Kerry, Gingrich: Climate change is real
Gingrich favors a market solution to global warming, to which Kerry responded, that’s like saying ‘Barry Bonds, go investigate steroids.’
Indeed, one of the biggest blockades to reversing global warming is the short-term profit motive of capitalism. As long as corporations are legally mandated to put profits before everything else, long-term solutions to global warming, which will cost money, will have much less chance of happening.
The other blockade, of course, is the Flat Earth Society in the White House.
Thomas Ware wrote on his blog, “We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no one will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive them only rarely… Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that products will reflect the true cost of the environmental damage that shipping them around causes.”
But while he argues this is anti-capitalism, I argue that there’s nothing anti-capitalist about it, and indeed this is EXACTLY what capitalism should do in the face of the challenges facing us. And more. As to the anarchists who say the market will take care of this without government intervention, well, it’s up to us to demand that our government do what Adam Smith said it should do: what the market can’t.