Last month your Creative Greenius weighed into the issue of carbon cap and trade on the TerraPass Footprint website. I offered my take on an article entitled: “Hacks and Handout-Seekers Hate Obama’s Climate Plan”
If you’re not familiar with TerraPass Footprint this is a great opportunity to check them out. But even if you don’t, I’d like to share my take on carbon cap and trade vs carbon taxes with you after the jump…
Everyone, without exception will pay a carbon tax in one form or another.
You’ll either pay it through the health care costs caused by fossil fuel pollution and what greenhouse gases are doing to the climate; through climate change adaptation actions; through higher costs to fight fires and other consequences of long term drought; through the impact on agriculture; through the response to sea level rise and through a myriad of other climate related costs.
I think it only fair and just that the people responsible for producing the most pollution and climate changing carbon pay for the costs their products and actions impose on all of us. If you’re one of those people then you must pay and you deserve to.
Bush and Cheney are gone now and your free, line-your-pockets at my expense ride is over now.
We’re already ten years past the point for trading carbon credits. It’s too easy to game that system and it’s not effective enough to get the job done in the time we have available.
Now it’s time for a straight and heavy carbon tax and I’d like that tax to pay for the development of the necessary renewable energy, plug-in cars and the smart electric grid we need to be building today.
I’d like that tax to subsidize my new solar energy rooftop system and my solar thermal hot water heater. I want it to help pay for my plug-in car too and upgrading my electrical system to a more efficient one.
And if you don’t think you should have to pay for that with the carbon taxes your business will be forced to pay then I say too damn bad for you and your business.
Change or go broke, but stop your whining and complaining.
I feel as sorry for you as I do for the buggy whip industry and the former titans of the matchbook industry. Times change, legacy products go by the wayside, and toxic killers don’t keep getting paid.
The missing sense of urgency and realization FAIL about the available time we have left to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions makes these petty business profit arguments pretty moot and outright laughable. And my sympathy for them is right up there with the empathy I have for Bernie Madoff and AIG bonus babies.
If folks don’t understand where we are in the climate crisis time line and that biting the bullet is long overdue then they don’t deserve any tears for the financial problems they still think are worth complaining about.
When they were given the chance, they screwed our childrens’ futures with their lack of actions on climate change thus far. So at this point I don’t give a damn what happens to their future profits or the part of the economy they think they’re so important to.
Creative Greenius 