After one quick response, here is a very late one — sorry!
Raising awareness does help but that doesn’t address the issue of convincing low-income households to buy ‘green’ on their already limited budgets. A solution here could be to subsidise more green businesses to make their services/products cheaper, but, again, this relies on electing the right politicians.
I’m very impressed with how you calculate your water footprint — fair play for doing that and reducing it too! It does raise an interesting question in the increasingly hipster world we live in — can you convince even the well-off to sacrifice their coffee to reduce their environmental impact? I highly doubt it, but if we ‘green’ the system through cleaner approaches/technologies and the right political support, this could be solved without hipsters having to sacrifice their coffee. For the record, I drink a lot of coffee and would find it hard to give it up, especially since I quite smoking : )
Carbon tax has already been implemented in countries around the world, with varying degrees of success. It shows that if done correctly, it can have a big impact e.g. British Colombia. But it’s also susceptible to lobbying from heavily-polluting industries, mainly because it will threaten these industries’ production. Again, this requires the right political support to fund new technologies to help these dirty, yet necessary, industries.
A lot of work is being done in Europe to do the same too, through the European Union Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) which has been very ineffective in the past but is undergoing a reform that could help the EU meets its climate targets from the Paris Agreement. However, it has to be agreed by its 28 member states (including Britain for now), who will have different industries lobbying for weaker targets. There will also be NGOs and different environment organisations lobbing too, but we’ll have to wait to find out who the politicians listened to more.
Have another awesome day!
Steve
