I'm not sure if they're just confused, or trying to sow misinformation.
It is however politically impossible in most places.
And the political impact would be angry people ready to listen climate deniers.
What's needed is a plan to eventually give everyone an electric car or some choice, any choice, that lets them do their daily business with much lower carbon consumption. Maybe taxes can change the behavior of industrial users but for consumers, this is totally daft solution.
I think that is just an excuse to not make changes that are necessary. Saying that something will hit the poor/average person/working family is an argument about wealth/cost distribution, which is separate from the actual problem.
When we, as humanity, have the natural resources, the technology and the labor required to do something that is objectively necessary, the only thing that can stand in the way is cost/wealth distribution: who gets to pay the bill.
So when objectively necessary changes do not happen, the only possible reason for that is that maintaining wealth/power are more important than suffering the consequences of not implementing the change.
It's not excuse, it's a reason. It's not even the poor that will push back here on gas taxes but the somewhat well-off but not wealthy. These are the kind of people I don't have cultural sympathy with but if you just say tell them "oh, you're going to be paying a whole bunch for that pickup", you may find you don't get to say that after next election.
When we, as humanity, have the natural resources, the technology and the labor required to do something that is objectively necessary, the only thing that can stand in the way is cost/wealth distribution: who gets to pay the bill.
The US has a massively unequal distribution of wealth currently. A plan to get the poor to for this problem will fail 'cause they don't actually have money.
Well, that's the very point. (And it was even why the carbon tax was mentioned in response to the GP comment.) Unless you make CO2 emissions (CO2 emitting behaviour) expensive for the members of the society (you can say, the average person) they (we) won't stop doing these.
Yes, a lot of people feel they have to drive a lot. But they probably don't. They can just afford it and thus they've organized their lives around being able to drive a lot.
Now if all these behaviours and activities would become very expensive then the market would come up with cheaper substitutes. Yes, people would have to change too but it wouldn't mean that everyone would just stop what they are doing and thus their lives would somehow grind to a halt. (E.g. can't drive to work any more doesn't have to mean can't work any more.) Carbon tax will also make carbon based energy production expensive which means that the alternatives will immediately seem cheaper and there will be a lot of incentive in deployment and development. Nuclear plants (fission plants, fusion ones don't seem anywhere near) will become attractive again and probably cheaper and more robust as well.
Nobody's claiming it's not hard. The claim is that it is the better solution. The other one is running into a very nasty future where food is expensive, water is tight and hundreds of millions of people will want to come to live to your country (unless you are one of thse who will have to migrate).
Bullshit. Consider that the average person doesn’t own a car.
Even in developed countries people drive more than they have to.
A debt which should be paid by past users, not current users who merely share the same country.
This is the tarpit of market-based solutions: debating endlessly about who bears costs, instead of just doing collective things collectively. And if you do have markets, every middleman and their dog will demand their slice of the pie.
I also disagree with the tactic of shifting responsibility to the individual to avoid doing anything where it actually matters. My individual contributions to climate change are negligible, this is a collective issue. We need to get industry and corporations in check and the only way we can do that is with heavy regulation.
What global warming does is destabilise the equilibrium we had in the global climate system, and one of the outcomes of that is more extreme weather. That means for example longer and drier droughts which obviously contributes to wildfire risk.
In short: you hint at tryanny.
The moment you mention how a carbon tax works (that it’s a market mechanism) progressives recoil. When evangelizing to progressives, I try to focus on “making polluters pay for the damage they are doing” (as opposed to making taxpayers bail us out) since they are more likely to be persuaded by appeals to fairness rather than efficacy.
Similarly, conservatives recoil at “tax” nomenclature, so when evangelizing to the , I refer to it as “carbon pricing” and emphasize the economic efficiency argument.
In either case, we have a long way to go, politically.
We, the consumers, will ultimately pay any carbon taxes. Which may be appropriate, but let's not be unrealistic about who will be paying.
And of course, we the public consumers will also benefit the most from making our industries greener and cleaner.
Speak for yourself. I haven't owned a car in my life and don't plan to change that.
Completely agree. We need governments to ensure externalities (both positive and negative) are reflected in market pricing so that economic forces can operate efficiently.
Implication: there must be a debt to pay for past and present GHG output. It should not be punitive. But it should be clear and predictable.