the USA, while most other major countries have moved well beyond that. Yet we still pretend that that the overall deal works, and that America is a "Great County."
In fact, America is a third-world country (education, law-enforcement, infrastructure, etc) by common measures, stuck fantasizing about being "the big dawg."
@elton
From what I've seen, read and digested, Brexit has been a stone-cold disaster of a political move, negatively impacting virtually everyone in the UK. I truly am amazed (and impressed?) how some people seem to keep giving it a go no matter what.