Comment 28141

By LL (registered) - website | Posted January 12, 2009 at 00:23:32

Just a note on my last post:

A Smith reiterated a comment made by many right-wing pundits about how a carbon tax would reduce our standard of living. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's not really the point as far as I'm concerned. Since it recovered from the last oil shocks, North America has maintained an extremely high standard of living - possibly the highest in the world. But the quality of life has been severely degraded. I'm talking about a long work week(and growing, despite "time-saving" technologies), an overly fast pace of life, an unhealthy diet, media saturation, advertising overload, traffic congestion, ugly cities, a lack of public space, a lack of personal choice in transportation modes, communities torn apart by inequalities... If a reduction in energy intensity of the economy is handled in a socially conscious and class conscious way, I think it can produce all kinds of benefits.

As we debate carbon and other ecological issues in the coming decades, I think we need to acknowledge the distinction between standard of living and quality of life. I think that we should work to live, not the other way around. Most discourse assumes the opposite. I think that's a big ideological barrier to social progress.

LL believes that the problems of the city reflect deeper social contradictions

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