“How Can We Make 1.5 Degree Lifestyles Equitable?” is a POLITICAL issue and not just an environmental one. And it’s one thing to be green but they keep pushing this into the political realm by “asking” everyone to be like them.
Lloyd, the author, doesn’t play much in the comments (neither do I here lately – just running out of bandwidth) but plenty of others do and there is a CLEAR distinction between Conservative and Libertarian thinking versus the Collective-socialists there.
It was only a matter of time until one of them threw the race card – and used South Africa to do so. Wayne Teel decided to pick on Vindaloo Bugaboo (“VB”) as the latter threw in a chart from FEE.org:
All cherry picked from real data and published on a website that promotes libertarian free market capitalism.
Clear that he doesn’t like others making their own decisions about what to buy, what to sell, and who gets to make the decisions economically. And of course, let’s throw the race card even if it makes no sense at all to do so in this discussion – simply “bogus”
I have heard these arguments before, in South Africa during apartheid. “Countries are boycotting us because if their blacks came to see our blacks, they would be jealous of our blacks economic success.” Unfortunately the argument is bogus because it is comparing apples to oranges. No black South African wanted to live under apartheid because it was disgusting and brutal.
No poor American wants to live in a trailer park with leaky roofs even if it is “better than” a house in Bangladesh and they own an old rust bucket car. The fundamental inequity of the US system gives the lie to the argument that we should not tax the rich because they provide a higher income for our poor than that of the poor in Mexico or India. We should recognize that we create the conditions for a high carbon society by our policies that allow fossil fuel companies to control our politics. The latest evidence for this is the vote to allow Dominion Power in Virginia to continue to donate to politicians (a money is speech argument) and lobby for keeping the status quo on carbon. We can’t make a 1.5 degree lifestyle if we continue to allow corporations to control our politics, within the US and globally.
The rich should pay taxes like the rest of us – but the Left is seeking retribution and punished after they keep adding surtax after surtax after surtax on these people and now call it “Equity”. They’ve always wanted to do so – how do you think the income tax was created in the first place? They simply seek refuge in yet another euphemism.
And if the oil companies are controlling “our politics,” somebody forgot to clue in GraniteGrok. Where are my checks! Ditto for the Koch brothers (now just Koch brother). For years I was accused of being on their payroll so where are my checks?
Again, the same question.
We can’t make a 1.5 degree lifestyle if we continue to allow corporations to control our politics, within the US and globally.
But his main point is “We can’t make a 1.5-degree lifestyle”; I dunno about you Kimo Sabe, but I prefer modernity to much less. I sure don’t want to be in your way if YOU want to embark on a life of austerity but here, the “We” is used in the macro and in the sense of EVERYONE will be involved. So…
You are assuming something that is not in evidence – that a majority of the people in the developed world wish to downshift to living in mud huts and caves.
And that’s a rather condescending attitude believing that everyone is stupid enough to be co-opted by corporations (e.g., the McDonald Happy Meals with toys and that Parents don’t have the will to tell their kids “NO! we’re not going to Mickey D’s today” that keeps getting trotted out here at TH in one form or another).
I suppose that Safe Spaces are going to become a Constitutionally enumerated Right….oh wait!
Lloyd will complain about the embedded carbon needed to make the gazillion of those crying pavilions for every snowflake that isn’t up to facing the unfair harshness that the rest of us call “Hey, that’s Life”.
And yes, I’m in a snarky mood tonite.
But that is the mindset – EVERYONE is all in and THEY get to set the rules.
Never did get an answer back from him.
