The Tao of the Carbox Tax

On the harmonious balance between man and nature

By Justin Hartfield

In the most literal sense possible- without the environment, human beings wouldn't exist. They couldn’t. In the same way that a coin must have both a heads and a tails, or a front must have an accompanying back, or a buyer must have a seller. One doesn’t exist without the other.

They are dependent on the one another for survival but on a deeper level, they exist for each other and because of each other. In fact, they are not two at all, but one. 

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Pay Your Air Share
How to let the market solve climate change
M. Harrison, for the editors

Good News: The international scientific consensus on climate change science has recently shifted, and once contentious division has now shifted to peaceful consensus. While Nobel laureate Al Gore's ominous predictions of apocalyptic 20-foot sea level rises have been debunked, so has the opposite contention that anthropogenic climate change is still a myth. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most comprehensive study to date by hundreds of scientists around the globe, now calls climate change "unequivocal" and specifically estimates that it will cause average temperature rises between 3°-7° F and sea level rises between 7"-23" by the year 2100 if human emissions continue apace. Results from this warming will vary from area to area, but will generally increase the incidents of severe climate events, including flooding, droughts and storm phenomena. This is the new scientific consensus, and it's changing some minds. As a result, many self-proclaimed skeptics have crossed the aisle into being converts.

Little Green Reasoning
Five Points on Environmentalism
M. Harrison

1. The denial of global warming's existence, from the perspective of the free-market advocate, is foolish. If global warming indeed exists, the solution will be the same as the solution to other well-established negative environmental externalities - technological development toward cleaner, more efficient technology. If it doesn't exist, the market would still move in an identical fashion to combat the other (proven) environmental cancers. Technological development will answer the question of how much global warming is controlled by man, not Al Gore and his lame movies.

Why is the earth warming? Are humans causing it, and if so, what can we do? There certainly is no scientific consensus on these questions, as even MIT scientists are doubting the human impact. And if there is one argument that opponents to climate change legislation wield most often, it is that the unsettled nature of the scientific debate over climate change counsels patience and delay. They ask, why would we spend money defending against an uncertain threat?

Prius Panic
Thomas Hutchinson

For the longest time I have wondered why the hybrid models were such a huge success in the United States. The waiting list for a Toyota Prius is now up to a staggering 8 months and the other hybrid models are along the same lines. It might be worth noting, however, that the sales of the regular consumer vehicles, being diesel and regular fuels, are still far and away the dominant sales in America. This only shows that the supposed craze for hybrids isn’t such a big deal, at least in environmental impact, as we thought.