The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using real science.

Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies are typically written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

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A fascinating technical study at Phys.org…

“The tax will not be implemented in the politically aseptic world of academic modelers, but in the real world of intense  political pressures. Its assumed purity will not survive the onslaught [as demonstrated by] … Sanders-Boxer [where] the carbon tax is treated as a huge honeypot for allocating money to powerful groups, including overseas interests.”

The carbon tax, a serious proposal supported by some thoughtful people, deserves careful consideration. This tax is the subject of an extensive and often technical literature with top scholars making proposals for Resources for the Future and for the Brookings Institution. [1] The term “carbon tax,” however, has a chameleon-like quality, meaning something different in each of three different contexts.

Three Rationals

In the context of economic theory, the carbon tax is a way to deal with an imperfection in the energy market.…

“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.…