The world is paying more lip service, but I really don't see climate change being taken more seriously in any significant way. Entrepreneurs are doing what they've always done: inflated their own egos while hoping to make a lot of money. It doesn't matter to them if their carbon capture machines only take back 1% of yearly carbon emissions as long as they can lobby the government to force everyone to buy their machines, make bank, and tell everyone how they're making the world a better place. When the goal is extracting as much money as possible, the system will be driven over a cliff as long as it can squeeze out a few more bucks. If anything, the carbon capture machines will give an excuse to pollute further because "the machines have it covered" even when the machines don't really have it covered. It's like recycling. Most plastics aren't even recyclable and of the ones that are, it's a highly polluting process. However, it's marketed as if a difference is being made and that plastics could be green, it's just that *you* need to recycle (again, placing the blame squarely on individuals instead of the corporations that generate the vast majority of pollution). The three Rs are reduce, reuse, and recycle. Really, that's the order in which we should be doing it. We should be reducing usage first and foremost, reusing what we can, and finally recycling the rest. The "problem" under our economic system is that reducing and reusing have very limited or no profit-making potential. Often times I'll see articles like "we need to eat bugs to be sustainable" (I'd rather go vegetarian/vegan btw) or "we need to use paper straws" and it's usually because some guy invested in a bug farm or paper straw factory. Even supposed sustainability becomes an avenue to sell more shit.
The new space race is an extension of that ego-boosting, self-serving behavior. We're supposed to cheer on these billionaires because they're "making progress" but to what end? The cynic in me thinks of it as the rich's ultimate backup plan after they've trashed the Earth so much as to be inhabitable. Hell, even the old space race was just a show of military might. Speaking of which, it's funny to me that the US considers itself the winner of that space race when Russia did everything first, particularly everything important for military usage (spy satellites and ICBMs), but the US just moved the goalposts to the moon. Then we're told of all the great advances discovered while engaging in that space race. Yes, large well-funded collaborative efforts tend to produce great results. Take war, for example, many advancements are made there too, but does that make war worth it? Space races are much more benign, but we have to look at priorities. Should we really let a few individuals have billions of dollars to play around with while so many others live in misery? The technological advancements made are nice, but there are other -- arguably far more effective -- ways of improving people's livelihoods.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at with the idea of the massive lawsuit of the American people vs the state. The supreme court will side with the system like they always do. Like it's the same issue that you point out that Bernie runs into. The system does not take kindly to change and stubbornly refuses it. We could have single payer healthcare and most of the country is even on board with the idea, but big media present the idea as absolutely impossible and the many politicians in the pockets of the industry reinforce that idea. Would the lawsuit force a conversation? Perhaps, but so has Bernie's campaigns. The problem is that the conversation is dominated by money whether it's money in media giving a bigger platform for certain ideas or money in politics getting politicians elected to act a certain way.
Lower taxes aren't what bring companies to the US, it's the potential to make huge profits. The US for the longest time was the largest customer base with the most amount of money to spend. What the US should've done was take a hard stance against corporations exploiting labor (domestically or abroad) but that was never going to happen because corporations and the government are in bed with each other. Really, that was our reason for opening relations with China, just a large pool of labor to exploit. China, however, has developed into a massive customer base of its own and so we're seeing big media ringing the alarms of China being dangerous because [insert ][/insert] but in reality it's because they have the potential to compete with the US economically. What you also see are corporations catering to China to get to that huge customer base. You'll see companies give up IP rights and ownership to China just for this customer base. Taxes really mean little in the grand scheme of things, it's just a thing they complain about because they want an ever-expanding profit margin. Taxes, however, would go a long way to funding important programs that we need here (though there are claims that we could just print our way into buying everything we want like in modern monetary theory, but I say there are practical limits to that).
I really don't see significant change being made even by firebrand politicians. If you want to make change, you have to be a credible threat, otherwise they just mock and ignore you. However, if you're a credible threat then they will ultimately suppress you with violence, which is why you'd need to be able to back it up with force of your own. There is a theory that things were mostly as good as they were in the 50s and later because the USSR was a credible threat to US dominance and offered a comparison with which people could use as a reference to their own standing in life. The US had to sweeten the deal to keep people loyal. Similarly, I can see China rising as a viable competitor and perhaps us getting a sweeter deal out of it.
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