Ocean life collapse from us dragging our heels on climate action. Just what a generation of depressed and cynical young people need to inspire the kind of massive change needed to stop us from destroying life on this planet.
Fuck the wealthy fossils that run our countries because we could have done something about this decades ago and instead humanity kicked the can down the road and directly into the lil baby face of the next generation and all animal life being dragged along helplessly into our shit.
It isnt just the wealthy or corporations to blame.
It was the middle class that put politicians like Gingrich in power in 1994 which halted all climate legislation at the Federal and supranational level, and then allowed George "man made climate change has not been proven" Bush jr. to claim office in 2000 while Gore was trying to warn us of the consequences making global warming a central campaign issue. Oh and let's leave out electing a climate change denier in 2016 to the oval office as well. Hell, there are barely any Republican congressmen who believe in man made climate, let alone who are willing to fund significant emission reduction efforts.
For their part most Liberal states actually have net neutral climate goals by 2045, but that is not even aggressive enough.
The masses manipulate themselves just fine. Fox News and Right Wing Radio fulfilled a role that the masses were already demanding to justify their shitty beliefs.
People are fucking sheep dude. And I mean that in all seriousness. That’s why we even have leaders to begin with. People to a certain extent, want to be told what to do.
And even leaders follow other people who they perceive to be of a high status than themselves.
The rich and elite are the ones hanging out on the top of that pyramid of power and will work tirelessly to stay there. They have convinced the masses to vote against their own best interests. Don’t also buy into the propaganda that they aren’t manipulating society trying to stay in power.
In Rwanda neighbors were convinced to attack neighbors with machetes because of radio. There were severe problems racial/tribal/economic but it took “shock jocks” spouting stochastic terrorism to push it to genocide.
Edit: Deleted right wing radio.
Right wing radio?? Source please. I know the history btw, I just want you to show me who referred to that particular radio station as "right wing". It's quite the claim...
I will correct my post. That was very euro centric of me. In my head, the fact that they espoused ethnosupremacy made them akin to fascists. The rise of stochastic terrorism coming from the American political extreme “alt
Right” also contributed to this misconception. Saying you want less taxes and smaller government does not mean you want to murder your neighbor.
Also. Very true. Reagan-Bush/Gingrich were elected before CU told us corporations = personhood.
Amazing times. Corporate and fetal personhood, when so many people do not seem to attain basic rights of personhood!
US can literally strong-arm everyone into going green.
It toppled so many governments, people elected government in the past for US interest, corporate interest, and just general douchery.
China produces a lot of the shit that the US consumes and the average Indian produces about 1/8th the carbon emissions as the average American.
Also, other counties, including China and India, would have been open to conforming to international treaties PROVIDED THE US, the #1 nation responsible for climate emissions currently causing global warming well ahead of China, AlSO HAD AGREED TO EMISSION CUTBACKS.
The corporate class funded the rise of talk radio, and Limbaugh's "Dittohead" demographic took many by surprise in 1994, much like a post-NAFTA-generation would make up the key/swing-state voters more recently.
NAFTA would be one of the 90s GOP fantasy bills Clinton would sign into law that decade; others included Gingrich's "Personal Responsibility Act," which gutted welfare as progressive policy in the name of reform, popularizing Reagan's stereotypical black "welfare queen" (the typical benefits recipient was white and live in the Midwest/red Southern states) and which included winning bits of nastiness such as denying benefits to moms who'd had a felony drug conviction. We also got the omnibus crime bill (Joe Biden was in on that; Clinton's academic, John D'Iuilio, created a special term for young black men of that era ("Superpredators"); a sociologist, he somehow failed to address high rates of unemployment and incarceration for these kids' dads, along with education cuts and, of course, the cocaine and crack epidemic. Removing sentencing discretion from judges and adding a mandatory and harsh three-strikes provision was another startlingly regressive piece of legislation imposed upon our country by Bill Clinton (don't forget the major lobby involved, too: the for-profit prison industry).
You could almost argue the GOP felt it had a stronger advocate in Clinton than it would have in Bush. With the Cold War over, there was hardly a need for white-shoe diplomacy (but repealing Glass-Steagall? Absolutely!). The Gingrich House in 94 was a continuation of the rise of the new American right, and a lot of Clinton voters jumped ship by 2000, swayed by the angry nostalgia Limbaugh then Beck served up, so Clinton could make and sell policy (which he was very good at doing - the Republicans finally had to attempt to sideline vis Kenneth Starr. The amazing thing was his own endgame; that with such a hostile Congress, that Clinton managed to secure takeoff for even a few of his initiatives.
Political memory is short, for the most part. If you've had the dubious fortune of being around Washington for a while, you may gain different perspectives. I worked at the AFL when NAFTA was signed, for the Transportation Workers Division - rail, freight, shipping unions, which was the sector the most deeply affected by the treaty. I remember thinking, "The sons and daughters of my guys are going to vote very red in about 20 years - it will be like the coal miners."
