Human beings are hard wire to be short termist and will always postpone future pain for current pleasure. We need an external agency to sort of remind us of the long term because we can't all be good citizens, imean just and we can’t all be long term thinkersd in fact, most of our population in the states here isn't really engaged in the issue, even if they worry about it a bit. So that is where youud ayoyou put these incentives. That's what we did with cigarettes in the states, where it's eight bucks a pack now, and like seven othat is taxes.
Author and environmental journalist Eugene Linden's new book, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present, lays out how successive US governments managed to delay action on climate change when they should have been raising the alarm. It also looks at why the climate emergency will have a big impact on the global economy and why China and India, which could have taken a lead on renewables, double downed on coal to fuel their industrialisation in the 1990s. Our host for the podcast is the economist and broadcaster Linda Yueh.
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