No, i want a shift towards an society that doesn’t rely so heavily upon petroleum products and natural gas.
I’d even take one that, say, taxes oil and gas corporations to pay for massive infrastructure projects to create sustainable mass transit nationwide and provide retraining for millions of O&G workers.
Or possibly one that uses its tax money to determine which single use plastics are necessary (eg. Sterile medical syringes etc), and then, having made that determination, bans industry from utilizing them in any other instance.
Really, we start getting to the heart of the matter when the government starts taxing industry and directly using that to retrofit residences and small commercial properties with sustainable infrastructure. Solar panels, water reclamation and irrigation, conversion of grass lawns to mixed use permaculture or xeriscaping as needed, multi-paned windows, insulation, breezeways, etc etc.
You want companies to be held responsible for gas being burned, there’s no way that responsibility isnt handled that doesnt make gas unavailable to people. Either banning it outright, or in your case taxing it away, the outcome is the same. It’s just not possible to reduce gas production and not affect consumers.
The only way this goes smoothly is consumers reducing demand.
When we replace all of the gas ranges in homes, restaurants, etc with electric ones, that creates a reduction in demand. How does someone renting a house with a gas furnace, a gas hot water heater, and a gas range reduce their demand for gas? Just eat less and don’t shower or use heat? It’s absurd to expect individuals to equally share the burden when they don’t equally contribute, nor have equal means available to them.
How does someone making $18,000/year afford to buy an electric car to stop using gasoline, and even if they do, how does that help with tire pollution, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than tailpipe pollution on most modern cars? What products can I buy that are completely void of any unnecessary use of plastic? Which ones that exist aren’t priced higher due to petroleum subsidiaries ensuring they remain the cheapest option for manufacturers to use to package their products?
How does someone living in Compton living a completely sustainable life change Bill Gates flying around in a jet and creating monoculture farms that each do more harm to the environment than the average person? Why is the onus on the average man, when it has been shown repeatedly that the average person uses entire orders of magnitude less than those in upper echelons of society? When people like Kylie Jenner use the equivalent of 40,000 people worth of resources in a week, why wouldn’t we start by leveling the playing field, and ensuring first that some aren’t abusing their privilege while others have not even enough?
How does someone making $18,000/year afford to buy an electric car to stop using gasoline
the same way they keep buying larger and larger gas trucks and SUV’s currently. We are so damn far from your notion that people are doing what they can and just dont have the means to do more. We agree on a lot of stuff, like the importance of public transit and less car-centric city design, but we dont have it because most Americans dont want it. They want more roads and bigger vehicles and cheaper gas.
In fact Im kind of losing motivation to push this, consumer responsibility would be the smoothest way, but I dont have any faith in the US population to even consider doing anything.
