Thus, to them it’s still “business as usual” - in private, we do whatever horse-trading gets us the most lobbying $$; in public we act like we’ve stuck up for our constituents, by signing onto an ineffectual law, and we go back to the payola party”.

They are too old, and too well insulated from the reality of life on this planet, to understand that we cannot continue to play the same games (In ancient Italy, it was “fiddling, while Rome burned”) They don’t understand that we have used up too many of the World’s resources, destroyed too much of its self-renewing capacity, polluted too much of its air, to ever return to unregulated carbon energy and/or unregulated capitalism. They don’t understand, and don’t even understand that there is a need to understand, that “a growing economy” is only the most deadly option of all, if these changes are not made.