Is Mother Earth Losing Her Balance?

"We live in a democracy and policies represent our collective will. We cannot blame others. If we allow the planet to pass tipping points...it will be hard to explain our role to our children. We cannot claim...that 'we didn’t know.'"

Jim Hansen
Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies



"...Taxes do two things. First and most obviously, they fund the operations of government. But far more importantly, taxes have been used since the founding of this country to encourage behaviors that we deem good for the nation and to discourage behaviors we consider bad..."

"...In Denmark gasoline is taxed heavily and costs nearly $10 per gallon because the government—with the consent of its citizens, the result of a public information campaign that wasn’t drowned out because there is no domestic oil industry to speak of—realized it was picking up about $3 per gallon of the real cost of gasoline.
Cars and trucks produce exhaust, which deteriorates buildings and statues, causes cancers and asthmas, and, when rain catches it on the way down, pollutes waterways and crops, with those poisons ending up in the food chain. With a national health-care system in addition to other public services, taxpayers in Denmark are picking up the cost of cleaning public areas and historic sites, treating the cancers and the asthmas, cleaning waterways, and restoring farmland that’s been polluted by gas additives, like lead and MTBE (methyl tertbutyl ether).

So they decided to recover those “externalized costs” from gasoline with an increased gas tax..."

Thom Hartmann
Cool Our Fever