Truly an excellent summary of the mess, how is started and how it was enabled.
Saddest part is where you point out that almost 60% of the people in the country just have no clue. I have a brother like that, I’ve been working on him for a couple of years trying to get him to pay attention to what is going on. He just refuses to be aware, prefers to keep himself wilfully blind to the issues that are bankrupting him and his 2 young daughters. It is EXTREMELY frustrating, and I’m sure there are a whole lot more people exactly like him out there.
You said of your brother, “He just refuses to be aware.” Refusing to think about something unpleasant is clearly a key way that otherwise intelligent people make themselves stupid.
There’s also the stupidity of good intentions paving the road to hell. Liberals mean well, and so it never seems to matter how disastrous their policies turn out to be.
Then there’s the stupidity of the demagogue. If Republicans don’t want to destroy the nation’s economy to accomplish NOTHING (China, India, Russia aren’t going to pursue global warming agendas, and these countries will make any sacrifice on our part useless EVEN IF global warming were actually REAL), they don’t care about nature. That sort of thing.
One of the big problems is that we are such a dumbed-down and irresponsible culture that these kinds of devices actually tend to work.