You can't call yourself a "leader" on the climate when you're routinely winning "Fossil of the Day" awards during international climate talks. That's not a champion of the climate, it's a villain.

Being the best of a list of villains (and we're not even that) doesn't make you the good guy. We're burning the world. We're the bad guys. The only area we've been leaders is in obstruction of progress, though we often have to fight for this title with the US.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Villains belong in stories; real life is shades of gray.

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

There's no grey in the science. We're burning the world, and attempts to sound enlightened with platitudes doesn't change that.

[–] shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Sure there is good and evil in all of us, but the point of living in a global society is to integrate the feedback received from others and hopefully become less evil in whatever we have done bad in.

Ignoring the feedback is at the very least behaving like the villain - if we want to shy away from ascribing such potentially reductive labels.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Who's feedback? Don't forget, most people (here and around the world) prefer wealth over conservation, and it's not close. The carbon tax had to be rolled back because it was massively unpopular and people wanted to burn gas for free. Other countries never put one in in the first place!

OP seems like the kind of person who likes to reduce the world to a binary, and is working backwards from that. Their "evidence", as a result, was basically just a collection of random stuff. If you actually look at our climate record vs. what our choices were in the first place, with no cherry-picking, we come out looking pretty green.

If you want to ask if we mostly do good or bad as a country in general, it's of course a much larger discussion. A good portion of Lemmy thinks North Korea is somehow great, after all (speaking of defying global feedback).