Earth Equity News

Picking Ourselves Off the Ground and Moving On. Commentary by Joseph Stiglitz, WashPost, November 9, 2008. "Barack Obama owes his victory in large measure to the prospect of the longest and deepest economic downturn in a quarter-century and perhaps since the Great Depression... Obama is also inheriting a climate crisis... We cannot save the planet without a global agreement, and we cannot get such an agreement without massive reductions in U.S. emissions. This transition could have upsides beyond the environmental ones. A carbon tax -- or the auctioning of emissions permits -- could generate huge revenues; some of those could be used to help Americans adjust to the new 'green economy,' while the rest could be used to reduce the deficit or lower taxes on workers. But we really have little choice here: Europe and other global players are likely to slap a carbon tax on U.S. goods if we don't deal with the issue at home. Their firms will not tolerate giving U.S. firms a competitive advantage simply because we refuse to bear our responsibility for the global environment... We may be witnessing the birth of a new economic model. We have been treating two of the world's scarcest resources, air and water, as if they were actually free. No wonder we have paid so little attention to resource-saving innovations. Perversely, the U.S. tax code has actually been subsidizing the production of the very fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. We have been pursuing a policy that amounts to 'Drain America first.' It has made us even more dependent on oil imports -- a stunningly short-sighted plan... The new economic model will require changes in the ways and places where we live and work. There will be some losers (including the oil industry, which has done jarringly well in recent years), but there will be even more winners. In so many ways, the United States has reached a low point. Picking ourselves up off the ground is itself no mean achievement. But I hope that our new president will do even more for us than that." Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. His latest book, with Linda J. Bilmes, is The Three Trillion Dollar War.