The Sanders-Boxer carbon tax will be 15 times costlier than letting warming happen

Totally agree, Paul. This is not about reducing carbon dioxide, this is about establishing a new source of tax revenue, which will inevitably be diverted as the current Federal gas tax, social security and the other “lockboxes” which have looted to feed the ravenous maw of the general fund and the relentless expansion of the welfare state. These people are clever in their way, but not subject to reason, Lord Monckton.

A tax that raises 1.2 trillion is not typically accounted for as pure destruction of wealth, as you’ve assumed here. It diverts wealth from one use to another. The US currently has a moderate structural deficit, which this would help reduce.
US industry is exceedingly skilled at avoiding taxes; in this particular case, the tax is structured so that tax avoidance achieves a desirable social purpose — unlike, say, corporate profit taxes, which have no direct social benefit.
I haven’t read the details yet on how it will avoid merely shifting production to lower-tax countries, which is the main worry with carbon taxes in general.

In actuality the flow that that much money will increase carbon usage. The money itself will not be sequestered. Even if only reintroduced as salaries it will cause significant consumer demand if not for goods originating in America, then manufactured overseas, thus adding to the carbon totality. These people are not economists. Boxer is a dimwit of the first water, Sanders is susceptible to every crackpot scheme imaginable.

A very erudite posting (at 8:52AM), Mr. Astley!!!
Well said & Thank You!!!

Petrossa says:
February 17, 2013 at 8:36 am
I’m with Paul Homewood. These taxes aren’t meant for mitigation, but for control of energy usage.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is worse than many realize. It is not just about controlling energy usage but about driving the cost of energy so high that what few manufacturing plants are left in the USA will shut down and move overseas and along with them our real jobs, actual wealth creation and economic security.

February 19, 2004 A Nation of Shopkeepers
…If the United States, however, continues its free-trade-induced trend towards “a nation of shopkeepers” (courtesy of NAFTA, the WTO, PNTR for China, and the newest round of free trade agreements with Jordan, Chile, Singapore, Morocco, Australia, the Andean countries, and Central America), it will continue to lose the advantages – similar to those of the rising British Empire – which had put it on top of the world in the 20th century. The Bush Administration, not to mention most of the Congress, has yet to grasp what is happening economically, even as it tries to defuse some of the political consequences of free trade agreements….

January 22, 2013 Recent Manufacturing Slump Dragging On
…More major evidence of ongoing and even worsening competitiveness problems in domestic manufacturing has emerged recently – principally the three record monthly trade deficits amassed by the sector since August, and rising import penetration, as just documented in a new U.S. Business and Industry Council study (available at http://americaneconomicalert.org/USBICImportPenetrationReport2013Final.pdf).
The brightest face that can reasonably be put on this news is that U.S.-based manufacturing is starting to look like the rest of the American economy – barely slogging along. More than four years after the financial crisis’ peak and despite the trillions of dollars’ worth of stimulus provided by the President, Congress, and of course the Fed, it’s a pitiful level of bang for buck – not to mention indebtedness.

Meanwhile electricity bills will skyrocket.

Obama’s war on coal hits your electric bill
The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt…. The costs will be passed on to consumers at the retail level.

This means down the road Ohio will go from $160/month for power to $3570/month for power. Who in heck can afford that?
However Mayor Michael Bloomberg has the answer.

The ‘Micro-unit’ Mini-apartment Building is Coming to New York City
….the mayor launched a pilot program that his administration has dubbed adAPT NYC, …Interested developers are being asked to submit proposals to develop a residential tower, at least two-thirds of which must be dedicated to miniature apartments of between 250 and 350 square feet in size…
Cities like London, Barcelona and Boston have embraced similar housing designs.
Jonathan Miller, President and CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., said he’s appraised a number of apartments under 200 square feet in size, the smallest of which was a miniscule 130….

10ft by 13ft isn’t an apartment it is a broom closet! (A California King size bed is 6ft by 7ft or more than a quarter of the space.)
Meanwhile in California Planners want to herd millions into densely packed urban corridors… adopting plans that would require most new housing to be built at 20 or more to the acre, which is at least five times the traditional quarter acre per house. State and regional planners also seek to radically restructure urban areas, forcing much of the new hyperdensity development into narrowly confined corridors.
That is a plot of land of maximum size of 40ft X 50ft per house. (A builder’s acre is 200ft X 200ft)
As if that was not enough zoning regulations are now being used to “Clear Land” that is already occupied.

