With the failure of creative imagination and scale as well as finance lately in Congress; namely the Biden/Pelosi BBB plan, a new green infrastructure plan of a Spartan yet forward thinking nature need be added to the roster of tries of the continuing, dwindling days of Democrat-led House, senate and Presidency. A legacy of zero-green global warming legislation is likely to be regarded as unacceptable to intelligent voters...
Democrats may need to trust in the adaptability of Democracy to raise taxes on the rich and the plutocrat class of Americans without becoming socialist. Democracy can and should support directed free enterprising favoring global and national ecological economic synergy rather than conflict or war. Planetary ecological economics include the moon and items like the new Webb Space telescope beyond that would benefit from service investments in an increasing moon base budget in a Keys bill for long-term development.
The Keys bill could be limited to three trillion dollars of initial spending with half of that directed immediately toward phasing out fossil fuel pollution and bringing as many homeowners as possible to off-grid solar power energy production. A national environmental reclamation project could receive continuing support and investments from future administrations trying to modernize national energy and environmental infrastructure; probably through taxing the rich. The bill would include a Mexican border desalination canal that through evaporation and collected roof-over-canal condensation made millions of gallons of fresh water for drinking, farming and transforming the American Southwest into a verdant, greenbelt defrapping ground solar heating in the process.
The Eisenhower administration stated construction of great reclamation projects in the west that changed land use. Farming in the state of Washington greatly expanded with the new Grand Coulee dam. Eisenhower also started the federal interstate highway system that changed the way Americans get around the nation. A new era of federal reclamation projects could start that build on well-known technologies, science and engineering to create vast fresh water making, hydrogen gas via electrolysis and liquid hydrogen cooled super-conducting power lines in pipelines.
The United States today has a lack of intelligent political will that could adapt to the challenges to democracy and viable ecology including atmospheric heating that arise. Not one percent of Americans are philosophers or political philosophers and perhaps few of the latter have really thought about the nature of political systems and political economy to the point of comparing and contrasting them. Instead people rely on old off-the-shelf theories like Marxism and unrefined capitalism as default substitutes for their own thinking. Ordinary people pursue narrow self interests and allow that the policy is good universally leasing unfortunately to plutocracy, aristocracy and several structures the founders revolted against in their will to have egalitarian nationalism without superior social classes. The alternative to capitalism in the simpleton’s viewpoint is socialism or communism- collectivism against repressive minority rule. Such a paradigm is a consequence of an absence of intelligent political philosophy reinforced by censorship of social media in communist and capitalist societies; oppressive minorities invariably find ways to repress dissent and the expression of non-conformist ideas (ideas not conforming to those of the repressive minority). The lack of intelligent political philosophy reinforces plutocracy and common living from paycheck to paycheck with the material paycheck and common use of fossil fuel vehicles and expansion of existing physical infrastructure regarded as solid and rational ways of political economy. If energy and paychecks are generated by a satanic troll in the infernal regions of hell burning coal that is o.k.
Democrats went over to the dark side of the environmental force when the Obama administration twisted the party’s arms to make Bush tax cuts on the rich permanent. Only Republicans are worse at environmental management and couldn’t care less about it since it is an externality to corporate profit. Republicans probably will take over Congress because of the Biden administration failure to get a pure green energy bill passed.
Republican are so bad at running able Presidential candidates Vice President Harris could win the 2024 Presidential race on the foundation of a robust federal reclamation
project featuring water, hydrogen and clean energy making. Red state Republicans- the populist wing of the party, have little chance of winning a campaign because of their resistance to Covid vaccinations and mask wearing. The omicron variant may eventually become the true herd immunity deviant closing out the more lethal forms of the disease, yet Red states Republicans also tend toward being environmentally illiterate global heating IQ. challenged that will buy electric vehicles only when fossil fuel ones are phased out by the manufacturers. The 2024 race looks like a race to the bottom. To win, Republicans would need to run someone resembling Robert Redford in Downhill Racer with a strong and real green reclamation bill. Democrats probably hope Sen. Ted Cruz is their opponent so they can begin Cuban communist collusion hearings against the foreign-born Canadian-Texan.
A green energy reclamation project could serve political economy well. It might also be advanced because it brings in support of diverse elements from red state voters that want an end to illegal immigration and blue state voters that would like green energy and jobs. The bill could include ten billion dollars of solar panels for central America to help their economies that ought to be paradises instead of gang lands with killer politicians on the left and right. A green reclamation project could serve as the basis for a recovered American economy with progressive taxes on the rich funding free community college education for all means-tested Americans. Independent voters might like a mirror project desalinating salt-water built across the border in Mexico bring the vast Mexican deserts into farmland (keeping Eco-reserves desert for wildlife adapted to deserts of course). They might like the super-conducting pipeline to branch off at El Paso to continue along the Interstate 10 corridor to Jacksonville where it would meet a Federal highway one pipe traveling to New England.
