Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change.
If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.
If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.
I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3.
I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough.
But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
I don't see any feasible alternative and I'm getting cognitive dissonance from people who are getting more vocal about climate change being an emergency and aren't pushing this.
The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend) is kind of inconsistent - it says that a revenue neutral tax is a "conservative" idea, then it has more about a "universal climate income" under "social justice".
Widespread is not the same thing as generally accepted. I think I've been reading vaguely hostile stuff recently about carbon taxes from vaguely progressive sources, but I'm not sure why.
I'm wondering if progressives are against it because it's considered conservative.
I don't see how that hypothesis is compatible with regarding climate change as an existential threat.
I mean, maybe it is potentially the end of the world for practical purposes, and maybe it isn't.
But if it is, then concentrating on behavior modifications that are appealing to impose independently of CO2 levels seems like an expression of either a desire for human extinction or of a disbelief in the problem.
[1] One way to think about that is you force people buying new cars to be carbon neutral by paying to retire existing cars.
I think that your suggestion, while I guess it's mainstream and basically what's already being done in most places, is guaranteed to fail in both respects.
If we tax one thing and subsidize another, without any linkage to CO2 emissions, then we will not get the reductions we need.
We cannot reconcile the idea that CO2 is the problem, while maintaining that some CO2 is more equal than others.
Can you explain further why you do not like the idea of pursuing the goal that matters, and prefer substituting one that doesn't?
Do you personally, at work, observe how metrics and KPIs that aren't chosen well, lead to bad behavior?
Putting an excise tax on new fossil fueled cars would discourage manufacture and sales. Using the revenue to help working class people retire and replace their older fossil fueled vehicles with zero emissions ones reduces the number currently in service. The key word with that is 'help' as in help that do what's needed. Instead of carbon taxes which punish working class people for not doing something unspecified to fix the problem.
That said I also support banning production of fossil fuel powered cars with enough forewarning that industry and the economy can adjust.
I don't think you're wrong, but an opinion like you're expressing doesn't say what, who, how it should be done. It doesn't set a goal that can be achieved, and it doesn't imply that success would solve the problem of reducing global CO2 levels.
Have you ever had a project manager tell you how to write code?
>carbon taxes which punish working class people
That's why the revenue needs to be sent right back to the people in equal amounts.
If that isn't good enough, it doesn't mean carbon taxes are less necessary. You haven't stated why it won't work or is not necessary in a way that I can understand yet.
Doing other things seems to me like the ultimate example of "looking for your keys under the streetlight even though you dropped them in the dark".
Or, it's like the joke "we must do something; this is something, therefore we must do it".
Building things produces CO2. People will argue endlessly about how much. It's impossible for everyone to agree on the facts, but the quantity matters.
We don't want any particular activity or product to be generated, we want less CO2. If we reward specific things that are associated currently with less CO2 but don't logically entail it, it will be a very short time until people optimize those goals by producing more CO2.
If the US had better public transit options, then maybe. But you have to do that first.