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Making the Economy Work for the Many, Not the Few. Step 9: Make Polluters Pay Us

Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.

Instead of investing in dirty fuels, let’s start charging polluters for poisoning our skies – and then invest the revenue so that it benefits everyone.

Each ton of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere costs our nation between $40 and $100, and we release millions of tons of it every year.

Businesses don’t pay that cost. They pass it along to the rest of us—in the form of more extreme weather and all the costs to our economy and health resulting from it.

We’ve actually invested more than $6 trillion in fossil fuels since 2007. The money has been laundered through our savings and tax dollars.

This has got to be reversed.

We can clean our environment and strengthen the economy if we (1) divest from carbon polluters, (2) make the polluters pay a price to pollute, and (3) then collect the money.

Please see the accompanying video, and share.

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{ This post originally appeared at robertreich.org }

By Robert Reich

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best sellers Aftershock, The Work of Nations and Beyond Outrage and, his most recent, Saving Capitalism. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, Inequality for All.