The far west coast could have a pipeline one day to consolidate energy transmission in a super-conducting power line that solar, wind and hydrogen fuel cells could deliver electrons to. People looking just to paychecks don’t have much time for political philosophy or innovating leadership ideas that should arise from an intelligent political class. When they fail the nation fails to meet common existential challenges.
A good green contemporary reclamation project would have a somewhat different meaning than that of the Eisenhower era when conservation of the natural ecosphere was not foremost in the mind of the President. A good green reclamation project should reclaim ecospheric health with the adaptation of modern technology to problems of sustainability made by over-population and technology and living design ill-suited to the contemporary world social and physical ecosphere. It could serve as a template for African, Asian and South American transitions catalyzing energy and healthy ecospheric sustainability. Free enterprise need be free of plutocratic domination and repression and that requires enlightened democratic governance (inclusive of smart leadership as one might expect in a Republic even though it isn’t there today).
Republicanism is a democracy’s method of bringing intelligent politicians (an oxymoron) to political leadership. When republicans select environmental and vaccine IQ. challenged and elitist rich insiders they elevate inferior leadership and deservedly lose or should lose elections. Democrats have their own issues of course that uniquely developed with the Obama administration enlisting the party to support Bush II tax cuts on the rich, support an avoidable civil war in Syria, conflict with Russian interests in Ukraine and homosexual marriage instead of making a new social structure that left traditional family structures uncorrupted.
If Pres. Obama had a policy initiative G.W. Bush he would have got Americans to invade Syria in support of liberating rebels to bring Sunni leadership and the tyranny of a repressive majority developing prosperity for-themselves. Perhaps Lebanon would have fallen to the Sunni too and today Lebanon and Syria would be as prosperous as Dubai. Obviously the new Sunni states leadership would have lacked royal imperialism and been destined to foist theocracy upon the masses. Russia could have been an American ally and been assured of continuing port facilities in Syria with a long-term lease. Democrats of the future would have lacked the hatred of Russia and tragically have lost support for an intifada of accusations of Russian collusion regarding President Trump’s 2016 election victory.
I note that my own policy preferences would have been abstemious concerning the tragic and avoidable Syrian civil war. I preferred constructive engagement with liberating social networking technology and patient commercial integration and transcendence of sectarian and class supremacies. The Obama homosexual policy of grafting homo-couples onto marriage made a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan requisite since the Taliban would have resisted forever a butch military domination of their territory. Countless retards, women and children would have been dragooned into service as suicide bombers to blow up hospitals, schools and etc. by the Taliban until. Troops withdrew. President Trump had a rational estimation of long term Afghan discontent apparently.
I stipulate that on most social moral issues I side with red state ensembles. Red states may be deficient of support for high-end intellectual thought and expression of ideas however, equaling that of socialists, collectives and others with elitist one-party rule latent desires. On economic and environmental issues I support actual egalitarian free enterprise within rational ecological legal parameters preventing destruction to environment or environmental ecosphere loss or decay and preventing oppressive levels of concentration of wealth. Owning of public stocks should be limited to investments by any individual to three. Networking wealth led to the U.S.A.’s wealth distribution being equal to that of Mexico today.
Engendering tribalism in politics defaults political power and concentration of wealth to elites owning corporate shares too big to drown under the onslaught of anti-intellectual, anti-political philosophy sentiments of pure materialism paradigms for short-term proplit. Broadcast media collectives with anti-political philosophy, anti-faith values drive voters toward self-preservation identity politics down the broad road to environmental and moral devastation. Not only does democracy fail with tribalism party values under collective media conditioning reflecting plutocrat-positive spin, so does the ecosphere.
Solar heat absorbing asphalt combines with heat absorbing structures to make numerous hot urban micro-climates that are unpleasant to live in an require extra air-conditioning often provided by dirty energy production. A million miles of asphalt highways around the nation should be resurfaced with solar heat reflecting composition developed by federally financed research. Those heat absorbing and releasing at nigh roads might even by converted into low efficiency solar energy production surfaces with efficiency improvements over time as material efficiency increases.
Salt water from the Pacific might be piped to the drying up Great Salt Lake with solar power to make evaporation and condensation collecting areas producing fresh water for locals and people downstream. Obvious Eco-reclamation projects of large scale too large to be locally or even state-financed should be addressed by the federal government. Special interest groups may include those that are the world’s best at developing worst-case scenarios for-others. New reclamation projects can be on a best-case scenario rather than the automatic lethargy lines in support of worst case.