- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
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“The world” hasn’t soured on Climate politics. Just the world’s politicians have. Not that they ever really tried to do anything about it. They’re just tired of pretending to care, at this point.
*The worlds politicians, who are puppets of the most sociopathic and psychopathic oligarchs…
A sculpture in Berlin called “Politicians discussing global warming”
Source: https://cementeclipses.com/portfolio/follow-the-leaders/
The sad thing is that people are voting for those politicians.
In Canada, the Liberals introduced the carbon tax around a decade ago. But one of the most popular points of the Conservatives was “axe the tax”. Seeing how popular the slogan was, amd wanting to be re-elected, the Liberals did just that. They removed their very own carbon tax.
It makes gas cheaper so people want that. Cheap gas to power their ever bigger pickup trucks and SUVs. Who would vote to keep higher gas prices and use a smaller car? Or even worse, who would vote for bike lanes and public transit?
Politicians are pretty much just doing what people expect of them. They have to make sure gas is ever cheaper, that growth stays infinite, while also pretending to do something about the environment.
It didn’t make gss or anything cheaper though. Corporations pocket more profit and now I do t get a rebate.
I would imagine that people in general would be more likely to support paying increased taxes to support climate change related action if they didn’t feel that those taxes could be the difference between paying rent and being homeless. New taxes can’t be the only solution because climate change isn’t the only thing people care about.
The carbon tax was revenue neutral. It came back to you in the form of rebates. If you were an average Joe and did absolutely nothing in response to it, you’d still break even.
But if you did do something to lower your personal carbon footprint, you’d get ahead. You’d be getting back more than you were paying. And the higher the tax went, the bigger the payout would become. That was the point of it. It was an incentive to lower your taxes and emissions at the same time.
But all people with half a brain could hear was TAX TAX TAX. And so here we are…
I don’t want to seem unkind but a lot of people are not choosing between paying rent or being homeless just because they should/could reduce the usage of their cars.
I know poorer people rely on car dependency and that taxing their gas is genuinely upsetting. However, the average Canadian monthly payment for a new car is $1,019. Some people can buy cars of $60 000 but the gas to feed it is too expensive and threatens their food or housing safety?
Again, this is going to sound incredibly disconnected and privileged, but I changed city and moved somewhere with public transit and an expansive network of bike paths so I don’t have to pay eternally for a car and its polluting fuel. It’s what made me afford my rent while being poor. It also has the benefit of polluting less.
More than 80 percent of Canada’s population live in urban centers. Some have public transit and is actively being cut. Some have bike networks where car drivers criticize every inch that’s not theirs. Most people living in those urban centers could reduce their car usage, but they chose to drive cars, whine about gas prices, parking costs, cyclists, and vote for politicians reflecting that.
Just the world’s politicians have
Not sure this is true. When people have more percieved short term problems (war, job security, inflation, etc), percieved long term problems become less important, especially if the proposed solutions have a negative impact on the short term problems.
Oh that’s the fun part! We die.
Luckily, we have the terror of fascism to distract us from the terror of ecological collapse!
Yay! You can stop fascists but you can’t stop entropy and momentum.
The climate continues changing, though.
So this is what shits me in Aus. We voted to not have an authoritative snake who would definitely accelerate facist retoric and make anti climate policy a prioity. Instead we voted in a worm who we thought we could at least negotiate with forgetting that worms have no spine . What the worm took away from the ground swell of support was not “oh people really dont want facism and maybe this climate thing is important” into “keep doing what we are doing the people love it”.
Few reasons why it became unpopular on a political level
- WEF types trying to shoehorn in their agendas and corrupting good ideas (walkable cities and sustainable food got turned into surveillance zones and eating the bugs)
- Oil industry propaganda (obvious)
- Boomers
- Megacorps using it as an excuse to snuff out smaller competitors.
If you want to save the planet you will have to start at the local level and practice regenerative agriculture.
Polls show that voters don’t actually prioritize decarbonization and, crucially, aren’t willing to pay much to bring it about. Axe fossil fuel subsidies and replace them with green technologies like algae fuel grown with wastewater. So much of climate activism got pigeonholed into “just use an electric car bro” and trying to sustain pointless consumerism and terrible agriculture practices.
If you exclude the billionaires and everyone else manages their footprint, we’d still go to hell in a hand basket because of just how much influence the billionaires club has on the climate.
Regulate the billionaires before telling the rest of us to doing sustainable activities.
they largely given up on it, as a youtuber i followed. like years ago. they were only doing perfomative actions while not enacting meaningful legislation against the polluters. now that far right govts have given them clout to not doing anything.
plus for a while these same companies were using subterfuge, and sabotage to avoid reducing their pollutions, funding " protest groups that deface properties to enrage support agains tthem", and funding “how to reduce your own carbon footprint by buying these eco-friendly products” too.
The whole world has soured.
