Monday, December 21, 2009

China Emission Monitoring and the Sortition Tax

Unfortunately, a sticking point in cliamate change negotiations is monitoring emissions. China has been hesitant to allow this feeling that monitoring all its businesses would be an infringement of its sovereignty.

Yet a sortition based consumption tax would solve the problem. I mentioned this in the first post of this blog. Each item or service sold, whether imported or produced here, would be subject to a tax. It would be applied in a competitive fashion. That is all the car producers would compete as to which is the most environmentally friendly, and takes care of its workers, and produces products that are safe and don't consume much gasoline, or perhaps are not dependent upon gasoline. Similarly, toy producers, computer manufacturers and others would compete to avoid the tax.

The sortition jury would vote to tax them. Those businesses that agree to monitoring would have an advantage. The sortition jury could also allocate up to five percent of the tax collected to both government agencies and non-profits who run monitoring programs. Businesses would be free to decline monitoring programs that it felt were too intrusive. However, they would be at a competitive disadvantage in getting a low tax rate.

The agencies and NGO's would have an incentive to design monitoring programs that are reliable but that companies were willing to accept--otherwise, they would get less of the money available for such purposes.

Seven to one Americans said the Administration should put a higher priority on improving the economy than reducing global warming. Thus, the sortition juries would look at a companies record of providing stable employment to Americans and its environmental record.

Note this is applied to labor standards, providing health care to its workers and above all environmental issues, both conventional and those associated with global warming.

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