carbon tax
stoat | June 25, 2012 Well, sort of. Via Timmy I find Will Hutton bemoaning the failure of yet another GW-type summit, Rio-20. We all knew it was going to fail: had I thought there was any question about it, I would have offered to bet heavily on its failure (in fact, so little do I care that I haven't even looked to see if it has failed. But I assume so...). But there would have been no takers. Nonetheless the pointless waste of time took place, which merely demonstrates how broken our politics is. But we knew that too.
Hutton correctly identifies at least one problem, but fails to see the obvious solution:…
tlambert | July 10, 2011Good news! I'm still able to post -- Australia has not returned to the Stone Age. A few links:
Key points of the carbon price package
Frank Jotzo: popular tax cuts and a carbon price that just might deliver
Roger Jones
John Quiggin
Larvatus Prodeo
Gareth Renowden.
The carbon tax alarmists are now not arguing that the tax will destroy the economy, but that it won't do anything.
Update Greg Jericho
stoat | June 6, 2011 I've finally been provoked into writing this post. Though actually it is going to be about something slightly different, or at least I'm going to go through a long rambling diversion, inspired by Idiocy on carbon permits by Timmy.
But since I'm also rather conscious that many of my posts are (when looked back over the period of a couple of years) utterly incomprehensible due to lack of context, I'm going to do some context.
If you look at the problem of Global Warming from an Economics point of view, then it is a perfectly standard problem, that of uncosted Externalities. Which is to say,…
tlambert | February 26, 2011Julia Gillard has done a backflip and agreed to introduce a budget-neutral carbon tax after last year promising not to introduce one.
In a matching backflip John Humphreys has come out against the tax, describing it as a "grab for cash" after writing a report in 2007 that favoured a carbon tax:
Our government is currently using an approach of regulation and
subsidy while considering the possibility of implementing a carbon
trading scheme. We would be better served if the government replaced
all of these options with a revenue-neutral carbon tax. A carbon tax
is preferable to a carbon trading…
stoat | December 16, 2010 I largely ignored Copenhagen (the conference, not the city, I hasten to add: very nice place I'm sure and I mean no disrespect) and chose instead to push for Carbon Tax Now, though I felt obliged to read a little bit of what they had to say. But now we have Cancun. What to say about that, other than rather unoriginal puns?
Nothing but the obvious really: it was a total failure and it would have been better if it had never occurred. Cancun was the triumph of the negotiator-class: the parasites encouraged by all the process: yet another waste-of-time conference designed purely to generate…
stoat | January 31, 2010Says the Grauniad. Not the "Hurrah", I added that. The Grauniad doesn't come out for it being good or bad news. But I think it is. Emissions trading is a waste of time and an enormous waste of money, promoted mostly by those who hope to get rich on it.
Carbon Tax Now.
My previous post refers.
hrynyshyn | May 6, 2009Here's how I would have liked to have introduced this post:
The good news is that, other than for an increasingly marginalized minority, the focus of attention on climate policy has shifted from the reality of global warming to the economic tools needed to address the problem.
Sadly, climate change denialism remains relatively robust and widespread, with more half of all Americans and popular columnists of George F. Will's stature still unwilling to accept the science. I have no choice but to acknowledge the task of getting everyone on board will require more time and energy, even while we…