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by skywhopper
2877 days ago
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There are limits to what individuals can do. Take automobile fuel efficiency. Cars these days are way more efficient and cleaner than they were fifty years ago, and they perform far better. Consumer choice would never have made this happen in response to market forces. You couldn't buy an efficient, high-performance car in the late 60s even if you wanted to. Companies needed an incentive to invest for the long-long term in technologies to improve the efficiency of their products. Short term price shocks weren't going to make that happen. Only multi-decade, ratcheting fuel-efficiency regulations that applied across the board and eliminated the risk to automakers for pursuing efficiency achieved our current state where we even _have_ the choice of buying cars that can achieve 50mpg or more with adequate performance. |
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Now, why do they drive so much and drive such inefficient cars? It's largely because fuel is so much cheaper in the US than in the EU.
What I was trying to get at in my original comment is not that we should all solve climate change by personal action, and that public policy shouldn't be involved. I wish I could pay more taxes so the country I'm living in would migrate to renewables faster.
Rather, it's that if you look at how concerned people are politically about climate change, and then look at their revealed preferences, both when it comes to what they do personally and what they'd really stand for politically, it turns out that in the aggregate they don't take the problem seriously.
How many people who say "we must do something" in the US would say put up with a 100% increase in fuel taxes (bringing it in more in line with the EU)? I bet you'd go from 50% approval to 5% approval pretty fast.
1. http://internationalcomparisons.org/environment/transportati...
2. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheet...