You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.
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As you may have guessed from the title of this post, this week we call attention to a few articles around the web examining the common sense behind a tax on carbon. It turns out there is none.
From time to time, there is a pitch made to conservatives that a “revenue neutral” carbon tax would be a win-win for everyone. It would help mitigate climate change while at the same time spur economic activity. Even if you don’t care about the former, you’re bound to like the latter. Or vice versa.
To try to win some new carbon tax recruits in the incoming Republican-led Congress, two recent high profile articles—one in the Washington Post by one-time Obama economic adviser Larry Summer and the other on National Review Online by the Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer—make that argument, with embellishments.
If a carbon tax sounds too good to be true, then your intuition is correct.
Robert Murphy, an economist for the Institute for Energy Research, provides the technical details, collected from the economic literature, as to why the economic gains don’t actually come along with a carbon tax as they are being promised. In his National Review Online article “Taxing Carbon Won’t Help the Economy,” Murphy rebuts many of Stelzer’s claims. Ultimately, he delivers this sage advice: