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Some weeks, we have to hunt hard for topics. Other weeks, well, they rain down like a monsoon. The latter describes this week and to provide an umbrella we’ve got the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s White House correspondent Debra J. Saunders on the political topics (and a bit on San Francisco) and The Skeptical Environmentalist himself, Bjørn Lomborg, who at this moment, is the world’s second most famous Scandinavian authority in climate. Also, a new poll question (answer it!) and Lileks make a cameo appearance to award Ricochet member Kevin Creighton the highly coveted Lileks Post of The Week.
Music from this week’s show: How Soon Is Now by The Smiths
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Scoldilocks should not intimidate us. I was disappointed that Peter used the term climate denier. It’s obviously incorrect and is an attempt to silence opposition. There’s very good grounds to question the climate records which have been manipulated. And starting with a graph at the end of the Little Ice Age distorts the picture. Starting at the beginning of the LIA would give you a different result. The models have been running hot and, as Freeman Dyson has pointed out, are untrustworthy. http://www.thegwpf.com/climatologists-einsteins-successor/
Bjorn Lomborg is in favor of a carbon tax? Piffle.
And just after he noticed that the US had reduced CO2 emissions more than any other part of the world, WITHOUT a carbon tax?
Very few people are truly logically consistent in their beliefs.
The Kevin Creighton “Post Of The Week” might be called “How Soon Was Then,” but the song is “How Soon Is Now?”
At the risk of sounding ignorant, may I ask what exactly is the carbon tax expected to accomplish other than adding more $$ to government coffers?
The idea of it is you are taxing a depleting asset that is critical to human survival. I’ve seen libertarian analysis that it is the only thing you should tax.
We you tax anything else, the central banks are inflating everything that gets taxed anyway so it’s just going to end up badly. Our whole system is based on inflation in that sense. Even though deflation is really just better living through progress, better living through purchasing power, the financial system and the government aren’t set up that way. It’s going to get unmanageable because of the deflation from automation and globalized trade.
I think ideally you would only tax carbon and you would have no other taxes. Then you would break it down to what you absolutely need from government and what the hell you are going to do when fossil fuels run out.
Now as usual, someone is going to tell me why that’s all wrong.
I didn’t bother taking the poll this time because it was missing that fourth option.
This is why debt, unfunded liabilities, and government grows without end everywhere and it can’t be controlled politically, too.
For example, this guy is talking about coins that have a valuable depleting asset in them –silver– vs. fossil fuels. We can’t keep doing this. It’s patently bogus.
He is trying to (crudely) control for inflation.
What I’m saying is there is no value added from a continually artificially inflated system. If you look around it’s obviously negative value.
I’ve said this over and over, but this is why libertarianism and conservatism can’t work or sell very well.
N.B.: The article dates from 2013.
I love the name, “Scoldilocks”!
However, Greta Thunberg is no more deserving of censure than those teenage girls who, with the same passion and conviction, warned the people that the only thing that could save them was total loyalty to Adolf Hitler.
In theory, we could substitute the carbon tax for the payroll tax, thereby getting less use of carbon and more and higher payrolls. In practice we’d probably end up with both taxes, at least, “temporarily.”
The payroll tax did not work out as intended. It doesn’t fund jack and it makes the poor, poorer.
If the new money goes into investment, it temporarily makes consumption more expensive (by competing for resources).
In the long run, however, increased investment results in greater wealth, increasing consumption as well.
European-style high tax/high social welfare governments tend to shift money from investment to current consumption, usually resulting in low growth.
All it does is misallocate capital. Every debt to GDP measure gets worse and worse. Same with assets too GDP. You service the debt with GDP, basically.
Hmm. It seems to me that this would negatively affect low income people while still growing government coffers at an accelerated rate, assuming the taxes would be on oil used to heat homes, gasoline for cars and most definitely coal in Appalachia. Here in Washington there is a movement to penalize the use of natural gas in new construction in order to promote electricity which is deemed cleaner. It’s all pretty confusing, at least to me.
This is option 3, counter-spun. But if we open that Pandora’s box, I prefer this variant:
Spend days running around the house, agonizing at Greta pitch (i.e., like my vote and feelings on the matter actually meant something). Get into the cooking sherry. Find an attractive person, possibly wearing leather garments, to slap me around for a reasonable price until I seize on the following bit of logic: My senator either voted based on opinion polls or, if not, deserves a chapter in an updated Profiles in Courage. Therefore, all other things being equal, I will vote for said Senator again.
My only problem with the poll is that I am almost certain I do not live in a state with a Republican senator. Given a tenuous grip on reality, I find hypotheticals deeply disturbing.
Great show BTW. Many thanks to Mr. Lomborg for reminding me that Greta is a frightened teenager. I had lost sight of that, ashamed to say.
Yes, and the models aren’t working well in 2019.
@pettyboozswha — Just to clarify, a “quisling” is someone who betrays his own side and works for the enemy; e.g., a Republican or conservative who urges people to vote for the Democrat instead of Trump.
In the Senate, perhaps Linda Murkowski might qualify; though the Democrats have hopes of Mitt Romney.
I can’t explain it but supposedly consumption taxes aren’t as regressive as they seem as long as you don’t have any other taxes. You can always do a rebate for low income people.
Consumption Texas limit government. They kill the economy more as you raise them compared to progressive income taxation. It also prevents politicians Central planning with the tax code.
I don’t see how promoting electricity over natural gas makes things better. An electric oven is insanely expensive to operate.
Aren’t the poor part of the 47% who don’t pay federal income tax? Indeed, many of them get a “negative income tax” without paying a cent. How does that make them poorer?
Conveniently ignoring, of course, how much electricity is generated from natural gas. Or (eek! get it away!) nuclear.
There was a great Ramirez cartoon a while back., “How Electric Cars Really Work.” It showed a big-eared (of course!) Barack Obama in a little electric car pulling a coal-fired electric power plant behind it.
Yes, but it would have been nice if Rob or Peter had noticed and pushed back. I’d like to think Lileks would have, if he’d been there. They were probably just thinking of their next questions and writing them down so they wouldn’t forget.
A single tax on carbon might perhaps work at the federal level. But what about state and local? What about the person with a solar-charged electric car? How do you tax them on carbon, to pay for roads? Let alone schools, etc?
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ogsqu
I’m not an expert on this. It’s basically what David Stockman says. I think he has a bunch of other restructuring around it, that accommodates what you are saying.
A tax on carbon would get built into practically everything because it’s used to make so many things or services.
I have question I would like to have answered by Bjorn Lomborg.
Perhaps @Yeti could pass along the question or get me a contact for Dr Lomborg.
Atmospheric CO2 levels in the past have varied from a low of about 180 ppm to a high of 7000 ppm during the Cambrian, a period referred to as the “Cambrian Explosion” because so many species emerged during that period. That level of CO2 is 1800% greater than the levels today. And surprise surprise, life survived and we did not see run away Global Warming . The average global temperature was higher by 6 deg celsius, but again with 18 times the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Does that fact not make the current hysteria over atmospheric CO2 a vastly overstated threat?
Two ways are listed above beside his picture. For instance:
https://www.lomborg.com/contact
Or at Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/
Thanks. I emailed him.