The Federalist: A Majority of Americans Believe OTHER People Should Make Climate Sacrifices

Green Pass
Nobody seems to mind, if a “Green” clocks up a lot of air miles.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to The Federalist, a majority of Americans believe climate action is a priority – as long as it doesn’t impact their lifestyle choices.

Americans Say They Care About Climate Change, But Don’t You Dare Ban Air Travel

Nowhere in the list of things that voters liked that should be done to cope with the ‘national emergency’ were measures that would affect their lifestyles or choices.

By Jonathan S. Tobin FEBRUARY 4, 2020

According to some polls, Americans generally agree with 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg that the threat of climate change is a national emergency. A survey taken by Yale and George Mason universities this past fall reported that 62 percent of registered voters would approve of a president declaring a national emergency to deal with global warming.

A majority of those polled said they approved of a laundry list of government actions designed to punish the fossil fuel industry and encourage other sources of energy as well as providing tax rebates to citizens who did things like erect solar panels on their homes or purchased energy-efficient vehicles.

But nowhere in the list of things that should be done to cope with the “national emergency” that voters liked were measures that would affect their lifestyles or choices.

So while Thunberg — Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year — continues to be covered by the mainstream media as a latter day Joan of Arc, there is little evidence that many people are actually seeking to follow her example. They may weep and cheer when she demonstrates contempt for the democratic process and excoriates her elders for failing to adopt her diktats without debate, as she has done at conferences at Davos and the United Nations.

But on actions that will supposedly save the planet from burning up within 18 months (or whatever the current consensus about the best date to use to scare people into declaring a national emergency happens to be), few Americans seem willing to be like Greta. That’s good news for the travel industry but bad news for those who take the global warming movement’s predictions of doom seriously.

Read more: https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/04/americans-say-they-care-about-climate-change-but-dont-you-dare-ban-air-travel/

Setting aside the question of whether the survey result accurately reflects public opinion, this disconnect between belief and action reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago with a Marxist.

He complained some people make too much money, that rich people should have to share their income, so everyone got an equal slice of the pie.

So I said “You make a more money than most people in Africa, more money than a lot of people in Australia. Why don’t you set an example, and give a share of your income to poor people?”

He replied “No. Every country has an appropriate level of income, what I earn is about the money everyone should earn in Australia”.

As far as I can tell this self centered attitude is as ubiquitous amongst climate believers as it is in leftist and Marxist groups.

I am not suggesting Americans who are concerned about climate change are all Marxists, but nobody in their right mind fights for a reduction in their personal living standards. It is always people higher up the ladder who are expected to make the biggest sacrifices. Those preaching climate action hardly ever think about those less fortunate than themselves, who think of the middle class climate activists themselves as a potential sacrifice.

Since most advocates of climate action genuinely believe they are already doing their bit, they usually utterly reject the idea they are climate hypocrites, even if they are woke celebrities who spend half their life flying about in a private jet.

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Editor
February 5, 2020 4:19 am

Socialism never applies to socialists, it only applies to the people socialists leach off of.

niceguy
Reply to  David Middleton
February 5, 2020 7:54 am

IOW it’s a supremacism:

Rights for those in group A.
No rights for in group B.

We need to call out all these “ideologies”. The carbon neutral lifestyle is afforded by forcing poor people to abandon agriculture lands to plant trees.

We need to always call these “intellectual” what they are, supremacists.

Intelligentsia supremacists.

niceguy
Reply to  niceguy
February 5, 2020 9:37 am

Now I think that Macron was not elected despite his obviously very limited intellect, but thanks to it. Macron is mostly a banking organizer. He organizes deals and gets funding for himself, from outside France, a transparently illegal deal (gift from Soros?).

Macron’s election, and “En Marche” (Forward!) is the revenge of extremely unintelligent (or neg-intelligent = negative intelligence) people (so called intelligentsia) after the victory of Donald Trump.

By giving victory to Macron, the French MSM said:

“We support the guy who doesn’t know how you can sell abroad, outside your currency zone (hypothetically, the French Franc zone) and pay your employees in the local currency. We support the guy who doesn’t know anything about criminality in dangerous areas, who doesn’t know where terrorists come from… or that they come as “migrants” [even when they actually have French nationality!]. We don’t care. We will lie for him. We make up stuff then contradict it, sometimes in the same paragraph (or same sentence) and literally call it “fact check” (in French: “fact check”).”

February 5, 2020 5:41 am

This is how the modern media molded mind works: Imagine a crisis and then have someone else pretend to fix it. Good gosh, friends.

Andrew

niceguy
February 5, 2020 6:06 am

Information control (aka fake news measures) means we say what is real news (or good enough news) and what is not.

Important notice: Getting stuff almost systematically wrong does not make into the determination of what is an unreliable source. Sources are unreliable per se (Russian sources, “populist” outlets, “extreme” right wing).

Mandatory tolerance (aka anti hate speech) means that we determine who can be publicly shamed and who cannot.

The fight against conspiracy theory allows us to define what is a credible evidence free accusation and which consistent theories are “flat Earth” (*) level crazy.

Gun control means that we should get to decide who gets protection by people with guns and who does not. (Those who get constant protection don’t have to be threatened or particularly vulnerable.)

It’s all about choosing for others.

(*) or “flat earth” cause then it isn’t a planet?

niceguy
Reply to  niceguy
February 5, 2020 7:42 am

Re: fake news.

Just like the Fukushima Daiichi (PR) disaster was awful for the nuclear industry (esp. the French Areva), it was good news for the study of Pacific fishes as the uncontrolled experiment of releasing radioactive tracers in the Pacific gave surprising undeniable evidence about the amount of fish migration, US fake news gives me a small amount of tracing of the origin of info in French media: news in the MSM is now so fake but also more traceable with stuff you couldn’t make up.

