Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Washington Post Economics Columnist Robert J. Samuelson’s advice to solve the climate crisis is to double or triple the price of fuel and hope for a scientific breakthrough.
We’re on mission impossible to solve global warming
By Robert J. Samuelson
Columnist
October 14 at 7:34 PMIf there were any doubt before, there should be none now. “Solving” the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible. That’s the gist of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. group charged with monitoring global warming.
Unless we make dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and others), warns the IPCC, we face a future of rapidly rising temperatures that will destroy virtually all the world’s coral reefs, intensify droughts and raise sea levels. We need to take action immediately, if not sooner.
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It’s not clear how this would be done. The reality is that global carbon emissions are rising, not falling. Emissions today are about 60 percent higher than in 1990, according to the World Bank.
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What is to be done?
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My own preference is messier and subject to all the above shortcomings. I would gradually impose a stiff fossil-fuel tax (producing not a 10 or 15 percent price increase but a doubling or maybe a tripling of prices) to discourage fossil-fuel use and encourage new energy sources. In addition, some of the tax revenue could reduce budget deficits and simplify income taxes. With luck, a genuine breakthrough might occur: perhaps advances in electric batteries or storage. That would make wind and solar power more practical.
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Imposing indescribable economic pain, while hoping for a bit of luck, is the “preferred” option? Why not simply build a few nuclear reactors, and use known technology to put a massive dent in the global carbon footprint?
Obviously I don’t believe CO2 is a problem – but if it was a problem, imposing unimaginably painful, life destroying taxes on ordinary people in the hope that their agony might produce a scientific advance would not be my preferred option.
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Much of the rest of the world has been paying 3 or 4 times that for America for donkey’s years, and have come up with some steady improvements but no breakthrough in half a century. It is not for the want of scientists.
Washington Post Economics Columnist Robert J. Samuelson: There is a guy that may live in the city, may or may not own a car, makes over a $200,000,00 per year and wants the price of oil to increase to $150.00 per barrel or price of gasoline to reach $6.00 per gallon. I would like to do an economic experiment with him. cut his income down to nation average and increase the price of everything he buys by the added value tax (carbon tax) 15% from raw material, 15% from refinery and 15% retail sales and see if he enjoys it.
We’re on mission impossible to solve global warming
By Robert J. Samuelson
Columnist
October 14 at 7:34 PM:
“With luck, a genuine breakthrough might occur.”
_______________________________________________
First genuine breakthrough for Washington Post Economics Columnist Robert J. Samuelson could be to leave Washington Post for the real world and make there a living on his own hands
without the help of “fossil fuels”.
Much better idea and the greenies, such as our man here today, cannot argue it.
Shut down the internet.
Just 3 example reasons why:
1. Bitcoin mining in Iceland has more than doubled electricity consumption in Iceland.
2. About 3 or 4 years ago, the BBC admitted that running servers *just* to maintain their iPlayer reaching less than 0.5 million people, used more electricity than their entire conventional broadcast network of huge mats, aerials and microwave links which covered 60+ million people.
3. An article recently I came upon suggested that watching a movie delivered by Netflix was using the same electricity as having 3 incandescent bulbs burning in your house. This was just the storage and delivery and *before* you count the PC or TV you’re actually watching.
Quick wits will realise major benefits to come out of that, even before Windows 10 bites the dust.
Any comment Samuelson……..
mats – haha. masts.
As a kid, I was always impressed by Radio Luxembourg.
10 Mega Watts of grunt.
I oft wondered why all the Luxonians weren’t fried to a crisp
Taxes seen by the population as too unfair or too burdensome destroy governments and regimes .
You might think that Americans, of all people, would realise that.
The WaPo and the whole left are showing with this monstrous IPCC power/money grab, how far they have moved from being the political representatives of poorer and working people. They turned their backs on blue collar workers living on marginal domestic budgets, preferring the social justice warrior agenda of urban elites – this shift is what handed Trump the last election. Now they have a climate plan to put most of the blue collar class on the streets.
This strategy lost them the last election. They’re doubling down, and will go on losing big time.
How extraordinary that climate skeptics are today the ones defending the working class and those less well off. Not everyone lives in LA or Palo Alto.
