There’s a lot going on around the protests that started because of gas prices in France and became about a lot of other things. The people behind it are incredibly varied and have wonderful and horrible and conservative and revolutionary points of view so I’m not gonna love or reject all of it.
But about the topic that started it all, I just wanna say that ‘gas prices shouldn’t be higher’ is definitely an opinion a left wing environmentalist activist can have.
Because when we limit CO2 omission by raising the consumer prices of gas, the result is that the rich (who are already doing so much of the polluting) can continue to pollute as much as they want while the poor have to decide whether they can afford to drive to grandma for her birthday. Just like anything that is ‘punished by a fine’ is really ‘legal for rich people’, anything that is limited by making it more expensive is really no longer available to poor people while nothing changes for the biggest polluters.
If we’re talking climate change and things European countries can do, when are we going to ban lignite mining? When are companies going to start being forced to truly pay every penny for the pollution of their production process? When are we going to ban private jets? When are we going to bring back all the public transport that has been cut in the past decade and make sure it is affordable and green and reaches into places that have never had public transport so far?
We could take a thousand measures that don’t put the burden on climate change on those who can’t afford to ‘go green’ on their own. And if we do feel that it is necessary to raise gas prices, we could make sure that those on low incomes are compensated so that they aren’t hit too hard by these measures.
So yeah,
‘gas prices shouldn’t be higher’ is an opinion a left wing environmentalist activist can have.
QueerAnarchism 