I'm not sure if they're just confused, or trying to sow misinformation.
It is however politically impossible in most places.
And the political impact would be angry people ready to listen climate deniers.
What's needed is a plan to eventually give everyone an electric car or some choice, any choice, that lets them do their daily business with much lower carbon consumption. Maybe taxes can change the behavior of industrial users but for consumers, this is totally daft solution.
I think that is just an excuse to not make changes that are necessary. Saying that something will hit the poor/average person/working family is an argument about wealth/cost distribution, which is separate from the actual problem.
When we, as humanity, have the natural resources, the technology and the labor required to do something that is objectively necessary, the only thing that can stand in the way is cost/wealth distribution: who gets to pay the bill.
So when objectively necessary changes do not happen, the only possible reason for that is that maintaining wealth/power are more important than suffering the consequences of not implementing the change.
It's not excuse, it's a reason. It's not even the poor that will push back here on gas taxes but the somewhat well-off but not wealthy. These are the kind of people I don't have cultural sympathy with but if you just say tell them "oh, you're going to be paying a whole bunch for that pickup", you may find you don't get to say that after next election.
When we, as humanity, have the natural resources, the technology and the labor required to do something that is objectively necessary, the only thing that can stand in the way is cost/wealth distribution: who gets to pay the bill.
The US has a massively unequal distribution of wealth currently. A plan to get the poor to for this problem will fail 'cause they don't actually have money.
Well, that's the very point. (And it was even why the carbon tax was mentioned in response to the GP comment.) Unless you make CO2 emissions (CO2 emitting behaviour) expensive for the members of the society (you can say, the average person) they (we) won't stop doing these.
Yes, a lot of people feel they have to drive a lot. But they probably don't. They can just afford it and thus they've organized their lives around being able to drive a lot.
Now if all these behaviours and activities would become very expensive then the market would come up with cheaper substitutes. Yes, people would have to change too but it wouldn't mean that everyone would just stop what they are doing and thus their lives would somehow grind to a halt. (E.g. can't drive to work any more doesn't have to mean can't work any more.) Carbon tax will also make carbon based energy production expensive which means that the alternatives will immediately seem cheaper and there will be a lot of incentive in deployment and development. Nuclear plants (fission plants, fusion ones don't seem anywhere near) will become attractive again and probably cheaper and more robust as well.
Nobody's claiming it's not hard. The claim is that it is the better solution. The other one is running into a very nasty future where food is expensive, water is tight and hundreds of millions of people will want to come to live to your country (unless you are one of thse who will have to migrate).
Bullshit. Consider that the average person doesn’t own a car.
Even in developed countries people drive more than they have to.