Jun 23 2011 L.A. County’s Private Property War
…Many residents insist a clearing-out is under way in these 2,200 square miles of arid land an hour north of L.A….
…Tough code enforcement has been ramped up in these unincorporated areas of L.A. County…
L.A. Weekly found in a six-week investigation that county inspectors and armed DA investigators also are pursuing victimless misdemeanors and code violations, with sometimes tragic results. The government can define land on which residents have lived for years as “vacant” if their cabins, homes and mobile homes are on parcels where the land use hasn’t been legally established. Some have been jailed for defying the officials in downtown Los Angeles, while others have lost their savings and belongings trying to meet the county’s “final zoning enforcement orders.”
Some top county officials insist that nothing new is unfolding. Michael Noyes, deputy in charge of code enforcement for Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, says, “We’ve had a unit in the office through the ’70s and ’80s.” But key members of the county NAT team say that “definitely, yes,” a major focus on unincorporated areas was launched in 2006.
Many residents insist a clearing-out is under way in these 2,200 square miles of arid land an hour north of L.A., a mountain-ringed valley at the western tip of the Mojave Desert named for elegant pronghorn herds that were all but wiped out by an 1884-94 drought.

Now that would not be Antelope Valley would it…..

June 22, 2012 First Solar gets L.A. County go-ahead for massive solar site
The nearly $1.4-billion Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One project was put on hold as the county checked that the thin-film solar panels being installed met certification, health and safety requirements….
The 2,100-acre property is located in the northern part of the county and situated on land previously used for agriculture and without threatened or endangered species, according to First Solar.

Welcome to Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holdren’s De-Development of the US

One wonders how many complete absurdities a good quality troll can intertwine into a few sentences. Below we have a fine example. Let’s deconstruct it line by line.
numerobis says:
February 17, 2013 at 8:49 am
A tax that raises 1.2 trillion is not typically accounted for as pure destruction of wealth, as you’ve assumed here. It diverts wealth from one use to another.
What it does is force the use of an expensive commodity to replace an inexpensive commodity. The only diversion of wealth is from the pockets of the general public who must now pay a higher price for everything into the pockets of those who provide (at a profit to themselves) the higher priced commodity. This is called stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Further, as such a tax raises the price of everything the only possible outcome is for a reduction in economic activity. Someone how can just barely afford a new car now can’t, and so on and so forth through the entire economy. The loss of taxation due to reduced economic activity is massive, far greater than the tax revenues you seem to think are simply free, That is of course without even counting the economic activity lost to other countries that simply use the lowest cost resource to produce the same goods.
The US currently has a moderate structural deficit, which this would help reduce.
If by “moderate” you mean technically bankrupt, sure. But the notion that increasing the cost of absolutely everything (which is the only possible consequence of replacing low cost energy sources with high cost energy sources) will have no negative impact on over all tax revenue is simply beyond naive.
US industry is exceedingly skilled at avoiding taxes; in this particular case, the tax is structured so that tax avoidance achieves a desirable social purpose —
Why is increasing the price of everything desirable? Particularly when the cost of doing nothing is a tiny fraction of that? Or do you consider making poor people even poorer, middle class people poor, and rich people richer a desirable social purpose?
unlike, say, corporate profit taxes, which have no direct social benefit.
No tax has a direct social benefit based on where it comes from. If you tax corporate profits and build a hospital, the social benefit is the hospital. If you tax personal income and build a hospital, the social benefit is a hospital. If you tax property and build a hospital, the social benefit is the hospital. If you tax low cost commodities to force the use of high cost commodities, there will be less corporate profits, personal income and property value to tax, and hence less hospitals. Or were you thinking that diverting money into the pockets of billionaires who own wind mill companies and solar companies and bio-fuel companies is a social benefit? Oh, yes, yes, I know, the employ thousands of people. The tens of thousands who lost their jobs due to the new economy in which the cost of everything is higher will be glad to know that.
I haven’t read the details yet on how it will avoid merely shifting production to lower-tax countries, which is the main worry with carbon taxes in general.
Haven’t read? How would you read the details of something that is impossible? Do you surmise that there is something that Boxer et al can do to raise the cost of everything and at the same time ensure that everyone simply keeps buying the same things from the same suppliers when foreign suppliers are less costly? Never mind haven’t read the details yet how about explaining how such a thing could possibly be accomplished by any means at all?