Maxime “in-peach” Waters put pressure on Pelosi to push that circus on us.

It ultimately led to Alan Dershowitz saying that no foreign policy related impeachable act was established (or implied) about alleged President Trump conduct, incl. anything allegedly in Bolton’s book (*) … which gave us Dershowitz says that a President can commit any crime whatsoever as long as it’s in his mind in the public interesting (as it contributes to his reelection). Now there are levels of fake news, and there is such thing as “errors a distracted mind can commit”.

But evidently no amount of “distraction” can cause such utter nonsense: only willful, complete commitment to lying, or blindly copying a source utterly committed to lying.

And the French media, the experts, even the teachers specialists of US politics regularly invited to TV (esp. @CorentinSellin) propagated that utter nonsense.

So the French intelligentsia sources its infos from the channels that gave us “Creepy P.rn Lawyer will save us from evil Trump” propaganda.

Now we have almost radio-cesium level tracing of fake news.

(*) or was it about the foreign policy related acts by President Clinton, or by President Obama? I really can’t tell. They needed the defense that only “criminal like” (foreign policy) conduct is impeachable a lot more than President Trump.

D. J. Hawkins
Reply to  niceguy
February 5, 2020 10:09 am

Dershowitz did not say the president can do anything he wants without fear of legitimate impeachment. His point was that there has to be a real crime as the basis. There is no part of the U.S. Code that makes it illegal to thumb your nose at Congress, or put the arm on a foreign government to do what you want. The first is politics, the second is diplomacy. Plain and simple.

niceguy
February 5, 2020 6:57 am

The best French leftists invention of all times was “la carte scolaire” (school map or school zoning?): you put your children in the local school. The local school is only for those who live in the zone. Like when banks (allegedly) gave credits based solely or mostly on addresses, but worse. (As the child grows older, the areas grow too. The 6 to 11 years old schools (“l’école”) areas are small and 16 to 18 years old school (the “lycée”) areas are larger.

So you have the guarantee that your children will only have to deal with the children of other people who live in the same exact area. The housing price in the area increases faster as immigrants come to other areas. As housing is unaffordable, public schools become more (implicitly) “select” and housing in the exact area is more valuable. Price increases are caused by un-affordability of housing. One of biggest taboo in the debate about housing, together with the insane norms for construction and renovation (you must configure all homes for the navigation of a wheelchair, which wastes huge free space).

[Note: France is a country of abjectly ignorant people, esp. economically. (Schools are controlled by the very far left.) People in commerce don’t get commerce. Those who do “promotions” don’t know why and for what purpose. They don’t always know they need to advertise those “promotions”. Most French people don’t understand price at an intellectual level not even those who sell goods and services. They do not too bad economically by imitating others who know what they are doing, but at the primeval cultural level.

[This is about bad French people are ignorant and can’t read: Marine Le Pen, “far right” French leader (actually she hates freedom of commerce and many of her points were those of communist leader George Marchais), who is an ignoramus, actually trashed (on all subjects, esp. the economy and finance) the pretend banker and pretend genius Macron during the only debate between the two. (Since the perspective of electing such less than ignoramus was unconscionable, all fact checkers concluded the exact opposite, the usual way fact checkers do their jobs. Reading the “fact checks” of course refutes the conclusion, as always.)]

Not even all real estate developers know the basic stuff in housing market! So you can ask some real estate developers to confirm what I just wrote a get the blank, unsettling AOC like eyes.]

Many people don’t know that major driver of housing in France. Even

So rich people came up with a way:

– to make housing more expensive
– to increase the value of their home a lot more than the average
– to deal less with immigrants
– to avoid the issues of people not speaking the same language at school
– to avoid culture clashes
while promoting a SOCIALIST IDEA.

Yes, the whole make rich richer and make their areas less “diverse” tool was promoted by the left.

Then they complain about the lack of diversity and high prices of course, and make laws to force towns to built low rent housing.

February 5, 2020 7:46 am

It’s exactly why I’ve been referring to this for years as Other People syndrome. That Guy should pay a tax. Someone Else needs to bear the burden. Never themselves. https://www.thepiratescove.us/2014/05/06/i-get-email-what-do-you-mean-by-someone-else/

ResourceGuy
February 5, 2020 9:46 am

Yes, shut it down starting with the Bay Area.

“Shut it down. Shut down all the garbage units on the detention level.”

February 5, 2020 9:50 am

“By Jonathan S. Tobin FEBRUARY 4, 2020
According to some polls, Americans generally agree with 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg…”

Another author starting off with an extremely vague strawman condition , allowing them to make all kinds of specious claims.

K. Hunter
February 5, 2020 8:21 pm

Imagine my surprise to learn that …“A Majority of Americans Believe OTHER People Should Make Climate Sacrifices”. Gee.

Rudolf Huber
February 8, 2020 4:05 pm

Not only in the US. I talk to a lot of people here on the street. The vast majority wants others to make changes. I also have the opportunity to discuss radical greens form time to time. They all are supremely well electrified and would not understand why they should give up their smartphones, their frequent party rides and their travel to Latin America in order to reconnect with their inner self. Let others to the stone-aging.

Johann Wundersamer
February 15, 2020 3:02 pm

Who needs air travel when there’s electric motorcycles with saddle bags and required accessories:

https://www.google.com/search?q=electric+motorcycle+with+saddlebags&oq=electric+motorcycles+with+saddle+&aqs=chrome.