“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”

– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.

Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.

F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…

“It is ironic that many environmentalists who would herald similar growth in population of some of the endangered species as a very good indicator of the environmental health of the planet, see the success of man as a harbinger of environmental doom. Even many economists usually consider an increase in production of steel or birth of an additional calf, as positive addition to the national output or Gross Domestic Product, but view the birth of a human child to have a negative impact on GDP.“

The twentieth Century has witnessed unprecedented demographic changes. For the first time in history, the world population almost quadrupled from about one and a half billion in 1900 to six billion in the span of just hundred years.  Likewise, Indian population too crossed the one billion level in May 2000, from about 238 million at the beginning of the Twentieth century.…

“The U.C. Davis proposal to establish an environmental water market partly induced by environmental regulatory drought does not hold water.  And we find pricing environmental water sales by auctions to reflect inflated non-market prices derived from the “project influence” of inducing a water shortage as a result of the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Project of 2009 …. Nonetheless, we welcome the opportunity to open up a discussion of how markets might alleviate drought hardship on farmers and, wherever possible, on the environment.”

Road sign on rural highway in Kern County, California, erected in 2010:

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.…