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I couldn’t agree with you any more than I do. For the past 20 years western liberals have entered into the collective delusion that it is possible to reduce gl
by smeeth 6y ago
I couldn’t agree with you any more than I do.
For the past 20 years western liberals have entered into the collective delusion that it is possible to reduce global GHG outputs to a level where warming will stop or reverse.
This should be obvious to anyone who has ever made a personal sacrifice for a cause and tried to convince others to as well. I’m vegetarian, and convincing even the most cute animal loving people to reduce consumption (forget stopping entirely) is shockingly hard to do. Convincing the entire world to replace fossil fuels was never going to happen.
The tragedy here is that the only trans-national political movement seriously concerned about this problem insists on directing all investment and attention away from the only viable solutions to the problem they care so deeply about.
- porb121 6y agoIt's impossible to nicely ask people to limit their consumption of resources to which they have unfettered access; it's very feasible to seriously limit their access to them. If meat (and other polluting products) were priced according to their emissions externalities, a lot more people would be vegetarians.
- chr1 6y agoReducing meat consumption and other similar measures will have vanishingly small effect, especially compared to the amount of CO2 that is going to be released from Siberian permafrost, which is already melting, and has more carbon stored in it than all the carbon we have added and will burn in the near future.
- lotyrin 6y agoIt doesn't seem politically possible to even ask people to limit their consumption, and enforcement would be suicidal to governance. We've seen what it looks like when you try: that it was not possible to ask people just to be polite and responsible regarding the epidemic -- they were practically ready to revolt instead of observe simple precautionary measures. Can you imagine if there were across-the-board actual enforcement in place for any of those measures, what it would have looked like? And that was an acute event, not something that's slowly boiling the frog.
- lanternfish 6y agoWe already tax things that we don't want people to buy, this isn't fundamentally different.
- lotyrin 6y agoYeah, but on that front, the parts of the market we need to tax have regulatory capture.
- ricardo81 6y agoOne simple thing that could be done that the EU should consider is taxing packaging. The absolute minimum should be used and anything more should be taxed. I'm sure everyone's received a delivery of a box within a box.