World to End Tomorrow, Poor to Suffer DisproportionatelyMort Sahl's old joke comes
back to life today:
THE jobless would be hardest hit by carbon pricing, with new research showing low-income households would have to pay about $600 a year to fight climate change. The research by academic Peter Brain found carbon pricing would disproportionately affect people on low incomes, especially the unemployed.
The Brotherhood of St Laurence commissioned Dr Brain to analyse the impact of increasing the price of carbon for various types of Victorian households. He costed carbon as a component of all consumer goods, not just direct energy costs, with calculations based on household disposable income, including government subsidies and tax.
This illustrates something that hit me the other day. Al Gore's purchase of carbon credits (from his own company, no less) is reasonably painless for him. He's got a ton of money from his Google stock options, and makes something like $175,000 per speech. If he's gotta pay, say $20,000 to offset his carbon bigfootprint, well, that's just chump change.
Labels: Al Gore, Global Warming
