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Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1m homes, analysis finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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If you lend your car to your cousin for a cross- country road trip, does your cousin's road trip count as his emissions, yours, or should it be double counted?
Similarly, my 401k has an S&P 500 fund in it, which contains some fossil fuel stocks. Does my carbon footprint go up every month by whatever fraction of a percent of Exxon my retirement fund buys each month?
When you eat a steak, whose emissions are the methane the cow burped? Yours? The ranchers? Cargills? Walmart's?
Honestly, consumption-based accounting makes way more sense to me.
Double count that shit. We're not going to get out of this hole if we split hairs semantically.
Triple count it if you have a fleet of vehicles over 10.
Double count it for dual axles and ANY truck driving while not hauling a load greater than a passenger vehicle is capable of moving.
Consumption accounting is impossible when the only options available to the consumer fuck them over completely.
Cheap subsidized beef means I'm going to buy it to feed my family.
Cheap subsidized gas means I can keep polluting with little cost.
CAFE laws making vehicles fucking gigantic make it impossible to consume less fuel.
Companies and laws dictate our consumption not the other way around. Tax or kill the wealthy, then we can talk.
It should be double counted since we need to do something about it. Cousin could pay the carbon tax on gas for usage, and owner could pay a carbon tax for milage usage at the end of the year.
I'm aware that this is a non-starter, but it would be a good start for getting overall emissions down. The billionaires should also pay a carbon tax above and beyond what the corporations pay, as a double incentive to stop polluting the planet for profit. Take away the profit, and companies will change.
Going to disagree with pure consumption based accounting.
Think there needs to be something about decision influence basis, otherwise the companies won't have pressure to change as the "bill" is accounted for elsewhere
This kind of accounting is about generating clicks, ultimately.
We know the actual fixes for this.
Cap and trade fixed acid rain. Pigouvian taxes like a carbon tax work. Even a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend where you split the taxed money evenly among everyone works; it literally pays people to not pollute.
The Green New Deal is a fix.
Novel accounting schemes that generate headlines like this are explicitly not a fix because literally all they do is generate bad publicity for billionaires and ad revenue for the paper. There's nothing real here.