Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Ted Nordhaus, nephew of Nobel Prize winning climate economist William Nordhaus, thinks the solution to eliminating CO2 is to impose a wide range of cost of living increases gradually, to avoid policy flashpoints which could trigger yellow vest style riots.
CLIMATE CHANGE REQUIRES BIG SOLUTIONS. BUT BABY STEPS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO GO.
Dramatic projects to mitigate climate change often don’t work. Slow, quiet, incremental policies are the planet’s best hope.BY TED NORDHAUS
JULY 20, 2019Recent months have seen something of a turnaround in the conventional wisdom about how to address climate change. In December, on the weekend before the Swedish Academy presented the Nobel Prize to my uncle, the economist William Nordhaus, for his work on climate change and carbon taxes, France’s yellow vest movement flooded into the streets, shutting down Paris and other cities across the country and forcing President Emmanuel Macron to rescind the carbon tax he had recently imposed on transportation fuels.
A month earlier, voters in Washington state, as environmentally minded a place as you will find in the United States, soundly rejected a ballot initiative that would have established a carbon tax in that state.
…
In the parlance of economists and political scientists, carbon taxes are highly salient, meaning that people will do more to avoid paying the tax than they would in response to the same increase in the market cost of energy. But that salience also makes carbon pricing politically toxic; taxes often stoke an outsized reaction even when they are very modest. One response to a carbon tax is to wrap your hot water heater in a thermal blanket and install double-paned windows. Another is to riot.
…
Yet the Green New Deal contains a crucial insight. Economists argue for carbon pricing because it makes the social cost of carbon visible in our day-to-day consumption. Voters and politicians, by contrast, have generally preferred to hide the costs of climate mitigation. Policies to subsidize clean energy technology—including nuclear, wind, and solar—have tended to be far more successful politically than efforts to price carbon.
Government subsidies typically make economists pull their hair out. They encourage rent seeking and require policymakers with imperfect knowledge to make decisions about which technologies to champion. And it’s true, from synthetic fuels to biofuels, Solyndra solar cells to plutonium breeder reactors, governments have bet on plenty of energy technology losers.
…
Read more: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/climate-change-requires-big-solutions-but-baby-steps-are-the-only-way-to-go/
What I find shocking is the sheer arrogance of these green proposals.
What is wrong with today’s establishment? What ever happened to at least trying to do what voters want, trying to make people’s lives easier, instead of attempting to fiddle the system to conceal why life has become so much harder?
Why have otherwise intelligent people become so mesmerised by big ideas, that they feel justified ignoring the pain their actions and ideas cause to ordinary people?
I don’t see any evidence that voters prefer to hide costs, as Nordhaus claimed; more likely slipping costs under the radar goes unnoticed until one day voters discover they can’t afford to eat.
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Isn’t Ted Nordhaus just another Breakthrough Institute nuclear shill like Michael Shellenberger ?
Ultimately it’s the same game as the other 96.9% of climate liars. They want to make the planet sustainable because they’re idealists. They can afford it. Too bad if you can’t or don’t want to.
If you don’t want to, you are an enemy of the planet … and you can guess where that would lead.
10 10 no pressure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjVW6roRs-w
These monsters only love power.
Instead of making poor people poorer quickly, we should do it gradually…
LOL…you don’t want those yellow vest people to come out now, but just gradually.
What a joke his whole idea is.
Agreed Eric!
The “Social Cost of Carbon” is very likely negative, that is, CO2 releases are a net benefit, so any attempt to reduce emissions is counterproductive. No matter how one goes about doing something un or counterproductive, the fact remains that it is destructive.
Plants and animals that eat plants and animals that eat animals that eat plants are on your side.
I’d say there is no social cost of carbon, but since these drips don’t even know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide, it’s not worth the wasted breath.
The green blob calls CO2 “carbon” to try to confuse people who don’t follow the issue with thinking the issue is soot.
It took me a while because it looks like it was hidden but this guy has a BA in History. That’s it. And being someone’s nephew means nothing.
Must be something in the water they are drinking ….
toilet water ?
😉
Because human nature hasn’t changed since expulsion from The Garden.
