The funny thing about carbon pricing is that even if you take the latest IPCC report as gospel, and even if you assume all of the governments around the world implement a perfectly efficient carbon tax, even so the “efficient” carbon tax ends up being fairly low for a few decades, and then it ramps up as atmospheric concentrations increase. (See William Nordhaus’s new book treatment of his “DICE” model for an excellent exposition.)
The intuition behind this result is that even the scary projections of catastrophic climate change don’t occur for more than one hundred years, and so discounting these future damages to the present leads to a modest externality from current emissions of another ton of carbon dioxide.
This phenomenon explains the fury with which partisans in the climate change debate argue over the proper “social discount rate.” …
Continue ReadingA contributor to Grist, which advertises itself as “a blogful of leafy green goodness,” is saying NO to a carbon tax and YES to a take-no-prisoners cap-and-trade program. A comment on the post succintly lays out the blueprint of a stringent cap-and-trade program:…
Continue ReadingEach renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.
There was no going back to renewables. Coal–and that included oil and gas manufactured from coal–was the new master of the master resource of energy in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Jevons stated in the introduction (p. viii) of The Coal Question (1865):…
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