Reply #32: But if that were the most important issue, why don't progressives complain [View All]

[AP]

...that Chávez is no progressive because he's not ending oil production in Venezuela?

The fuel of economic development is fuel -- it's petroleum. The enviromental damage is a cost we all endure in the short term until we develop alternatives over the long term.

Just because we haven't created alternatives yet is not a good enough explanation to your average voter who cares about the economy and her job and the cost of consumer goods for why you're not looking everywhere for oil.

I don't think voters would be impressed with Democrats denying the marketplace ANWAR just because it would be a punishment for not having an alternative energy policy.

As for your last paragraph, I have to reiterate something I said above: I think people do, in the abstract, want to protect the environment. But I think when you put the environment in the context of a list of priorities, not many people put the environment at the very top of the list.

Above, you compare it to "your complaining," which I suspect was a sentence construction that either consciously or unconsciously helped you avoid having to place another issue next to "protecting the environment" that many people would actually consider a higher priority.

I think many voters are more than happy to make compromises where jobs and accumulating wealth trump the environment (that's sort of the history of humankind), and they only way to make them to consider environmental issues is to show them how they might actually be counterproductive to wealth creation.

I think Democrats should think twice about whether they want voters to percieve them as the party that puts the environment above everything else.