The average American produced 16.5 tonnes of CO2e in 2014. The average Briton produced 6.5 tonnes. British people do not live in medieval squalor, nor do they all live in bedsits in central London and travel everywhere by tube.
The only thing stopping American politicians from vastly reducing CO2 emissions is the will of the electorate. The top-down political solution actually comes from the bottom-up - by persuading people to vote for candidates who support decarbonisation. You only have one president, but he was chosen for office by 62,979,636 voters.
Tighten the CAFE standards until something other than the Ford F-150 is the world's bestselling passenger vehicle.
Get rid of coal. Take some of the ~$6bn/yr that you currently spend subsidising the fossil fuel industries and deliver a package of job-creating tax credits in Wyoming and West Virginia.
Do whatever it takes to remove minimum lot sizes, single-use zoning and minimum parking requirements from zoning laws. I'm sure that the Supreme Court could be persuaded to change their mind on Euclid vs Ambler. Maybe people would drive less and walk more if suburbs weren't legally required to be unwalkable.
Reallocate some of the ~$20bn/yr you spend on agricultural subsidies to disincentivise cattle feedlot operations and incentivise soil sequestration.
Impose gradually escalating taxes on road and domestic aviation fuel and spend the revenues on mass transit infrastructure. Offer low-income citizens a rebate.
No, I disagree with the rebate thing. For one thing, low-income citizens don't need to be flying domestically (if they are, they're not "low income"). And a lot of low-income citizens are living car-based lifestyles that are frankly luxurious compared to poor people in other nations, and is costing society a lot. These people need to move to denser cities and take public transit. The only thing I'd support is subsidies to help them relocate from their rural homes to places where they don't need cars and can get jobs.
A rebate was a key part of getting Canada's recent carbon tax through parliament. The standard arguments against pricing carbon are "it'll kill jobs", "it'll kill industry" or "it's just another tax on hard-working families". I think that any effective green policy agenda has to have a lot of direct and obvious quid-pro-quos to address these concerns. It's not ideal in a narrowly rational sense, but it's politically expedient.
Some climate-related policies are going to be inherently painful, so we should seek wherever possible to mitigate that pain, spread it around equitably or ration it out over time. Getting people to transition to more sustainable lifestyles is obviously the goal, but uprooting a bunch of low-income workers has terrible optics and burns political capital that could be better used elsewhere. You're aiming for diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.
The calculus is slightly weird in the US due to what I will politely describe as a unique political culture, but you can frame a lot of it in American political grammar. Call it the "war on weather" or something, appeal to the self-image of America as the world's moral leadership, sell it as every citizen's patriotic duty and use the term "common sense" a lot. Emphasise how it'll build a long-term economic advantage over China. If you think immigration is bad now, just wait until half of South America becomes uninhabitable. If we pass this R&D bill, we'll have a monopoly on this technology in the future. Green policies are eminently achievable in the US political landscape, but they need to be thoroughly decoupled from liberal rhetoric.
Yeah! And don't forget Shepard Fairey for the visuals. I hope you're incorporated because you could make a fortune in the agitprop business. Just sell the people what they never knew they needed.
Seriously, I agree with your end goal in the reduction of man-made CO2 emissions. I even agree, in spirit, with items 3 and 4 above. What I don't agree with is the sudden dismantling of industries and punitive taxation.
I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve. I also believe that the Earths weather operates wholly independently of man's industrial activity at this time.
Plenty of other countries have already done it. There's literally nothing stopping Americans from following suit if Americans decide that it's the right thing to do.
>I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve.
If the IPCC are right, that'll be far too late. They say we need ambitious action now. They could be wrong, but is that a gamble we want to take? Is it worth risking a disaster-movie scenario so that we can keep driving big trucks and prop up some industries with no future anyway? If the IPCC are right and we do nothing, how will we explain it to our grandchildren? "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we thought that 99.9% of scientists were wrong?". "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we couldn't be bothered getting the bus?". Is that how we want to be remembered?
Well we could start by not building in the suburbs any more, and instead building more densely (this is done with zoning regulations), and raising fuel taxes as well.
Urban/Suburban infill development is a terrific idea. It's being accomplished at a far faster clip than a lot of people realize, but there could be better incentives at the federal level (US).
Fuel taxes are pretty high already. Increasing them will hurt a lot of people very badly.
Umm, what? American fuel taxes are pretty cheap. Fuel is almost half the price here than anywhere in Europe, largely due to Europe's higher taxes on fuel.
It's actually becoming a problem; our fuel taxes haven't risen as much as inflation, and our road infrastructure is funded largely by fuel taxes.
Fuel taxes are high enough for America. It's not fair to compare the US and the EU. The EU has an extra trillion or so per year to spend on swanky infrastructure and entitlements since it doesn't have to outlay much for its own defense.
The only thing stopping American politicians from vastly reducing CO2 emissions is the will of the electorate. The top-down political solution actually comes from the bottom-up - by persuading people to vote for candidates who support decarbonisation. You only have one president, but he was chosen for office by 62,979,636 voters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...