Eliot Spitzer: A Climate Change Fix Conservatives Can Love

<a href="http://current.com/shows/viewpoint/videos/the-dice-are-loaded-nasas-james-hansen-warns-escalating-climate-crisis-requires-intervention/">Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer</a>/Current TV


This story first appeared on the Slate website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

So let me get this straight. We just found out that July was the hottest month on record.

This past week, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and father of climate change science, wrote of the peer-reviewed research he just completed: “For the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

And last month, Richard Muller, a University of California-Berkeley physics professor, MacArthur Fellow, and former climate change skeptic—whose research was funded by the Koch brothers—concluded that “global warming was real and that prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

The pace of global warming is accelerating and the scale of the impact is devastating. The time for action is limited—we are approaching a tipping point beyond which the opportunity to reverse the damage of CO2 emissions will disappear.

And what are we talking about in our presidential campaign? Obamaloney and Romney Hood. Silliness has taken over, and the capacity to raise tough issues has dissipated if not gone entirely. Climate change appears to have fallen off the political agenda.

Yet there is an answer for either candidate courageous enough to take the first step. This answer is steeped in conservative economics: Companies that pollute should be taxed so that a product’s cost to society is reflected in the price of that product. Milton Friedman and Richard Posner agree on this point!

The idea, proposed by Hansen, is simple: a fee on carbon emissions collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to legal residents on a per capita basis. It is simple, would move us away from carbon-based fuels, would cost most consumers nothing, and would stimulate innovation in the clean-energy sector. Right now, in contrast, we are subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year—while the greatest minds in science agree that we are destroying our planet.

It is not a matter of ideology to say that this makes no sense. It is a matter of simple, conservative economics. Is it too much to ask our candidates that in the hot, dog days of August, they trade ideas, not ad hominem attacks?

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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