Everyone has always had the option to vote with their dollars. If we allow ourself to be eco-capital-realists for a moment, we have to conclude that living on a habitable planet is simply not that important for most people.
> Everyone has always had the option to vote with their dollars.
Imagine for a second that this was an actual election. To vote for fossil fuels, people just have to call a phone number or drive to a polling place (gas station).
To vote for carbon neutrality -that is, to be actually carbon neutral- a voter has to buy a new, more expensive car. They have to stop flying. They have to change everything they eat. They have to plant a bunch of trees. They have to spend hundreds of dollars on renewable electricity to ensure at least someone is getting renewable power, even if it isn't them personally. Or they can just stop using electricity, I guess.
Imagine an election where you had to fulfill all those requirements for a year in order to vote annually. Would you say that voters "had the option" to vote? I wouldn't.
Money has unequal power depending where its spent. You personally, trying to buy renewable electricity, have to spend hundreds of times more than a large scale coordinated action. Think of it as like the economy of scale.
That's clearly incorrect. 43% of Americans think global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime[1]. If they could just "vote with their dollars" then the US would have seen immense changes in renewable energy and EVs in the past 20 years.
There are 3 factors:
Market forces make it extremely difficult to create large change at the personal level. You can't crowdfund grid-scale renewables. Even if you have the option to pay extra for renewable power, it does almost nothing- renewable power has zero marginal cost, so it will always be sold anyway. Your impact on how much supply is built is marginal, unless you can pool your money into a huge fund, which is not a program that exists, because people instead want to take advantage of existing political processes, but unfortunately...
Political forces make it extremely difficult to create even small changes. 30% of Massachusetts voted for Trump. Every state has a relatively high proportion of conservatives, and our political systems are all designed to make compromise very difficult. At its absolute worst, in the US congress, only 2 bills per year can be passed without a supermajority, due to budget reconciliation. Surprise, not much gets done.
Finally, 30-40% of the US just flat out thinks its bullshit and are against it on principle. Many of them are quite happy to actively fight against the majority, and it's spectacularly easy for them to do so. Not being wasteful is in fact much harder than being wasteful, so one asshole can wipe out the careful effort of many good people.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. Some people don't care, enough that we can't change right now. You detailed more clearly what I wasn't trying to say.
I don't see how that's related. My point is that not everyone has the luxury of choosing to buy more expensive, eco friendly, goods. Some people have to pull from the bin of mass produced garbage food, rather than going down the street and paying 4x for something sustainably sourced.
The very first consequence of being poor is that you have to live further from work. Burning up 4 extra hours a day, on a bus, isn't possible for everyone.
The statement
> Everyone has always had the option to vote with their dollars.
