This doesn’t even make sense
Every now and again the world produces a great human. Jane Goodall is one shining example. For decades her name has been associated with animal welfare and primatology, principally studying chimpanzees. These days Goodall, who recently turned 90, is a tireless climate activist, spending 300 days a year touring the world talking to young people and generally speaking out about the immediate peril of global warming.
In a recent stop in Canada, Goodall took a stand against that government’s climate change tax. She worries that the fight against climate change has been “politicised … causing people just not to listen,” because the urgency of the crisis demands a universal response.
Goodall further noted that Industrial carbon taxes rarely impose significant financial burdens on major energy companies, which can pay a levy out of their enormous profits and then go right on drilling and mining resources that are damaging to the environment. The key to the problem is to force major oil companies to stop drilling entirely and instead start investing in alternative energy resources.
I would add one more important point to Dr Goodall’s list. The major burden of taxation rests, as ever, on the shoulders of the poor. Trying to tax away climate change is a cheap solution for lazy politicians. It’s really legislative victim-blaming, and is ultimately as ineffectual as trying to tax away obesity.
The principal villains of most of our modern problems are lack of education in critical thinking, huge corporations and billionaires. Monolithic companies and billionaires fund our worst politicians and lobby for self-dealing legislation while burnishing their images with ultimately useless gestures. Ignorance helps them get away with it.
Making the poor pay for fighting climate change is another underlying evil. Meanwhile the rich and powerful use their influence to promote propaganda to advance their money-grubbing agendas.
I commend Jane Goodall and her nonagenarian colleague in the fight against climate change, fellow Briton David Attenborough. It should be an inspiration to us all that such people exist, people who plant trees whose shade they will probably never live to enjoy. In a world of Trumps, it’s nice to pause now and again and think about the good people in the world. I hope you agree. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.