“The notion that energy efficiency measures might bring deep emissions reductions along with greater economic growth has long promised an attractive ‘win-win’ for policy makers and business leaders. The extensive literature on rebound presents an uncomfortable challenge to this view, undermining the idea that efficiency leads to decreased energy use on anything approaching a one-to-one basis.”

The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2013 grossly overestimates how much energy efficiency can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to scholars cited in this very study. As such, IEA’s claim that demand-side measures can account for almost three-quarters of emission reductions by 2020 could result in global-warming mitigation efforts that overinvest in efficiency and underinvest in low- and zero-carbon energy technologies.

The Paris-based agency’s projections of emissions reductions from energy conservation and efficiency are based on questionable assumptions, experts said, pointing out that rebound effects frequently take back much or all of the energy savings that efficiency policies attempt to capture.…

“Government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven.”

– Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World. New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 453.

“An Inconvenient Truth About Margaret Thatcher: She Was a Climate Hawk,” declares Will Oremus in Slate. In “The Iron Lady’s Strong Stance on Climate Change” (Daily Climate, reposted at Climate Progress), author Douglas Fischer notes “how seriously [Margaret Thatcher] viewed the threat of climate change and the robustness, more than 20 years ago, of climate science and United Nations body tasked with assessing state of that science.”

True, UK Prime Minister Thatcher was the first and most important international figure to champion the cause of climate alarmism. But the above authors conveniently stop their discussion with her pronouncements in the early 1990s.…

The major premise of the International Monetary Fund’s carbon tax proposal is the concept of social cost. According to the IMF, fossil-fuel consumers do not pay for all the harm they do to public health and the environment. Hence, the IMF reasons, fossil energy is under-priced, society consumes too much of it, and corrective (“Pigouvian”) taxes are needed to achieve “efficient” energy markets.

The IMF acknowledges that social cost of carbon (SCC) “estimates in the literature have varied considerably, ranging from $12 per ton (Nordhaus, 2011) to $85 per ton (Stern, 2006).” The IMF’s “estimates assume damages from global warming of $25 per ton of CO2 emissions, following the United States Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon (2010), an extensive and widely reviewed study.”

Actually, the Interagency Working Group recommends that agencies use four SCC estimates to calculate the per-ton benefits of CO2 reductions: $5, $21, $35, and $65.…

 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published a report urging the world’s governments to “reform” energy subsidies estimated at $1.9 trillion in 2011. Eliminating government policies designed to rig markets in favor of particular energy companies or industries is a worthy goal. Unfortunately, that’s not the agenda the IMF is pushing.

The IMF seeks to shame U.S. policymakers into enacting a carbon tax. Assuming $25 per ton as the “social cost of carbon” (SCC), the IMF claims the U.S. massively subsidizes coal, gas, and oil — simply by not taxing the carbon content of fuels. Our total energy subsidy is estimated to be $502 billion a year, making America the world’s biggest energy subsidizer!

Not Taxing = Subsidizing?

Some may find the IMF’s terminology counter-intuitive, even Orwellian — as if not taxing carbon is a subsidy on a par with cash payments to politically-preferred companies or industries funded at direct taxpayer or ratepayer expense.…