People keep saying this. I am not really sure what they mean by "quality of life" any more.
"But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options." [0]
I don't think that if the number of options was reduced to a handful my quality of life would go down significantly.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-...
I think it's mostly about aspirations to hyper consumerism and reduction of choice. The choice argument very quickly drops to some very US grounded freeeeeeeeedom argument about constraints and the role of society. Once you realise the complainant had no intention of buying a gas guzzling rolls royce or washing their hair in pure benzine, it becomes clearer to me it's opposition to the idea of having to accept limitation, not their impact. It also denies the very high likelihood of increased harms to others by refusing to agree on a middle path. We might need to have less choice to allow Africa and Bangladesh to have more life choices is hugely unpopular.
I don't want to be king btw, or a member of the death committee. But I also know effectively health rationing exists right now. We are not living in nirvana and life affecting choices and decisions are made about us every day.
Deciding to put a twenty year end of life on current oil economics and ending exploration right now feels like a basis for discussion. We have enough sources to get feedstock for pharma and plastics. We might have a huge problem in agriculture and the dependency on artificial fertilizer and insecticide.
Your quality of life would presumably improve due to cleaner air and less pollution. If you take public transit you are also lowering your carbon footprint and alleviating congestion, improving quality of life for you and everyone else in town. If you walk or bike (I bike every day and find it faster to get to work than driving in rush hour traffic, in fact), you are getting a little cardio out of the deal and improving your quality of life. And presumably if enough people opt to walk/bike/transit, investment in that infrastructure will follow and quality of life in that department will also improve.
The true costs of our luxury goods like a personal car are completely hidden to us. It's important to realize how harmful to quality of life certain luxuries we are accustom to really are.
It's not approve or disapprove it's afford or not afford in a wider sense than your personal affordability.
I don't disapprove of you or your life choices. I disapprove of a system which necessarily hangs up on this individualistic story against aggregates.
Not wanting to drive (hah) too far on this, the road system you drive on is a state and federal investment. If the heavy goods went by rail andnot road, and we did focus on deisel abatement and NO and particulates reduction you might have upsides.
Your life is going to change. Slowly at first then not so slowly. Your kid's life is definitely going to change. Your grandkids lives will for sure be different from what your life is.
Do we want to start mitigating changes now and avoid the worst case scenarios? Or do we say !@#& the next two generations, no one can tell me my life has to change.
My point is not that the people who are likely to be caught up in mass migration are bad in any way. My point is that the impact of migrations of dozens of millions will absolutely impact housing, healthcare, jobs, transportation, politics, everything. If the current turmoil we've seen with relatively minor migrations from central America and from Syria are anything to go from, we are in for turbulent times.
Mitigating the impacts of climate change has nothing to do with virtue. It's eminently prudent
Maybe true. But also maybe not true. Your individual state in this is distinct from mine (lifelong user of public transport and cycling) and your neighbours and doctor would very probably disagree about the up and downsides. But I won't deny you feel this now, or that millions of people would feel this. I probably over empathise with different millions of people who don't experience your life and cannot do what you do, but economics say could do better and a lot better if you did a bit worse. How do you feel about that?
- use the dividend to pay the carbon tax, and keep driving.
- buy a new car, keep part of the dividend
- walk/bike/transit, keep the whole dividend
Why are you defending a system which makes low paid workers sleep in their cars?
That poor person isn't taking multiple flights per year, buying lots of stuff, et cetera. So even with driving to work he's probably still keeping a small fraction of the dividend.