How To Make The Economy Work For The Many, Not The Few #8: Make...

HOW TO MAKE THE ECONOMY WORK FOR THE MANY, NOT THE FEW #8: MAKE POLLUTERS PAY US

Instead of investing in dirty fuels,
let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the
revenue so that it benefits everyone.

Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs
our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions tons of it every year. 

Businesses don’t pay
that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us—in the form of more extreme
weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it. 

We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.

This has got to be reversed.

We can clean our environment and strengthen the economy if we (1) divest from carbon polluters, (2) make the polluters pay a price to
pollute, and (3) then collect the money. 

Please see the accompanying video, and share. 

Robert Reich

This is from Robert Reich’s blog, www.robertreich.org. He is professor of public policy at Berkeley, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, and author of 13 books, the most recent of which is “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.”