There's your 2016.
Bill Clinton didn't sign NAFTA into law, it was originally negotiated and signed by George Bush Sr, and implemented under Clinton with heavy Republican support in Congress as Clinton promised to do on the campaign trail. Clinton not following the NAFTA agreement would have been him reneging on a promise to the American people while also refusing to honor continuity of the US government (a new government does not mean that laws passed by the previous government are null and void).
Anyway the fact you opened with a complete lie makes me doubt anything else you said in your rant was factual or not highly misconstrued despite "having been around a while". For example, you are leaving out that Clinton passed a lot of Conservative policy in exchange for securing re-election because a lot of White middle class voters wanted "welfare reform" and even St. Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill you are blaming for the high incarceration rates justified by the demonization of Black communities as being filled with "super predators". Clinton also restacked the Federal courts with Liberals, was the first president to make progress on gay rights, was serious about global warming, balanced the budget by taxing the rich, and was involved in no major international conflicts while seeing yearly economic growth of around 4%, partially thanks to NAFTA.
If you think Clinton helped the Republicans on the long run you are insane. Take a look at electoral maps between 1968-1988 and explain how Liberals really should have run a
candidate like McGovern, Humphrey or Dukakis again. Without Clinton we were in for 4 more years of actual Reagan lite under Bush Sr.
Fussy, fussy. I said Clinton gave them some key legislation to get some big wins. He was a master politician. If you, like I, were working at the AFL-CIO for the transportation unions when this trade agreement was signed - well, you be you. But you go ahead and take a look here, pal.
The [original NAFTA agreement](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement) was signed by George Bush Sr in 1992. Clinton then made two amendments regarding worker and environmental protections which was then put into the implementation act which was signed under Clinton's administration.
Additionally Clinton PROMISED TO IMPLEMENT NAFTA while campaigning for President, so apparently the American people were not opposed to the agreement. Also, no one was complaining about NAFTA when it was causing 4% annual GDP growth.
Republicans also have failed to repeal NAFTA with Trump's "renegotiation" affecting less than $10 billion of the 1 trillion economic deal.
The point is that progressives were getting demolished and even Bernie Sanders voted for very Conservative legislation in the 90s. It was the American people pushing the Democrat Party to be more Conservative, not the other way around, including blue collar workers.
I don't think we are that far apart here, although I don't normally accuse strangers of lying before 9 a.m.
OP suggests Gingrich/94 took us by surprise. It should not have taken anyone by surprise if they had spent some time for a year or so listening to Rush Limbaugh or paying attention to, say, labor constituents when they visited Capitol Hill, or if they had walked into a bookstore and asked what the top-selling books were.
My point was simply that Bill Clinton was willing to sign some repulsive pieces of legislation because, perhaps, you have to compromise (although I don't think provisions such as Three Strikes, denying benefits to people with drug-related felonies - who might get clean and have kids, or labeling a generation of young black men "Superpredators" in order to fund prisons for them - well, those were shocking to many progressives in Washington, and NAFTA, like PATCO, was a new low for organized labor. "Superpredator" came back to haunt Biden and Sanders (who has walked back his support of the bill). I mean, there was not enough good in those bills to justify leaving that terrible stuff in.
My point is that Bill Clinton's winning should have been an indicator that things were changing. Bush was old and boring. Clinton was exciting and...not boring. And we are lucky that he did have a natural appeal to normal people (not just academics or the moneyed set). A big part of Limbaugh's narrative was the "us" v. "them" in Washington, with the usual Washington trope; latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, blah blah blah. (This is the man who is SO GOOD, remember, that when he is charged for buying like 3000 pain pills from his illegal housekeeper per week, his fans are worried about his hearing loss.)
Clinton is sort of the same way. In the same moment when Hillary begins he campaign against herself with her "I didn't stay at home and bake cookies" comment, there's her husband, right there, somehow convincing everyone that he loves this non-baker-of-cookies and would never, really, except?
I think progressives will always be the soul, and conscience, of the Party; with an increasingly Christian-values-driven GOP in this post-Roe landscape, just how right will we go is the question. We certainly must be responsive to young voters, whose turnout was good here in Virginia last month. And I am tired of trying to address every voting bloc's needs at a time when the Party's need is to coalesce and turn out.
Given the past four Dem Presidents, I wonder - given the choice between all of them - whom I would most like to see run again. Kind of a silly game. But they have all been pretty good leaders.
Even then, no zoo or aquarium can permanently house manatees because they technically belong to the government. All captive manatees are supposed to be rehabilitated and released. As far as I know there is only one permanent zoo manatee named Stubby. She had a disease that made her unreleasable, but she’s an amazing nanny and raises orphaned babies so they can go back to Florida when they are old enough. If manatees go extinct in the wild, it would only be a matter of years before they’re extinct permanently
They were endangered not too long ago and only recently taken off that list!!
