Hide the Price

[David B. Benson]

The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World
David Leonhardt
2019 Apr 10
The New York Times

A longer piece in TNYT Magazine. The author points out that a tax on carbon is too unpopular most places. Instead an appeal to so-called clean energy works as long as costs are not mentioned.

I add that appeals to the low apparent price of wind and solar power also appears to work with the populace.

[engineerpoet]

It would be nice if you would include links to these pieces.

[huon]

Hi, EngineerPoet-- Creating a link on a mobile device is, I imagine, cumbersome. So I'm happy to oblige.

[Roger Clifton]

Apr 13, 2019 10:04:11 GMT 9.5 David B. Benson said:

The author points out that a tax on carbon is too unpopular most places. Instead an appeal to so-called clean energy works ...

The article is behind a pay wall, so perhaps you could summarise it and critique it for us. However, I notice that the author uses the weasel phrase, "clean energy", which we should pounce on as identifying someone influenced by the spin of the gas industry.

Advertisements for gas routinely include the concept of "clean energy", implying that those who choose to use it are without sin. This suits people who only permit their taxes to be wasted on a mere token of windmills, as long as their intermittency is backed up by the discrete, odourless, invisible gas, copious and untaxed. In this tokenism they expect to be forgiven by their future grandchildren as being ignorant of the evil they committed by their inaction.

When hearing the phrase "clean energy" we should contradict it promptly. Pervasively, the public is accepting of an indefinite future powered by gas, as long as there is a token windmill here or there. We need to remind them that there is an imperative to stamp out all carbon-based fuels within the lifetime of today's decision-makers, not left as an impossible job for the young.

[David B. Benson]

Roger Clifton, I suppose most already know the gist of it: the European Union has a fee which is much too small to matter; British Columbia has a successful tax which is rebated to taxpayers and so popular; most governments can't manage to find the political will. For example, Washington state failed to pass a referendum twice now and a corresponding measure didn't make it through the legislature in the session now ending.

But expect the utilities to do it? Sure, that is popular so long as the measure before the voters mmentions not a word about cost to rate payers; that last kills it.

The article fails to point out that wind farms lead to lots of natural gas use for backup. Similarly the grid planning dilemma raised by solar power. Those knowledgeable on these matters are few and far between.

I disremember what the article might mention about batteries. I think nothing as the thrust was the divide between the economists wanting a Pigovian tax and the populace having none of it.

[Roger Clifton]

British Colombia's carbon tax gets returned to the taxpayers, who constitute the bulk of the voting public. The populist structure of this tax had been mooted by Hanson et al, and certainly by others as well. Other provinces, but not all, prepared to follow suit. I heard yesterday from a Canadian (who presumably is up-to-date with hometown news) that the Trudeau government threatened to impose the equivalent federal tax on any province that failed to do so. Current news (URL below) says that four conservative province governments (Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan) refused and are therefore getting a federal tax of CAN$20 per tonne of CO2 imposed on them. Inevitably, they are mobilising an army of lawyers to block the tide of the scientific evidence, the rising generation, the passage of history and the overwhelming responsibility to act.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tasker-federal-carbon-tax-explainer-1.5077445