I did not realize you voted for Harris. I will revise my opinion and I really do hope that I do not ever forget that fact.
While I am critical of many things Kamala Harris, I realize that she was the lesser of the two weevils by some margin.
What do you have against Tim Walz?
Similar to Kamala Harris herself, he has shown poor judgment. Earlier in his life, with the DUI and such, but also in office, where for example he was instrumental in commuting the sentence of a gang member who murdered an 11 year old girl while shooting at a rival from another gang.
I certainly do NOT see Walz as interchangeable with any other white guy, or even any other white guy of a certain vintage and political experience/leanings.
Certainly the way you were talking about him suggests as much.
I understood why Harris chose Walz as her running mate and frankly, I was extremely impressed with his performance on the campaign trail, more than I had anticipated.
She chose him because he called Republicans 'weird'. Before that quip, he was nowhere in the Sweepstakes.
What exactly do you think was so impressive about his performance on the campaign trail?
The fact is that neither Harris nor Walz were perfect candidates because no such creature exists. Certainly stacked up against Trump, they were a veritable choir of angels singing on high.
Indeed.
But I am extremely cognizant of the fact that Biden entered the 2020 race mostly to oppose Trump and that he was the perfect candidate to defeat Trump: experienced older white guy with enough liberal cred to help with that wing and a deserved reputation for working across the aisle. I happen to think that Biden a) would not have run again if Trump had not thrown in his hat and b) should not have dropped out as he demonstrated that he could defeat Trump and I believe he would have done so again.
2024 was not a repeat of 2020. In 2020 Biden was much younger, even though he showed signs of age even then. What helped Biden in 2020 was that Trump was an incumbent who mishandled the Pandemic. Biden also benefited from COVID which allowed him a slower campaign schedule. I do not think Biden would have fared well with the campaign schedule though August, September and October. He simply did not have the stamina.
Dems got stuck in no-man's-land. They could not reasonably continue with Biden, but there was litte time to select and build up a replacement.
Now I do think that both Biden and Trump were too old to run for POTUS but Biden is more fit on every single measure one can name, including physical and mental fitness. It would have been far better for Biden to have defeated Trump and then resigned some point into his term, citing health reasons.
Trump certainly comes across as physically fitter and stronger. Just because he is an ass does not mean we should not acknowledge that he did have that advantage over Biden.
My opposition to fracking is not based upon emotion but upon actual evidence (some seen with my own eyes) of the damage that the practice does to the environment.
Evidence is more than anecdote of what you have seen in that geographical oddity that you call home.
And any environmental damage needs to be compared to damage from other technologies as well as benefits of being able to extract more oil and gas. We went over this before. Electric cars are still a minority of even new cars, and an even smaller minority of all the cars on the rod. Then you have power plants, industry, home heating and other uses. We will need oil and gas for several more decades to come, and we must replace declining oil fields with finding new fields (which are few and far between) or with technologies that allow us to extract these resources better. Being able to fracture rock and extract oil and gas from shale formations is one such technology.
As mentioned before: in order to frack, one must obtain a certain type of sand that is mined via strip mines, which is damaging just like strip mining for coal is damaging.
Generally, a sand "mine" is called a quarry and is not nearly as damaging as mining for coal.
Around the town I lived in Germany they had a lot of sand and gravel quarries. After they were used up, some of them were cleaned up and turned into swimming lakes. Can't do that with coal mines!
This is not emotion-based although I'm beginning to think that your love affair with fracking is emotion based.
I disagree. You see sand being quarried and you are against it for that reason. You do not see the benefits from fracking (even though you enjoy reasonably priced natural gas and gasoline) nor do you see damage from other energy technologies like coal.
Energy technologies are all about balancing costs and benefits. And benefits of fracking (½ of our oil and ⅔ of our natural gas production) are simply too big to throw away just because Kamala Harris wanted to ingratiate herself to the radical environmentalists.
The pipelines you are so enamored with in fact endanger water supplies.
Not in any meaningful sense. No technology is perfect of course, but pipelines are the best way to move large quantities of fluids over long distances from point A to point B. Which is why I am not the only one enamored with them, and why US has an extensive pipeline network, carrying oil, gas and refined products all over country.
If pipelines were even 1% as dangerous to the aquifers as their opponents claim, we'd long since have lost our water supplies!
The opposition ecomentalists have to pipelines despite their usefulness and safety is quite irrational and based on emotion.
I realize that this does not happen near where you live but it does happen to be an issue where I live.
There is a pipeline running just a few miles from where I live, and there is also a large terminal connected to that pipeline.
I honestly cannot remember a time in my life when I did not oppose coal mines, at least once I was aware of the fact that there were coal mines and the damage they did to the miners and to the environment.
So, you should be happy that fracking for natural gas allowed us to greatly reduce coal use.
Coal was necessary at one point, but is is far more damaging than other technologies. Therefore, efforts should be made to reduce coal use to zero as soon as possible, not only in the US, but across the world too. And that can't be done with just solar and wind.
We agree there. I am not willing to embrace increasing nuclear energy because of the potential for serious environmental harm and the danger to humans and other living things in the event of an accident.
Both are severely overstated. Nuclear energy is another issue where opposition is largely emotional.
Nuclear has to be a part of the solution if we are serious about climate change and the environment more generally.
Look at countries by their coal use:
Note that France uses a lot of nuclear and therefore has the highest share of non-fossil primary energy and use very little coal. Germany, despite all their pretensions of being überenvironmentalists, use several times as much coal and have about half as much non-fossil share as France.
For the record, I strongly support energy conservation whenever possible, including more efficient transportation, heating, cooling, electrical needs, etc.
I do too. But the fact is, we need the megawatts too, not just "negawatts". And every way to generate energy will have environmental costs. The question is not how costly is something compared to some Platonic ideal, but rather how costly is something compared to feasible alternatives. If exiting nuclear power or natural gas fracking leads to more coal burning, then the costs will get much higher and it should not be done.
I am absolutely cognizant that all sources of energy currently in use do cause some --too much!--environmental damage.
Then please act that way!
We live in a very walkable neighborhood.
I wish I did. Atlanta area is very car-dependent except for certain neighborhoods.