They think we are their property to do with what ever they please.
Yes, by all means, we must bring the frog to a boil SLOWLY
javert:
+10. You beat me to it!
Don’t disparage the French!
What do you think the (privat) Federal Reserve System is and its direct taxation (1040). We The People have been boiled SLOWLY since 1913.
The ancients knew that democracy couldn’t last. The people would vote themselves a raid on the treasury.
BWTM: The ancients didn’t know about credit. Not only is the treasury empty (!), we have debt equal to 5 full years of revenue. But we’ll be okay this year.
I like the other frog story better:
Fell into a bucket of milk, was doomed but kept struggling anyway. Until he turned the milk into cream and leapt out.
Some how I don’t like the idea of being slowly boiled alive which is the analogy that comes to mind here.
It has been done to you all your life.
Maybe Swift’s “Modest Proposal” could be put to work? In periods of starvation (brought on by these folks), we could keep them in reserve and do as Swift suggested..for survival?
Yeah, but don’t eat them all at once. Smart fellers like him, you should take an arm here and a leg there so’s his superior brain power can be used for a bit before the last o’ him goes in the pot.
People liken gradually increasing pain to a frog in a slowly heating pot of water. link The thing is that real frogs jump out when the water gets too hot.
People are at least as smart as frogs. When the pain gets too much, they will do something. That’s why we have President Trump.
“….The Green New Deal contains a crucial insight……”
This is the sort of “straight man” line that comedians like Groucho and Jack Benny just loved.
Fill in your own riposte!
Another “if we introduce the lies, misinformation, and deceit slowly enough they won’t notice it and accept it for fact”.
Green ideologues know better than us, they know how to save the very planet, from us. They are also watermelons and hate capitalist consumption. They want to make us poor by slowling increasing the cost of living such that we won’t notice. In fact, these ideologues actually want fewer of us (not them of course) but understand that publicly aclaiming this goal would not extend their lifespan.
This is a common trick of the socialists. Phase in a costly policy over many years so nobody notices. If their policies were so great they would put the whole thing in right a way but they wont because people, after feeing that pain, would revolt. It also gives them time to blame the problems such a new policy brings on other things. In short they rely on the stupidity of the public.
The reason their policies don’t work is always because we have not spent enough yet. See: Education, Homelessness, Public housing, etc.
Also see the most recent iteration, the “northern triangle” countries. We did not spend enough supporting those countries so it is OUR fault they are coming here, not the lousy immigration laws and activist leftists encouraging the migration to the US and the socialist and communist governments creating the miserable economic conditions resulting in the exodus.
The variation to this is the negotiated compromise.
“I want to take everything you own in the name of saving the planet.”
“What? I don’t want to give you everything. There must be another way.”
“Well… how about we compromise. We will take half of everything you own. That is fair. We are meeting in the middle.”
“Hang on. No. I still don’t want to do that.”
“Well! Now who is being un-democratic and refusing to discuss proposals like a rational adult!”
Before doing anything if anything at all, Trump EPA should insist on an independent thorough review of the last updated of the social cost of carbon. The process of Barack Obama/ John Holdren determing what the message “should say” before the message is written is pretty clear. The Obama / Holdren update of the SCC was completed before the Paris Accords meeting in late 2015 for messaging purposes. I went back and compared this Obama 2013 update with the previous update completed in 2010 and found that for all of the discount rates used the SCC increased by 60% (almost) across the board …all years and all discount rates. Mighty suspicious.
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Because our emissions have almost no effect on the atmospheric CO2 content reducing our emissions can have no effect on the climate. A tax of whatever amount introduced in whatever fashion is all tax and no climate benefit. Its purpose must be something else not mentioned in this propaganda.
Someone should tell Ted that in the USA most safety vests are orange, some blue, and some yellow. Many are a mixture of many colors. There is no requirement to carry one in the US or any of the states, as far as I know.
For such a requirement, I suggest red/white/&blue.
“Economists argue for carbon pricing because it makes the social cost of carbon visible in our day-to-day consumption.” [Nordhaus, 2019]
The more convincing argument is that no one will notice.
