Oxygen Tax
A few posts back we met a cardboard oven, a neat idea, and a promotional video which tended to take a “politically correct” stance on the notion of a carbon footprint.
Now I’d like to promote a crazy idea of an oxygen tax. Large forested area produce the oxygen that is necessary for our particular form of life on planet earth. A major source of this oxygen is are the rain forests of the Amazon. However for a variety of economic reasons large areas of these rain forests are being cut down to produce land that can be employed for other uses including farming.
Now we are quite willing to accept that if a particular nation has natural resources such as oil, coal or fresh water that other nations should pay for these products. Brazil, however, supplies the world with oxygen yet no one appears to think it reasonable that Brazil should be paid for the great resource it supplies to the planet.
Of course there are considerations of supply. If a nation has great supplies of oil then it builds pipelines and charges for its product, likewise a river of fresh water could be dammed but it would be rather difficult for Brazil to contain the oxygen it freely supplies to the planet.
It now appears to be politically acceptable that nations should reduce their carbon imprint, or in some cases offset the carbon dioxide they release. So why not introduce an oxygen tax and recompense Brazil, as well as other heavily forested areas, as a reward for preserving their forests?
Is this a totally crazy idea? Would anyone support it. Or to we simply sit by, calculating our individual carbon imprint, or trying to figure out if its better to use paper or plastic bags, while the world’s major forests are cut down.
