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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

“Detached suburban SFH/SUV/pickup trucks/flights to tropical destination” might be too long of a name.

The great sin of neoliberal "environmental" politics is blaming individuals who basically follow the incentives laid our for them by the structure of the economy and not, say, corporate executives and private equity managers who suppressed research results and lobbied legislators to prevent public investments in transit, efficient housing and clean electricity.

It has been decades since the research has been publicly advertised. My whole life actually. There has been nothing stopping the US from implementing fossil fuel taxes to curb consumption, except it would sink any politician’s election, because people want cheap fuel. People want tropical vacations, big cars, and big houses with yards. People want to consume.

Even right now, the single biggest political issue for voters is gas prices, and having to consume less. And who they can vote for so they do not have to consume less.

According to the study opinion of 90% of Americans has no impact on goverment (https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/). Adding to it that the popular opinion itself is shaped by corporations I think focusing on individuals is mostly FUD.

Suppose all corporations got together and decided to support raising the gas tax to $10 or $20 per gallon. I would bet voters would mobilize in record time to vote out any politicians supporting it.

If 90% of Americans sufficiently cared about reducing carbon emissions, car sales would look different.

If society wasn't as car-dependent as it is for basic survival, car sales would look different. It's not reflective of how much Americans sufficiently care about reducing emissions.

That Gilens and Page study has been debunked time and time again by various followup studies. Overwhelmingly the American people get their way. If not that, just look at direct polls from sources like Gallup. Even amongst climate-conscious progressives, the will to pay extra for gas or beef to negate climate change just isn't there.

Edit: as a test question for anyone who believes this 90% nonsense - can you name a single piece of high-priority, salient legislation (i.e. not an executive order or Supreme Court decision) that a vast majority of Americans didn't want, but that went through anyway because the government did the bidding of the corporations?

Overwhelmingly, the reason why we don't get policies like climate change mitigation, universal healthcare, housing, etc. is because Americans are just fundamentally divided on these topics. And where they are somewhat "united" (say, a public option for healthcare), they don't want to increase taxes to pay for it.

(High-priority and salient because things like dairy trade policy are probably influenced more by lobbying, but that's because most Americans obviously don't care about dairy trade policy)

The National Defense Authorization Act? Obviously that answer has nuance and is not saying that the US should go without the spirit of what the NDAA is supposed to do, but in practice...

It has been decades since the research has been publicly advertised.

Yes, there's plenty of blame to go around, but Ford has much better advertising and many more lobbying dollars than researchers.

Hell, fewer and fewer compact cars are being made for the US market. By the time I need to buy a new car, all that's going to be available will be vehicles that are probably way heavier than what I want, let alone need. I don't want a vehicle like an F150 or a Bronco, I want a Fiesta (which has been discontinued).

So while I can reuse bags, avoid plastic straws, raise my thermostat in the summer, etc. I can't buy a responsible car that isn't for sale. I can't move into a densely zoned neighborhood that doesn't exist. I can't take public transportation that doesn't exist. I don't get to pick how the food for sale in my super market was grown/transported to the store.

So buy a Prius. They have been around for 20 years. The point is, clearly, the vast majority of the other 330M US residents want a bigger, heavier, higher car. As evidenced by the sales numbers of cars.

Solution has always been dead simple. Increase fossil fuel taxes to whatever levels necessary to curb consumption. But again, that is not what the people want. ExxonMobile themselves come out and campaign for $20/gallon gas tax, and they would get vilified.

Yes, when what's for sale is a handful of pick ups, a ton of SUVs and maybe one sedan, the sales will undoubtedly favor bigger vehicles. When the only new homes that are being built are sprawled out, that's where you'll live. If you can only get factory farmed food at the store, that's what you'll eat. People want what is marketed to them & what is found for sale. I'm not saying individuals aren't blame free here, but that they have less and less choice.

> when you're increasingly only being given a choice between a pick up and an SUV, the sales will undoubtedly favor bigger cars.

Source? As far as I can tell, Prius, Corolla, Camry, Civic, Accord, and a plethora of small vehicles have been easily available for purchase for decades. And continue to still be available.

