I have no idea if the title has anything to do with what follows, but I was trying to tie together the death of one America's wittiest baseball players (Yogi Berra) with the visit of the non-economist environmental Pope to the U.S. Why would I want to tie these two things together? No clue. ANyway...
The pope claims that the environment cannot be “safeguarded or promoted by market forces.” Confronting the climate crisis will require a deeper, spiritual transformation of society, replacing “consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing.”
I find nothing objectionable about the pope’s moralizing tone and language of “sin.” But his skepticism about market-based solutions to climate change is rooted in a misunderstanding. A market-based approach to controlling greenhouse-gas emissions — through carbon taxes or tradable emissions permits — does, in fact, reflect moral conviction. The pope gets carried away condemning the “efficiency-driven paradigm of technocracy,” overlooking the fact that efficiency, in this context, is a moral principle.The central idea in all of these programs — from the Emissions Trading System in Europe to the carbon tax adopted in the Canadian province of British Columbia — is to put a price on carbon, so that all businesses and consumers are held accountable and charged for the environmental consequences of their actions.
via www.nytimes.com
