Because "deciding" to live in the high temperate latitudes is not a decision so much as an accident of birth. If you want to move everyone out of the those areas, you will have to move a perceptible fraction of the Europe's population (something on the order of 10-20 %, depending on where you draw the line). Not to mention giving up a perceptible fraction of our available arable land.

Upthread, I entered into a discussion of the merits of taxing environmental externalities purely on the basis of their environmental impact vs. taxing based on both environmental and social considerations.

The short version of my stance is that in the ideal world, environmental taxes should serve environmental concerns and redistributive taxes should serve to redistribute the wealth. In the real world, however, there is a realpolitik argument for not making environmental taxes too regressive and not hitting necessary subsistence goods too hard.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.