Gasoline price at the pump goes up and down about every 3 days.
No one seems to care. People still drive it the cost goes up.
I haven’t noticed folks slowing down on the open roads.
Further, in the great State of Washington, sales taxes increase and shoppers still shop.
This will work, at least up to a point. People just do not notice the slow erosion of their buying power, lifestyle, and rights. You just have to slowly take them away, little by little, until the people no longer have a say but do not yet realize it.
This course is made much easier if you have control of two institutions – the press (or mass media these days) and universities. Guess what? The liberals have utter control of both. There is no one to blame but ourselves for allowing this to happen. When a third of the population is too stupid to think for themselves, a third is too meek to fight it, the leaders of a socialist revolution win.
It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion…its tragic but there seems like nothing you can do.
They can compensate with redistributive change. It’s either an opportunistic disease, or a placebo effect that they can force once they reach critical social mass, which, it seems, they have. We live in euphemistic times.
The best solution for the people and the planet is for fools like Ted, his ilk and socialist ideologies to be completely ignored for the junk it is. I’m 97% sure that socialism has never worked for the people, only the elite few, all of whom of course (so they imagine) are the self righteous green blabbers.
Sanity tells us that the Socialists can never be allowed to gain political power.
Adolph H and his band of murderous thugs were mostly a laughing stock in 1923. But by 1933, half the population of Germany was cheering him. The other half either cowered in fear or began fleeing. 10 years is the blink of an eye in political-historical politically.
Now today’s Leftist’s cleverly try to portray the Right as the Fascists. But that of course is an intentional misreading of history. The true Fascists are of course on the Left, the socialists, the Big Government control everything by the police power of the State. And when the conservatives are in control, it is anarchy and revolution the Socialists use to seize power.
The only option is to never let the Left have political power to impose their ideology on the People. For California it may seem too late. But the Sacramento socialists still have to operate within the larger framework of the US Constitution. There is still hope that enough of Cal’s middle class sees what the LEftists are doing to make them poor, and can still vote them out of power.
The Left’s holy grail of course is having a dishonest bunch of Socialists in the majority on the Supreme Court. If they can get that, then they can run rough-sod over the constitution with their philosophy of a “Living Constitution”. If they ever get that, it really could be game over for US democracy.
The US was never intended to be a democracy. The Founding Fathers know how bad that would end.
People have to be lied to for their own best interest. The conceit underpinning every religion.
These greens are just shameless.
This is all part of the new politics where electorates are told they are voting for one thing and the politicians give them something totally different. It is also the reason why the UK is coming out of the EU where this kind of behaviour is rife, why Trump got elected and why the Brexit party in the UK, suddenly came from no where won the most recent (EU) elections.
So, yes let’s have the current politicians doing even more of this lying to the electorate – because it will only speed the demise of these current lying politicians.
Boris Johnson is now the PM of the UK! Gawd help us!
Has he expressed an opinion about carbon taxes? I got the impression that he leaned towards the sensible on this matter. Slightly Trump-like.
Not yet, he isn’t. The ballot result will be declared on Tuesday the 22nd and the incoming PM (Boris Johnson, I hope) will take over on Thursday. Then we can say “Goodbye and good riddance “ to the worst PM of my country in my lifetime of almost 70 years. Of course, she has left us with a commitment to net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 which no one will have the guts to reverse in the current (political) climate.
Kill them slowly ,not too quick or they fight back .
It’s a normal day at the office for”greens”. As others point out, for them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is simply not permissible when there is a planet to be saved.
The gradual imposition of a fuel price “escalator” was tried in the UK more than a decade ago. It was abandoned after haulier protests on the roads using tactics which were admirably French in style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom
The insanity is, these clowns have invented a problem. It doesn’t exist. They then dictate to the rest of us, how we should go about solving this problem. They have openly admitted the agenda is different, no conspira@y theory there. ‘Did you guys think it has something to do with Climate…?’ That’s only the most recent declaration.
The main problem we have today is throwing out Political corruption. That’s what drives the phony Climate crusade, aided by a willing media. Scaremongering is essential for Political survival and it sells sensational Headlines.
Eamon.