[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.…
Continue Reading“When they finish repowering Altamont with 280 more ‘bird-friendly’ machines, these killing fields will easily have five times more deadly rotor sweep than the old Altamont.”
Altamont Pass, the avian mortality capital of the U.S. wind industry since the 1980s (see “The Avian Mortality Problem” in this study), is in the news. But it is more wind-industry propaganda. The story is how safer turbines need to be installed so more birds and raptors could be saved from all those terrible smaller turbines. This hope, endorsed by the new face of Audubon, however, rests on flawed mortality studies.
For those that will not accept the fact that the wind industry manufactured these studies to suit their purposes, here is a very clear example. The Altamont Pass study published in 2004 determined that the small old turbines were killing thousands of eagles, hawks, owls and other birds each year. …
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