Cav's Place

With all the talk about offsetting carbon emissions, it was about time for somebody to start offsetting trees. It would of course matter what kind of trees will be planted and where, but let’s take it one thing at a time.
As for them being a for-profit organization, as long as they do what they say they’re going to do, and at what seems to be a very reasonable price as well, why not? If there’s anything worth making a profit from is helping the environment, because so far people were only profiting from destroying it.

Though many will scoff at the idea because of the added cost, how about adding a tax on paper products, be they books, newspapers, packs of printing paper or anything else? There’s already an EU tax on electronics which is supposed to fund the collection centers where such products are to be properly disposed of or recycled, as the case may be, when they will be thrown away, so why not a tax to fund replanting trees that were cut to produce that paper? Should also apply to anything made of wood, of course.
If you sit to think about it, all it would do is get the price of the product closer to the actual cost. That’s the issue with environmentally-friendly products, people say they’re too expensive when in fact the others are too cheap compared to their actual cost. Plus that such “green” taxes, if used appropriately, can’t be challenged by people saying they’re paying for things they don’t use. Not unless they somehow manage to live without breathing at least…

If you compare the amounts sold, newspapers and printing paper are a far worse problem than books from that point of view and applying such a tax on those might have interesting effects. I wonder what would happen if it would be applied to newspapers especially.
Taking the prices of newspapers here into account, it would probably cause said prices to at least double, if not triple. That should make people share them instead of buying more and be more picky about the ones they do buy. Also, considering the widespread move to digital media lately, that is likely to make more people read their newspapers on-line.
Keeping that in mind, the same tax should add no more than 10-20% to the price of a book. Now people are already complaining that books are too expensive and I tend to agree, at least over here, but I wonder why do we find it more acceptable to pay the writers, the agents, the printing press workers or the machines used than to pay Earth for providing it all to us?
And there is something else. With the price of a newspaper going up 100-200% and the price of a book going up 10-20%, perhaps this would make more people take a book along on the bus or subway… Which won’t be a bad thing at all, if you ask me.

There are plenty of taxes we shouldn’t be paying because there are plenty of things that shouldn’t be done with our money and others that we should be paying but don’t since there are things that should be done but aren’t. I guess somebody is there to make sure all governments keep looking for better ways of making a round world be upside-down.