this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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You do need political action on it, which makes climate change an inherently political topic. The issues are elsewhere:
The latter group thus decided to tell the former group that reality is not what it is and that their minor inconveniences should be absolute dealbreakers.
It requires political action, but this could happen without politicizing it.
If politicians recognize the need to do something, they might do it even if they do not center their campaign around it.
German support for Ukraine was in a similar situation. Though parties had different ideas and the election would very much be decisive for the future direction, support for Ukraine was not particularly politicized in the election - they focused more on other issues. In the end actors supportive of Ukraine won though, and now they are offering their support without having politicized the issue.
Irresponsible actors have politicized the facts themselves. Trump didn't run on "climate change exists and I am going to make it worse". Instead, he ran on "climate change is a Marxist China hoax, now eat my beautiful clean coal!"
In the past, when it wasn't quite as urgent that we act, there was a relatively broad societal consensus that it made sense to protect the environment. But now that some people actually feel extremely threatened in their wealth by climate action, we are experiencing an this frenzied attack on our collective intelligence from the right.
Blaming liberal/left-wing/green political actors for "politicizing" climate change is just victim-blaming. The ones who have given up on a shared, science-based reality are the fascists and the gonservatives.
Sure but you'll still have to explain to people what the hell you're doing there.
Canada's carbon dividend system appears to be a good idea fucked up through a mix of suboptimal implementation (including being hampered by state-level gonservatives), bad own PR, and successful negative campaigns from bad actors.
I'm not passing blame, I'm just saying it might be good for it to be depoliticized a bit. Especially if it involves those more willing to act on climate actually winning.
Whichever policies work well should ideally be more of an academic/technical debate rather than a political one.
But ... there's one side in the conversation that is refuting basic facts. This unshared reality is making it impossible to depoliticize the debate. The country can either take a hiatus from democracy entirely, or finds a way to force right-wing politicians to deal with reality again.
And it's not all about academic debates either, as someone needs to define desired outcomes, e.g., who to prioritize, today's seniors, tomorrow's refugees, today's rich people, etc.
Of course politics is about prioritization. But some things are not politicized as we all seemingly agree it should be prioritized, like military in America.
Climate is so highly politicized because one side is refuting basic facts. They are shouting loud about it and running their propaganda, making the issue politicized. This does not seem to have happened that much in this campaign, as they are focused on other things.
For better or for worse, depending on who wins. I'm just arguing that politicization of climate is not inherently a good thing; rather, in an ideal political situation, it shouldn't be politicized at all at this point.