In the above linked document the EPA states that US greenhouse gas reductions, using IPCC models, is going to have the effect to reducing earths temp.’s by about ..1C (1/10th of a degree C for those with bad eyesight!) and will stop the seas from rising by about 1 cm. This will occur because CO2 will be reduced by 3ppm! Some would say at least they are trying. The US creates about 20% of the world CO2 emissions. I suppose that we are to be the leader by example, so if the entire world acted like in the 2010 EPA regulation, world temp would by .5C less in 2100. Of course, a Nina or Nino could throw the world’s temperature much more than that in a matter of a few months.

The person who controls the spending controls the people. You think it’s your taxpayer dollars at work but you’re only getting what you put in less admin expenses and less their “take.”

Unfortunately, Barbara Boxer is my Senator and she is one of the stupidest people in Congress, she is just carrying the flag for the unidentified ‘geniuses’ who thought this one up. So No, Jeff L. She is not capable of doing a crossword puzzle, much less anything else that requires thought.

Isn’t the tax revenue around $2 1/2 trillion?…..and they haven’t been able to stop one thing global warming is supposed to make worse, not one earthquake, volcano eruption, tsunami, meteor, or comet….

We’re going to have to just keep plugging away, getting the truth before more and more people until there are enough numbers to rage against every nuance of Green – not just those in power, but every leaflet they produce, every bullying message telling us to sacrifice our way of life to “save the planet”, every poster torn down, every light bulb changed back, every windmill destroyed. It’s rage that’s going to do it. People are angry and fed up and if these green terrorists don’t get pulled back into line, demoted and their funding stripped from them, that rage is going to vent.

The problem is they don’t CARE if the tax is more expensive.
They want to be absolved of their sins, not actually accomplish anything….

The bottom line is that the cost-benefit ratio is 8 or 15. For a project to be worth doing the c-b ratio should be less than 1.
The cost-benefit ratio will rise if :-
1. The costs of a given amount of warming are overstated. That is, if the climate does not become as extreme as Stern assumed, or if people adapt to the changing conditions.
2. That the likelihood of extreme catastrophic global warming is over-stated. (For risk-neutral people, a 10% loss of $100 is treated the same as a the certain loss of of $10. For risk-averse people they might be willing to pay a premium more than the average expected losses, but never more than the maximum loss.)
3. The policy is not as effective in reducing emissions as proclaimed. This could be through:-
(i) Over-stating the theoretical capabilities of the carbon tax (stuff like elasticities incorrectly estimated and opportunity costs not being recognized)
(ii) The policies effectiveness being watered down and costs increased through the horse-trading that is required to get a Bill through both Houses of Congress.
(iii) The tax is not being optimally adjusted for CO2 reductions (rather than tax revenue maximization) – with adjustments made as conditions change.
(iv) That when the tax really becomes effective, with people can no longer affording to heat their homes properly, or have to use their cars less, that the politicians will not do a U-turn.
In summary, the cost-benefit ratios that Lord Monckton calculates are too low (making the policy justification appear better than it is) if catastrophic consequences of global warming are over-hyped, the economic theory is over-hyped and politicians are less than perfect at delivering exactly what they promised. For economic theorists, the cost-benefit trade-off can expressed graphically, the elements of GW costs listed, and the policy issues are analyzed here.

This analysis assumes that the IPCC are completely correct with regard to every detail of the science and as many here have pointed out, that is a massive assumption. What is interesting is that even with this handicap; allowing the alarmists their every conceit and letting them push every number beyond the limits of plausibility; the economic case for a carbon tax remains completely ridiculous.
This argument by Christopher Monckton is the economic equivalent of winning at wrestling with both arms tied behind your back while wearing a tight kimono. Imagine how strong the argument would be if he were to take the kimono off!

davidmhoffer: Thank you for your kind reply that is completely in accordance to the politeness requirement of this website.
Any tax is going to hit real people, of course. The income tax does, sales taxes do, import tariffs do. But the government isn’t then just burning the money; it’s building bridges and roads, invading far-away countries, providing health care to the elderly, etc. We can talk all day about the cost-benefit of those activities; it seems rather off-topic for this website.
So now we have a proposal for a different kind of tax, one expected to raise $1.2 trillion over ten years. Lord Monckton is, as is quite reasonable, trying to evaluate it.
Unfortunately, his analysis is too simplistic: it ignores that the $1.2 trillion is going to be used to pay for things the government is doing.
The main point of a carbon tax (or a cap-and-trade system) is to make it so that the private sector figures out how to reduce carbon emissions for as little cost as possible: a company might spend up to $20/ton to reduce its emissions, but if it can spend $1/ton, it will. The direct cost to society at large then is not directly the revenue the government expects (that’s just a transfer), but the money companies will spend on reducing emissions.
A more involved analysis should also compute further effects: for example the effect of some less efficient manufacturing lines in say Michigan closing, firing all their workers, and perhaps being replaced by a modern plant in South Carolina that employs half as many people. It’s a tax, so it changes where the money is, and some things will become too expensive to continue doing. Yes, that has deleterious consequences; let’s count them up.

