Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Climate Change as the Next Plague

As this new report from the government makes clear, the more we make the planet sicker the sicker it will make us. Which then places new emphasis on how we should react to resistance to doing what it takes to make change happen.

Clearly, the resistance to change is more complicated than just being at the hands of the greedy few among us. Stopping the use of fossil fuels also means taking away the livelihoods of tens of thousands of working folks. That this also ought to suggest the inherent incapability of our current economic model to adapt to changing circumstances doesn't change the fact that, in the here and now, that very real short term pain needs to be addressed.

From my point of view, this idea that a carbon credit exchange market will bring about the needed change, while still allowing people to make money, is just not ever going to be enough change in the time frame needed. What really needs to occur is for fossil fuels to be subject to an ever increasing production, and consumption tax, where it might start out modest but go up rapidly after that.

With that tax in place the proceeds from it should go toward only two objectives: 1. The development of a hydrogen fuel replacement. And 2. The distribution of means based tax rebates to the working folks to offset both increased consumption costs, but also to compensate for job losses due to other fuels being abandoned by the various companies now active in producing them.

This will mean, however, that people who make significantly more than the median wage levels in this country will have to make significant fiscal sacrifices; either in swallowing the increased production and consumption costs, or in investing in the technologies that will get them out of their fossil fuel dependency. After that, if the rich continue to pursue resistance to this absolutely required change than we should feel no compunction whatsoever in advancing the notion that greed is a weapon of mass destruction, and it should, from that point on, be treated as such.