Martin Konvička: “Truly poor people are used to poverty. They have established ways of coping with it, from pursuing various discounts to family and neighborhood help, working in the gray zone and, most importantly, the ability to make do with little. Moreover, governments will compensate them for energy poverty in some way, because no one wants to have hungry Roma ghettos in the streets, or laid-off workers from Skoda.
The middle classes will feel the impoverishment, in fact they already have. Their savings are melting away, and this is just the beginning. Yet they are the ones who support the New Green Deal the most.”
I’ll just add a quick comment on that:
First. It’s not just about how poor a person is in an objective sense (how much they can afford), but how they subjectively experience it. And people who feel middle class experience it worse. They are the ones who get hit. For them it will be the most painful.
Second. There is a similar feeling among New Green Deal supporters to what we experienced at the end of communism. We thought that the departure of the communists was enough to make life better. It was a tragic mistake. Today, this is how they view the “carbon economy”. They will find out their tragic mistake soon enough.