Dallas’ Republican chair confirms my suspicion, once again, that Climate Denial is a result of poor toilet training.
At the end, a Republican voter agonizes about his party’s lack of integrity on the issue.
Dallas’ Republican chair confirms my suspicion, once again, that Climate Denial is a result of poor toilet training.
At the end, a Republican voter agonizes about his party’s lack of integrity on the issue.
There goes Allen West pushing the Republican talking points: People are saying you should do things to reduce your carbon footprint, and the resentment-mongering Republicans straw-man those positions as Democrats saying you have to get an EV and you have to get rid of your gas appliances, etc.
The source of Republicans power is a combination of their shamelessness (quite a superpower, actually) and their relentless stoking of resentment within their base.
But that’s essentially what some people are saying, (NOT many Democrats, unfortunately) & it’s the only tenable policy. Tu quoqueness is worse than useless; personal lifestyle change is orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude too small to prevent cataclysm. Price incentives mostly punish the poor, & valorize, reward, & worsen inequality, pushing us faster toward fascism, while paradoxically trying to force people to make personal lifestyle change the focus, but in a twisted, shadow-driven way.
In the end, mandates & prohibitions will be necessary if they’re not everything. Outlawing new ICEV sales & gas hookups in new construction are examples, while not forcing most people to choose EVs & heat pumps (& induction cookers—yay!) right away, they will be coercive at some point, & will not be enough, either. The Supreme Court (& other courts) need to be packed; an emergency needs to be declared, treasonous speech needs to be curtailed (lying about climate & renewable energy, eg); the slowdown in offshore wind construction needs to be speeded up; the backlog in permits, & transmission need to be finessed or bulldozed through; all that’s dependent on this emergency being declared an emergency.
A lot of the requirements are, of course, being seen first by the big businesses, and I predict that private homes will be grandfathered in, but the cost of maintenance for obsolete features (as anyone who bought a “money pit” Victorian home or tried to maintain a historic property will tell you) is prohibitively expensive.
At least removing the complexity and pressure for building developments to be plumbed for gas is something contractors might appreciate.
Sorry, I don’t know what you mean by the first statement.
Your Victorian home example illustrates my point about valorizing & exacerbating inequality. Such things should be public goods, essentially museums with various uses including housing the formerly homeless, artist & tech colonies, non-profits, specialized libraries…
A few with coal bins & furnaces, ACs, & gas heaters should be preserved as examples of primitive technology. People can write about them like Charles Dodgson wrote—however humorously & in hints—about the horrors of mercury exposure.
But some people will huddle in their trenches, whether from individual dysfunction, bribery, or coercion, until PFPA, Planckian Funereal Paradigm Advancement renders unsustainable ideas moot.
Gross inequality, probably all inequality, will have to be eliminated for civilization, such as it could be, to survive, & be something that should survive.