Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- The Economist observes that the effects of climate change fall disproportionately on poorer people, rather than the wealthier ones who have caused more of the damage:

The costs of global climate change will again be unevenly (and uncertainly) distributed, but harm will often be smaller for richer, temperate countries. As a result the estimated economic loss from warming is almost certainly understated, because the nastiest effects are concentrated in places where incomes are lowest: and, correspondingly, where tumbling incomes have the smallest effect on global GDP.
...
The rich are disproportionate contributors to the carbon emissions that power climate change. It is cruel and perverse, therefore, that the costs of warming should be disproportionately borne by the poor. And it is both insult and injury that the wealthy are more mobile in the face of climate-induced hardship, and more effective at limiting the mobility of others. The strains this injustice places on the social fabric might well lead to woes more damaging than rising temperatures themselves.

- Meanwhile, Richard Florida writes that inequality only exacerbates the dangers of economic downturns. And UNICEF makes the case to finally put and end to child poverty (and reduce inequality) in Canada.

- Noah Smith points out that no matter how much wealth gets linked to intangibles, economic stability and prosperity ultimately depend on actually producing goods. And Cameron Murray notes that longer-term development depends on industrial policy - which governments presently seem all too eager to leave to the few wealthy enough to shape it personally.

- Canadians for Tax Fairness calls for Canada's provinces to work on ensuring corporate transparency.

- But Jeremy Nuttall reports on Christy Clark's PR-focused response to the Mount Polley environmental disaster as an example of how governments are all too often focused only on minimizing corporate wrongdoing. And Brent Patterson points out the Trudeau Libs' decision to allow the dumping of mine waste in fish-bearing creeks as just another example of profits being put before the planet.

- Finally, Ken Neumann worries about the consequences of the Libs' obsession with courting Chinese capital regardless of its effect on Canada.