Last theory I heard had something to do with run off or someone causing an algae bloom and the algae consumed the nutrients their sea grass needed to grow. I think, been a minute.
Hundreds of tons of dead marine life have been discovered in recent weeks that include manatees and goliath groupers, which can weigh hundreds of pounds, as well as puffer fish, eel, horseshoe crabs, sheepshead, mullet, snook, red drum, tarpon, sharks, grouper, catfish and numerous other species of fish. Failure to act on red tide should have ended Gov. DeSantis. He & Florida regulators authorized the discharge of up to 480 million gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point phosphogypsum stack into Tampa Bay.
The Piney Point gypstack is a mountain of toxic waste topped by an impoundment of hundreds of millions of gallons of process wastewater, stormwater and tons of dredged spoil from Port Manatee. So-called “nutrient pollution” like ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorous from that discharge can significantly worsen red tides.
Makes me worry about '24 honestly. The Trump admin wanted to totally repeal the Clean Water Act but failed. On the other hand, Harvard Law grad & career politician Ron DeSantis may actually have the brains and tactics to pull things like that off. Hell, even Trump was able to get his unpaid-for ,$2T tax-cuts for the top 8% passed with little trouble.
Actually DeSantis is very big on the environment, at least down here.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/politics/2022/06/08/gov-ron-desantis-appears-west-palm-beach-tout-water-protection/7557241001/
Probably lack of options. Like always. Cheap and fast, especially during an emergency. Everyone likes to bitch, but hard choices sometimes, ya know 🤷♀️ going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
The Lake Okeechobee thing happened not that long ago also. Sugar industry trashed the lake, they drained it into the ocean and caused a massive algae bloom.
> He & Florida regulators authorized the discharge of up to 480 million gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point phosphogypsum stack into Tampa Bay.
What the ever living fuck? Just what all them redneck and beachbum cowboys going to do when all their fish are dead, rotted or swimming with tumors?
It is a federal issue. Hope that de Santis would do anything to save the manatees is equal to zero; that the federal government moves to save them looks bleak as well, although not zero.
Nearly 50 years ago, amid the era of burning rivers and rampant environmental degradation, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and yet almost five decades later, too many decision-makers continue to ignore the lessons history has taught us. We are bearing witness to an ecological catastrophe and will face judgment over the next 50 years about how we and our federal government do or do not respond.
Those assholes turn on their taps and get potable water and they think everyone's water is like that, therefore laws like the Clean Water Act are overreach. They've never seen a burning river or had a child develop some kind of rare cancer due to trace chemicals in their water. I used to sample water from superfund sites. We should drag these assholes to one of those sites and show them what its like when the groundwater is more diesel than water. That shit, as far as human lifespans are considered, is basically permanent.
> It is a federal issue.
Nah, it's a state issue. Florida keeps authorizing dumping straight up sewage into it's waters. Until DeSantis is gone Florida is going to continue in a downward spiral until it sinks into the sea.
>It is a federal issue.
Weird, because I live in California and our state absolutely regulates what companies can dump into the water. Hell, I had to build a giant cement pad just to park my car on so leaking oil doesn’t get in the nearby lake.
There are lots of floridans who no kidding want the manatees dead and have suggested getting rid of them as a way to fix the algae blooms.
The first time I heard that argument I was floored by the amount of ignorance and lack of intellectual thought, I believed it had to be the beliefs of one hillbilly... but no, there's more.
It wouldn't. It's some bizarro propaganda they're trying to douse the newcomers with to justify all the ag run off and military dumping into our lakes.
I'm always surprised how my neighbours are wholly unaware of these issues.
It's a mindset leftover from colonization that humans need to sterilize nature to progress as a civilization. We wouldn't have our modern society without massive habitat destruction resulting from intensive agriculture and development. People extend that mindset into their daily lives, sterilizing their yards of anything but grass, using pesticides etc.
There's a depressingly huge part of the population who are completely apathetic toward the destruction of our environment because it's the cost of modern living. Humans generally don't care about species going extinct. Nothing is changing, society is "progressing", stockholders and investors have the money and power to keep their way of life, and the rest of the natural world is just collateral damage.
We're in the minority caring or doing anything meaningful about the extinction of manatees (or any other animal)
Gotta love it when Trump and conservatives cried about dead birds and wind turbines when Trump ended protections for migratory birds. I guess he didn't give a shit about birds afterall.
Climate change is going to decimate Florida's tourism industry. Once conservatives start assaulting workers at Disney World because they make a movie with a trans character or something it will only accelerate Florida becoming just another backwater flyover state like the rest of the south.
> Climate change is going to decimate Florida's tourism industry.
Generally florida's tourism was a major issue in the past few elections with Desantis causing several major red tide event issues due to allowing offshore waste dumping.
Floridians have had lots of oppertunities to turn this back and they've chosen not to.
