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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Q: 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?
A: Because power is an addiction and they just do NOT care what happens to other people, as long as they have some kind of power. That should be obvious even to a blind pianist. After all, both Stalin and Pol Pot did their best to slaughter their people, simply for existing.
This heat wave has finally broken and we got both rain and cooler air (thank you, Zephyros!) and I hope it stays in the 70s from now on, but it was just a heat wave. A nastier heat wave than this one struck in 1994, with many deaths resulting from what used to be called heat exhaustion and/or heat stroke.
This isn’t anything but weather, and we have zero – zip – ningun – rien – control over that, so how do these nutballs expect any reasoning person to believe that they can control the climate on a planet-sized scale if they can’t even control the weather?
The term “stop climate change” is nothing but a pseudonym – false name – for political control of a population by various means, including raising taxes and increasing the cost of utilities beyond the capacity of ordinary people to pay for those things. It just shows you should NEVER take anything for granted, because someone, somewhere, will want to take it away from you.
Why? “Because hobbits as miserable slave, Frodo, are more pleasing to Sauron than hobbits happy and free.” – JRR Tolkien.
For the record Ted Nordhaus, you are full of Schmidt.
CO2 in the atmosphere is good , and more CO2 is better.
Excerpt from my recent paper:
15. Atmospheric CO2 is not alarmingly high, it is too low for optimal plant growth and alarmingly low for the survival of carbon-based terrestrial life. The real danger is not too much CO2 – it is CO2 starvation. Over geologic time, CO2 is ~permanently sequestered in carbonate rocks.
Plants evolved at atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 2000 ppm and greater, and many grow best at about 1200 ppm CO2 – about 3 times current levels. That is why greenhouse operators pump 1000-1200 ppm CO2 into their greenhouses.
Major food crops (except corn) use the C3 photosynthetic pathway, and die at about 150 ppm from CO2 starvation – that is just 30 ppm below the minimum levels during the last Ice Age, which ended just 10,000 years ago – “the blink of an eye” in geologic time. Earth came that close to a major extinction event.
During one of the next Ice Ages, unless there is massive human intervention, atmospheric CO2 will decline to below 150 ppm and that will be the next major extinction event – not just for a few species but for ~all complex terrestrial carbon-based life forms.
Reference: “(Plant) Food for Thought”
(first posted in January 2009 on wattsupwiththat.com, published on icecap.us in December 2014)
by Allan MacRae, Dec 18, 2014
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/plant_food_for_thought2/
Reference: “Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?”
by Patrick Moore, October 15, 2015
https://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/
Excerpts from
“CO2, Global Warming, Climate and Energy”
by Allan M.R. MacRae, B.A.Sc., M.Eng.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/15/co2-global-warming-climate-and-energy-2/
Taxes should be increased to double the price of any luxury items, cosmetics, parfums, private planes, yachts, luxury houses and condos and gentlemen farms, designer clothing and other such attire.
Use the money to build net zero energy buildings and build entire communities where people walk and jog, and play, and work.
There would not be any yellow vests anywhere ever.
There is a quote I once read:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false flag for the desire to control it.”
A Carbon Dioxide tax will raise the price of everything we buy because a Carbon Dioxide tax will cause the price of gasoline to climb higher which will cause retailers to raise their prices since their costs for transportation have increased, and retailers without a legitimate reason to raise their prices will do so anyway and blame it on the Carbon Dioxide tax.
A Carbon Dioxide tax is one of the dumber, more destructive ideas of our time.
To avoid larger government and the waste of top-down subsidies that don’t work, take the libertarian route. Give ALL the carbon tax receipts back to American citizens in equal monthly dividends and let American citizens decide which technologies save them the most money.
Before you say that Americans will never get the money back, consider the Federal income tax withheld from your paycheck. The IRS collects a tax from you and then refunds overpayments annually. The only difference in a carbon dividend is that you will receive your dividend monthly rather than annually.
Folks in the lower 70% income brackets will get back more carbon dividend than they pay in carbon tax, thereby avoiding yellow-vest riots. Folks in the upper 30% income brackets will pay more in carbon tax than they receive in carbon dividend, but folks in those income brackets can afford the expense and don’t riot in yellow vests to achieve their political goals.
Most importantly, keep the money out of the hands of politicians. They cannot resist spending our money on pet projects.
Larry
If you don’t want politicians to have an unlimited money supply abolish the (not) Federal Reserve and fiat money.
The only thing Form 1040 tells you is that you are less than a slave and gives them the right to, unconstitutional, know EVERYTHING about you.
You think taxing to fund redistribution (of perhaps 60% of the take, the rest is skimmed) is Libertarian?
Overhead would be less than 10% [Regional Economic Modeling, Inc. (REMI) 2013].
URL: https://11bup83sxdss1xze1i3lpol4-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/The-Economic-Climate-Fiscal-Power-and-Demographic-Impact-of-a-National-Fee-and-Dividend-Carbon-Tax-5.25.18.pdf
“To avoid larger government and the waste of top-down subsidies that don’t work, take the libertarian route. Give ALL the carbon tax receipts back to American citizens in equal monthly dividends and let American citizens decide which technologies save them the most money.”
Returning 100 percent of the Carbon Dioxide tax to the taxpayers would not include returning the rise in prices for everything else. Gasoline won’t be the only thing rising in price because of a Carbon Dioxide tax, everything will be rising in cost because of the increase in the cost of gasoline.
There is no free lunch.
Raising
You are correct that virtually everything we buy will increase in price as a result of a carbon tax, but a comprehensive evaluation (REMI 2013) of the legislation that is currently going through the maze of committees in the US House of Representatives (HR 763) shows that for the lower 70% of income brackets the carbon dividend will be more than the increased costs of all purchases . The upper 30% of income brackets use more fossil carbon than the lower 70% combined and would thus pay more in carbon tax than returned in the monthly carbon dividend.
Regional Economic Modeling, Inc. (REMI) 2013. https://11bup83sxdss1xze1i3lpol4-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/The-Economic-Climate-Fiscal-Power-and-Demographic-Impact-of-a-National-Fee-and-Dividend-Carbon-Tax-5.25.18.pdf
Here is the link to HR 763: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/763
You mean like sales taxes, VAT taxes, and income taxes on the rich, lower middle class?
Only direct taxation is bad. Government needs money but to keep government small only indirect taxation is the way to go. . And of course the gold standard.
Just another example as to how Progressivism is a lie: Price/cost transparency is the last thing they want or can afford.
“What is wrong with today’s establishment?” That’s easy – they’re not being effectively challenged. There is no debate – ‘climate change’ is JUNK science that upends the truth; and the reason is the best kept secret of all – eco-totalitarian world government, yet essentially NO ONE is exposing it. So most Americans believe the fraud is only about making money from [literally] thin air – just crooked business as usual – so why worry? Globalism is eco-fascism that needs to be fully exposed to end this madness.
It’s a federal mafia. And we all know how a mafia works. By fear.
In our modern society people have to make use of energy. People do not want to go back to life the way it was 200 years ago when we did not make use of fossil fuels. Anyway the energy technology of 200 years ago will not support such a large human population so going back to the old energy technology would cause billions of premature deaths. But the reality is that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and there is plenty of scientific rationale to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. So all this carbon taxing will have very little effect on CO2 emissions and will have no effect on climate. But even id we could stop the climate form changing, extreme weather events and sea level rise would continue because they are part of the local climate. Rather than trying to kill the economy with more taxes, we will be far better off to improve the economy so that we have more economic resources to provide appropriate infrastructure to protect us from the ravages of extreme weather events.