James Heartfield wrote:
>
> Nathan, Miles and Doug all protest that I must be
> wrong about global
> >warming, but in all seriousness, if they believed
> one per cent of
> the predictions of impending environmental disaster
> WOULDN'T THEY FEEL OBLIGED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
and
Cian wrote:
>
> {?? writes]
> > A simple first step would be a sharp increase in the
> > gasoline tax in the U.S. I'm afraid the Hudson will be
> > be lapping my ankles before that happens.
>
> Just imposing European style taxes on cars and petrol
> would be a start. Petrol is way too cheap in the US.
And who is going to impose that tax? And what would their motive be? (By motive I don't mean what their motive should be but what the motive of someone in the position to impose the tax would be>)
I don't see how Jim's challenge can be in good faith. And I don't see how the responses to it make any sense at all. Steps will be taken when there is loud public clamor, threatening disruption of business as usual, for those "steps." For persons who are out of power to say, we should do this or that, is academic in the bad sense (looking for neither truth nor change) unless they have a scenario of how they would achieve power to implement those otherwise empty engineering solutions. The proposed gasoline tax is even more utopian than a proposal to stop the manufacture of automobiles. The two are equally practical in political terms, and the latter would be materially more practical: it would concentrate the intelligence and will of "society" wonderfully on the problem of how to move people around.
Carrol