Canada’s Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It’s Being Attacked::How Do You Defend A Working Carbon Price That’s Benefiting Poor People?
Canada’s Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It’s Being Attacked::How Do You Defend A Working Carbon Price That’s Benefiting Poor People?
I live in a very rural place (not in Canada) with very limited public transportation. I can get a ride to work if I’m willing to be there 5 hours early. I can’t get a ride back, so I’m stuck 40 miles away from home unless someone is willing to come and get me.
I would gladly ditch my car for a reliable bus ride. I’d schedule everything around it.
I imagine it could be an awesome experience where you get to know the people on your route as they come and go.
I don’t know. I hate driving. I hate paying for gas.
There are indeed rural places in the world with decent public transit, and rural places get the same benefits of efficient transportation as cities. We just don’t want to build non-car centric rural places in North America for whatever reason, in fact we got rid of long distance passenger rail here, which used to serve tons of rural areas and was seen as a standard mode of transportation even in rural places until the rise of cars and highways, so public transit has actually gotten much worse in rural areas and the transportation barrier has genuinely been shown to be a major contributor to the higher rates of poverty in rural areas.
Oh absolutely. I’ve seen it firsthand. In 2001 the neighborhood I grew up in flooded. Houses that were worth 200k suddenly started selling for 5-10k (even less in some situations). 5-6 bedrooms, 2 story houses.
Poor people seen an opportunity and took it.
Even the smartest of their children were stuck. No cars, grocery store 30 miles away. They were fucked.
So where did they get their food? The gas station/convenience store, that’s where.
Children were raised on slim Jim’s and Mountain Dew.
What they could have purchased for one dollar they pay 3.
It’s a sad and ugly reality.
This highlights an ugly truth about climate change:
Unless you’re an off-grid person who eats your own produce and generates power on-site, being rural isn’t green at all. There’s a reason Canada gives rural people a larger carbon-rebate and discounts the carbon taxes off of farm fuels, and still rural people scream bloody murder about carbon taxes.
Fundamentally, if you’re rural for funsies and your life involves heavy interactions with the urban world (shopping, working, etc) then you’re living an unustainably carbon-intensive life. But since we valorize rural people as the Salt of the Earth (and give them disproportionate representation in electoral bodies) nobody can say that out loud.
At least there used to be a time when rural towns were built around rail infrastructure. Canada was built by trains, so originally small towns were dense, one-main-street affairs abutting a train station. But now it’s all about highways. And those are bad for the Earth.
Transit depends on density. That can even be tight pockets of density, like a small town with a dense low-rise street-wall and no driveways and parking-lots. But you can’t feasibly run transit down rural roads, or suburban keyholes.