The Cost of Ignoring Our Problems

I was  listening to economist Robert Reich talk about the mainstream media (MSM) the other day.  He began by stating the obvious: the far right stuff from Fox, NewMax, and OAN is essentially a collection of lies and misrepresentations, and there is no way the MSM could be anywhere near that poisonous.

But he went on to provide a few things that bother him about the MSM, one of which is they like to talk about how expensive the solutions to our problems are without putting that into the context of the cost of doing nothing.

As suggested above, climate change may be the poster child for this fallacy.  Yes, the rapid decarbonization of our energy and transportation sectors are expensive, and so is reorienting our approach to land use.  But what are the costs of huge losses of land mass? Desertification? Flood and hurricanes?  Loss of biodiversity?  Ocean acidification?

The only conceivable way to turn this around is putting a tax on carbon and deforestation that discourages misuse and incentivizes new and effective solutions.  As previously discussed, the best approach to all this is the Carbon Fee and Dividend, as described in the blog post linked here.