Free Buses, Car Mileage Taxes, and Natural Gas Bans
Let’s stop being reasonable and look to the future.
The headline for his article encompasses three courses of action, the mere mention of which in a public forum will send the angry-tariat scurrying to their AOL accounts to send letters of protest.
I can name a few other ideas, like bike lanes, and infill residential construction, capable of drawing out commentary thin on facts and thick on inferences of evil intent.
All of these issues are ultimately linked to the need to take actions to ultimately reverse the damage we humans have and are doing to the planet.
An op ed from the Union Tribune, written during the pre-election run up on gas prices, makes the case for expanding public transit. Carolina Martinez, climate justice director with the Environmental Health Coalition, uses both the science and economic impact of our car-centric transportation system to make her case:
Our transportation system is a major contributor to climate change. Here in California, the transportation sector accounts for more than 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Today, we are seeing the effects, in the deadly heat waves smothering the West, the ongoing and historic drought, a record number of wildfires and the ever-present threat of rolling blackouts.
Our car-centric transportation system is a drag on the economy. The health costs of climate change already top $800 billion per year in the U.S. Then there is the growing cost of destruction from weather and climate-related disasters — wildfires, drought, floods — which hit $95 billion nationally in 2020. These costs are borne by all of us.
The lack of transit is a drain on family finances as well. Even before the current spike in gas prices, San Diego-area households spent almost 14 percent of their budgets on transportation, and more than 90 percent of that goes to buying and maintaining private vehicles. The American Public Transportation Association estimates that families in our area could save about $930 a month — $11,200 per year — by using transit instead. Those savings could go a long way toward helping struggling families and securing a better future for our kids.
She’s got lots of ideas for changing the transportation matrix, some of which are big asks in an inertia-filled era where getting from one place to another is a privilege, not a right. Monetization of things in the public sphere has been a pillar of Western economic development; declaring that they should be part of the commons is considered a subversive idea.
I’m not saying that private enterprise/capitalism is a bad idea; I am saying things are out of balance. Much of our commerce is dominated by assorted flavors of monopoly that prioritize profit over everything else. The outsized wealth of a handful of people is being created by a taking of resources that once were considered shareable.
Making the argument for doing things differently is an uphill slog, and facts alone won’t get us up the mountain. I get it; lots of people can’t imagine a world where economic growth isn’t the ultimate intention of public policy
Nowhere is the argument fiercer than in the area of climate change. Things have gotten to the point where government intervention has to be hidden away, renamed, or disguised. President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act includes a record $374 billion for climate spending and will prevent four billion tons of greenhouse gas from emitted.
Climate change denialists once again proved to the world that they don’t (or won’t) know the difference between climate and weather with the release of a Climate Fact Check for 2022, organized by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
Sure enough, they couldn’t find a connection between fossil fuel consumption/greenhouse gasses and the occurrence of any major natural disasters occuring during the past year. ( It’s worth noting that scientists believe climate change has worsened natural disasters; they don’t say it causes them.)
Drawing upon “research” conducted by the Heartland Institute and the research with the Heartland Institute and the International Climate Science Coalition,
their data was dutifully reported by the usual suspects at Fox News and the Daily Wire, along with gaining credibility by inclusion in Google News.
Once upon a time, protecting the planet was a bipartisan issue. The Environmental Protection Agency, along with many of the regulations most-hated-by-conservatives, was a creation of the Nixon administration.
Now, saying climate change is a far-left proposition serves to cover all kinds of bad behavior in legislative bodies. An idea in progress involving numerous proposals called the “Green New Deal” became a pejorative used so often that even centrist Democrats (like Rep. Scott Peters) felt obliged to defame it.
There’s no room to negotiate in the face of assertions by reactionaries that saving the planet is an evil scheme serving the interests of [fill-in your favorite scary name]. I say it’s time to change that, and the way to start is by aiming high.
Let activist groups get behind a mileage tax, banning natural gas, and free buses for everybody. These are all things that need to occur in some form in the future, and the way to get to them is not to try and sound so reasonable out of the gate. It’s time to shift the spectrum of opinion towards realism and away from reactionary scare stories; only then will progress get made.
***
You can follow me at:
Twitter (for now)---> @DougPorter506
Post —→DougPorter@wordsdeedsblogger
Tribel ——> DougP Porter@dougporter506
Mastodon ——> DougPorter506@mastodon.social
Facebook —----> https://www.facebook.com/WordsAndDeedsBlog
PS – I’ll be taking January 3-8 off.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com