Have you tried to buy a car recently? It's one thing to say Toyota still makes a Carolla. That doesn't mean they're producing them as much as Tundras. That doesn't mean you can go to your car dealer and just buy one. My girlfriend had to get a car 2 weeks ago. No one at the automall had regular sedans. She had to settle for a gas guzzling SUV because that's all that's available.

Again, consumers don't have the choice you seem to think they do.

Sales from the last 20+ years without supply chain disruptions is more representative of people’s preferences than sales during a unique 2 year period with industry wide supply issues.

In recent years, it's more of a function of SUV/truck production far outpacing car production: https://www.detroitchamber.com/covid19/north-american-car-an...

Go back far enough and you'll see that people bought more cars (because more cars were for sale).

Which way is the causation? Unless there is collusion amongst all automakers to make more bigger vehicles, I would assume carmakers are making what people want. Outside of Covid supply chain, I have never heard of people being unable to buy cars and having to settle for SUV/pickup trucks.

It was originally automakers desire to exploit regulatory loopholes in a series of safety, economy, and tax regulations by exploiting exceptions meant for commercial-uss light trucks but crafted in exploitable manners. (Different exploits, across the industry, drove minivans and then SUVs to popularity, then also large SUVs in particular.)

But the advertising campaigns designed to get people on board with what it was most convenient for manufacturers to deliver had a lasting impact on demand even after most of the regulations the classes of vehicle were meant to exploit were closed. (Also, the presence of lots of large vehicles on the road caused by that makes it worse for smaller vehicles, so it becomes self-reinforcing once in place.)

There are things you can't do in small cars or cars in general. Hauling gravel to fix your drive, lumber and such. Children require seats too. When you commute with other people it requires more space also. (I'm not in a city and required to do several things myself.)

The existing regulations are a lot looser if you can classify it as a light truck. In Australia people drive very small "pickup cars" (there's another word for it) because it's not necessary to exploit a bad law. Perverse incentives killed the station wagon.

Some of us don't fit in a Prius. Add Rear facing baby seats to make it worse. That is one reason I don't have one.

>fossil fuel taxes

Are regressive. And nobody is actually offering a plan to manage the pain applied to the working class. You, of course, are rich enough to be mostly unaffected.

Utilities are privatized, transit is just enough to say it's there, housing prices are through the roof. The corporate media tells people to be afraid of social programs and you blame them for listening. Of course, you also swallow the propaganda yourself, and expect a "market-oriented" approach to be accepted by the people who the market left behind.

But there's always enough money for another war.

> And nobody is actually offering a plan to manage the pain applied to the working class

Increasing taxes on higher income/wealthy and redistributing the cash to the poor. It is always the plan when a solution to a different problem is regressive.

Both sets of people can be to blame.

Both sides of this argument can be passing the buck whilst benefiting from participating.

The incentives laid out for them by the people THEY elected?

I'm guessing about 50% voted for somebody else, and 90% weren't happy with any of the candidates on the ballot.

In most Congressional districts, only the primary votes matter, and most people don't vote in primaries.

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/17/newly-drawn-...

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/fairvote/pages/2412/at...

https://www.uniteamerica.org/sections/partisan-primaries-dis...

“The CEO made me buy it” is what children would say.

It’s pretty clear today what you can buy or not but to lesson your climate impact.

If you choose to blame your poor choices on “incentives” well, that’s on you.

Own it.

>If you

I am a physicist with a 2009 Prius and a shitty apartment in an old house in Providence. I've been advocating for better policy for more than a decade. You've got the wrong guy.

The problem is that you don't understand that politics is mostly about the choices of people who are not like you, and your puffed-up bourgeois elitism doesn't help anyone.

I don’t own a car at all, by choice.

Exactly what maritime shipping wants you to think. Emitting tons of raw sulfur in one voyage, it's still to this day largely unregulated.

I did not list them all out to save time, but maritime shipping would be included in the “cheap material goods made with overseas labor”.

Sufficiently tax the emissions if the boat wants to unload in the country so that cleaner boats are used or production moves on shore.

Can't wait for excessive breathing to be shunned as well.

There might be some middle ground between using a 15 mile per gallon vehicle to shuttle 2 kids around and breathing.

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