Lol they spent decades doing the opposite, generating the vast majority of emissions with big manufacturing and big livestock, and then successfully shifting blame on poor peasants claiming the planet is heating because they're not sorting their recycling well enough.
How about buying electric instead of combustion while trying to not buy a new car unless it's really necessary? That should reduce emissions, shouldn't it?
In Nottingham, UK they made it so companies have to pay for every parking space per year over a certain amount, and that money gets invested in public transport. Over time congestion has grown much slower in Nottingham than similar cities, I'm amazed that more cities don't do the same.
Simpler perhaps, but not really better. High gas prices hurt the poor disproportionately because it's a larger part of their income, they don't have as much control over WFH policies or their locations for reducing commutes, and they can't typically afford to upgrade to fuel efficient vehicles. Plus since almost everything is transported by truck, high gas prices make the cost of everything else go up too.
I think part of the labor shortage is from people who did the math and quit after realising that they weren't actually earning anything after subtracting transportation costs.
If we’re talking about some sort of tax on employers based on the commute of their employees, it’s going to disproportionately affect the poor anyway. If you tax employers though you’re incentivizing further control of their employees lives.
Yes, higher gas prices would increase the cost of shipping and therefore most products, but there’s no world in which we hold corporations accountable for their externalities and consumer goods remain as cheap as they are.
Before we do anything else we should be working to end lobbying and put every single lobbyist leech on society out of a job. Otherwise this is all pipe dreams. They'll just lobby it away.
I've seen that already, at least pre-Covid and in the U.S. Even though I'm pretty sure that asking that during an interview is illegal, I've been on post-interview sessions where someone inevitably says "yeah, but this candidate lives nearly an hour away, while this other candidate lives 15 minutes away..." so they found out somehow.