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Club Pigou: James Hansen and Carbon Tax Aficionados
James Hansen, climate scientist and scourge of our carbon-intensive lifestyle, is the subject of a 5,000-word profile in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine.
In it, he rails against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill as watery slop and is critical of environmental-organizations-turned-Washington-insiders. Here's Mr. Hansen on environmental groups supporting the Waxman-Markey bill: "This is just stupidity...the fact that some of these organizations have become part of the Washington ‘go along, get along' establishment is very unfortunate."
Elizabeth Kolbert, the author, offers few critiques of Mr. Hansen, either directly or through others. But she does describe him as long winded and too enamored with power-point presentations that begin in the Eocene period. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, offers another caveat after praising him effusively: "I don't think he has a realistic view of what is politically possible."
In part, this is because Mr. Hansen favors a carbon tax. In the article, he calls for an emissions tax that would add roughly $1 per gallon of gasoline. And that's just a start point: he would like to see the tax go up from there.
This isn't the first time Mr. Hansen has advocated a carbon tax.
But it leads us to wonder: Is advocating a carbon tax really such a naïve vision of beltway politics. Consider the list of other folks who think a carbon tax is the most practical, sensible way forward.
There's Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Add in Al Gore, who likes to call it a "pollution" tax.
And then there's Chinese leadership, who have at times flirted with a carbon tax.
It's pretty heady and powerful company, although not all are card-carrying members of Club Pigou for the same reason. (The ‘club' is named after economist Arthur Pigou. A tax on carbon emissions is a classic Pigovian tax, because it raises the cost of an activity - emissions - in order to lower the negative cost of that activity - global warming.) Many believe that a carbon tax is the simplest, least bureaucracy-laden way to reduce carbon emissions.
Mr. Hansen certainly proved ahead of his time with his modeling of global climate change. Is his also ahead of his time with his call for a carbon tax?
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11 Comments so far
Show AllAm I confused, or is this WSJ reporter advocating a carbon tax?
Of course, carbon tax is a good idea - and it needs to be assessed, not on the retail products, but at the point the carbon irretrievably leaves the ground - at the wellhead and coal tipple.
That the temperature of Earth is regulated by the atmosphere was discovered almost 200 years ago by Joseph Fourier; that CO2 is an important gas regulating Earth's climate and that burning fossil fuels was warming Earth was discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the late 1800s. So, Hansen is hardly ahead of his time. Read Spencer Weart's The Discovery of Global Warming.
Dr. Hansen's recommendation is inadequate. James Lovelock, the British climate scientist, in The Revenge of Gaia, calls for an immediate end to burning fossil fuels and a halt to logging worldwide.
If one feels that Lovelock is overreacting, read Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky or Out of Thin Air or his most recent book, The Medea Hypothesis. Several of the mass extinctions in the last 500 million years have been due to Greenhouse Gas events.
As Hildegard of Bingen wrote over 900 years ago: Nature will not be mocked.
I am disappointed that Elizabeth Kolbert stooped to name calling, particularly someone who is advocating an action that will move humanity in the direction of saving itself from itself.
No, I don't believe that Lovelock is overreacting but I think that he is overreaching. Production and consumption of fossil fuels is simply not going to stop overnight and Hansen knows it.
Because money is the only thing that American businesses and citizens understand, Hansen is right to insist upon increasing the financial footprint of carbon use. A higher tax on wood harvesting would also suit me just fine.
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I didn't see the Wall St. Junkbond properly listing the pros/cons of the various options to enable the people to more easily identify/demand the responsible policy to halt Global Warming.
A substantial carbon tax is the way to go. Yes, it's regressive but the way to deal with that is a steeply progressive income tax.
Yes, the carbon tax should basically replace income tax on the first 50 or 100k. If this is still too regressive for the poor, every adult could be given a monthly check of 100 or $200.
Hansen proposes a complete rebate of the carbon-tax receipts, on a per-capita basis, to stimulate conservation and conversion to lower-carbon alternatives.
A straight carbon tax as opposed to cap and trade carbon schemes is preferable.Carbon credits could offset the tax for producers of Carbon sequestering crops like industrial Hemp and Algae for food and fuel.Carbon negative sustainable crops would be the only eligible crops ,not solely food crops or crops that require destroying existing carbon sinks.
This would bring lumber and paper companies into the fold without loss of profits.PJD412 good point and what about gas flaring that should be included if not banned outright! peace
They should phase it in so truck drivers, etc, have some time to adjust to the 'new reality'. Otherwise it'll create unnecessary economy dislocation to certain vocations, and its almost impossible to determine where those vocations are (for targeted redressment, for example)
Cap and Trade is a Wall Street scam. Who gave our Senators and Congressmen the license to grant corporations the 'right' to poison us? A simple tax on pollution is fair, honest and easy to implement. It's time to kill corporate 'personhood' for the good of the planet.
Cap & trade is a scam, that's failed in Europe because of its complicated design and its underlying premise of rewarding the polluters.
The alternative that's receiving no media coverage is carbon rationing. Check out Mayer Hillman on the subject. Rationing offers an elegant, efficient and effective method for cutting carbon emissions. It has the additional bene of redistributing wealth by allowing those with money to pay for the carbon ration allocated to those who won't exhaust their ration and can use the dough. Further, rationing has a successful history as implemented during WWII.
Of course the best approach is summed up on a bumper sticker: leave the oil in the soil. As Vandana Shiva, among others has noted, the earth's very sequestration of carbon is what made our precious globe habitable for homo sapiens. We're furiously undoing that sequestration in a frantic grab for more profits and to perpetuate an unsustainable lifestyle. The earth will carry on but will do so in our absence.