Indeed, if we want to call the gas tax regressive, then by that standard, the need to own a car to get anywhere is horribly regressive. If we’re actually concerned about low-income people, we should be worrying about how much they’re forced to pay for the gas itself, not the tax on it.
How many people living on their rural property build their own roads to get there, as compared to relying on taxpayer subsidies?
Talking only about the gasoline industry when considering climate change is, at best, ineffective. What’s more, that’s exactly what the cartoon is calling out, i.e. touting the reduction in tailpipe emissions while ignoring all the myriad other ways that EVs are just like ICE vehicles. (Which includes large contributions to climate change.)
Technically (as in, as a term of art), it is not regressive. Rather, the gas tax is a flat tax. A regressive tax is one whereby the tax rate decreases as the taxed amount increases. A flat tax is one whereby the tax rate remains the same regardless of the taxed amount.
let us work toward elimination the huge polluting industries for gasoline refining and distribution
Unlikely. If we keep doubling-down on vehicle infrastructure, the remaining ICE vehicles will see greater vehicle-miles traveled (VMT). It’s not just the number of cars out there, it’s the number of cars multiplied by the distances that they travel.
let us shrink the huge polluting industries of oil extraction and refining
Unlikely. The industrial processes and materials used to produce EVs use copious quantities of petrochemicals.
are a huge step toward slowing the growth of climate change.
Unlikely. EVs still need the same infrastructure as ICE vehicles, and the chemical process of curing concrete alone is one of the major sources of CO2 emissions. As well, the ecological destruction wrought by automobile infrastructure is a significant contributor to climate change.
A road is more than a smooth, flat surface. A road that’s designed for cars has to have an extensive roadbed of gravel and soil laid down, as well as a thick base of pavement on which to lay the surface, because of the weight of vehicles. A bike path, or a street where children can play, is comparatively speaking just some asphalt.
You are correct. I forgot to qualify my statement to say that it applies on city streets. Apologies, I can’t find the YouTube video that discussed the study right now.
Hi-viz doesn’t do anything. There’s no statistical difference in casualty rates between people wearing it and people not. Consider that drivers routinely plow into the back of emergency vehicles stopped by the side of the highway, completely wrapped in hi-viz, reflective material, and with million-lumen flashing lights. This is victim-blaming nonsense.
How DARE people move around the landscape in the traditional way that humans have been locomoting for tens of thousands of years without considering YOUR needs!
(That is, if you can’t see what’s in front of your car, you need to slow down.)
e: typo
The other commenters have covered some of the points I’d make, so I’ll add: After decades of investigation into Patient Zero for AIDS/HIV, there wasn’t a single, identifiable transmission event to which the epidemic traced, but rather evidence that the virus was present here and there long before the disease was identified.
Intuitively, I think it’s the same with COVID-19, that there wasn’t a single, discrete animal-to-human transmission event. Even if my analogy to HIV is faulty, China built the lab in Wuhan to study endemic coronaviruses; that means that anything in the lab had been in the wild for years before researchers collected a sample of it. Therefore, it’s overwhelmingly likely that humans had already been exposed to some form of it, and it was present in local populations. At the very least, there would have had to be multiple exposures, because not everybody exposed to the virus got infected, not everybody infected showed symptoms, and not everybody with symptoms transmitted the virus to other people. That, and the fact that it’s a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
So, even if the Wuhan lab failed at biocontainment, and people caught a strain of virus it was studying, that wasn’t the cause of the pandemic, which could have kicked off any number of ways. I’m not going to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak outright, but on the other hand, even if it’s true, there’s little practical value to the knowing about it other than improving biocontainment procedures. It certainly doesn’t justify the Sinophobia that tends to accompany the lab leak theory, and the Sinophobia is what I think makes people reject the lab leak possibility so vehemently.
(The other “lab leak theory,” that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons. Nobody has that technology, not even close.)
Which one is more fantastical, a flying, super-strength, alien humanoid; or a covert, large-scale demolition operation with not a single leak?
Indeed, it’s not really a flavor, but that sensation is called astringent.