“What is needed is universally affordable air conditioning, which means inexpensive power to run the units. The Green New Deal and, specifically, a carbon tax, whether during the summer cooling peak or the winter heating peak, is a death wish for humane, comfortable living.”

Red, white, and blue Americans should stay comfortable this summer and not heed calls for voluntary A/C conservation. Ditching self-interest is a step on the road to energy serfdom where “carbon guilt” is adjunct to mandatory policies. Citizen voters should be clear: affordable, plentiful free-market energy comes before sacrificial political energy.

Media Spin

The mainstream media, pushing climate alarmism doubly as an anti-Trump meme, is focused on heat waves and the irony of increased CO2 emissions from more air conditioning.

“Historic heat wave is double whammy for climate change,” reads The Hill.…

[Editor Note: This reprint of a February 2009 post by Robert Murphy at MasterResource is back in play regarding the self-styled conversion of Jerry Taylor from skeptic to climate alarmist. Taylor, a principal at MasterResource at the time, was well aware of the Martin Weitzman argument (below) but claims he was introduced to and converted by it years later.]

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.) …

Joe Romm, founder of ClimateProgress (now part of ThinkProgress) at the Center for American Progress, is the bully man against anyone daring to challenge the narrative of man-made climate peril and the affordability of government-forced transformation away from mineral (dense) energies.

His ire has included two editorialists at the New York Times who are not buying climate catastrophe–Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat. But with the losing politics of carbon dioxide (CO2) rationing, not to mention the open scientific questions of climate sensitivity, these two opinion-molders have the high ground.

Bret Stephens

Romm lambasted the Times in 2017 for hiring “extreme climate science denier” Bret Stephens, a characterization that brought rebuke from the Washington Post and other Left outlets. [1]

Most recently, Romm complained about Stephens’s interpretation of Nancy Pelosi’s rejection of the Green New Deal as incrementalism.…

“Efforts to sell Republicans on the idea that [a CO2 price] is the most market-friendly approach to the emissions problem have failed miserably, and will continue to fail.”

– Justin Gillis, Forget the Carbon Tax for Now, New York Times, December 27, 2018.

Oh, how the free-market climate realists (science, economics, politics) feel vindicated. The mainstream press has (belatedly) announcing the Carbon Tax politically dead and a distraction for the whole climate debate.

The article by veteran New York Times writer Justin Gillis was one of (at least) three remarkable reality pieces inspired by the year-end UN climate conference (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland. The others were:

• Politico‘s Why Greens Are Turning Away from a Carbon Tax,”(December 9, 2018) and
• FT’s Trump Has Officially Ruined Climate Change Diplomacy for Everyone (December 12, 2018).