Holy shit, somebody is actually pointing their finger at the right people!
I can't believe he's not talking about drinking straws or plastic bags or some other laughable distraction.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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That's Markey for you.
Kind of.
I mean, yes, this is good, but it's still small potatoes compared to the fact that we need UNPRECEDENTED industry-wide EMERGENCY action, starting like 20 years ago.
We're in the throws of mass-extinction. We are predicting a BILLION climate refugees. And every horrible prediction is coming true way earlier than expected.
Mass media isn't screaming about it every night, so we trick ourselves into believing it must be a manageable situation. But it simply isn't. We aren't just headed for a cliff. We've already fallen off it. We just haven't noticed because we haven't started bouncing off the sharp rocks yet.
I don't think anyone has ever talked about drinking straws or plastic bags as having a meaningful effect on carbon emissions. Reducing their use does reduce the amount of plastic that winds up in landfills and the wilderness, which is the actual point of those proposals.
From some quick data I found, aviation is responsible for 2.5% of carbon emissions. In the US, about 17% of flights are private. Probably a fair number of those are hobbiests, but even if you take that number at face value, you could summarily execute all people who take private jets, and you'd reduce carbon emissions by about 0.425 percent. I'm skeptical that that is going to really make a massive difference in the grand scheme of things.
Carbon tax. We needed it 20 years ago but even more now. Ironically a Republican idea that has been ignored for years.
Right. There's no reason why private jets shouldn't be paying to offset 100% of their emissions. For cars it's a different story because it's a tax on the poor for something they need. Private jets are purely luxuries, only used by the wealthy, and have a viable alternative.
Maybe a dumb question, but how does providing money actually offset emissions? Are there emission vacuums somewhere that require payment to operate?
Well, trees are one of them. More money means more trees planted.
Or that money could be invested in renewable energy, which will reduce emissions in other areas.
And when you increase the cost of something, you get less of it, so taxing emissions should mean fewer emissions.
And so on.
not real ones, most of them are scams where countries accept money in order to not deforest areas they werent going to anyway, double dip, or just deforest regardless
Nope, fuck cars. Tax carbon, give free public bus passes. Easy.
The closest bus to me is about a 1.5 hour walk, with the path options either being, the side of a 70 mph highway, or the side of 45 mph side roads (no sidewalks).
The bus pass would just take up space in my wallet and nothing more.
I work from home to reduce my car usage dramatically, and already pay annual taxes on the car itself as well as every gallon of gas (in top of standard sales tax) that goes into it. The car is 15 years old and gets over 30mpg.
Your 'easy' solution requires uprooting people's lives dramatically and is, dare I say it, an incredibly naive take on the real problems that the planet, nations, and individual people actually have.
And before you say 'move somewhere with people' I do live where people are, I live in between two of the biggest cities in my state, moving closer to those cities requires a) a huge sum of liquid cash, and b) a huge increase in my cost of living.
Think critically about the world you are in, have perspective about other people's living situations, and have respect for your peers. Blanket solutions are historically ineffective.
They're totally forgetting that people need to live where other people don't. Farming. Solar fields. Forestry. Mining. Wind farms.
Thbk realistically about the world you're in. Ban cars and buses will be everywhere.
This isn't a problem in poor countries.
In what poor country are cars banned?
Funny how you respond to just this comment but not the others.
What bus is going to run to bring farmers to massive farms, miles apart?
The busses that run between cities, like in most countries
And what about the places that aren't between cities? Rural areas are larger than you think. You're expecting people to walk 4 miles and wait 2 hours for a bus on a regular basis.
You can't walk 4 miles? Grow up.
I expect people to cycle 10 miles on a regular basis. these aren't real problems that you're describing. You're just justifying the harm you're causing the environment because you're too lazy to make very minor efforts that most of the world does already.
Snow. Good luck.
I'm 100% in favor.
My preferred solution is to tax carbon, and redistribute it as a tax credit/stimulus evenly to the population. I like that better than treating it as normal income so it stays focused on being a Piguovian Tax and not repurposed as a general revenue source.
But honestly, I'm in favor of pretty much any carbon tax initiative.
We've sort of gone beyond the taxation phase, in my humble opinion. The world is on fire. It's really time for more drastic moves and we can't afford to keep coddling the wealthy.
Yeah, but tell me how I need to drive my Prius to the grocery store less.
her response is insanely tone-deaf too lol
"Well, no one can be perfect". 100% true, but everyone can choose to not fly in a private plane lol
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At the moment, billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are getting a bargain, paying less in taxes each year to fly private and contribute more pollution than millions of drivers combined on the roads below.
For the sake of our environment, it is time to ground these fat cats and make them pay their fair share, so that we can invest in building the energy-efficient and clean public transportation that our economy and communities across the country desperately need.
We cannot continue to ask frontline communities – disproportionately low-income, rural, immigrant, Black and brown Americans who are bearing the weight of the climate crisis – to subsidize billionaires jet-setting the globe.
The revenue generated by the Fatcat Act would be transferred to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund and a newly created federal Clean Communities Trust Fund to support air monitoring for environmental justice communities and long-term investments in clean, affordable public transportation across the country – including passenger rail and bus routes near commercial airports.
If Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and countless Wall Street hedge fund managers want to fly private jets, the least they can do is pay their fair share in taxes to compensate for the damage to our environment and the wear on our infrastructure.
It’s unconscionable that they be allowed to continue to pay pennies on the dollar to pollute our environment as Americans suffer through the hottest days in an estimated 125,000 years.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Frequent flyer tax plz
tax the living shit out of them
Did someone say that my million dollar plane will cost another million dollars to operate? Oh noes, I can't...LOL - it's just money; I found 2 millions by raising the price of my apartments by $100 a month. Enjoy your new rent, proles!
Guess we should just do nothing then.
Yes, tax them to the bone.
But but.. politicians taxing their wealthy donors? I'll believe it when I see it.
There's a chunk of the Democrats, notably 'progressives,' who are willing to do just that. Markey is one.
Yup I'd like to see it, but Dems tend to do a lot of virtue signaling without follow through
The major issue blocking their action is that every Republican votes against it, and a handful of Democrats are bought off, so they vote with the Republicans. The Republicans hold a majority in the House of Representatives, so this means that no new climate legislation is going to pass before the 2024 election.
I get it, but isn't it strange that we're always chasing the dragon, it's always just within reach.
I wouldn't say that.
- In 1959, Teller spoke, but nothing happened
- In 1988, we got congressional testimony from Hansen, but no legislation to speak of
- In 2008 we had cap-and-trade legislation, but it didn't get a vote in the Senate because supporters counting votes saw it couldn't get even 40 votes
- in 2022 the Inflation Reduction act passed, getting 50 + 1 votes in the Senate, after being converted in to an almost-all-carrots-no-stick type bill to appease the few Democrats who were being paid off by the fossil fuels industry.
We're on the right trajectory here, just not nearly fast enough
Skip the tax go straight to execution