Al Gore endorses Robin Hood Tax

Last week, Al Gore backed a Financial Transaction Tax as a means of building market sustainability, saying that short-termism threatened both the economy and the environment.

Gore told the Business for Social Responsibility Conference in San Francisco: "We need to make a change in the business of investing. We need to fully integrate sustainability into markets and build a generation of sustainable capitalism.

"In the absence of a carbon price and other measures, those businesses that do their own accounting and do the difficult but rewarding work of how to price externalities will be rewarded."

He added that high frequency trading also threatened the environment. 

"We now have around 7 trillion subprime carbon assets in the global economy and their value, like the subprime mortgages, is based on an assumption that is highly questionable.

"The assumption is that it is perfectly OK to dump 90 million tonnes of heat trapping pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet every 24 hours as if the atmosphere is an open sewer. That assumption is incorrect. When will that assumption collapse, bringing down with it the stated value of these subprime carbon assets, I don't know."