Carbon added tax

This year the countries around the world are supposed to reach an agreement for the next treaty on preventing global warming. This new treaty will replace the current Kyoto treaty and it is hoped it will have bigger targets and involve most of the big polluters countries (one of the shortcomings of Kyoto treaty was that big countries like U.S., China and India didn't sign it). So there is much discussion about what this treaty should stipulate and how it will be enforced. I don't follow all the news on this subject, but in general (main stream media) I didn't see articles written by economists about how to handle global warming. And this is an economic matter after all, since we will have to pay somehow to protect the environment. I thought of the economists I read and I imagined Stiglitz should have written something about how to tackle global warming. And indeed, I found this interesting paper on his site. It discusses various proposals on how to tax CO2 emissions and how the implementation might work or not. The most fair solution in my opinion is the "carbon added tax" which is similar in concept with the VAT: each part of the production chain is taxed according to the emissions it produces for the goods and service he delivers. The total tax in fact is paid by the consumer, which thus has two incentives: to consume less and to consume "greener" products (that carry a smaller tax). For sure it's not trivial to enforce such a tax world wide, but this is a sound solution from the economic point of view.

And even more

The yellow semi-submarin



Fish and corals



The desert and the Nile valley



Temple of Hatshepsut

Finally, some more photos from Egypt

Obelisc from Karnak temple



On the way to Luxor




The camel and the pyramid



Pyramids of Keops and Kefren



A beduin village

Brother Lee

Whenever somebody calls me on my mobile phone I hear this song and I feel like running to find my brother Lee who's just like me... :)



...where they know when you're fakin' it...

Cu dus si intors

I write this blog in English (because I want to practice and also because I have a lot of friends who don't speak Romanian and they might read it some day, if they don't already do). I read, write and speak English almost every day. I often use English words when I talk in Romanian and many times I just say whole phrases in English although I am talking in Romanian to somebody. And yet, it is so far away to be "The language" I speak. I like to play with words a lot, I like to coin phrases with two meanings (depending on the listener's knowledge), I like the twisted meanings from hard crossword puzzles (I don't remember most of them, but there is one that somehow got stuck in my head: se pune greu la cale - lest), but I don't remember doing ever such things English (btw, if you ever notice that at me let me know :)). So definitely, Romanian is my language.
And what was I saying in the title? That was my busy status at one point on messenger (Romanian has diacritics too, which most of the time I don't use when I write on the computer).

Blogging is hard

I have a couple of things I want to blog about, but it's getting harder to find the time and the mood to write them down. I'll just make a brief list so at least I don't forget about them and hopefully I'll come back to each of them later:
- more about Egypt and maybe some more pictures;
- more about "Letters to my son", a very beautiful book indeed;
- some articles from The Economist about the planetary ocean and what mankind is doing to it;
- the paper about the carbon tax proposed by Stiglitz;
- the account I got for Google Apps and the release of Python 3.0; maybe I'll trick myself into learning this programming language, you never know :)

World seen from the back of a camel

Just a teaser from the trip to Egypt. More to come...