Robert Reich on Climate Fairness
US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, gives a clear and succinct account of a fair climate policy on NPR's Marketplace:
Our atmosphere belongs to all of us, and polluters should have to pay to use it. The citizens of Alaska get yearly dividends from the oil companies that take away their natural resources. Why shouldn't the same principle apply when industries use the biggest common resource of all? The money they pay for permits could be returned as yearly dividends to every American family.
Now, it stands to reason that if polluters have to pay for the right to pollute, some of these costs might be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But the yearly dividend checks would offset any price increases.
I'll have you know that I actually stood next to Reich once, briefly, in the corridor of a Senate office building. (Yes, you may touch my hem.) [Image courtesy of Wikimedia.]
Get the Lead Out
The first study to follow lead-exposed children from before birth into adulthood has shown that even relatively low levels of lead permanently damage the brain and are linked to higher numbers of arrests, particularly for violent crime.
Previous studies linking lead to such problems have used indirect measures of lead and criminality, and critics have argued that socioeconomic and other factors may be responsible for the observed effects.
But by measuring blood levels of lead before birth and during the first seven years of life and then correlating the levels with arrest records and brain size, Cincinnati researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet that lead plays a major role in crime.
This just makes me angry. It's not like the health risks of lead were unknown -- they were well understood decades before the compound was phased out of gasoline and paints. Still, politics got in the way of common sense: and society as a whole suffered, and not just over the short term.
It makes me wonder what other kinds of long-term risks we're creating right now--risks that are well understood, entirely preventable, but simply tolerated.
