> 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