Global Warming

Here's the main body of a letter from Frank de Jong to a newsgroup I belong to.

"Climate change is again at the top of the global agenda. Hopefully this time the nations of the world will take concerted action.





Two points:




1. Conventional wisdom states that addressing climate change will cost huge amounts of money. The climate change defenders say it would be money well spent, while the climate change deniers say it would be a waste of money. But this entire premise is incorrect.





Climate change can and should be addressed at zero cost, by using the tax structure as a policy tool, through tax shifting, i.e. untaxing jobs and business and up-taxing resource use, land values and the privilege of polluting. Green tax shifts are revenue-neutral and cost taxpayers and governments nothing. In fact they benefit the economy by rewarding value-added, labour-intensive, resource-efficient, clean production and punishing ecologically destructive manufacturing and life styles.




2. Switching the source of government revenue from personal incomes and business profits to levies and fees on the use and abuse of the global commons, should become policy whether climate change exists or not. There are multiple benefits to green tax shifting, including more jobs, a more prosperous economy, less sprawl, more walkable neighbourhoods, increased economic viability of local food and clean energy, resource conservation, nature preservation, less poverty, less cancer, heart disease, diabetes and asthma.


These points obliterate the arguments of the climate change deniers by presenting a fiscally responsible, politically attractive market mechanism that will address climate change by dramatically reducing the human impact on the Earth without unfair subsidies or punitive compliance legislation."

I think he has some good ideas here. What do you think?

Global Warming

Now that global warming has happened, what do we do about it?
 
Sea levels are rising.  Do we spend billions on dikes and levees?  Or do we encourage lowland-using activities to relocate to higher ground?
 
Major rivers are likely to change their courses.  Do we spend billions on trying to confine the rivers?  Or do we relocate our river-dependent industries?
 
Agricultural zone boundaries are much farther north than they were forty years ago.  Do we spend billions trying to force nature to do our bidding?  Or do we learn to grow different crops, and grow our old crops in different places?
 
Formerly well-watered places are now arid, and formerly dry places are now suffering excess rainfall.  Same pair of questions.  Spend billions on dubious technology or learn to relocate?
 
Our current tax structure and land-ownership pattern makes relocation unduly difficult.  Land is too expensive to buy but too cheap to own for long term.  Relocation means abandoning now-worthless land that was initially bought at great cost, and buying new land at even greater cost.
 
Landowners are not making much from this scheme.  The only winners are banks who loan ever-increasing amounts of money for bigger and bigger mortgages.
 
What if we got smart and levied high real estate taxes on the location value of land, thus making it impractical to own land that's not immediately needed?  It seems that initial purchase prices of land would be greatly decreased.  Land that becomes worthless to to changes in the natural world would be much easier to abandon because new land could be more readily bought elsewhere.  The only losers would be banks, who would no longer have a market for huge land-purchase mortgages.
 
Of course there's still a need to curtail human activities that needlessly result in unnecessary global warming, but a more dynamic land usage pattern is going to be a necessary part of any solution.