Here’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s recent column in the New York Times addressing the oft-discussed issue: Are efforts to achieve environmental sustainability necessarily damaging to the strength of the economy?
As usual, as we dig deeper into subjects like this, we learn that there are important complexities.
In this case, some efforts to decarbonize open up huge economic opportunities.
Krugman uses the “carrot and stick” metaphor and points out that carrots like financial bonanzas tends to work better than sticks, like taxes. Yet, in reality, our society is too far from where it was a few decades ago, where the consumption of fossil fuels becomes extremely unattractive the moment someone is asked to cover the costs of the environmental damage associated with climate change, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity.
Is our civilization’s dependence on oil “not going to change?”
Obviously, Big Oil wants to keep the status quo in place, regardless of the environmental damage it’s doing to every living creature on this planet. And the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to make sure this assault against all life forms endures in perpetuity.
But this won’t work. It may be true that the United States is rapidly transforming itself into a dictatorship like Russia, China, North Korea, and the other 50+ sovereign nations on this planet. But the rest of the developed world is working hard to decarbonize its energy and transportation sectors so as to prevent environmental collapse.
Hillsdale “College” writes:Do you suppose, for a minute, that I want some ultra-right-wing “college” to tell me how I should regard the Constitution? What a sick joke.
I don’t want to hear from the John Birch Society, nor the Heartland Institute, nor the KKK, to lecture me on the meaning of the Constitution.
White Nationalists Want to Tell You What the Constitution Means
Jim Meskimen, the fellow quoted at left, is among the brightest and most talented people I’ve ever met, but I take issue with what he says here.
When one’s native country has become beset by a criminal sociopath in the position of leadership, responsible, high-integrity people become politically active, and do anything in their power to remove this cancer before it destroys us.
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