The give away that none of the people promoting this scam actually believe in it is that none of them have changed their life styles one iota. If the situation was truly as desperate as they claim, they would have already made the changes they wish to enforce upon us. The day that they revert to a pre-industrial life style, renouncing all use of fossil fuels including synthetic fabrics, live in timber buildings eschewing cement, concrete and steel and forgo the benefits of electricity and modern medical care, I shall give their claims consideration. Until then, I shall completely ignore their ludicrous assertions.
Bingo!
There is nothing stopping the author from implementing this “tax” on himself, and telling us all about it’s wonderful benefits. Keep your fuel receipts and calculate how much tax you owe. Send that money in with your income taxes.
The feds will ACCEPT your payment. Better add another 30% for the increased fuel cost of all the other non-fuel items that would be higher under your scheme.
After you experience it for a while, try to convince other watermelons that they should get on board. Let us know how committed you are to this cause, before you try to FORCE it on the rest of us.
Until they start calling for a large scale and rapid nuclear power program it is impossible to take this stuff seriously.
All of us need to respond to these sorts of things in the appropriate media outlets. Consensus climate science isn’t rigorous science and the public needs to know how bad it is.
My guess is that half the people out there don’t understand that the arctic freezes completely in the winter. They don’t understand that the oceans have 1000x the heat capacity of the atmosphere, so coral reefs can sleep through whatever minor warming has happened– if it’s even happened and if the temperature record is reliable!
It’s great to discuss things here but those clowns need some pushback. Eventually more and more people, we hope, will see that none of this makes any sense.
It’s typical that the Wash Post would ask an economist to solve a problem he has no competence about. I love the idea that cheaper batteries will make solar and wind better (apparently the news that wind turbines cause warming hasn’t reached him yet). And the idea of a “breakthru” also displays considerable ignorance about future energy technologies, which basically reduces to molten salt small moduler nuclear reactors.
By my calculations, roughly $3 trillion worth of molten salt reactors could replace all of the electricity generation from CO2 sources and also replace all gasoline used for personal transportation.
The reality is that global carbon emissions are rising….
….in third world sh1tholes
So we’re going to tax the countries where it’s falling
Hey Washington Post, just send the bill to Amazon.
Notice the really important and striking point in this piece.
It is not the proposal to double or triple prices.
It is the use of ‘we’. ‘We’ should double or triple prices. Who is this ‘we’? Is he proposing that China and India, for instance, double or triple energy prices?
Don’t think so. He is proposing we, the USA, double or triple OUR energy prices.
Suppose we did. Suppose that reduced our transportation emissions by 50%. Right now we are doing about 5 billion tons a year. I guess one third or so is transport? So we reduce that one third by half, and we drop from 5 billion tons to 4 billion tons.
In the meantime, if it takes us a couple of years, China and India and developing world have raised their own emissions by several billion.
So lets hear it again. Why exactly are we supposed to double the prices? This is the usual American Green fantasy, that the US can single handedly by unilateral action lower global emissions. It just cannot. Its only doing 5 billion and falling out of 37 billion. No matter what America does unilaterally its not going to help. And yet, the Greens keep on demanding it make reductions while refusing to ask the other emitters of the other 32 billion to make any reductions.
As part of a concerted international action, in which everyone would make obligatory swingeing reductions, it might make sense. But this is not what is being proposed. What’s being proposed is make hugely expensive reductions which would substantially de-industrialize America, while everyone else carries on or increases emitting. Why?
Note by the way that his estimate of what would be required and effective is right at the bottom end of the recent IPCC estimates. The IPCC midpoint would probably be a ten times increase in prices. Worldwide, as well. Not just in America.
Go figure. To me this is yet another example of, lets make an impossible and useless demand, because it will not be met, and then we can use the failure to do it as something to organize around. This time not by some random agitator, but by a well respected economist writing in the Washington Post. Signs of the times.
The first step on return to sanity on these efforts is to understand its not about CO2 or any of its believed effects on Global Climate.
“As part of a concerted international action, in which everyone would make obligatory swingeing reductions, it might make sense. But this is not what is being proposed. What’s being proposed is make hugely expensive reductions which would substantially de-industrialize America, while everyone else carries on or increases emitting. Why?”
