I'll try to keep on eye on his blog, and post more physics, not that I exect them to understand it. Today he was riting about a carbon tax.
The good politics of the carbon dividend idea
The conservative case for carbon dividends (and tax) has attracted a fair amount of attention, mostly positive. Sarah Duffy has a useful critique that I agree with in part, but I have to call out and disagree with this in particular:
There seems to also be a bit of bait-and-switch going on. This stance allows them to oppose any climate change policy that isn’t a carbon tax, supposedly because that is the most economically efficient solution. At the same time, they don’t need to worry about anyone calling their bluff and actually enacting it because they’ve hitched their horse to a policy antithetical to most Republicans: more taxes. It’s disingenuous to claim to recognize the urgency of climate change and simultaneously hold that the only acceptable solution is a carbon tax given that, as Brad Plumer recently noted, every GOP member of the House voted against such a policy only last June. So, the only climate change policy that could ever be acceptable to conservatives is a carbon tax, but all conservatives in office have already rejected the idea. Convenient, no?Well, no, especially because this argument would've worked so well under previous political conditions and falls apart today. Let's run the tape backwards and look at prior times that a call for a carbon tax in lieu of regulations got prominence. Most recent was the runup to Clean Power Plan regulations that use complicated steps to ratchet down emissions, where some people opposed that plan as it reached fulfillment and argued for taxes instead. Prior to that was cap-and-trade legislation in Congress in 2010, another regulatory approach. Prior to that was the Supreme Court consideration in 2007 whether carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant and regulated under the Clean Air Act.
In all those cases, arguing for a tax was (by some anyway) a disingenuous effort to stop momentum towards a regulatory solution. Duffy's argument then would've been fine, and I made a similar critique at the time.
In the current political situation, the momentum is towards a repeal of Obama's Clean Power Plan and American participation in the Paris Agreement, to be replaced with nothing. These conservatives are saying at least regarding the Clean Power Plan that you've got to replace it with something that gets the job done. The political effect is to make it more difficult to repeal CPP without replacement, the opposite of what Duffy says (and from what I've heard, the proponents are saying carbon dividend > carbon regulation > doing nothing, also contrary to her statement).
Duffy and everyone else is right that these conservative elder statesmen have limited political power today - but to the extent they're getting attention, they're doing something positive.
I agree with her other points on the limits of a carbon tax unless it's really high, but the carbon tax doesn't have to repeal all other government efforts. In particular, government subsidy of new energy research and early implementation could occur, tax subsidies could be left in place, and state regulation could continue.
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