[Editor Note: This excerpt from Dr. Cordato’s 1992 essay, “Excises, Social Costs, and the Myth of Efficient Taxation: The Case of Carbon Taxes,” (IRET Policy Bulletin), is a timeless, yet timely, refutation of the illusion of a science-based carbon tax (revenue-neutral or not). It is reprinted for the current debate with the permission of the author.]
“Politics have led to ‘calls for immediate action.’ The economics provide a pseudo-justification for such action by suggesting that if a social cost is generated, a tax is justified on economic efficiency grounds. This leads to contortions of the science such that only the scientific evidence and arguments that support the political ‘call for action’ enters into the analysis.”
A clear illustration of the myth of efficient taxation concerns recent interest in a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions.…
Continue ReadingSESSIONS: All right. Carbon pollution is CO2, and that’s really not a pollutant; that’s a plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases. Let me ask you one more time: Are you asserting, just give me this answer; if you take the average of the models predicting how fast the temperature would increase, is the temperature in fact increasing less than that or more than that?
McCARTHY: I cannot answer that question specifically.
– Exchange between Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Gina McCarthy (U.S. EPA), March 4, 2015.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environmental & Public Works has sent this letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on April 1, 2015–and it is all about science and not parody. At a previous hearing, Administrator McCarthy claimed ignorance about climate model temperature predictions (above) but promised to answer the question(s) in writing.…
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