the us taxes gasoline quite low in relation to other countries. it’s part of the reason we have so much sprawl, and are so car dependent.
us average of all taxes ( town, state, county, federal ) is 52 cents a gallon. the average from the top 36 “advanced” economies is 2.24 a gallon.
that’s down to the fact you still drive on the roads, and the roads still need maintenance. if we didn’t have so much sprawl then by definition we’d have less road surface and less (cost) to maintain.
[ not that raising gas taxes will fix our sprawl. it’s a hard problem to solve now that driving is so entrenched. ]
I’m not sure how you think that me burning the oil in my car or throwing the plastic bag into the garbage is any less “responsible” for the polition than the company that pulled it out of the ground. It would take some olympic level mental contortionism of self dillusion for me to arrive at that conclusion. That is like blaming the coca farmers for the cocaine addictions in the US.
You posit that we should not blame the consumer/user of a product (for example, using fossil fuels in your car, and using plastic bags), and that we really should blame the producer of the product for making it (instead of some other more environmentally friendly product), then you imply that it’s not the coca farmer’s (the producer’s) fault if there’s a market of consumers that want to use their product… so, we need to either blame the producer (both Big Oil and Coca farmers) for making the products, or we blame Consumers for buying and consuming the products… Can’t be bad in one case, but good in another…
Well, I guess it can, the Coca farmer vs Big Oil is sort of an apples/oranges comparison. In the Cocaine example, the consumer specifically wants that particular product, where-as for the Oil consumer, the consumer just want’s some form of transportation, and some way to carry stuff home from the grocery store, and probably would be perfectly OK if there was some alternative, more environmentally friendly way of accomplishing the same thing (providing it wasn’t much more expensive, or much less convenient)
I’m sure there was no marketing at all. Stuff just sells itself!
There are no structural reasons why ICE cars are the primary mode of transportation in North America. It’s not like oil companies and car companies influenced the building of roads over public transportation [Narrator: they did] or blocked the development of high-speed rail [Narrator: they did] or hid the effects of carbon emissions on public health [Narrator: they did] and climate change [Narrator: they did].
There’s a reason both “gaslighting” and “astroturfing” refer to the products of fossil fuel extraction.
I think this is a dumb analogy but I’ll try it out.
Do you think only the addicted people are to blame? That it’s exactly, and only, their own fault that they get addicted? I don’t. There is almost always a bigger systemic problem behind issues like this when you look a little further. Why do they need to escape into drugs? What systems are there to help them get clean? etc.
Do you think the best solution to the drug wars in the Americas is to get all drug users to voluntarily stop taking drugs? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that suggested as a solution for thát problem before, why should it work for fossil fuels and waste?
What would you think if the drug-cartel bosses created a add campaign promoting different ways to get out of your addiction that all made it clear that the drug user can solve this problem themselves. Would you not suspect that they had ulterior motives? That they know the users can’t all kick the habit. And that they are hoping by offering this framing to make people forget the other options of solving these problems? Like anything at the systemic level?
I don’t care who is responsible, I care about what would work to change this. If you hold only all individuals responsible and wait for them to all do the right thing, then we are all going to die because that is never going to happen. We need systemic change.
Demanding individuals take action first is at best a good way to derail a conversation and make a ally feel unwelcome, and at worst, if people actually take your advice and stop part-taking in the conversation until their own house is in order, a massive setback to the amount of people that want to help change the system now.
There is an underlying reason for everything that happens. My point is that one should make sure and get their house in order before throwing rocks at others.
Doesn’t that hold true for the producers as well? I mean, consumers didn’t have access to the private research that Exxon had that showed that oil production led directly to climate change; in fact, they buried that research for decades. Where’s the responsibility for “getting their house in order” there?
I suppose you also blame smokers for smoking, with little to no responsibility of the tobacco producers who used heavy marketing dollars to get people to try an ever-increasingly addictive product while their own research showed it was harmful; then fought tooth-and-nail to suppress the research that showed just how deadly it was.
So the consumer is most to blame, but they were working with information that wasn’t just imperfect, but were intentionally deceived by the producer? How can you recognize that about tobacco companies and not the perfect parallel of oil companies?
My blame for the oil consumer is for the current state not history. This thread started because I wanted to make sure current blamers were at least trying to do their part to curtail dependency and pollution from hydrocarbons.
I blame both in both scenarios. I am not arguing that only one side or the other is to blame. It is a counter argument to “the consumer is not at all to blame”.
The consumers have been voting with their wallet since the ‘70s, buying ever more efficient vehicles and eventually electric vehicles; paying extra for sustainable electricity like solar and wind, despite power producers’ lower costs of production over time for those sources.
Consumers are hurtling as fast as they can towards a low-oil or no-oil extraction future, and the industry still holds them back. That’s the current situation. Your blame is misplaced.
The crash in the price of oil was already well underway before the pandemic turned it from a gradual decrease to a panic. Alberta’s oil sands have been upside down for a decade and the only way fracking progressed in the US is with heavy government subsidies and leveraged to the hilt.
By your own words, you place most of the responsibility on the consumer. Your first post in this thread was to challenge @heng about their own hydrocarbon use; implying that, until they reduce their own hydrocarbon consumption to zero, they have no say in reducing production. That’s astroturfing gaslighting.
Edit: Getting my terms correct. It would only be astroturfing if you were being paid to do it.
It sure was, and it was as a direct result of Russia undermining OPEC’s price fixing schemes.
This is not true. Although advances have been made, the best selling vehicle in the US is a mostly unneeded inefficient pickup truck. The vote is in, most of the public does not care.
