I would be interested in lower handing fruits that does not for 1/4 of the population to change. If we change consumption / spending habits that will also propagate.
Personally, I think politicians are doing a really good job in trying to balance things.
Eg. It should be super easy to increase taxes on one-family detached houses and cars. This would almost immediately lead to reduced emissions – so this fruit is almost on the ground.
However, the truth is that people don't want to live in apartments and take public transport.
It would have been even easier to, for instance, never allow the extraction of bituminous sands and tight oil : cannot burn something that was never extracted !
But as Tony Blair's aide explained so clearly, politicians have nothing to gain in trying to prevent these issues, and everything to lose, because the average voter doesn't give a shit about even the near future.
That would be government micromanaging and considering individual methods of extraction - My personal belief is that government should be higher level. Ie. focus on the externalities.
High taxes on fossil fuels would make not profitable to extract in complex ways.
This is also about externalities : these two sources already have quite a lot of them even without considering the greenhouse effects.
They are also less effective than the (foreign) alternatives, and it becomes impractical to differentiate at the very end of the chain, when it all been blended together and processed... This in theory should be handled by market forces, but in practice it doesn't seem to work : the US tight oil industry has been losing money almost every year since its restart in the oughties, yet somehow keeps getting funded : is this the next big Wall Street scam after subprime mortgages, funded with bank bailout money ??
I would be interested in lower handing fruits that does not for 1/4 of the population to change. If we change consumption / spending habits that will also propagate.
Personally, I think politicians are doing a really good job in trying to balance things.
Eg. It should be super easy to increase taxes on one-family detached houses and cars. This would almost immediately lead to reduced emissions – so this fruit is almost on the ground.
However, the truth is that people don't want to live in apartments and take public transport.