No. of Recommendations: 11
The enviro candidate doesn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, but would be the best chance to save the bay from the likes of Vistra and/or Sable Offshore Corp.
Which makes them not the intelligent choice. It's not intelligent to do something that cannot achieve your most important priority. If they don't stand a snowball's chance in hell, then they are (by definition) not the best chance to save the bay. Literally the worst chance to save the bay.
The D guy might want to build the world's largest BESS next to your neighborhood. But politics is a team sport, and electing democrats has a team effect. So if the Democratic team has control of the levers of government, then it becomes marginally less likely that a BESS will get built next to your neighborhood irrespective of whether the guy you vote for or not actually wants that outcome. Because the democrats as a group are far more likely to support measures that permit development with adverse environmental outcomes than republicans are as a group.
A recent example is Joe Manchin. His personal political preferences are almost the antithesis of what enviros support on climate change - but because he was a D, and thus gave the Democrats the majority, the Democrats were able to pass probably the largest single climate change measure that has ever existed. Had the GOP held the majority, nothing would have passed to help climate change.
So when you write:
The pragmatic choice is not the intelligent choice if it's just the lesser of two evils. It's just pragmatic; a Hobson's choice.
That's just wrong. Being pragmatic is intelligent. It's unintelligent to choose the greater of two evils. And when comparing members of a political party, describing a member of the party that generally aligns with your positions as an "evil" is usually wrong no matter what their personal positions are.
