In an earlier post I suggested that the tax on tobacco (it's proven to kill people!) should be followed by a tax on ugly people, who are proven to be annoying, and a tax on fat people who are proven to be overweight. Why the latter? Well, the New York Times supplies me with an argument.
Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming.
This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.
Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990’s, is 350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide.
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