There's issues where politicians deviate from the average person, but it's not most things, and this isn't an example. "Takes climate change seriously, after all their other problems" describes like 90%+ of everybody.

Edit: Well, maybe 70%, and another 20% that deny some aspect of it.

[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Carbon taxes also won't solve anything. At best it's a token effort, A carbon tax is just pushed to the consumers, making quality of life worse.

There are studies that if you completely and radically reorganized how we work and live and how wealth is distributed, we could have higher standards of living while only consuming 30% of energy and resources.

But there is no way to get there because the power of the neoliberal plutocrats is too strong. And they employ the smartest people on earth to craft the best propaganda to keep and grow their power. It's not about humanity as a species or human nature, but about the current absolute power of capitalism globally.

[–] CanadaPlus 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Not burning fossil fuels is always pushed to consumers. Most stuff consumers use involves some of it, and most people prefer the stuff, whether that's rational or not.

we could have higher standards of living while only consuming 30% of energy and resources.

Riiiight. Have you ever had to organise or build something? It all takes resources, and nobody is working with a ton of slack. Unless that study is assuming all kinds of futuristic physical infrastructure just magically appears to carry the burden, it doesn't make sense.

If we all lived at a basic third-world kind of standard, we could probably do it on 30% of the resources. If you want to own a car or have a lot of privacy, you're SOL, though. And even there it'd take time to rebuild things to accommodate the new system.

[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - ScienceDirect