It’s good to know that a rock star can contribute erudite and/or entertaining opinion to newspapers. Here’s U2’s Bono with a confusing, and internally conflicting, Top 10 for the next decade in the New York Times :-
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03bono.html
On the matter of Climate Change (what ? Only at Number 3 ?), he contributes this street-cool support for Contraction and Convergence (C&C), the framework, and the framework-based market of equal global per capita shares of the atmosphere :-
“An Equal Right to Pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle) : In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now. One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. And yes, real economists would prefer to tax carbon at the source, but so far the political will is not there. If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated.”
I think you’ll find that Equal Rights in Carbon are pretty hot in “deep green” quarters, actually, Bono; you just haven’t taken the trouble to find out.
https://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/ICE.pdf
https://www.gci.org.uk/contconv/cc.html
https://www.climatejustice.org.uk/about/contractionandconvergence/
2 replies on “Saint Bono Preaches Equality”
. . . mix rock and hard place . . . and get a per capitalist utopia . . . hmmm methinks.
I haven’t been on an airplane for 9 years..
nor my family..
I wonder how big Bono’s ‘carbon’ footprint is…
Yet he would preach to me, and call me a ‘sceptic’