I agree. Same goes for all those oil and coal execs – personal and business lives, they’re “elites” at the top, too. In fact, perhaps start with the billionaires in those industries who’ve gotten us into this mess by spending many years and much money (and many hours in private jets) denying climate change while those bad ol’ liberal and progressive Hollywood and tech and political “elites” were doing the opposite.
If you want to go on about wealthy people not doing their fair share, I’m with you. But ten supposed “hypocrites” like DiCaprio or Gore have done far less damage put together than one Rex Tillerson; or, for that matter, than any longtime Fox News personality or right-wing talk radio star who’s spent the past two decades crying about how carbon taxes and government regulation of polluting industries is a plot by the liberal coastal elites to persecute Real Americans™.
If North Korea or China wanted to make CO2 more expensive for their populations, they can just make it so. France? Germany? the USA? Not so much. They have those pesky “voters” to cope with.
Voters who have trouble grasping economic concepts like “revenue neutral” along with the base scientific concepts surrounding the need to reduce atmospheric CO2. Unfortunately, a significant portion of any country’s electorate (at least a third in the U.S.) are intellectually unequipped and/or inadequately educated to give due consideration to such issues.
Worse, the GOP and conservative parties in the West often take the same laissez faire/profits-first attitude toward the issue that the authoritarian Chinese do. They consistently gull those low-info voters with distractions about “hypocritical green elites” and “hoax-perpetrating” climate scientists the necessity of preserving jerbs in dying and outmoded polluting industries.
If Western liberal democracies are to consult the people before putting these measures into place (as they should) then they need to educate the people. I’m not sure how long that’s going to happen as long as conservatives and other “free” market fundies are trying their best to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The right wins when it can portray the issue as “the family budget today” versus “sea levels toward the end of the century”, and at least in France and the USA that seems to be working. I haven’t met anyone recently who has wished that gas prices in our area would go back up to $3.89 a gallon.
Correct. Modern conservatism in all its forms (including neoliberal economic orthodoxy) ultimately appeals – bluntly or in a sneaky way – to short-term and simplistic/sequential thinking. Its presence in the debate has deliberately made a difficult problem an almost intractable one.
That’s a good example. The idea that they might carpool or not own a car at all has been made alien to a lot of them by conservative culture, and until recently electric cars were portrayed as expensive toys for Hollywood and tech elites. Living in a city with good public transit means having the option of not thinking about the price of gas at all, except perhaps in terms of macroeconomic and political implications.
