Originally a comment by Papito on Can’t a guy get a sunburn in peace?

I see three things going on here:

Sound familiar? I definitely hear echoes of that old, regressive belief that sinister people are responsible for weird weather in today’s attempt to pin heatwaves on the rich or on coal-mining or on motorists. Environmentalism has rehabilitated in pseudo-scientific form the age-old instinct to find the witch or the sinner who is to blame for society’s misfortunes.

One part is just sticking his thumb in the liberals’ eye. This is a big part of why we got Trump in the US and you got Brexit in England. There’s no real calculation among these followers, just spite. I thought of them as the “South Park Republicans,” people who wanted to be offensive, cuss, and make fun of people, and resented Mommy and Daddy for telling them it wasn’t nice. There is no end to their rhetoric: it can always be made more hyperbolic, more ridiculous, and the mob will scream all the louder. Nor is there any need for consistency among the verses, as long as the refrain remains “F the Liberals!”

Another part is the way in which the left makes a kind of religion about every putatively correct belief. We all deal with this in the case of gender ideology. Witches to be burned, starting with JKR. The left also has its mobs of dumb followers who just repeat whatever cant they’re told to. Black Lives Matter! Trans Women Are Women!

In the case of climate change, we have some folks on the left who are very much “Ready, Fire, Aim!” In my area, where most heating is provided by natural gas if not oil, there’s a town that’s working to outlaw installation of natural gas heating and cooking in new buildings. Everybody is supposed to use electric heat pumps. But the state as a whole gets the vast majority of its electricity from gas, which is half as efficient when burned to produce electricity as it is when burned to produce heat. Virtue-signalling about dubious improvements (the recycling bin in my town really just gets dumped in with the trash at the other end of the ride) does not improve anything, and inflames the opposing mob more.

I agree that the evidence supports the idea that coal burning should flat out stop. But the left also got nuclear power dismantled in Germany, which is what put Germany in the bind it’s in today, beholden to Russia for natural gas and burning far too much coal. Germany tore down nuclear plants and built coal plants, and that was not really an improvement. Let’s get the policy right before we enact it.

A third thing going on here, which we can’t discount, is the differential burden of higher fossil fuel taxes. In my family, we are firmly in the zoomocracy. Nobody in my house has to go to an office very often, and we use cars only for out of town travel and shopping trips for large things. I live in a nice part of a nice city, and my kids can ride their bikes to school, camp, college, everything. I can go two weeks without getting in a car. Does this make me virtuous? No. I’ve got a contractor coming today to see about fixing a bathroom that has some problems. Will he ride his bicycle here? No. Will any one of the guys working for him not drive here if he takes the job? No; they’ll commute, by car, from even farther away, because it’s very expensive to live in my city. This means that the cost of gas falls most heavily on them, not on me. This is the reason the gilets jaunes got all rowdy in France.

Ritualistic blaming of the wealthy does nothing to solve global warming; they can laugh it off, or buy a tropical forest and claim absolution for their yachts. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to go to jobs – who can’t do their jobs from the other side of the internet – pay at the pump. And if their jobs happen to be mining coal, then they’ll pay twice. Global warming is a problem, and we have to respond to it, but it is politically – and morally – idiotic to put the heaviest burden on the working poor. We have to solve social problems at the same time we solve environmental problems. The working poor must be lifted up by our policy solutions to global warming, or they will be self-defeating.

And, yes, that puts us in a terrible position, because we have other political factions who don’t give a damn about either problem, and are counting on us to screw up one or both.