Cav's Place

Not long ago there was a card shown on PostSecret that said “I wish energy prices would keep rising. People will never use less just because it’s right.”. I often feel the same way, from an environmental point of view it makes perfect sense. Make using resources more costly and people will tend to use less, no doubt about it.
Of course that means the wealthy might use slightly less but in fact the poor will be hit hardest because they’ll be able to afford even less when they already barely manage, but looking at that very objectively reveals advantages yet again for the environment. Some will revolt and others will try to adapt. Part of both groups will end up dead one way or the other (and those who’ll revolt will likely take some of the wealthier ones down with them), therefore reducing the population and the amount of resources required by it.
Yes, it’s brutal, but it certainly seems quite effective. I’m not seeing any gentler methods working well enough these days… Besides, from that same very objective point of view, we’re talking about a certain number of individuals from a single species, one that is in desperate need of a culling actually, who would be sacrificed in order to give a chance to all other species that make this world their home. Looking at it like that, it’d be very fair to eliminate humans as a whole if that’d truly help, but unfortunately I think we’ve made things so bad that we’re the only ones who might have a chance to fix them before sending the world too many hundreds of millions of years back down its evolutionary path.
But to go back to the issue at hand, when even US Republicans start including a few ideas that might actually help the environment among their plans simply because the costs of destroying it are becoming too high, you know you’re getting somewhere. Of course those ideas are only in addition to their dreadful plans aimed at increasing production instead of lowering consumption, not instead of them, but you have to start somewhere…
We could do this fairly, but that would probably be too much to ask. By that I mean there should be taxes on the things that harm the environment and those money should be used to subsidize “green” technologies and products in order to make them more attractive to the customers and also speed up the research and development process. Also, any increase in price should be justified by real costs (including the environmental ones) and any additional profits should mean higher income for the workers (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, middle managers), not for the ones at the top who earn way too much as it is. But, as I said, let’s take it one step at a time…