While the world waits for a vaccine to give us relief from the pandemic, global warming and the climatic consequences are accelerating. This rapid pace of change required that our research on the subject, first completed only in 2018, be fundamentally rewritten. Here is a brief summary of what we learned.

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As we would expect during an election year, several candidates are proposing new government programs. So far, we have proposals for higher teacher salaries, an infrastructure bill, universal daycare, student debt forgiveness, free college education, and a tax credit for low income earners, to name a few. Some of them surely deserve consideration. When candidates are asked how they plan to pay for them, however, the universal response is to raise taxes. Warren would impose a wealth tax, while the rest of the candidates seem to coalesce around rolling back the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. By leaping immediately to tax increases, they leave us to conclude that they can find nothing in the current budget to cut. Is this sensible? Shouldn’t the current level of spending at least be discussed? Let’s try to be fact-based and rational.