{"id":45274,"date":"2018-10-12T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T09:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=45274"},"modified":"2018-10-11T15:35:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-11T19:35:35","slug":"carbon-taxes-may-be-efficient-but-lets-not-rush-into-it-quite-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/10\/12\/carbon-taxes-may-be-efficient-but-lets-not-rush-into-it-quite-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Carbon taxes may be efficient<\/em>, but let’s not rush into it quite yet…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terence Corcoran<\/a> says we shouldn’t jump at the chance to kill our economy just because carbon taxes are efficient<\/em>:<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel committee supported the government of Canada\u2019s carbon-price scheme. The Montreal-based carbon-taxing NGO, the Ecofiscal Commission, hailed Nordhaus for having \u201cdemonstrated\u201d that a universal price on carbon was the most \u201cefficient\u201d way to curb climate change.<\/p>\n

Before jumping aboard the Nordhaus bandwagon, however, carbon-taxing politicians and all Canadians might want to take a closer look at what they are being led into.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Nordhaus and his co-winner of this year\u2019s Nobel in economics, former Stanford economist Paul Romer, are great believers in \u201cincentives.\u201d As Romer said in a post-Nobel interview (tweeted by McKenna, naturally): \u201cI believe, and I think Bill (Nordhaus) believes, that if we start encouraging people to find ways to produce lower carbon energy, everybody\u2019s going to be surprised at the progress we\u2019ll make as we go down that path. All we need to do is create some incentives that get people going in that direction, and that we don\u2019t know exactly what solution will come out of it \u2014 but we\u2019ll make big progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why a tax? If all we need to do is deploy the price mechanism, why impose a tax? Let\u2019s ignore for a moment the dubious assumption that the science and economics of climate change are sound and settled. Would it still not be better to have the government set the carbon price, require the energy companies to charge it, but allow the revenue to flow not to government but through to energy companies and their shareholders, and others in the supply chain? That\u2019s where market forces and the above-mentioned miracle price mechanisms \u2014 rather than government planners \u2014 would determine where to invest and what energy alternatives are best. (No gas retailer could possibly eat the cost of a 90-cent-per-litre carbon tax, so they\u2019d have no choice but to pass at least most of it along to the customer).<\/p>\n

One of the ironies of carbon taxation is the enthusiasm for \u201cmarket mechanisms\u201d and \u201cprices\u201d among politicians who otherwise abhor and resist market pricing of everything from roads to health care to rental housing to public transit to education to broadcasting and telecom and the internet and the price of cannabis, not to mention the Canadian price of milk and chickens. With carbon, market pricing is suddenly a great idea, no matter how fanciful the analyses and speculative the projections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terence Corcoran says we shouldn’t jump at the chance to kill our economy just because carbon taxes are efficient: It didn\u2019t take long for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel committee supported the government of Canada\u2019s carbon-price scheme. The Montreal-based carbon-taxing NGO, the Ecofiscal Commission, hailed Nordhaus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,65,84],"tags":[245,692,755,332,1189],"class_list":["post-45274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-environment","category-government","tag-climatechange","tag-externalities","tag-incentives","tag-nobelprize","tag-pigouviantax"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bMe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45275,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45274\/revisions\/45275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}