Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Here's one for you green lefties, and it links to one of my main OCD targets: the GNSFT (Great North/South Forex Tilt).

A recent study by some striving clean mind and body type found some nice numbers using a little bookkeeping trick called "consumption-side carbon accounting", which works like this: if a widget is manufactured in say China and then shipped to the US – where it is “consumed” – the carbon embodied in the widget goes not on China’s books, as per the usual practice, but on America’s.

Apply that to trade figures, and well, guess what: "since 1990 – the Kyoto Protocol’s baseline year – 75% of the growth in the North’s consumption-based emissions took place in China."

Production where it's dirtiest is often also where it's cheapest, and cross border arbitrage by the multinationals results in just this sort of poison trail stretching from dirtiest smokiest inner Hanistan to the plain-of-aspect, low-priced products on the shelves of Walmart.

The smiley guy needs a border cost barrier to o'erleap here -- one that would put a serious block on his household trinket trove, culled planet-wide and now on sale at a store near you.

We the sovereign self-determining job-holding citizen majority need to slap an emergency planet-protecting Pigou-type green fee(*) on every product or service that passes into these free and equal states, just to off set any dirty difference between their production process and a domestic equivalent.

This oughta be job one now, I should think...at least for green geists who want to link up their sacred cause with the venal sprawlquest country livin' economic interests of the broader Homer K Simpson jobster masses.

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(*) With direct social dividending of all proceeds...of course of course of course.