That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.
Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.
This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.
> That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.
Yes, the purpose would be to reduce consumption of basically all things, since cheap fossil fuels are the basis of manufacturing and transporting almost all things. Hitting people hard would be a necessary effect of reducing carbon emissions, although wealth transfers from the rich to poor via taxation can modulate how much the poor are hit relative to the rich.
> That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.
In the short term, but it may incentivize more local production chains in the future. A large part of the reason food is grown in such large, factory farm setting is because transport is a fraction of the cost of the food itself. As you say it's a complex problem and there aren't any simple solutions.
It would return food to local grown again. Making it no longer the cheapest option to ship food from the other side of the planet rather than growing in the same state.
Local isn't available everywhere in the quantities needed to feed large local (city) populations. That might change over a long enough period of time, but waiting for market forces to adjust the food supply to to closest locations available would leave a lot more poor and hungry people in the meantime.
If we're going to tinker with things in that way, it's better to do it on the side of pushing renewables and EV's as fast as possible. Until then, things like raising a gas tax are regressive, falling significantly harder on people least able to bear the extra burden.
Then we shall continue on the road we have been on, consuming enough fossil fuels to affect climate change. Hence the conclusion one comes to is to live it up while we can.
That's a false dichotomy. It's not "raise fuel prices 5x to 10x or fail". We should be working on a constellation of initiatives that move things forward but without leaving significant chunks of people behind.
If the bottom 25% of the economic ladder get stomped on and pushed into poverty (when not already there) how does that help? It will set things back: Because the people getting stomped, going hungry, working 2 jobs and 60hours a week-- they're not going to sit back and suffer in silence as things get worse. The backlash would be enormous and political pressure insurmountable.
We need solutions that account for the people impacted by them or we'll get nowhere. Throwing your hands up and saying Fine, "live is up while we can" because a simple solution doesn't solve a complex problem is defeatist. And stops you-- likely a very smart person-- from contributing to the dialog of how to solve an extraordinarily complex problem and implementing some of those countless big and little things we can do to keep moving forward.
Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.
This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.