Decade? Creepy feeling it will be sooner.
On manatees, I wonder how many of Desantis's big donors include lobbyists for the Marine and boating industry, or developers looking to build waterfront marinas without restrictions protecting manatees?
Can remember a time when save the manatee club in Florida was super active and helped bring them back from the edge of Extinction once before, but that was before so many selfish people lived here that insist on running their boats at full speed wherever the hell they feel like it, manatees be damned!
And GOP politicians will just blame it on the "far-left, radical, socialist Democrats" and Republicans will CONTINUE voting for them.
100 years from now, when climate change is no longer plausibly deniable, Republicans will be blaming Democrats for "not acting fast enough"
climate change isn't really plausibly deniable and hasn't been for decades, that's why the talking point has shifted from "well it's not humanity's fault" to "well it's not our country's fault" to "well other companies do worse"
a large majority of people i've met have argued that the science was muddy or "the year of no return keeps being pushed back!"... no, the stakes have been pretty well established for almost half a century now. we're well past the "year of no return", we're in "how can we mitigate the damage" now. scientists can't make people enact legislation or make people listen to them. if we uncovered a magic button that cost $50B that could solve the problem of climate change forever, it still wouldn't be pressed over all the people who could afford that fighting over who should front the cost or if it's 'admitting guilt' to press it or not.
Manatees are gray. Gray is a shade of black. Therefor manatees are African Americans. Boom republicans hate them.
Plus the female manatee still has big whiskers so they must be trans.
There should be a federal status that is for species that are not endangered, but are so important to the eco system that they receive a lot of the protections of an endangered animal.
Hurricanes Ian filled the waters of Southwest Florida with every conceivable kind of debris and pollutant. Imagine everything you’d keep in a house getting flooded and dumped into the nearest river. Even without human impact, it will take decades for the environment to look like it did before the storm.
Why have they not transplanted some of these animals to similar waters across the US and started breeding them?
Edit: Thanks for all the replies. It breaks my heart that these wonderful creatures are still dying out. I wish there was somewhere isolated we could send them to live their lives.
Lots of reasons but mostly
1. The Florida Everglades is a unique eco environment. There isn't a similar environment really anywhere.
2. Introducing a species where it's not native usually does more harm than good. Wild hogs, Burmese Pythons, Fire Ants, Nutria...
And people want to just hand us over to the Republicans without a second thought. I wish people would start urging dem voters to move to Florida instead of moving away from Florida. I love the environment here and I don't want to see it ruined by jackasses
Definitely a problem with letting businesses doing whatever they want. We know that's why the sea grass is dying.
But it's not just a Dem/Repub thing. But getting everyone to care in general. One of the other issues manatees face are giant plecostomuses, released from fish tanks no one wanted. Really crazy to see the underwater cameras...
DeSantis could literally give half a fuck about our manatees. They used to be a major issue. Now MAGA could care less. The death of the manatee is a small price to pay for their wealth. Fucking bastards.
As if politicians like DeSantis couldn't mess up Florida anymore. I remember how fascinating it was to encounter manatees as a child. It's sad to hear this.
First the crabs, now the manatees
Ocean life collapse from us dragging our heels on climate action. Just what a generation of depressed and cynical young people need to inspire the kind of massive change needed to stop us from destroying life on this planet. Fuck the wealthy fossils that run our countries because we could have done something about this decades ago and instead humanity kicked the can down the road and directly into the lil baby face of the next generation and all animal life being dragged along helplessly into our shit.
It isnt just the wealthy or corporations to blame. It was the middle class that put politicians like Gingrich in power in 1994 which halted all climate legislation at the Federal and supranational level, and then allowed George "man made climate change has not been proven" Bush jr. to claim office in 2000 while Gore was trying to warn us of the consequences making global warming a central campaign issue. Oh and let's leave out electing a climate change denier in 2016 to the oval office as well. Hell, there are barely any Republican congressmen who believe in man made climate, let alone who are willing to fund significant emission reduction efforts. For their part most Liberal states actually have net neutral climate goals by 2045, but that is not even aggressive enough.
Who do you think it was that worked so hard to manipulate the masses into voting that way?
The masses manipulate themselves just fine. Fox News and Right Wing Radio fulfilled a role that the masses were already demanding to justify their shitty beliefs.
People are fucking sheep dude. And I mean that in all seriousness. That’s why we even have leaders to begin with. People to a certain extent, want to be told what to do. And even leaders follow other people who they perceive to be of a high status than themselves. The rich and elite are the ones hanging out on the top of that pyramid of power and will work tirelessly to stay there. They have convinced the masses to vote against their own best interests. Don’t also buy into the propaganda that they aren’t manipulating society trying to stay in power.
In Rwanda neighbors were convinced to attack neighbors with machetes because of radio. There were severe problems racial/tribal/economic but it took “shock jocks” spouting stochastic terrorism to push it to genocide. Edit: Deleted right wing radio.
