This is why I aplaud most protesters, but climate groups almost always seem to miss the mark. Bringing attention to a topic does not change policy, throwing tomato sauce at a painting or being an intentional cockwomble in traffic only inconviences those who have no power to effect change.
But climate change groups are “target[ing] the individuals responsible for supporting the problem in the first place” when they block drivers.
People are largely too poor to live close to work and anyone who works the kind of inconsistent shifts lots of peoplework can’t carpool. They also aren’t the ones fighting work from home
First of all, I have doubts about the degree of overlap between the two groups of people you mentioned. Jobs with inconsistent shifts tend to be things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near. Conversely, jobs specialized enough to be worth commuting a longer distance to are more likely to have consistent shifts, making carpooling more likely to be viable.
Second and more importantly, “work from home” is only one aspect of the problem and being among the executives fighting it is hardly the only thing that would make a person part of the problem. That gets us back to your first claim: “people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not. They’re too poor to live close to work and have a single-family house with a yard at the same time, and they choose to prioritize the latter. That not only makes them directly responsible by participating in the traffic that they’re in, it also makes them indirectly responsible by demanding policies like low-density zoning that inflates supply of single-family houses while restricting supply of dense multifamily housing. This subsidizes the price of the former, drives up the price of the latter, and physically displaces even some of the people who would like to live in dense multifamily out into the suburbs.
things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near
This is a pretty huge fantasy. Jobs like that have a strong tendency to be clustered around expensive business districts where those who work can’t afford to live. The average commute is half an hour by car or an hour by bus.
people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not.
Outside of your fantasies they actually are. The average single family home is now 589k and many old folks are burning down the equity in their home rather than passing them down. Also its not much of a solution to tell everyone to move in from suburbia to the city to rent from a slumlord when there isn’t enough housing there NOW. A fraction could move in but it doesn’t scale to the rest of them until we actually build more housing in the places people want to live.
I don’t see how carpooling is relevant here at all. Even if you carpool or take a bus, you still need the road and wouldn’t be able to commute if that road gets blocked off.
The person said the people on the road were responsible for the climate issue when individual decisions other than whom to vote for often has limited impact. If we want to effect meaningful change we need collective action on the part of our nation and government not just individuals.
Putting the blame on individuals knowing that the sum total effect of best case individual action means jack shit is a way to defect attention away from the decision makers whose actions actually have some hope of changing our trajectory.
But climate change groups are “target[ing] the individuals responsible for supporting the problem in the first place” when they block drivers.
People are largely too poor to live close to work and anyone who works the kind of inconsistent shifts lots of peoplework can’t carpool. They also aren’t the ones fighting work from home
First of all, I have doubts about the degree of overlap between the two groups of people you mentioned. Jobs with inconsistent shifts tend to be things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near. Conversely, jobs specialized enough to be worth commuting a longer distance to are more likely to have consistent shifts, making carpooling more likely to be viable.
Second and more importantly, “work from home” is only one aspect of the problem and being among the executives fighting it is hardly the only thing that would make a person part of the problem. That gets us back to your first claim: “people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not. They’re too poor to live close to work and have a single-family house with a yard at the same time, and they choose to prioritize the latter. That not only makes them directly responsible by participating in the traffic that they’re in, it also makes them indirectly responsible by demanding policies like low-density zoning that inflates supply of single-family houses while restricting supply of dense multifamily housing. This subsidizes the price of the former, drives up the price of the latter, and physically displaces even some of the people who would like to live in dense multifamily out into the suburbs.
This is a pretty huge fantasy. Jobs like that have a strong tendency to be clustered around expensive business districts where those who work can’t afford to live. The average commute is half an hour by car or an hour by bus.
Outside of your fantasies they actually are. The average single family home is now 589k and many old folks are burning down the equity in their home rather than passing them down. Also its not much of a solution to tell everyone to move in from suburbia to the city to rent from a slumlord when there isn’t enough housing there NOW. A fraction could move in but it doesn’t scale to the rest of them until we actually build more housing in the places people want to live.
I don’t see how carpooling is relevant here at all. Even if you carpool or take a bus, you still need the road and wouldn’t be able to commute if that road gets blocked off.
The person said the people on the road were responsible for the climate issue when individual decisions other than whom to vote for often has limited impact. If we want to effect meaningful change we need collective action on the part of our nation and government not just individuals.
Putting the blame on individuals knowing that the sum total effect of best case individual action means jack shit is a way to defect attention away from the decision makers whose actions actually have some hope of changing our trajectory.