REDUCING DEMAND FOR OIL
We need to create a sweet deal for the great majority. It’s long overdue anyway.
To reduce fossil fuel consumption, we need a way to make the price go up without creating an impossible situation for the working class, the 80% of people who have legitimately tight budgets.
The thing is, the price of oil has always been artificially low because we subsidize it directly and indirectly. By subsidies, I mean all public policies that make the price artificially low. This includes wars for oil. It also includes lax environmental regulations and permitting processes that allow oil companies to pollute our air and water, destabilize the climate and kill off wildlife without paying the true cost of these societal burdens.
There needs to be a way for the price of oil and petroleum products to go up so as to reduce demand and make the prices more closely reflect the true societal cost.
The problem with making oil prices go up is that most people can’t afford it, unless you compensate them. You have to put money in people’s pockets.
There are 1000 ways to do this. It’s sad that we even have to have this conversation. It’s sad that the earth’s bounty has been so unequally distributed for so long, that we are so accustomed to gross inequality that we don’t know how to talk about equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of living in this planet.
But for once in the history of the human race, our fates are tied together. We have to get everyone on board, or at least the majority.
So we have to craft a proposal that is acceptable to the majority. We have to create a sweet deal, a deal that is sweet to the average person, not just the oligarchs who have always run the show, while fooling us into thinking we have this big democracy or something.
No. THIS time around, we ACTUALLY need the consent of the governed.
And we have to bribe them (the governed).
So the question is: What is the bribe going to look like?
In other words, how do you make it so that the burden of this transition does NOT fall unduly and unfairly on the great majority? How do you make it so the poor and middle class do not bear the burden of this transition?
THAT’S THE QUESTION.
Any ideas?
I advocate policies that are already long overdue, like Medicare For All, a universal basic income, a $15 minimum wage, a federal job guarantee, stronger pro-union laws, etc.
There will be a ton of resistance to these ideas, because capital controls the conversation. And the people have long been manipulated into voting against their own interests.
But we can’t let the conversation be controlled by negativity or inertia or mindless conformity.
So I’m asking my reader to be part of the solution by answering this question: What policies are you willing to support, to make this transition affordable for the vast majority of people who DON’T have room to spare in their family budgets?