Probably because the options won't affect those making and supporting those policies, and the whole way the system is setup, the impact is gonna hurt everybody from middle class all the way to the bottom.
1. Upper Class / rich people would be generally more affected, as they rely on a lot more nice-to-haves like pools, cars, and air-cons. I'm middle class and I only just got these things, I can very easily do without them, like I had in the past.
2. Rich people generally don't get affected by much, because they have money to compensate and make things better for them.
It sounds like you're gonna want to drag down the upper class as well so they will have shared misery.
Then ain't losing their pools, cars, and air-cons. A downright ban on cars or air-cons is unlikely (ban or air-cons will mean a death sentence for hundreds of thousands during heat waves), and a ban on cars will mean major disruption, especially as US cities and jobs aren't public transport friendly.
And there will be various ways to work around it for the upper class, e.g. get an electric luxury car which would be allowed, install big-ass solar panels, and so on. At worst the cost for having them, from 1%-0.001% of their income, will jump to 2%-0.002%. For a working class person, it would be a much larger percentage, meaning air-con and car will be a bigger burdern, starting to get comparable to rent.
And the upper class/rich have other tricks like exceptions for business use (e.g. register their house an office for their personal business or owned by the company), or merely their pals voting in their favour (e.g. "private jets are not currently subject to carbon tax in the majority of European countries due to exemptions from the EU emissions trading system"). If needs be, they'll just pay the carbon offset too, which will be another insignificant cost compared to their income.
We've known for like 50 years that the longer we push cost onto environmental externalities, the worse the options get. It's a little late to complain about the options, folks.
First, the headline is an awful miscategorization of reality (no matter how credible the source is).
Second, the US public operates within an illusion of freedom. The options aren't up to US public to take action on. The options are up to large corporations and ultra-rich to take action on. My carbon footprint is nowhere near the size of persons such as the Waltons, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or entities such as bitcoin mining farms, OpenAI, BP, Exxon Mobile, Shell, Amazon, Nestle, Walmart, Google, Raytheon.
Me riding my bicycle as a primary form of transportation, and eating a homegrown vegetarian diet, does nothing to combat climate change as Kim Kardashian's plane flies overhead. Nothing I do stops Exxon and BP from spilling oil into the waterways, or American car manufacturers from refusing to pivot to renewables. Instead of maintaining a hard line, US government hands out carbon credits to companies for successfully skirting climate regulations. Me choosing to not use cloud computing does nothing to improve that situation. I didn't price the US public out of cities, so that individuals now have to commute over an hour to barely make a living (using even more precious fossil fuels), corporations did that under government supervision.
The whole "climate change is a personal responsibility" thing is a fabrication of those corps who are actually doing the damage. That it gets parroted in the media regularly is shameful.
We would like some more options - those that involve pain across the board rather than just targeting the worker drones at the bottom. Like shutting down thermal coal mining and making it an offence. We know already that power generation can be completely handled by renewables as even with our feeble renewable setups we can regularly exceed our power needs.
And get them to put nuclear off the table. It has never been, or ever will, be anything other than a dangerous, stupid and expensive way to make power.
I'm fine with whatever. I'm getting to the point where I wish I was liquidated or vaporized in 2018. Shut off the power, tell me I have to live in the woods, take away my car, starve me. Wait. That's what is going to happen anyway. Yeah, they should have just done that to me in 2018. I'm sick of everything. With every key press I type entering this note into this stupid internet guestbook masquerading as a temple for a piss poor religion reminds me of everything that big tech has taken from me. All of my productive years. Nothing to show for it really because all of the work was based around malinvestment and captained by well heeled idiots. The scale of what was stolen from the best minds of my generation. Instead of building facebook.... you know... we might have been able to get ahead of this. But you know. Whatever. Boil me yesterday.
If it helps, I come from a different horseshit treadmill - advertising production. I'm just here to talk to people who are smarter than me, cause I got sick of reddit.
You've made the right choice. Keep making it and build stuff that matters. There world has changed and folks chasing the dragon of what was are about to be decimated.
13 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] thread2. Rich people generally don't get affected by much, because they have money to compensate and make things better for them.
It sounds like you're gonna want to drag down the upper class as well so they will have shared misery.
And there will be various ways to work around it for the upper class, e.g. get an electric luxury car which would be allowed, install big-ass solar panels, and so on. At worst the cost for having them, from 1%-0.001% of their income, will jump to 2%-0.002%. For a working class person, it would be a much larger percentage, meaning air-con and car will be a bigger burdern, starting to get comparable to rent.
And the upper class/rich have other tricks like exceptions for business use (e.g. register their house an office for their personal business or owned by the company), or merely their pals voting in their favour (e.g. "private jets are not currently subject to carbon tax in the majority of European countries due to exemptions from the EU emissions trading system"). If needs be, they'll just pay the carbon offset too, which will be another insignificant cost compared to their income.
Second, the US public operates within an illusion of freedom. The options aren't up to US public to take action on. The options are up to large corporations and ultra-rich to take action on. My carbon footprint is nowhere near the size of persons such as the Waltons, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or entities such as bitcoin mining farms, OpenAI, BP, Exxon Mobile, Shell, Amazon, Nestle, Walmart, Google, Raytheon.
Me riding my bicycle as a primary form of transportation, and eating a homegrown vegetarian diet, does nothing to combat climate change as Kim Kardashian's plane flies overhead. Nothing I do stops Exxon and BP from spilling oil into the waterways, or American car manufacturers from refusing to pivot to renewables. Instead of maintaining a hard line, US government hands out carbon credits to companies for successfully skirting climate regulations. Me choosing to not use cloud computing does nothing to improve that situation. I didn't price the US public out of cities, so that individuals now have to commute over an hour to barely make a living (using even more precious fossil fuels), corporations did that under government supervision.
We would like some more options - those that involve pain across the board rather than just targeting the worker drones at the bottom. Like shutting down thermal coal mining and making it an offence. We know already that power generation can be completely handled by renewables as even with our feeble renewable setups we can regularly exceed our power needs.
And get them to put nuclear off the table. It has never been, or ever will, be anything other than a dangerous, stupid and expensive way to make power.
Like huge carbon sequestration efforts, or direct atmospheric remediation. Large public projects that 'create jobs' etc. Lots of positives to sell.