It Pollutes, So Tax It!
By Paul Homewood
A new paper from GWPF calls for the introduction of carbon taxes, instead of mandating renewables:
London, 24 October – An important new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation argues that the failure to limit CO2 emissions is a direct result of politicians’ obsession with mandating renewables as the main policy response.
The author, energy economist Professor Peter Hartley, argues that from basic economic theory, the imposition of an emissions tax is the best method of reducing CO2 emissions. However, policymakers have ignored this almost unanimous view of economic experts, and instead have mandated favoured technologies, notably renewables.
According to Professor Hartley:
“Mandating renewables is inefficient in theory and ruinously expensive in practice. There may be a case for subsidising research into new technologies, and there is certainly a strong case for spending on adaptation measures like flood defences, drought-proofing, improved evacuation and disaster recovery procedures, and the like. These defend against extreme weather events no matter the cause, can be chosen to suit local vulnerabilities, and do not require contentious international agreements to be effective. But picking energy winners in just a few countries is proving expensive, dangerous to national security, and worthless as a response to extreme weather events”.
The paper includes comments from two other economists, Professor Ross McKitrick and Robert Lyman. While having some disagreement about the details, McKitrick agrees that the principles behind carbon taxation are “inescapably obvious” and that if such a tax were put in place, “no one would respond to it by flinging vast amounts of money at wind or solar energy.”
Peter Hartley: It pollutes, so tax it (pdf)
The paper appears to be rather muddled.
It begins by labelling carbon dioxide as “pollution”. It cannot be overemphasised that it is nothing of the sort. Unfortunately this sloppy thinking leads the author down the road of a Pigouvian tax – the “polluter pays principle”. Yet as the paper acknowledges, there is no evidence that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are detrimental, even if they have led to a small amount of warming.
And even if such damage did occur in future, how would we be able to quantify it? By setting a tax too high, we would end up causing much greater economic damage.
I would not disagree that mandating/subsidising renewable energy is probably the worst policy, as it is government and not market driven. But worse still, Hartley does not seem to recognise the monumental risks being taken over grid and energy security by this over reliance on wind and solar power.
But the real economic objection to a carbon tax is that it will end up having the same result as our current policies. Fossil fuels will end up being priced out use, and society will be left with an unreliable and expensive alternative, just the same as it is now.
Whatever the costs of global warming may or may not be in decades time, we know for a fact that the wellbeing of people around the world will suffer now without access to cheap, reliable fossil fuels. Eventually some new technology will come along, which will replace fossil fuels because it is better.
That is how economics works, and why the world is so much better off than it used to be. We should not be trying to interfere in that process.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I think GWPF have lost the plot promoting such rubbish.
I could not agree more. Carbon taxes are regressive, very regressive. The less well-off spend more of their monthly income on energy for heating and transportation plus the last 6 months has made it abundantly clear food prices track energy prices.
Is Carbon Dioxide pollution? Doesn’t even the most rabid Climate Catastrophist agree that without itthere’d be no life. Calling CO2 pollution is like calling Oxygen pollution. Untreated sewage in rivers is pollution, dumping mining waste with Cadmium is pollution.
No they are not. Proper carbon taxes are accompanied by cuts in taxes elsewhere, so that the overall tax burden is at the same level. A proper carbon tax would allow the poor to lower their tax burden in fact. That is why actual economists support it. We already have taxes on energy use but they are arbitrary and in many cases far too high. And they apply at only certain places in the chain so that renewables or EVs do not pay their real share.
Phoenix44,
Please quote us the detail of when you last saw a new tax offset an old tax, on a dollar for dollar basis?
When;
Where; and,
Name of the two taxes.
Very unlikely even possible for most people as they don’t use / buy the products anyway where taxes would allegedly be reduced and probably still could not afford to buy such products even if zero taxes were imposed on them. All they experience are invented and increased taxes on what they actually need. And all those extortionate taxes on transport fuels increase the price of _everything_.
>>new tax offset an old tax
Is that the rubbish that has a won a Nobel Prize in Economics? That is supported by virtually all economists? If we have to have something because of climate change, there is no doubt whatsoever that the least damaging thing is a carbon tax. It removes government from the equation and allows consumers/markets to find the most effective solutions based on individuals valuation of all the alternatives. Dismissing it in this way is frankly ignorant.
