Well, duh. People have spent decades cementing their opinion about climate change. That's not going to shift just because we broke the record by an eighth of a degree.
Maybe if it were 10 degrees, people might start shifting priorities. But climate is always going to be a frog-boiling problem. It won't be anybody's top priority until it is way, way, way too late.
It's more striking that #2 was immigration. I get that people don't care about an environmental issue; the effects are too distant. But does immigration really affect people all that much? (Aside from the immigrants, obviously, but they don't vote so it doesn't matter.)
Were you seeing hordes of illegal immigrants, and the street corners are empty now that we're sending them off to war-crimes-level prisons? Did you get your job back now that the bracero has been kicked out? Was there some massive drop in crime, different from the decades-long gradual improvement?
I'm being sarcastic, just because I don't see any of that, but maybe that's just me. Are there people actually seeing that firsthand? Or (as seems more likely to me) people are getting frantic about the illegal immigrants they see on TV, but not getting frantic about the climate, for reasons that are more ideological than pragmatic.
I live in a rural area of the southwest and hadn't traveled or flown since the pandemic, until last spring. Then I flew to Minneapolis to say goodbye to a dying aunt. The ethnic change I saw in the city and on my flights were shocking to me. The culture shift didn't feel trivial to me. I suppose it does if you live with it daily.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 7.5 ms ] threadMaybe if it were 10 degrees, people might start shifting priorities. But climate is always going to be a frog-boiling problem. It won't be anybody's top priority until it is way, way, way too late.
It's more striking that #2 was immigration. I get that people don't care about an environmental issue; the effects are too distant. But does immigration really affect people all that much? (Aside from the immigrants, obviously, but they don't vote so it doesn't matter.)
Were you seeing hordes of illegal immigrants, and the street corners are empty now that we're sending them off to war-crimes-level prisons? Did you get your job back now that the bracero has been kicked out? Was there some massive drop in crime, different from the decades-long gradual improvement?
I'm being sarcastic, just because I don't see any of that, but maybe that's just me. Are there people actually seeing that firsthand? Or (as seems more likely to me) people are getting frantic about the illegal immigrants they see on TV, but not getting frantic about the climate, for reasons that are more ideological than pragmatic.