Populist Brexit, French and Italian politics, “Trumpland”, the refuge crisis, droughts, flooding, monsoons, hurricanes and many other examples of wars and unrest are mainly caused by climate change.
It is not enough to sit back and let things happen, according to Antero Vartia, who says that we must take personal responsibility and pay for clearing up this mess.
Antero Vartia, the former Green Party MP, has decided to set up a new venture to help reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. He gave a presentation to the students at Helsinki’s Eira High School – see photo. The room was packed with students and teachers to listen to him.
His new venture, called the “Compensate Foundation”, is a not-for-profit foundation that collects cash in a convenient manner for carbon emissions when consumers buy products.
Consumers will be offered a voluntary and simple choice to pay the correct amount of off-setting compensation for the product’s carbon footprint. Payments can be made over the internet or at the cash register. All of the money paid to the Foundation will be donated in its entirety to several bodies that will invest it in carbon removal investments.
His message is simple – people cause emissions and should pay. We should not be waiting for politicians, companies or other countries to pay the bill! Carbon emissions are like spilt milk – if you make the mess, then you are responsible for wiping it up.
He made the point, “No more outsourcing, no more waiting for others to clean up the mess because everything will be lost if we do not stop climate change.”
He went on to say that we must not only stop carbon emissions, but also overcompensate to remove the high current levels of CO2 from the atmosphere. He estimates that the cost will be around €0,60 a day for each person based on the assumption that 1 ton of CO2 costs €20.¨
Carbon taxes, he states, are useless when attacking climate change because the money collected goes to the government’s budget and hardly ever to tackling climate change.
Stop for a moment, and think about the consequences of doing nothing:
- … you may not be around 2 decades from now but you are almost certainly sending a lot of your friends and family members to the death chamber. Do you want that on your conscience? or
- … you could put it another way round – investments in climate change will be really great because they are so badly needed everywhere! Do you really want to miss out?
