Writing on Reason.com Chicago Tribune columnist Steven Chapman, in the context of bashing Republicans for not buying into the left-environmentalist line on global warming, comes out strongly in favor of a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide. Here’s what Chapman has to say:
The method most congenial to personal and economic freedom is a carbon tax. Instead of putting the government behind favored forms of energy, as the administration likes to do, it would create strong incentives for people to find their own ways to reduce emissions.
It would achieve maximum benefits at minimum cost. It could be revenue-neutral, if the receipts were used to pay for other tax cuts.
So there it is, “it would achieve maximum benefit at minimum cost.” Notice, he does not say what those benefits would be nor does he say that they would outweigh the costs. If what he means by “benefit” is reduction in CO2 emissions, that may be true. But of course, reducing CO2 is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end–the goal is to reduce global temperatures over what they would otherwise be, thereby reducing the problems that are associated with warming. Here’s the reality that Chapman does not address–and it has nothing to do with whether or not you accept the alarmist claims of global catastrophe. There is not a carbon tax that anyone would reasonably propose–that is a tax that would not bring the world’s economy to its knees–that would make anything but an undetectable fraction of a degree difference in global temperatures over the next century or even two. In other words, this tax that Chapman is favoring would be a completely futile gesture in terms of real benefits, measured as a reduction in global temperature and an amelioration of the problems that global warming is supposed to cause. And just in case Chapman thinks that these are just the words of some denier, here’s what well know climatologist/alarmist Jerry Mahlman says about this in a 2006 interview with Earth and Sky and republished in the Energy Bulletin:
I’ll tell you one of the horrifying facts of global warming, and why it is so inexorable. Suppose that you and I wanted – along with all the rest of the people in the world – to cut down on CO2 emissions so that they would be small enough to let us guarantee that the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere next year, and the decade after, and the decade after, would not go up any more…You’d have to cut it by 75 percent.
That’s a horrific number if you think about everything that you do: whether it’s talking on the telephone, or driving our cars, or heating or cooling our homes. Think of everything that’s manufactured, energy used to extract metals, for example. So the answer is 75 percent, if the entire world were going to participate…You would have to have a radical change in your lifestyle…We need to be talking about what we’re going to do to arrest global warming – to keep it from happening, to keep it from warming – now. That’s the problem…In fact, it’s worse than I talk about, because suppose that we’re able to produce the miracle – the absolute miracle – of reducing 75% in our emissions globally. Guess what? Over the next hundred years, the Earth would warm up another degree Fahrenheit, even though we produced that miraculous result.
So I ask, what size carbon tax is Chapman proposing and what are these “maximum benefits” he is referring to. I would accept a simple list of alternative tax levels that he, as a proponent of liberty would advocate, along with the reductions in temperatures that they would generate over baseline in a hundred years. That would have to be the first step. The second would be to demonstrate that the costs imposed on current and future generations are justified by the benefits that these lower global temps would bring about. And if they don’t outweigh the costs then what exactly is his logic in proposing these new taxes. But I’m sure he has reviewed this data already. After all he’s clearly not one of those knee jerk Republicans who simply make or reject proposals without having the necessary facts at hand.