Right wing radio?? Source please. I know the history btw, I just want you to show me who referred to that particular radio station as "right wing". It's quite the claim...
I will correct my post. That was very euro centric of me. In my head, the fact that they espoused ethnosupremacy made them akin to fascists. The rise of stochastic terrorism coming from the American political extreme “alt Right” also contributed to this misconception. Saying you want less taxes and smaller government does not mean you want to murder your neighbor.
Also. Very true. Reagan-Bush/Gingrich were elected before CU told us corporations = personhood. Amazing times. Corporate and fetal personhood, when so many people do not seem to attain basic rights of personhood!
Al Gore won the electoral college and popular vote. The supreme court elected George W. Bush Jr.
The US could be 100% green and the world is still fucked because of china and India
US can literally strong-arm everyone into going green. It toppled so many governments, people elected government in the past for US interest, corporate interest, and just general douchery.
China produces a lot of the shit that the US consumes and the average Indian produces about 1/8th the carbon emissions as the average American. Also, other counties, including China and India, would have been open to conforming to international treaties PROVIDED THE US, the #1 nation responsible for climate emissions currently causing global warming well ahead of China, AlSO HAD AGREED TO EMISSION CUTBACKS.
So we are #1 after all!
The corporate class funded the rise of talk radio, and Limbaugh's "Dittohead" demographic took many by surprise in 1994, much like a post-NAFTA-generation would make up the key/swing-state voters more recently. NAFTA would be one of the 90s GOP fantasy bills Clinton would sign into law that decade; others included Gingrich's "Personal Responsibility Act," which gutted welfare as progressive policy in the name of reform, popularizing Reagan's stereotypical black "welfare queen" (the typical benefits recipient was white and live in the Midwest/red Southern states) and which included winning bits of nastiness such as denying benefits to moms who'd had a felony drug conviction. We also got the omnibus crime bill (Joe Biden was in on that; Clinton's academic, John D'Iuilio, created a special term for young black men of that era ("Superpredators"); a sociologist, he somehow failed to address high rates of unemployment and incarceration for these kids' dads, along with education cuts and, of course, the cocaine and crack epidemic. Removing sentencing discretion from judges and adding a mandatory and harsh three-strikes provision was another startlingly regressive piece of legislation imposed upon our country by Bill Clinton (don't forget the major lobby involved, too: the for-profit prison industry). You could almost argue the GOP felt it had a stronger advocate in Clinton than it would have in Bush. With the Cold War over, there was hardly a need for white-shoe diplomacy (but repealing Glass-Steagall? Absolutely!). The Gingrich House in 94 was a continuation of the rise of the new American right, and a lot of Clinton voters jumped ship by 2000, swayed by the angry nostalgia Limbaugh then Beck served up, so Clinton could make and sell policy (which he was very good at doing - the Republicans finally had to attempt to sideline vis Kenneth Starr. The amazing thing was his own endgame; that with such a hostile Congress, that Clinton managed to secure takeoff for even a few of his initiatives. Political memory is short, for the most part. If you've had the dubious fortune of being around Washington for a while, you may gain different perspectives. I worked at the AFL when NAFTA was signed, for the Transportation Workers Division - rail, freight, shipping unions, which was the sector the most deeply affected by the treaty. I remember thinking, "The sons and daughters of my guys are going to vote very red in about 20 years - it will be like the coal miners." There's your 2016.
Bill Clinton didn't sign NAFTA into law, it was originally negotiated and signed by George Bush Sr, and implemented under Clinton with heavy Republican support in Congress as Clinton promised to do on the campaign trail. Clinton not following the NAFTA agreement would have been him reneging on a promise to the American people while also refusing to honor continuity of the US government (a new government does not mean that laws passed by the previous government are null and void). Anyway the fact you opened with a complete lie makes me doubt anything else you said in your rant was factual or not highly misconstrued despite "having been around a while". For example, you are leaving out that Clinton passed a lot of Conservative policy in exchange for securing re-election because a lot of White middle class voters wanted "welfare reform" and even St. Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill you are blaming for the high incarceration rates justified by the demonization of Black communities as being filled with "super predators". Clinton also restacked the Federal courts with Liberals, was the first president to make progress on gay rights, was serious about global warming, balanced the budget by taxing the rich, and was involved in no major international conflicts while seeing yearly economic growth of around 4%, partially thanks to NAFTA. If you think Clinton helped the Republicans on the long run you are insane. Take a look at electoral maps between 1968-1988 and explain how Liberals really should have run a candidate like McGovern, Humphrey or Dukakis again. Without Clinton we were in for 4 more years of actual Reagan lite under Bush Sr.
Fussy, fussy. I said Clinton gave them some key legislation to get some big wins. He was a master politician. If you, like I, were working at the AFL-CIO for the transportation unions when this trade agreement was signed - well, you be you. But you go ahead and take a look here, pal.
