RSS Feed MenuWe know how carbon dioxide interacts with heat radiation. We know how much carbon dioxide is being added to the atmosphere every year. And we have a fair estimate of how much more will be added over the next decade if nothing changes.
The trouble is, we don’t know the things we most want to know. How much will additional increments of carbon raise the planet’s surface temperature? How dangerous are such changes? What value should we set on preventing them?
Because we don’t know the most important things, our climate policy is necessarily based on projections. We are trying to measure risk and the value of mitigating risk. In other words, climate policy is a little like buying insurance.
You’d never spend your entire income on a life insurance policy. On the other hand, it would be reckless to go uncovered against large and possibly lethal risks.
That’s the approach we should be taking with carbon dioxide. We want to put a price on carbon dioxide that encourages consumers to conserve and producers to substitute.
The cap-and-trade plan before Congress does not set prices. It sets a limit on the total amount of carbon to be emitted. Such a system creates complex and often perverse incentives, as the Europeans are discovering. In order to win political approval, they set the emissions cap so high that no carbon abatement is expected for years to come.
A carbon tax, by contrast, would instantly signal everyone to change their behavior. A tax of, say, $15 per ton would add 14 cents to a gallon of gasoline and raise an estimated $80 billion a year. And it would launch a shift that could be accelerated by higher taxes if the first round did not work fast enough. And unlike a cap-and-trade system, which creates property rights, a tax is very easy to reduce or repeal if further research shows that global warming is proceeding slower or is less harmful than governments today fear.
A good insurance agent thinks not only of the policy he or she wants to sell, but about the total needs of the insured. Let’s have more of that kind of thinking and less hustle.
Originally aired on Marketplace on December 9, 2009.
Bill // Dec 10, 2009 at 8:05 pm
” a tax is very easy to reduce or repeal”. How many taxes have started out as a response to a specific goal only to be diverted to general revenue when the goal is achieved? In any event, I do not believe we will have any certainty as to the extent of man’s contribution to climate change in our lifetime so any carbon tax will be permanent and used to fund the ever increasing involvement of government in our lives.
Also, it does not make any sense to pay insurance premiums that are greater than the loss that would be incurred by the peril they are to cover. Credible economic environmentalists, like Bjorn Lomborg, believe the costs of adaptation to be less than the costs of prevention.
sinz54 // Dec 11, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Bill:
The costs of adaptation will still have to be paid for.
We’ll have to build dikes or levees all the way around Florida and the Florida Keys. (Much of the fabulously wealthy Gulf Coast is at or even a bit below sea level even today.)
And Bangladesh, which is 80% Muslim, is going to demand that the “Great Satan” pay for the dikes and levees around their nation–or else.
Bill // Dec 11, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Ok, but if climate change is affected more by natural processes than by man, then we will still be faced with paying the costs of adaptation and we will have fewer resources after diverting the billions towards reducing CO2. There has always been climate change (without any help from man) so it is reasonable to conclude that there will be climate change in the future as a result of natual processes. The prudent course of action would be to plan for adaptation.