“The day after enactment, environmentalists will start calling for raising the carbon tax, decoupling it from revenue neutrality to finance more wind and solar boondoggles. And they’ll still want additional regulations to drive emissions down faster. If conservatives resist this, they’ll get the same ‘denier’ routine they get now.”
I first started working on climate policy in 1997, first in California, then Canada, and then in Washington, D.C. Having spent seven years inside the Beltway, I’ve now returned to Canada, working for the Fraser Institute on natural resource policy.
In the states, I watched the U.S. edge nearer-and-nearer to very bad climate policy, that being a mixture of cap-and-trade and ad hoc regulation. The inside-the-beltway “consensus” was that we were inevitably headed for national greenhouse gas (GHG) control legislation.
Study after study warned that national mitigation policies would cause significant economic damage, be regionally discriminatory, be economically regressive, and reduce U.S.…