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Higher gas prices are actually great for the climate
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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I want gas prices to keep going up to insane levels as quickly as possible. A major acute pain will cause change.
There's only so much you can change urban sprawl. In the US especially, high gas prices just mean people who are middle-class or below can't afford to get to work. Last summer, 6% of my salary after tax went into the commute to and from the office.
You can change a ton. Especially in an urban sprawl environment.
Urban sprawl means it's comparatively easy for people to get PV, heat pumps for heating/cooling and EV chargers at home.
With that, you make yourself completely independent of high gas prices.
Yes, it has high up-front costs, but the long-term benefits are massive. And with enough pain comes political momentum, which can be used to get state subsidies for that kind of stuff and that way you and your country can become independent of importing fossil fuels while at the same time reducing harm to the climate.
And yes, it needs to hurt quite bad first to cause such a big systematic change.
And that's where the Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness comes into play.
Oh, of course. It's always been the case that being poor is more expensive. Or to put it differently, if you can afford higher up-front costs you end up saving in the long run.
But even then: right now you e.g. mostly only get affordable ICE cars. But if the people who can afford it now mostly buy electric, that will have an effect on the used cars market in a few years.
Again, I'm not talking about socioeconomic fairness. Higher fuel prices hurt, and they hurt the poor more than the rich. I'm talking purely on the effects on the climate, and these are undeniably there.
You're asking for even more financial stress for probably closer to a billion people who are already struggling. The rich do not care what the fuel costs.
They say the populace is 3 meals away from a revolution at any given time. Ripping the band-aid off seems to me like the only way forward at this point.