Good question. And to add to that, if the environmentalists/Climate Nazis are supposedly concerned about “pollution,” and the EXPORT of industry and jobs from first world countries (like the U.S.) to “developing” countries means those transferred industries will operate under LESS controls of ACTUAL “pollution,” their stupid proposed policies will INCREASE (REAL) pollution, all while doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about “climate change.”
The stupidity, it burns!!!
Let’s make the whole country look like Sears….in the final days.
I’m already paying USD 7 per gallon (not living in the US) and it did not bring a single scientific breakthrough and it did not stop global warming.
Ask not what crytpo miners can do for you, but what you can do for the cryptos.
Here we go again. Environmentalists. supported by that pseudo-scientist Hansen, wll do anything to keep CO2 out of the air, even if it means destroying our lifestyle and civilization. What if that CO2 is not made by humans but by natyre? And it is so unnecessary because we could easily switch over to nuclear power. I have not seen any reasoned objections to it, just distorted and overblown fears of accidents. A total waste was first allowing the Long Island Shoreham nuclear power station to be built, then tearing it down, and then sticking the ratepaters for the cost. I am still paing for it through my electric mills. It is well gidden in fine print so most people don’t even kno it. And then they wqnder why we have the highest electric rates in the nation.
“Environmentalists. supported by that pseudo-scientist Hansen, wll do anything to keep CO2 out of the air, even if it means destroying our lifestyle and civilization.”
Actually, Hansen (and Gore and a couple of other bigshot climatologists) support nuclear power. I predict that more will now join their faction.
No, they will do anything to keep American CO2 out of the air. Chinese, Indian, Indonesian CO2 does not bother them in the least.
The only kind they want to reduce, at any cost, is the kind which is too small in amount to make any difference.
Ask yourself why.
What crisis? And when tripling fuel tax leaves the climate changing, maybe double that tax again?
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FINALLY that “odometer” is going to get over the 50,000 level! Three cheers!
Just ban all aircraft flights……..that will help. 😉
Well, you could double or triple prices with a Saudi shutdown and continued political dysfunction in Venezuela and Canada.
I wholeheartedly agree that every Democratic Party candidate should immediately get behind this commonsense proposal to increase fuel taxes so as to triple their current price. $10/ gallon gas should be their rallying cry to save the Earth.
Democrats need to make it part of their campaign platform to save the planet, it’s the least they can do if they really want to solve climate change. I could foresee climate change being solved in short order if they’d just publicly embrace this proposal.
The Climate Cuckaloos sure are on a mission; to destroy the US economy, and create a world-wide depression which would kill millions of poor people, especially the old, the sick, and the very young, all in the name of “saving the planet”. They are pure evil, making Hitler himself look small-time.
Something like this has already been tried in the UK. Back in the 90’s the government introduced “the fuel price escalator” for the usual bad reasons. When it became too much to bear there were significant protests by farmers and truck drivers, causing disruption of the nation’s fuel supply. The government eventually climbed down and the price escalator was dropped before the year 2000. It even has its own Wikipedia page.
It seems the lesson hasn’t been taken on board by the planet-savers. They are now expecting to get away with doing something far far worse.
Not having read the latest IPCC screed, I could be mistaken here but …
What better things could you do with a small part of 122 Trillion and still get the result you are seeking ( assuming that is much lower CO2 emissions)?
It seems to me that the UN could spend, say, a TRILLION on actively promoting and supplying contraception to the places where the fossil burning populace is going to grow dramatically. ( India, China, Africa) as well as everywhere else since fossil fuels don’t mine, transport, refine or burn themselves without human intervention. Fewer humans makes fewer users makes less demand makes less CO2 and everything else the greens wring their hands about. But no. Nary a word.
Supplying contraceptives to poor places has never had an impact on the rate of child birth.
In third world countries they have kids because kids are an extra set of hands that makes the family richer.
Families don’t reduce the number of kids they have until kids become a burden, rather than an asset. The only way that ever happens is for the families to become richer.
$122 Trillion isn’t a number, it’s a concept. It’s given in order to make all other alternatives sound inexpensive.