[mbiondi]

It's not popular vs unpopular, it's politics. Climate science is super politicized in this country. Google is a progressive entity who claims to offer a balanced view but instead works as a bad actor and favors one point of view as "truth". They are turning into another New York Times.

[michaelmrose]

Climate science is politicized because moneyed interests have a strong incentive to continue to deny the science and conservative individuals have both a shared financial interest with liberals to conspire with those interests and a unique political interest in drawing a contrast between themselves and progressives by spreading propaganda and lies.

Thus while Democrats and Republicans both vote against all of our interests only Republicans because of their unique interests have an incentive to spread lies. Insofar as popularity, these lies like smoking doesn't cause cancer are becoming increasingly unbelievable.

Specifically people used to literally argue that warming wasn't even real and now 2/3 of people in the US hold that its an issue and that government isn't doing enough to address it.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...

Interestingly among Democrats the belief that humans have a large effect on climate change is highly correlated with education with HS or less being 58%, some college being 73%, college grad 83%, and finally postgraduate 86%. Meanwhile among Republicans the breakdown is 21, 22, 22, 25. Among Republicans the politics is vastly more important than the science.

When google agrees to stop supporting harmful lies they aren't inherently taking a political stance. The republicans have merely politicized the truth. Bowing to this misdirection would itself be the political act. Lets take a stand for just worrying about the facts instead of the politics. This stand in my mind must necessarily include talking about the side which is spreading harmful lies.

[simorley]

> Climate science is politicized because moneyed interests have a strong incentive to continue to deny the science and conservative individuals have both a shared financial interest with liberals to conspire with those interests and a unique political interest in drawing a contrast between themselves and progressives by spreading propaganda and lies.

Except that climate change is funded and backed by wall street, banks, media, etc. The real monied interests are on the side of climate change.

> Thus while Democrats and Republicans both vote against all of our interests only Republicans because of their unique interests have an incentive to spread lies.

But monied interests back both democrats and republicans.

> Specifically people used to literally argue that warming wasn't even real and now 2/3 of people in the US hold that its an issue and that government isn't doing enough to address it.

Wonder why that is? Oh that's right, the monied interests are backing neverending ads pushing climate change.

It's funny how everyone from the world bank, goldman sachs and google is backing climate change and you are saying it's the "monied interests" who are against climate change.

Think about it. If monied interests were against climate change, then google wouldn't be banning anti-climate change ads...

[michaelmrose]

At some point public interest turned against cigarettes too despite moneyed interests being in favor of poisoning millions of people forever to keep the money flowing and it became desirable to be seen to sacrifice something while actually leaving society dealing with most of the costs of obtaining that profit.

Climate change has become so overwhelmingly obvious that most people can't be persuaded that its not real so the moneyed interests are focusing on proclaiming that they are on the right side of history while trying to blunt any effective change that would hurt their pockets.

That is why for example that its super important for you to recycle that coke bottle but not important for companies to stop poisoning the planet or paying for it to be poisoned elsewhere.

Climate change is a real issue and the overwhelming fact is we have a huge hand in the multitude of maladies that plague our planet and if we don't do something beyond trivial tokens like recycling a coke bottle we are all fucked. Few with substantial wealth to be gained in the short term are considering the long term effects and they are funding both sides to keep those costs from hitting close to home.

The difference to return to the first analogy is Democrats are trying to keep cigarette taxes low while Republicans are proudly proclaiming that manly men smoke and their grandad lived to 95 smoking on whiskey and bacon and 2 packs a day!

Democrat inaction may rob us opportunities to preserve our health, wealth, prosperity, and lives but Republican lies stand to rob us of even the awareness of an actual problem that is a necessary precondition for any sort of action.

Pretending these things are the same would be a mistake.