Simple Solutions To ‘Outsmart’ Climate Change

One of the simplest and most effective ways to fight climate change isn't buying an electric vehicle or putting solar panels on your roof. It's taxing the rich.

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When you talk about outsmarting climate change it's hilarious to me that the smartest solution is the simplest one that we keep returning to. And what you what outsmarting climate change really means is how can we burden regular people more with by avoiding through our own cowardice and inability to actually stand up to powerful people targeting the companies the production of the of oil and of what's causing the worst of climate change. Yeah, I came up when I was writing this book I came up with a little pithy slogan that we should not tax molecules we should tax the rich. Which is it's insane because the idea of a carbon tax carbon is this neutral stuff that working-class people use. you and I use it. Rich people use it. and this idea that it's causing climate change we're going to tax this neutral stuff it can easily be turned into something that's going to be a tax on everyone right? And no one likes that. So you know traditionally when the left was powerful the main way the left got stuff done is through re mass redistribution of wealth and that's through taxing the rich. and so we need to we need a massive and taxing of the rich and by the way over the last 40 years nothing but tax cuts for the rich. You know from Reagan through w through Trump. Like that's just what they've been doing. And so we could and that even you know like if we don't even want to I mean obviously I'm all on board for nationalizing the energy sector. I think that's something ultimately we have to do. but if we could just make our tax regime way more progressive and generate a huge amount of revenue to actually invest in remaking our energy system and remaking our infrastructure. like that kind of big let's say like new deal style sort of public goods public investment regime and you know in the new deal they tax the rich at these incredible levels too. That's what we need. and focusing on the molecules sort of distracts us from this class struggle that we're facing. and what we need to do to solve it.