Spending tax money to keep the one industry the biosphere needs to have shut down urgently going – that’s dumb. According to new research, the Canadian government spends “hundreds of millions of [Canadian] dollars per year” on subsidies for oil and gas business. Go ahead and tweet something angry with the hashtag #stopfundingfossils. The Canadians are not uniquely dumb, however, as globally hundreds of billions of US dollars are handed out in oil subsidies.
Land grabs are when disproportionally wealthy entities from strong economies buy land needed for local food production in lesser developed territories. Sky grabbing would be what the West did by spending the atmosphere’s capacity for carbon dioxide emissions while building economies. While sub-Saharans contributed the least to the problem of climate change, their fields are the ones that have already been transformed to deserts. US policy makers currently assumes a cost of about 1 US dollar per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. A new study estimates the social cost of carbon in individual countries, and have found to be much higher in average and wildly varying: 86 US dollars in India, negative in Russia.
Unlike other regulated pollutants that have almost entirely domestic consequences, CO2 impacts are global, and climate change is a “tragedy of the commons” problem. A ton of CO2 contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from. If all nations looked only at the impact of a ton of CO2 on their own nations, the collective response would be vastly inadequate to address the true damages from climate change.
Jason Bordoff, former Obama adviser
In Great Britain, non-violent anti-fracking protesters are going to court… on terrorism charges. And that’s a sign the protesters are winning, argues anti-fracker Caroline Lucas.