In a nod to labor unions, President Joe Biden is moving to boost wages for construction workers on projects paid for with federal funding, a step that would appeal to a key constituency ahead of next year’s presidential election and potentially shrink the pay gap between northern and southern states.
It wasn’t that it was cheaper. If it was cheaper they would have already been using it and they weren’t. What happened with the CFCs was actually a concerted effort banning them in products across multiple governments. The industries basically just figured their shit out due to nessesity.
Nessesity breeds invention. Convenience just strands the matter at the bottom of the to do list.
My country has started phasing out things like hydrogenated oils in foods due to health concerns and single use plastics. The market is given a hard deadline in advance - adapt or die… and they do.
Next on the chopping block are single use plastic take out containers meaning that infrastructure is being developed right NOW to make reusable, resterilizable and cyclable metal containers because the deadline isn’t going to change. The industry won’t let go of the market of people wanting food delivered… So they will change the culture and the infrastructure and there are just as many jobs to be had. Gas powered cars are on the chopping block for 2035. No new vehicles will be sold so they are making the infrastructure changes now and a lot of consumers are already being influenced by that knowledge.
People forget that capitalism isn’t the answer to everything. The market will always hurt people because if they can scrape a buck out of something that bleeds they will. What stops us from being flooded by inferior products that can harm you, dangerous working conditions that can kill you and exploitative practices that rob you of your time, health and freedom is governments. Collective governments like unions, municipal governments, state governments and federal governments. Instead of using those bodies as tools of control for individual citizen behaviour we should be looking at using them effectively against the forces that decide to market their crap at everyone else’s expense and leave their mess for us to clean up so they can impress their shitty investors by how much misery they can turn into cold dead cash.
That way is far too slow to combat issues that are threatening to our survival. I’m not sure that we have time to wait for the market to “adjust itself” based on changes in demand, especially when those changes aren’t very widespread and there’s a significant amount of people who don’t believe it’s even real and will go out of their way to be more harmful to the environment. It’ll take more than a couple US states banning plastic straws before they no longer become profitable, for example.
It might never happen.
The point being that it is a tactic that can be used. The US state governments are bonkers in how much power they individually have. People think it means more freedoms but it really just translates to being twice bound as though you have two warring countries determining what you are individually allowed to do and the ability to change gets held up in endless debates about federal over reach. Your federal government could and should be able to make choices like these.
But they can’t… Because of a deep underlying distrust in Federal systems being baked into the American national identity. That’s why when you hear about a Country actually making culture changes for the environment it’s never the US. The best the US Federal government has done is ban microbeads which are easily replaced with other stuff at no inconvenience to the consumer.
We are too far along to be talking about individual states.