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Overnight Video: Mitt Romney vs. Reality

97
Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus4/06/2012 4:23:20 am PDT

re: #96 Expand Your Ground

Speaking of which…

Sure to push buttons:

Nasa scientist: climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery

Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasa climate scientist Prof Jim Hansen.

He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an “injustice of one generation to others”.

Hansen, who will next Tuesday be awarded the prestigious Edinburgh Medal for his contribution to science, will also in his acceptance speech call for a worldwide tax on all carbon emissions.

In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.

[…]

Good luck with that. We can’t even get taxes raised to pay for water works or old folk homes. We’ll never do a global carbon tax.

Hansen, for as much as I respect and even like him, is way out of his field when he is talking about economics and politics. There are no global taxes simply because there are no global tax collectors. There are no global tax collectors because there is no global treasury. There is no global treasury because there is no global government.

And there is no global government because we all can’t live together peacefully.