We're Already Paying Carbon Taxes

"The fact is that American taxpayers are paying for the costs of climate change now. These costs don't hit us all at once but sporadically, in different places and at different times. They don't feel like a carbon tax, though they amount to one. Every time we use fossil fuels, we increase our tax burden, a burden that unfolds like a sequence of trap doors, just like climate change itself." ~ Mark Shapiro

“The ground is shifting beneath our feet," declares author Mark Shapiro. Mark explains how he reacted to an oil spill from the tanker Prestige along the coast of Galicia in 2002 devastated a nearby town's economy and cost billions in cleanup expenses. From the agricultural fields of California to the Amazon rainforest, from the export powerhouses of China to the bizarre world of carbon traders, Mark tells the story of how profoundly climate change is shifting the economic landscape. Mark explores how some new powers are rising and others are falling as the world struggles to contend with the fundamental economic fact of our time, the rising price of carbon.

Mark Schapiro writes about the intersection of the environment, economics, and political power. Mark teaches journalism at UC-Berkeley and at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

"In his powerful new book Carbon Shock, Mark Schapiro transcends standard discussions about the well-known culprits and ramifications of climate change and takes us on a harrowing, international exploration of the universal economic costs of carbon emissions. In his path-breaking treatise, Schapiro exposes the multinational corporate obfuscation of these costs; the folly of localized pseudo-solutions that spur Wall Street trading but don't quantify financial costs or public risks, solve core problems, or provide socially cheaper and environmentally sounder practices; and the laggard policies of the US, Russia and China relative to the EU in fashioning longer-term remedies. Not only does Schapiro compel the case for a global effort to thwart the joint economic and environmental plundering of our planet in this formidable book, but he expertly outlines the way to get there." ~ Nomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers and It Takes a Pillage
Source: COMMONWEALTH NATIONAL PODCAST: Mark Schapiro: Carbon Shock – A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

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Music includes Jill Sobule - A happy song about global warming, Reverend Billy - The Water Song, Every Call You Make, FDR 3-4-1933, Capitol Steps - Glory Glory Paranoia, Charlie Chaplin - The Great Dictator, Poison Girls - Abort the System, Dala Girls - Ohio, David Rovics - The Flag Desecration Rag, System of a Down - Boom!, Bob Marley - War, Capitol Steps - Don't Know Much, Tom Lehrer - Smut, Creedence Clearwater Revival - Proud Mary, Phillip Glass - Thirteenth Dalai Lama