Do you ever consider that you personally are helping the extreme parties by passing on memes like "but what about the foreigners!" and "poor folks are paying the bills!" when this topic comes up?
We all saw how quickly Brexit went, and neither UK nor Europe is better afterwards, you just need few skilled populists push the right levers at right time and its done, for good. Why feed them even more without even listening to their concerns?
I am all for EU despite its dysfunctions and consider it overall a good institution in Europe, but ignoring problems and having tunnel vision only on efforts that you like ain't smartest approach, things will backfire. People and societies we form are complex in various ways, lets respect that a bit if we want some long term consensus and not constant infighting and ignored tensions which benefits just our enemies, like current one in the east.
That's the fact here.
Relative emissions and various kinds of cost factors matter a lot. The climate isn't going to improve by stupidly and blindly spending billions, goodwill and precious time on low-yield measures, when less resources could be spent on high-yield measures elsewhere. That is why stuff like banning plastic straws or kitchen gas stoves is actively harmful. Because the "what about those foreign big emitters" argument is very valid.
These facts re-hash arguments about planetary limits which have been ongoing since the 1970s if not before, and pit past growth, consumption, and pollution amongst western nations (the US, Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia, largely), with the hopes for economic growth, still strongly coupled to consumption and emissions, of the rest of the world, quite notably China and India, but also Africa's future billion or so in coming decades. It's notable that despite the Industrial Revolution and carbon age being roughly 250 years old, half of all emissions date from the 1970s, a time at which Western emissions were slowing heavily following the 1970s oil shocks.
It's not a case of either/or but both, the reality is complex, and simple, and most especially nationalistic simplifications, finger-pointing, or whataboutisms really don't advance the discussion.
We’re seeing this play out in children due to Covid lockdowns. Their development was retarded. They started speaking later. They lost functionally three years. Many are pushed through school compounding the issue. At the same time violence at home rose during that time due to stressor.
We need to avoid such policy shortcomings. Administrations at various levels need to think things out. I’m not saying do nothing. I am saying tread lightly while considering many issues.
What you are doing, it bringing up a series of unrelated issue and trying to pin them on these policies, or suggest, in an ignorance, that they are not thinking about one of the core political realities of their career.
This is all the more reason to speed up the transfer of renewables which have near zero marginal cost, and aren't emitting carbon and particles which damage the people around them.
Speaking or cycle of pain and poverty, the particle pollution of coal plants and refineries is an ongoing public health crisis. This policy is an aspect of making them pay for the pollution they previously were making their neighbors pay for, in asthma, COPD, mercury poisoning, lung cancer and many other illnesses directly attributed to these plants emissions.