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Wow... just wow. I'm overwhelmingly under-learned on this topic, but from the sounds of scientists, shit is literally hitting the fan. What books and research
by celestialcheese 9y ago
Wow... just wow. I'm overwhelmingly under-learned on this topic, but from the sounds of scientists, shit is literally hitting the fan. What books and research in the last couple years are good for non-scientists about the effects of rising oceans on socio-economics and politics?
- Consultant32452 9y agoIt will be hard to find anything that isn't exceedingly one-sided if socio-economics and politics are involved. One thing to remember when you read that stuff is that the poorest are the ones that suffer the most from the regulations we put in place. For example, I support taxation on any product or service with externalities where it's nearly impossible to price the damage done into the product naturally. Pollution is a perfect example of this. I buy oil from you, but third parties are harmed. Therefore somehow I need to pay a tax and compensate everyone I'm harming. Anyways... who do you think this tax will harm the most? The billionaire oil barons? Of course not. They will still be billionaires. It's the poorest who need cheap fuel so they don't freeze to death in the winter. If we manage to actually enforce anti-carbon regulation across the globe, who will be harmed the most? It's India, China, and Brazil among others who are still industrializing. It's the people who we're just trying to get up to the point of actually being pretty confident they will get 1-2 meals every day... not even making them wealthy. Often these things are framed to appear to be going after the "evil rich" person who burns coal. Sure, we know burning coal kills lots of people. I would never deny those stats. No one ever talks about how many lives are saved by burning coal. As technology progresses perhaps countries will not need to burn coal to go through industrialization and pull their people off the brink of starvation, but we're nowhere near that today. So we need to consider these types of things as we talk about the socioeconomic and political ramifications of climate change. The solution can't be worse than the problem for poor people.
- CuriousSkeptic 9y agoDistributing the revenue from said taxes back as a public dividend should solve that problem nicely. Since we're all impacted by those externalities a public dividend is only fair. And since the distributed money compensate for increased costs the tax can be pretty high, and thus effective in directing money towards alternate solutions.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago... which makes the case that proponents of such taxes are at least partially motivated by anti-capitalism and socialism.
- CuriousSkeptic 9y agoI'm against capitalism, so that would be a fair assessment of me. But if you really want a label, try geo-libertarian, I'm definitely not a socialist. In any case, even hard core capitalists would recognize the value in controlling extenalities to help the market economy do its things. If it helps I'm not a proponent of taxes per se. The tax I'm advocating could just as easily be described as rent. It is my hope that a fair, and effective, rent extraction from our shared capital (land, pollution rights, spectrum bands and so forth) could actually help abolish unfair and damaging taxes like income taxes.