Category Archives: climate change

Greg Mankiw must be happy: Oil just hit a new high of $81.24 a barrel this morning. This is a Pigovian tax with the proceeds going to Saudi Arabia rather than the US Treasury, but if Mankiw is right that … Continue reading →

Mark Thoma has an excerpt of Partha Dasgupta’s review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book today. It took me a while to get Dasgupta’s point, so let me try and rephrase it in a slightly simpler manner, since it was pretty … Continue reading →

This story seems to be doing the rounds, with the implication that a chap named John Kanzius seems to have invented a perpetual-motion machine. Of course, he doesn’t quite come out and say so, but here, see for yourself: An … Continue reading →

Deborah Solomon today has a good primer on one of my pet subjects, carbon taxes vs cap-and-trade. She says that it’s "the biggest political battle in Washington over climate change," however, which is over-egging the pudding a lot: the economists … Continue reading →

What wonders of disingenuousness the auto industry is capable of! Right now,
the Big Three are worried about proposals to mandate that they increase the
fuel economy of the vehicles they sell, and so they’re wheeling
out economists to say that the proposals don’t make sense.
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Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism submits: The BBC, citing a study in Nature, informs us that climate change models have underestimated the risk of flooding. High atmospheric carbon dioxide levels mean plants suck less water out of the soil. Wetter … Continue reading →

Last month I wrote about junk-mail reduction company Green
Dimes, calling
it a VC-backed for-profit philanthropy. I met with the CEO, Pankaj
Shah, on Saturday, and he was hesitant to go that far: his company
was "socially responsible," he said, but he wouldn’t necessarily call
it a philanthropy.
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Greg Mankiw has a
simple equation:
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Paul Klemperer has three
unanswered questions on climate change. I can’t answer them fully, of course,
but it might be useful to at least make a first-order approximation, or an attempt
at one.
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Green Dimes
has just raised
more than $20 million of venture capital from Tudor Investment Corporation
and others.
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The Economist, surprisingly, and disappointingly, has come out in
favor of carbon taxes over a cap-and-trade regime.
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The Czech Republic, of all countries, probably has more upside than downside from at least the next degree or two of global warming.
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Taxing every annual holiday flight, bar the first.
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Kay’s proposed solution is… well, Kay doesn’t have a proposed solution. Instead, he asks for “modesty of aspiration and acknowledgement that many uncertainties cannot be resolved”. In other words, absolutely nothing. We can – we must – do better than that.
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Quebec’s carbon tax isn’t really Pigovian, because it isn’t large enough to noticeably reduce carbon emissions. But it’s a good start, since it’s always easier to increase a “sin tax” than it is to implement one initially.
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For $350 million a year, Ecuador’s offering not to drill for oil in the Amazon jungle.
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With tougher standards, on the other hand, the Big Three will no longer need to worry about being out-competed on the gas-guzzling side of things, and they can invest more money in more earth-friendly cars. They should be lobbying for this bill, not against it.
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Europe’s carbon emissions have been reduced by its cap-and-trade system.
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Mark
Thoma, tongue only slightly in cheek, wants Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw
to duke it out on carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade:
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Charles Komanoff, of the Carbon Tax Center, responds to my questions.
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No one approach will be sufficient. We need a cap-and-trade system and a carbon tax for the areas not covered by cap-and-trade.
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