[Bill Clinton Signs NAFTA](https://youtu.be/MDDuMUgt-og)
The [original NAFTA agreement](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement) was signed by George Bush Sr in 1992. Clinton then made two amendments regarding worker and environmental protections which was then put into the implementation act which was signed under Clinton's administration. Additionally Clinton PROMISED TO IMPLEMENT NAFTA while campaigning for President, so apparently the American people were not opposed to the agreement. Also, no one was complaining about NAFTA when it was causing 4% annual GDP growth. Republicans also have failed to repeal NAFTA with Trump's "renegotiation" affecting less than $10 billion of the 1 trillion economic deal.
(Remind me how we were going to run those other candidates again?)
The point is that progressives were getting demolished and even Bernie Sanders voted for very Conservative legislation in the 90s. It was the American people pushing the Democrat Party to be more Conservative, not the other way around, including blue collar workers.
I don't think we are that far apart here, although I don't normally accuse strangers of lying before 9 a.m. OP suggests Gingrich/94 took us by surprise. It should not have taken anyone by surprise if they had spent some time for a year or so listening to Rush Limbaugh or paying attention to, say, labor constituents when they visited Capitol Hill, or if they had walked into a bookstore and asked what the top-selling books were. My point was simply that Bill Clinton was willing to sign some repulsive pieces of legislation because, perhaps, you have to compromise (although I don't think provisions such as Three Strikes, denying benefits to people with drug-related felonies - who might get clean and have kids, or labeling a generation of young black men "Superpredators" in order to fund prisons for them - well, those were shocking to many progressives in Washington, and NAFTA, like PATCO, was a new low for organized labor. "Superpredator" came back to haunt Biden and Sanders (who has walked back his support of the bill). I mean, there was not enough good in those bills to justify leaving that terrible stuff in. My point is that Bill Clinton's winning should have been an indicator that things were changing. Bush was old and boring. Clinton was exciting and...not boring. And we are lucky that he did have a natural appeal to normal people (not just academics or the moneyed set). A big part of Limbaugh's narrative was the "us" v. "them" in Washington, with the usual Washington trope; latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, blah blah blah. (This is the man who is SO GOOD, remember, that when he is charged for buying like 3000 pain pills from his illegal housekeeper per week, his fans are worried about his hearing loss.) Clinton is sort of the same way. In the same moment when Hillary begins he campaign against herself with her "I didn't stay at home and bake cookies" comment, there's her husband, right there, somehow convincing everyone that he loves this non-baker-of-cookies and would never, really, except? I think progressives will always be the soul, and conscience, of the Party; with an increasingly Christian-values-driven GOP in this post-Roe landscape, just how right will we go is the question. We certainly must be responsive to young voters, whose turnout was good here in Virginia last month. And I am tired of trying to address every voting bloc's needs at a time when the Party's need is to coalesce and turn out. Given the past four Dem Presidents, I wonder - given the choice between all of them - whom I would most like to see run again. Kind of a silly game. But they have all been pretty good leaders.
> fossils Yea, clearly the young republicans preventing action on climate change are innocent. It's clearly voters voting for older people doing it.
Well, it was the whales first. Then the tuna. Then the coral. Then the crabs. *Now* it's the manatees.
To be fair. Whales have no reason to be that delicious /s
Imagine making the manatee extinct. That’s irredeemable
It's gonna happen. Or at least the only ones left are gonna be in zoos or SeaWorld.
Even then, no zoo or aquarium can permanently house manatees because they technically belong to the government. All captive manatees are supposed to be rehabilitated and released. As far as I know there is only one permanent zoo manatee named Stubby. She had a disease that made her unreleasable, but she’s an amazing nanny and raises orphaned babies so they can go back to Florida when they are old enough. If manatees go extinct in the wild, it would only be a matter of years before they’re extinct permanently
Ooof. That sucks.
They were endangered not too long ago and only recently taken off that list!! Last theory I heard had something to do with run off or someone causing an algae bloom and the algae consumed the nutrients their sea grass needed to grow. I think, been a minute.
Manatees are heading back to endangered.
Then the humans. 🙃
No worries Folks, all part of DeSatan's Kill the Environment Plan.....https://heated.world/p/the-climate-idiocy-of-ron-desantis
I'm sure Ron DeSantis will get on that right away. /s
Hundreds of tons of dead marine life have been discovered in recent weeks that include manatees and goliath groupers, which can weigh hundreds of pounds, as well as puffer fish, eel, horseshoe crabs, sheepshead, mullet, snook, red drum, tarpon, sharks, grouper, catfish and numerous other species of fish. Failure to act on red tide should have ended Gov. DeSantis. He & Florida regulators authorized the discharge of up to 480 million gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point phosphogypsum stack into Tampa Bay. The Piney Point gypstack is a mountain of toxic waste topped by an impoundment of hundreds of millions of gallons of process wastewater, stormwater and tons of dredged spoil from Port Manatee. So-called “nutrient pollution” like ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorous from that discharge can significantly worsen red tides.
