Exploring the Link between Unemployment & Climate Change

Bill Drayton
Source: Bill Drayton

In his article for MIT Press's Innovations Journal, Bill Drayton explains the connection between unemployment and climate change. Entitled “Engage People, Retire Things,” Drayton’s essay explains the profound connection between combating the employment crisis and fighting climate change:  labor and non-labor inputs to business (such as natural resources, energy and land) are substitutes.  The less labor developed economies use, the more resources and energy they use, and the more greenhouse gases they emit.

Drayton argues that changing perverse incentives in the tax code that reward natural resource exploitation and penalize hiring would dramatically increase job creation and dramatically cut GHG emissions by correcting the current imbalance in which non-labor production factors, including burning fossil fuels, predominate at the expense of labor utilization. 

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