[livueta]

That's true, though the intent behind posting the referendum was as a reflection of (lack of) direct public support for potentially personally painful measures. Getting something done through legislative channels obviously isn't worthless or meaningless, but it's not as direct of a reflection of a willingness to incur changes as a referendum is. In a unipolar state like WA, the actions of the legislature can be pretty divorced from actual popular sentiment, and runs the risk of being undone by referendum - which has a lot of precedent in fairly recent WA history.

[ZeroGravitas]

It's a bit circular to refer to it as personally painful measures though, and that seems to be a regular trope.

Carbon taxes etc., are fairly subtle and boring technocratic method to achieve a goal. The reaction to them is almost entirely based on false impressions, a nested series of false impressions actually. There is no problem, there is no solution, this solution would make things worse, this solution would hurt me personally. this solution is just a scam and so on.

"I don't want to do the thing that economists say is most efficient, because it would be painful" as a democratic opinion doesn't really make any sense. If it's efficient then you can use the efficiency gains to compensate anyone who loses out.

And then that deliberately misinformed reaction is somehow raised as yet another reason for not doing the most sensible thing, and to talk about how "painful" it would be to stop polluting and incentivize efficiency.

And the only reason we appear to need to talk about what people want in this weird, third-hand, circular way, is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change. And since that answer isn't acceptable to some people, they need to come up with elaborate ways to prove that people don't actually want what they say they want, and that economists say is the best thing to do.

[livueta]

> It's a bit circular to refer to it as personally painful measures though, and that seems to be a regular trope.

I guess I should have said "popularly perceived to be personally painful" - which I think you'd agree with? Carbon taxes are fantastic measures that are one of our best shots at success, and I think it's a shame the referendums didn't pass. The actual harm to voters would objectively be pretty low, but again, perception is what matters. Fact can obviously feed into perception, but in a case like this where we're explicitly dealing with misinformation campaigns correctness is necessary but, alone, insufficient.

And yeah, of course that reaction is deliberately misinformed - I tried to catch that in my original comment:

> It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either.

The proponents of these bills had their shot. So did the deceptive oil majors. So far, hasn't worked out. What's the new plan - cede the fight for public opinion and try to do everything via administrative rearguard actions? I'm sticking to this point because the implicit response usually seems to be either that or "wait for a utopian mass moral awakening" - and neither is much of a strategy.

> is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change.

Well, kinda, and that's what I was getting at by mentioning push polling. If you position addressing climate change as a common-sense positive-balance deal requiring zero self-sacrifice, then sure. However, the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do is well-documented. If you drill down a little into what that willingness to incur change actually looks like, you get results like [1]. This is why referendum results are interesting as indicators of revealed preference. What I'm trying to avoid here is taking the push-poll cheap idealism as deep commitment, and using that to inform commitment to dead-end policy choices.

The core of my argument here is

1) real climate action is essential, and carbon taxes are one of the best means of implementing this from a technical perspective

2) voting outcomes and polling suggest that public support for changes that are popularly perceived as personally painful is limited, even in cases of subtle and boring technocratic methods like (1)

3) given (2), attaining the popular support necessary to wholesale ban private cars appears wildly unlikely

4) therefore, maybe focus on the stuff that we're actually somewhat close to (2016 vs 2018 referendums gained ~4%) instead of utopian pipe dreams that inspire fierce opposition

I may have been unclear because I feel like a lot of your point is addressing arguments I didn't make - I agree that carbon taxes are great and that opposition to them is largely not substantive. The problem I'm trying to point out is that if _even in this case_ things are ropey, talking about banning cars is beyond pie-in-the-sky. There's a strong need to focus on interventions that are minimally disruptive to lifestyles in order to maintain the degree of popular support necessary for long-term change. Convincing someone of the (true facts!) that a supply-side intervention like carbon pricing will have a minimally negative or positive impact on their day-to-day is way easier than talking that hypothetical person out of their car.

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[1] https://apnews.com/article/8e6baa6c2d3badeb4e91b6e6d078a5c0