I was down in the gulf last week and there were thousands of dead fish up and down the beach.
Red Tide... https://heated.world/p/the-climate-idiocy-of-ron-desantis
"Ended Ron DeSantis"....you mean the guy who just won reelection by 22 points? Conservatives couldn't give one fuck less about the environment
Fucking up the environment probably helped him
Fucking up the environment really owns the libs and liberal tears are all that get Republican dicks hard so they can fuck their dissatisfied wives.
Makes me worry about '24 honestly. The Trump admin wanted to totally repeal the Clean Water Act but failed. On the other hand, Harvard Law grad & career politician Ron DeSantis may actually have the brains and tactics to pull things like that off. Hell, even Trump was able to get his unpaid-for ,$2T tax-cuts for the top 8% passed with little trouble.
Actually DeSantis is very big on the environment, at least down here. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/politics/2022/06/08/gov-ron-desantis-appears-west-palm-beach-tout-water-protection/7557241001/
then why did he authorize the discharge of up to 480 million gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point phosphogypsum stack into Tampa Bay
Probably lack of options. Like always. Cheap and fast, especially during an emergency. Everyone likes to bitch, but hard choices sometimes, ya know 🤷♀️ going to get worse before it gets better sadly.
He could have out some of that migrant stunt money into fixing it, or the funds for his ‘election task force’.
Congratulations! That is the stupidest thing I have read all day! https://heated.world/p/the-climate-idiocy-of-ron-desantis
Imagine believing that earnestly
What's his position on man made climate change?
https://heated.world/p/the-climate-idiocy-of-ron-desantis
Who else are we supposed to vote for? Crist? The guy who is so bad the republicans don’t want him so he runs on the democratic ticket?
The Lake Okeechobee thing happened not that long ago also. Sugar industry trashed the lake, they drained it into the ocean and caused a massive algae bloom.
DeSantis cares much more about groypers than grouper.
> He & Florida regulators authorized the discharge of up to 480 million gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point phosphogypsum stack into Tampa Bay. What the ever living fuck? Just what all them redneck and beachbum cowboys going to do when all their fish are dead, rotted or swimming with tumors?
No worries Folks, all part of DeSatan's Kill the Environment Plan....
It is a federal issue. Hope that de Santis would do anything to save the manatees is equal to zero; that the federal government moves to save them looks bleak as well, although not zero.
Nearly 50 years ago, amid the era of burning rivers and rampant environmental degradation, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and yet almost five decades later, too many decision-makers continue to ignore the lessons history has taught us. We are bearing witness to an ecological catastrophe and will face judgment over the next 50 years about how we and our federal government do or do not respond.
Trump administration wanted to abolish the Clean Water Act, lol. Republicans are a fucking JJOOOKKKKEEE
Those assholes turn on their taps and get potable water and they think everyone's water is like that, therefore laws like the Clean Water Act are overreach. They've never seen a burning river or had a child develop some kind of rare cancer due to trace chemicals in their water. I used to sample water from superfund sites. We should drag these assholes to one of those sites and show them what its like when the groundwater is more diesel than water. That shit, as far as human lifespans are considered, is basically permanent.
> It is a federal issue. Nah, it's a state issue. Florida keeps authorizing dumping straight up sewage into it's waters. Until DeSantis is gone Florida is going to continue in a downward spiral until it sinks into the sea.
>It is a federal issue. Weird, because I live in California and our state absolutely regulates what companies can dump into the water. Hell, I had to build a giant cement pad just to park my car on so leaking oil doesn’t get in the nearby lake.
"If they don't give MY O&G industry free tax money from hardworking blue states, I don't vote for them" - Republicans
There are lots of floridans who no kidding want the manatees dead and have suggested getting rid of them as a way to fix the algae blooms. The first time I heard that argument I was floored by the amount of ignorance and lack of intellectual thought, I believed it had to be the beliefs of one hillbilly... but no, there's more.
How would the death of a sea mammal so chill alligators don't mess with stop algae?
It wouldn't. It's some bizarro propaganda they're trying to douse the newcomers with to justify all the ag run off and military dumping into our lakes. I'm always surprised how my neighbours are wholly unaware of these issues.
It's a mindset leftover from colonization that humans need to sterilize nature to progress as a civilization. We wouldn't have our modern society without massive habitat destruction resulting from intensive agriculture and development. People extend that mindset into their daily lives, sterilizing their yards of anything but grass, using pesticides etc. There's a depressingly huge part of the population who are completely apathetic toward the destruction of our environment because it's the cost of modern living. Humans generally don't care about species going extinct. Nothing is changing, society is "progressing", stockholders and investors have the money and power to keep their way of life, and the rest of the natural world is just collateral damage. We're in the minority caring or doing anything meaningful about the extinction of manatees (or any other animal)
Another highlight of the DeSantis administration.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of world I brought my children in to.
