Citizens Climate lobby Roscommon/Crawford Chapter

Roscommon/Crawford Chapter What’s Happening  Regular readers of this blog will remember that Citizens Climate Lobby has developed and supported a proposal to mitigate climate change by enacting a national tax on fossil fuels. Some people refer to the idea of taxing fossil fuels as a carbon tax, although the formal name for Ccl’s proposal is Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. The idea was first introduced in the US House of Representatives and is now known as House Bill 763 as it awaits action from the full House and Senate. Although the bill is widely lauded, action by both the House and Senate has been slow in coming since many believe the administration would surely veto the proposal if it were passed by Congress. What’s happening now is that our politicians are finally beginning to come to their senses in considering solutions for climate change. It seems that nearly everyone in both the House and Senate, regardless of political party, concurs that a...

Roscommon/Crawford Chapter Bhutan In a recent blog, we discussed the book, The Future We Choose , which spoke of opportunities for mitigating climate change . This blog suggests a model that we might emulate as we find our way forward from our nation’s current problems. The model is a most unlikely one, it comes from a small nation in the far east with a king. You may be shocked at their wisdom.  Bhutan, officially known as the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in South Asia. Located in the Eastern Himalayas, it is situated on the ancient Silk Road between Tibet, India and China. A small nation, Bhutan reports a total population of just under a million people with a land mass of 14, 824 square miles (less than ½ the size of lower Michigan). In 2008, Bhutan transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy and promptly created their National Assembly, a bicameral parliament of the Bhutanese democracy. For the last few years, Bhutan has...