global warming and immigration
This is old news, but an interesting application of land rent. The principle behind land rent is that you pay for the land you take from society. By the same principle, you should pay for the oil, water, clean air, and anything else you take from others. But in return you don't pay other taxes. Hence tax becomes an incentive to create more, and to benefit society.
A recent letter to Nature (discussed here) argues that if pollution causes global warming, and global warming creates millions of homeless people, then any country that creates thirty percent of the pollution should accept thirty percent of the immigrants. An excellent idea!
posted by Chris Tolworthy at 9:27 AM
2 Comments:
Great idea.
To be fair, Europeans and Japanese are polluting less not because they are more virtuous but because they could not afford to pay oil in dollars. To preserve scarce dollar resources, governments imposed hefty energy taxes.
True enough. And I should have also added that I didn't mean that post to sound anti-American. According to the graphic in the New Scientist article, the US already accepts a level of immigrants in proportion to its CO2 emmissions. I support that, and hope it continues.
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