Yesterday, I saw that Tim Worstall wrote "...a carbon tax will do just fine" and thought he was a warmist.
Some people contacted me to argue that I'd "badly misunderstood" Worstall; he's allegedly really on the climate realist side.
In the comment section at a related post at Bishop Hill, alleged non-warmist Worstall is still suggesting that we need a carbon dioxide tax to prevent bad weather.
Then someone linked to the piece below, where Worstall praises the Australian carbon dioxide swindle.
I'm having a real hard time seeing Worstall as being on the side of climate realists...
The Australian Carbon Tax Plan: Pretty Good Actually - Tim Worstall - Forbes
Some people contacted me to argue that I'd "badly misunderstood" Worstall; he's allegedly really on the climate realist side.
In the comment section at a related post at Bishop Hill, alleged non-warmist Worstall is still suggesting that we need a carbon dioxide tax to prevent bad weather.
Then someone linked to the piece below, where Worstall praises the Australian carbon dioxide swindle.
I'm having a real hard time seeing Worstall as being on the side of climate realists...
The Australian Carbon Tax Plan: Pretty Good Actually - Tim Worstall - Forbes
There are those who think that we don’t have to do anything about climate change. OK, the news that Australia is trying to do something about it won’t interest those. There are those, like myself, who agree that we do need to do something but despair at anyone ever actually doing the right things. At which point we should raise two cheers for what Australia has just announced that it’s going to do.
Sadly, only two cheers, not three. For they’ve taken a great idea and then larded it with the usual bells and whistles of government picking technology winners, subsidies to favoured constituencies and so on.
...
OK, so there are lots of people who don’t think that carbon emissions are a bad thing so this won’t appeal to them. But let’s stay with the mainstream and accept that they are. So, we tax those bad things and then at the same time we reduce the taxation of good things, like the incomes of the low paid. It’s not just good politics (“look, it’s the rich over there who will pay!”) it’s also good economics.
Tax bads not goods.
The other 133 pages of the report are what stop it from getting three cheers, but those two paragraphs alone make this a better policy than anything at all which has been done in either Europe or the US as yet.
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2 comments:
Weird. I read today's observation of Worstall, go over to WUWT and see a whole freaking post by him. Clearly we have a somewhat anonymous blogger that the gods have decided to give 15 minutes of fame to.
"Anonymous blogger" is a little cruel don't you think?
I've written in the past for The Times, Telegraph, Express, Guardian, Philly Inquirer, even the WSJ, my blog's been in the top 50 of UK blogs for years now (I started way back in 2004) etc etc.
But on the main point: I'm neither warmist nor non-warmist.
To me it's a matter of logic and knowledge. I don't know enough about science to be able to critique the IPCC reports.
However, I do know enough about economics to be able to understand what the IPCC is saying about economics. So, I concentrate on that.
And, if we simply take the IPCC science at face value and then look at the economics then it is still true that all of what we are told we've got to do, by Greenpeace, FoE, WWF, the Green Party, even the UK Government and parts of the US one, they're wrong.
For example, you'll have noticed that most environmentalists insist that economic growth is itself part of the problem. Yet the IPCC is insisting that economic growth is part of the solution.
My point is, and always has been, that even if the IPCC is correct about the science the proposed solutions still need to be looked at.
We don't need to kill the economy, don't need to overthrow capitalism nor markets, we just need to rejig the taxation structure. Tax carbon and tax something else less.
If you like, my position is "if the warmists are right it's still only a minor problem".
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