First, in the 1960s and 1970s came the meme that mankind is a disease due to industrialization caused by capitalism.
Then came the past 25+ years of IPCC supporting research which was intentionally biased to toward showing alarming AGW by CO2. Without that research and the IPCC’s favoritism toward it then there would be no proposed Sanders/Boxer carbon tax.
Now Christopher Monckton’s economic case study on the cost-benefit of the proposed Sanders/Boxer carbon tax bill clearly shows it is cost-ineffective thus yielding a reasinable conclusion that the “future adaptation where needed is sensible, but present-day mitigation is unjustifiable”. Ny take is The carbon tax cannot work to mitigate carbon.
The sales pitch for the tax requires alarming carbon scenarios from the biased IPCC thus appeasing some radical fundamentalist environmentalists, but the proposed carbon tax usefullness itself is not primarily carbon reduction but it it provides a more urgent purpose of the welfare state to keep its present welfare programs above water and fund welfare expansion.
So I sort of partially agree with Paul Homewood’s comment on February 17, 2013 at 7:47 am. But only in the context I gave.
John

Many CAGW alarmists state that the world would be better off with a lower level of CO2 somewhere between 330 & 350ppm. Have there been any studies to test the effect of a lower level of ambient atmospheric CO2 on crop yields? I know that enriched levels increase yields and so decreased levels should have the opposite effect. Perhaps several studies are needed to determine the loss of crop production given both a lower level of ambient CO2 and the shortened growing season of the then proposed lower global temperature and the affect it would have on the global food supply.

crosspatch says:
February 17, 2013 at 10:26 am
////////////////////////////
Absolutely.
And to the extent that it succeeds in reducing CO2 levels on a global level. not to forget that we may be depriving ourselves of the benefits of what even more CO2 would have provided for food production and the like.

@richard v
I lived for many years in Africa and one of the things that always amazed me about the brutal and repressive regimes that pop up here and there is how there is never a shortage of people willing to collaborate and serve as henchmen for the leaders. Politicians are always the butt of harsh comments but they could not implement their hare-brained schemes without a coterie of willing hench-people, content with their relative security, confident of their impunity, serving the classic role of ‘useful idiots’. I have read a great deal on the subject of Climate Change and the number of useful-idiot-hench-people serving to propagate evident lies exceeds my wildest expectation.

Numerobis, methinks you are understood better than you understand your own rhetoric. Best to cut and run.

“This is perfectly correct. What is hard to understand there”
What’s hard to understand is that it is a restatement of my first paragraph, but given as if it was in opposition to what I wrote. It’s hard to argue when you take my words to mean the opposite of what I meant them to mean, then say that I’m the illiterate one.
Here’s a third attempt at my claim: (1) Taxes are a drain on everybody. (2) Government uses money to do things that have value. (3) If you are going to do a cost-benefit analysis, and you take the revenue as a cost, then you have to account for the benefits paid for by the revenue. Alternately, you can ignore the benefits paid for by the revenue and compute just the cost incurred by companies trying to avoid paying this tax.
I thought I’d argued all that clearly before, but twice I’ve gotten point (1) thrown into my face with a claim that I’m some form of idiot since clearly taxes are a drain on everybody. Crispin seems to go one step further and claim that bridges and police in fact have zero value.

Lord Monckton,
Is there a mistake in this: ”

Garnaut (2008) is one of many who recommend keeping greenhouse-gas rises to 450 ppmv CO2-equivalent above the 280 ppmv prevalent in 1750, to hold 21st-century warming since then to below 2 K …

I think Garnaut and others are saying atmospheric CO2-e concentration must be kept below 450 ppm, not 450+280 ppm.
I haven’t read the comments on this thread so this may have already been asked by someone else.
By the way, using Australian Treasury figures, I estimate the Australian CO2 tax and ETS will cost at least $10 for every $1 of projected savings: http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/06/what-the-carbon-tax-and-ets-will-really-cost-peter-lang/. However, the projected savings are unlikely to be achieved – they depend on the whole world participating in a global carbon pricing system.