[Editor note: This is a repost from Marlo Lewis, Jr.’s piece from last year, published at the CEI blogsite. It is particularly relevant given the increasing isolation of R Street and the Niskanen Center in the climate-change debate.]
… Continue Reading“… it is untrue that conservatives have been trying to beat something with nothing. Our “something” is climate realism and an energy sector free to power a growing economy because government eschews all forms of market favoritism.”
“The 2016 elections have given conservatives and free marketers an unexpected and rare opportunity to help a bold president change the direction of national policy. We squander that opportunity if we instead legitimize the progressive movement’s anti-fossil fuel crusade and promote an economically-destructive tax that would actually grow government under the pretense of streamlining it.”
” … there are still numerous economic and societal barriers to rapid decarbonization.”
“And it is not like wind and solar come free of environmental concerns. The sheer size of wind and solar installations needed to underpin our electricity system is significant.”
“… lower income households will bear the largest relative burdens of the higher energy costs that are likely as a result of climate policies. While there are ways of mitigating these unequal impacts, they require difficult trade-offs.”
– Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick, “Decarbonization: It Ain’t That Easy, RFF Blog Post, April 20, 2018.
A recent blog post by Daniel Raimi and Alan Krupnick of Resources for the Future (RFF) is unusual, even remarkable, given the institutional history of their organization. For RFF in recent decades has gone Left, way Left, for the cause of climate alarmism/forced energy transformation (see here). …
Continue Reading“Substituting CO2 taxation for existing levies is not the tax debate from the conservative/free market side. The debate is about the flat tax versus a consumption tax as fundamental tax reform. And, hypothetically, if Malthusian decarbonization were to come about, what would be revenue-neutral?”
“In Neeley’s defense, he switched sides assuming that Obama energy policy would continue at the federal level. That way, he could argue [in his lucrative new position] that a CO2 tax was the least worst policy compared to cap-and-trade and existing command-and-control (still a weak argument). But Trump won, and the tide went out… [leaving] Neeley exposed an energy/climate progressive (statist).”
“The conservative/libertarian position is to not price or otherwise regulate carbon dioxide. Eliminate intervention, do not introduce it. Reject Mathusianism’s ultimately anti-humanistic, deep-ecology worldview.”
In “Confessions of a former Carbon Tax Skeptic,” Josiah Neeley of the pretend free-market R Street Institute, pens his latest case for supporting a federal tax on carbon dioxide (CO2).…
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