global warming

The principle behind land rent is that you pay for your debt to society. Society makes your land more valuable, so you owe them. (And you pay no other taxes.) If we have land rent, people will get used to the benefits of paying their debts to society. It then becomes politically easy to extend the principle to other areas.

One area where we urgently need to pay our debts is global warming. Nature itself has provided us with coal, oil, air, water, etc, creating a massive level of value. But if we dump carbon dioxide into the air, we reduce the value of the world for everyone. So we owe a debt to our neighbors (and if they cause more of the problem than we do, then they owe a debt to us).

The size of the debt might seem large, but it is nothing compared with the long term cost of global warming. Here's just one more in an endless line of statistics: the carbon dioxide we are releasing now is similar to the amount released 55 million years ago. It raised the acidity of the oceans, killing off more than half of all ocean species. Recent ocean floor core samples indicate that the oceans took one hundred thousand years to recover.

Global warming: one more problem that would be solved if we had land rent.