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A Canadian Coast guard icebreaker is seen near Nunavut in the late summer of 2010.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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Climate urgency

Last Saturday, I read in The Globe and Mail that we don’t care about climate change because it doesn’t seem to pose an immediate or near-term threat (Why Don’t We Care About Climate Change? – Opinion, Dec. 22). Then I opened the December issue of Up Here magazine, a publication dedicated to life in the North.

I read about houses in Tuktoyaktuk which are in danger of being swallowed by the sea because of climate change. I read about houses which may be toppled as the permafrost beneath them melts. I read about melting sea ice, about the shore on Pelly Island eroding 30 metres a year. I read that the Arctic is warming at about twice the rate of southern Canada. No immediate or near-term threat from climate change?

Ask a Northerner.

Pamela Stagg, Picton, Ont.

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We are alive as a civilization because we know how to prioritize real and present threats first. The author’s analogy to educating the public on the perils of smoking to that of climate-change education is misplaced. The benefits of quitting smoking accrue directly to the person making that decision, in their lifetime, many immediately – more energy, better breath, better appetite, control over their body, financial savings, in addition to a potentially longer life.

Try to imagine the success of a quit-smoking campaign in which the only benefit cited for your change of behaviour is the possibility that, some time down the road, it may ease the stress on the public-health system. How many people would sign up for that?

About as many as are signing up for the sacrifices asked by our global leaders. The climate is changing, it’s about time the arguments did, too.

Mark Thornley, Toronto

Carbon persuasions

Your editorial, We Can’t Go Carbon-Free For Free (Dec. 27), distills to this: Prohibitively high taxes are needed to coercively educate the backward on the canons of planet-saving through economic impoverishment. This kind of rhetoric has a long pedigree. Puritan religious ideals commonly implore the flock to martyrdom, while the priestly class uses its carbon credits as classic indulgences.

Barry Stagg, Toronto

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A carbon tax is transparent (easy to understand), efficient (uses existing infrastructure and bureaucracy), fair (carbon emitters pay), flexible (the more carbon you emit, the more you pay). One example is the purchase of gas. The carbon tax is added at the pump.

Like any tax, a carbon tax inflicts financial pain , but given the state of the environment, we have to decide if we are going to continue to cut bait or actually start to fish. The pain has to be weighed against the prospect of handing over a planet to future generations that is in environmental free fall, perhaps irreversibly so.

Kenneth Robb, Fonthill, Ont.

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One of the leading causes of global warming is the ever-expanding overpopulation of our planet. The world’s population, estimated at 7.7 billion, is expected to increase to 9.8 billion by 2050.

As more and more wealth is created, and with the advancement of technology, this can only lead to more demand for goods and services which generate more pollution. Compare the number of planes and cruise ships spewing contaminants today with the number just 70 years ago as one simple example.

At some point, governments, movers and shakers will have to come to grips with the growth of Earth’s population and pose some real solutions. If the planet’s population were half of what it is now, would we be having this carbon discussion?

Ed Bodi, Oakville, Ont.

Kids, Canada’s finances

Re Robbing The Future To Pay For The Present (editorial, Dec. 26): You write that the deficit “is being driven by spending on things such as the Canada Child Benefit – which, even if it is a good idea, is current consumption. It’s borrowing to spend in the present, for the present.”

Spending on children, especially those in need, is an investment for the future, not unlike investing in building bridges, roads and public transit, but perhaps far more important as we develop strong, well-educated members of society who will in turn support, rather than require support from, future generations. This is not a trivial issue: This year’s child poverty rate is estimated to be between 11.7 and 13 percent.

Lynne Rummell, North Vancouver

Narcissistic genius?

Inequality arises because output per head increases while real wage rates stay more or less fixed. Malthus, with his subsistence theory; Marx, with his concept of the “reserve army of the unemployed”; even Keynesian theories of periodic slowing of aggregate demand, all lead to the conclusion that rising real output per head must inevitably generate greater and greater income inequality; somebody must get the increased output and it cannot be the wage-earner. The rich become richer because wage-earners do not become better off (Backlash At The Border In 2018 – letters, Dec. 22).

This is where we get to Donald Trump. It has been his narcissistic genius (?) to see that real wage rates in rich countries have stagnated because there are poorer countries whose inhabitants would like to move to the richer – labour has become increasingly mobile – and profit-seeking capitalists in the richer who are driven to move their employment-generating capital to the poorer, where wages are lower. These two factors mean wage rates in richer countries cannot rise (though they may reduce inequalities among countries), and that the increase in output per head makes for ever-greater inequality.

No Thomas Piketty needed.

The ways to raise real wage rates within a country (“Make America Great Again”) and thus reduce inequality are:

1) to restrict as much as possible the growth in the labour force;

2) to prevent capital from moving overseas.

These are the goals Mr. Trump seeks. All the tariff stuff is designed to reinforce these factors.

No wonder his proletarian wage-earning base loves him.

Brian Bixley, professor emeritus, economics; Mulmur, Ont.

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Donald Trump has been saying since his 2016 coronation that the only way to stop drugs from entering the U.S. is to build his beautiful wall. I resided for a spell in a place surrounded by the impenetrable structure he so admires, a facility with all the latest in security gadgetry – but just about every illegal drug one might desire was easily available. The President should check it out; there’s probably one in his neighbourhood. After surrendering his belt and shoelaces, he might even run into some old friends.

Don McLellan, Vancouver

The Over-55

Re The Rise Of The Perennial: How The Over-55 Are Beginning To Dominate The Workforce (Dec. 24): Perhaps the perennial understands that work is freedom.

Douglas Cornish, Ottawa

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