People to be rewarded for ‘green travel’, says tech CEO
The CEO of a Chinese tech giant last week told an audience at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 that technology is being developed which will incentivize people to be more environmentally friendly when they travel.
Alibaba Group CEO J. Michael Evans, who also shared that the company is developing the tech framework to monitor each individual’s carbon footprint wherever they go, said that the platform will also reward people for green travel.
“So we have within our business something called ‘AMAP’, which is a mapping – think Google Maps or Waze – plus travel destination business,” explained Evans during a panel called Strategic Outlook: Responsible Consumption. “And so what we’re going to do is first allow people to calculate the best route, the most efficient route, and the most efficient form of transportation and then if they take advantage of those recommendations, we will give them bonus points that they can redeem elsewhere on our platform.
“So they are incentivized to do the right thing even if they were provided the opportunity to do the wrong thing.”
But the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that in the hands of world governments, those “bonus points”, or rewards, may very well mean freedoms.
Last year, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used a traffic light model to reward her citizens with freedom in increments, dependent on vaccination status.
“The new COVID-19 Protection Framework sets a pathway forward that rewards the rapidly growing number of vaccinated New Zealanders with more freedoms to go about their lives safely,” she said in October.
“If you are still unvaccinated, not only will you be more at risk of catching COVID-19, but many of the freedoms others enjoy will be out of reach,” she warned.
Similarly, Australia created a campaign called “Spread Freedom” designed to incentivize Australians to get injected with the promise of more freedom.
“The Spread Freedom campaign focuses highlights how people can be more confident in experiencing more freedoms, more regularly, as higher levels of vaccination are reached,” says the Australia Department of Health on its website.
The New South Wales government rolled out a freedom “roadmap”:
“People across NSW who have received both doses of a COVID-19 vaccine will be allowed more freedoms next month after NSW hit the target of six million jabs,” said NSW Health in a statement.
“This is the first step in the roadmap and further freedoms will follow for those who have had the jab when the state hits new vaccination targets of 70 and 80 per cent.”
Such freedoms included being outside for one hour with family, in addition to the hour allowed for exercise, no more than 5 kilometers from home.
Joe Biden, who pushed his own vaccine mandate which allowed people to work if they got injected, scoffed at the notion that freedom would be factored in at all.
“Freedom. I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID,” Biden said in October while pretending to be an unvaccinated American. “I mean, come on, ‘freedom.'”
In September, Biden had frankly said that personal choice isn’t on the table when it came to vaccines.
“This is not about freedom or personal choice. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.”
It remains to be seen what rewards people will be given if climate change is declared a public health emergency.