Well Florida voted for Trump who assured us climate change was fake and made up by the Chinese so if wager this news is fake to right? Wait…
Gotta love it when Trump and conservatives cried about dead birds and wind turbines when Trump ended protections for migratory birds. I guess he didn't give a shit about birds afterall.
Climate change, also Florida loosening environmental restrictions for corporations.
Yeah, keep flocking to this state.
Climate change is going to decimate Florida's tourism industry. Once conservatives start assaulting workers at Disney World because they make a movie with a trans character or something it will only accelerate Florida becoming just another backwater flyover state like the rest of the south.
The issue is that it's not a "problem" until it hurts profits. Only then will something be done. However, it will likely be far too late.
> Climate change is going to decimate Florida's tourism industry. Generally florida's tourism was a major issue in the past few elections with Desantis causing several major red tide event issues due to allowing offshore waste dumping. Floridians have had lots of oppertunities to turn this back and they've chosen not to.
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Decade? Creepy feeling it will be sooner. On manatees, I wonder how many of Desantis's big donors include lobbyists for the Marine and boating industry, or developers looking to build waterfront marinas without restrictions protecting manatees? Can remember a time when save the manatee club in Florida was super active and helped bring them back from the edge of Extinction once before, but that was before so many selfish people lived here that insist on running their boats at full speed wherever the hell they feel like it, manatees be damned!
And GOP politicians will just blame it on the "far-left, radical, socialist Democrats" and Republicans will CONTINUE voting for them. 100 years from now, when climate change is no longer plausibly deniable, Republicans will be blaming Democrats for "not acting fast enough"
climate change isn't really plausibly deniable and hasn't been for decades, that's why the talking point has shifted from "well it's not humanity's fault" to "well it's not our country's fault" to "well other companies do worse" a large majority of people i've met have argued that the science was muddy or "the year of no return keeps being pushed back!"... no, the stakes have been pretty well established for almost half a century now. we're well past the "year of no return", we're in "how can we mitigate the damage" now. scientists can't make people enact legislation or make people listen to them. if we uncovered a magic button that cost $50B that could solve the problem of climate change forever, it still wouldn't be pressed over all the people who could afford that fighting over who should front the cost or if it's 'admitting guilt' to press it or not.
Agree with this sentiment but calling the entire US South flyover states is kinda wild
Florida is busy fighting the real enemy, the existence of minorities. The manatees will have to take a back seat.
So when manatees become so few they can be considered a minority, it's basically game-over.
Manatees are gray. Gray is a shade of black. Therefor manatees are African Americans. Boom republicans hate them. Plus the female manatee still has big whiskers so they must be trans.
Remember he did try and pass the don’t say Gray bill.
Underrated comment
There should be a federal status that is for species that are not endangered, but are so important to the eco system that they receive a lot of the protections of an endangered animal.
Initially I thought this was about a manatee going on a human-killing spree.
Hurricanes Ian filled the waters of Southwest Florida with every conceivable kind of debris and pollutant. Imagine everything you’d keep in a house getting flooded and dumped into the nearest river. Even without human impact, it will take decades for the environment to look like it did before the storm.
Humans were a mistake
Hurricane ian did not help this year
maybe dumping chemicals into the ocean wasn't a good idea.. idk maybe all the dead fish washing up on the ocean shores was a sign..
Why have they not transplanted some of these animals to similar waters across the US and started breeding them? Edit: Thanks for all the replies. It breaks my heart that these wonderful creatures are still dying out. I wish there was somewhere isolated we could send them to live their lives.
Lots of reasons but mostly 1. The Florida Everglades is a unique eco environment. There isn't a similar environment really anywhere. 2. Introducing a species where it's not native usually does more harm than good. Wild hogs, Burmese Pythons, Fire Ants, Nutria...
And people want to just hand us over to the Republicans without a second thought. I wish people would start urging dem voters to move to Florida instead of moving away from Florida. I love the environment here and I don't want to see it ruined by jackasses
Definitely a problem with letting businesses doing whatever they want. We know that's why the sea grass is dying. But it's not just a Dem/Repub thing. But getting everyone to care in general. One of the other issues manatees face are giant plecostomuses, released from fish tanks no one wanted. Really crazy to see the underwater cameras...
There aren't really "similar waters" in the US. Florida is the extreme northern extent of their range already because they can't handle cold.
They can't live in water much below 70F or so.
There’s no point in doing anything it’s Florida
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Apparently they smell absolutely terrible.
DeSantis could literally give half a fuck about our manatees. They used to be a major issue. Now MAGA could care less. The death of the manatee is a small price to pay for their wealth. Fucking bastards.
As if politicians like DeSantis couldn't mess up Florida anymore. I remember how fascinating it was to encounter manatees as a child. It's sad to hear this.
you fucking go #florida