Conversations on Vietnam Development
Jeffie Lam,Natalie Wong,Edith LinandClifford Lo Published: 2:53pm, 8 Sep, 2023
Hong Kong officials met the press at 2.30pm on Friday to provide details on efforts in handling the aftermath of the city’s worst downpour in more than a century amid mounting questions over a perceived lack of preparedness.
Citizens’ Climate Lobby Posted on December 17, 2022 in Advance Climate Policy
For over a century, economists have advocated taxing goods or services that impose greater costs on society than their price reflects. The idea isn’t to raise revenue, even if that’s a nifty benefit, but to discourage the overuse of things that cause unintended harm.
No bigger example of such unintended harm exists today than the air and climate pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The International Monetary Fund conservatively estimates that the price of such fuels fails to account for $4.2 trillion in air and climate pollution costs each year.
By imposing a fee on fossil fuels to fairly reflect those social costs, on the other hand, we can invoke the power of the market to efficiently limit their use. That’s why more than 3,600 economists call carbon fees “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”
Public support for carbon fees would be stronger if everyone grasped how they work to discourage the production and consumption of goods that cause societal harm. Unfortunately, many people don’t get it.
“The expectation that carbon taxes do not work is one of the main reasons for their rejection by people in surveys and real ballots,” an international scholarly review concluded in 2018. For example, only 39 percent of respondents in one Swedish poll understood that a carbon tax “affects my own and other people’s behavior.”
Tiếp tục đọc “‘Putting a Price’ on Tobacco, Alcohol, and Carbon Emissions”By Nadeen Ebrahim and Laura Paddison, CNN Updated 12:08 PM EDT, Fri September 15, 2023
A satellite image shows the town of Derna in the aftermath of the floods in eastern Libya on Wednesday.Maxar Technologies/ReutersCNN —
It started with a bang at 3 a.m. Monday as the residents of Derna were sleeping. One dam burst, then a second, sending a huge wave of water gushing down through the mountains towards the coastal Libyan city, killing thousands as entire neighborhoods were swept into the sea.
More than 5,000 people are believed to have been killed with thousands more missing, though estimates from different Libyan officials and aid groups have varied and the toll is expected to rise.
The eastern Libyan city of Derna, the epicenter of the disaster, had a population of around 100,000 before the tragedy. Authorities say that at least 10,000 remain missing. CNN could not independently verify the figures.
Buildings, homes and infrastructure were “wiped out” when a 7-meter (23-foot) wave hit the city, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which said Thursday that dead bodies were now washing back up on shore.
But with thousands killed and many more still missing, there are questions as to why the storm that also hit Greece and other countries caused so much more devastation in Libya.
Experts say that apart from the strong storm itself, Libya’s catastrophe was greatly exacerbated by a lethal confluence of factors including aging, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate warnings and the impacts of the accelerating climate crisis.
Tiếp tục đọc “Aging dams and missed warnings: A lethal mix of factors caused Africa’s deadliest flood disaster in Libya”
CVD 