Few people are yet ready to accept this cost of Carbon in their lives. Yes, they will have to, but if they aren’t ready what will you do? Persuade them that it is in their best interest? Yeah? Oh, we are back to offsetting again. I guess it comes down to how you feel about your fellow human beings. Are they good or bad? Wise or foolish? If you believe only the worst about your fellow man then you believe you must remove their choices and rights. This negates al responsible argument. This prescribes dictatorship. That has no future. People must be willing volunteers so the best we can do it to take action at governmental and international levels to edit people’s choices.
People really don’t like having their ‘rights’ taken away. However, people have strange concepts of what is a right. No one questions that you can’t kill another man. You cannot steal from another. You cannot take away another’s future. However, people only understand these restrictions because they feel it is equitable, i.e., it protects them, AND because they can join up the dots between cause and effect. The trouble with something happening a long way in the future to somebody else is that people can’t join up the dots. They don’t see what it has to do with them. If they fly away on holiday today then come home safe and sound. No one gets hurt surely? It doesn’t hurt them directly therefore it is a victimless crime. We borrow this right from someone’s future. This right does not belong to us. It is stolen. Someone else will never be able to live, let alone travel, because of our ‘rights’. This is pretty shocking stuff. All because we can’t join up the dots.
It used to be said that Property is Theft. In our new reality the truth is that most of our perceived 'rights' are in fact just privileges we stole from somebody else. Maybe it is time to share them a little more widely. We have this false concept that somehow we ‘earnt’ these privileges. Does anyone in a rich Northern minority country work harder than a poor farmer in
Through ingenuity and hard work should allow to you to exploit resources more efficiently and generate wealth and prosper, this cannot be a tax on another man. This other man should have equal access and opportunity as you. He may choose to not take that opportunity or he may not have the aptitude to exploit it but, no one has a right to take that opportunity away.