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.
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.