Ooh, hark at you. What is rubbish is calling CO2 a pollutant. And since when was economics a “hard” science, or science at all for that matter. The Nobel institute has been discredited ever since they awarded prises to the IPCC and Obama, before he had even taken up the presidency.
It is well said that economics was invented to make astrology seem responsible.
“Responsible” should read “respectable”!
apparently ‘Drought proofing’ comes into it somewhere!
I sent this to Benny Peiser:
A most depressing and deluded paper. He can’t see the wood for the trees. No action is needed, least of all a “tax on carbon”
That’s entirely missing the point. It’s naive to thing that we can continue to shout into the wind that there’s no need for taxation and that somehow that will work. This is simply letting perfect be the enemy of good. A proper carbon tax would cause far less damage than the current way of doing things.
Since CO2 is a benefit to the planet, then surely releasing more of it should be rewarded. We should receive tax reductions for releasing this life-giving gas.
A most depressing and deluded paper. He can’t see the wood for the trees. No action is needed, least of all a “tax on carbon”
Thanks Paul for your sane and most useful comments.
I append my comments to Benny:-
Dear Benny,
Thank you for your response.
Please note that I no-where criticise the fact that GWPF have published this paper and indeed stated that “many parts of his paper are both interesting and compelling.”
I would be most upset if I thought that you were to “become part of the cancel culture” or close down debate. You, of all people, will be well aware that many of the problems the UK faces at present can reasonably be ascribed to our activist chums resolutely REFUSING any debate.
But I will be pleased if you will read my email again and address the points I make. You may be insouciant about whether or not the GWPF is associated with the “CO2 is a pollutant” disinformation and the notion that Carbon taxation may be just the ticket.
Emphatically, and for the reasons I state, I am not.
I can see no reason why the GWPF could not have used a less incendiary title and have diplomatically but firmly distanced itself from the “CO2 is a pollutant” meme. I find it hard to imagine that Prof. Hartley could reasonably have objected and it would have been to the GWPF’s credit that it WAS indeed pleased to publish the paper, despite reservations.
You must surely be aware that the EPA in America is actively and specifically using this ‘pollution’ nonsense politically and to further the notion than CO2 must urgently be reduced (to Net Zero).
I look in vain for any mention that my email will be forwarded to the President and Trustees as I request.
If you will not do this, then please inform me as I must do so myself.
With Best Wishes,
Martin
There is nothing wrong with a carbon tax if the damage function is appropriate. Some might say that the actual cost of emitted carbon dioxide is zero. I would not disagree, but there are those who do. It is a funny sort of pollutant which, if removed from the atmosphere entirely, would result in the death of almost all life on Earth.
At the moment, motorists are paying the equivalent of about £1000 per tonne C in duty and VAT on the duty. I would suggest a level of £10 per tonne. That would reduce petrol cost to about 90 p/l.
Agree with your first paragraph. Thus we should get tax credits for releasing this beneficial gas to atmosphere.
This notion that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” is one peddled endlessly by the eco-loons but is completely wrong. Carbon dioxide is a natural and essential component of the air and, without it, no vegetable matter or trees would grow. Tell that to the vegans and they’d probably refuse to believe it! If we somehow could remove all carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as some zeolots would like, then all life on earth would cease to exist and we really would be facing armageddon.
Bang! Bang!
That’s both of its own feet shot off by the GWPF.
This is an absolutely ridiculous paper for Ross McKitrick and the GWPF to be associated with.
The summary alone tells you the author(s) do not understand the role of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is a big fail for the GWPF and I am appalled.
I am appalled at the GWPF getting DUPED into publishing this article which appears on the face of it to be a valid economic argument (How would I know?).
Surely the GWPF must have been aware that the whole basis of the paper rested on that ghastly CAGW MEME which is grossly FALSE; but has gone viral on the Media.? The fact being that CO2 levels are currently low at 400ppm and could well be bumped up to an optimum for plants of circa 1000ppm. Not that we would be capable to do that.
Put simply the article is nothing but a Propaganda press release for the upcoming COP27 fiasco put on by the now corrupted UNITED NATIONS, with its acolytes and tentacles such as the IPCC, the UNFCCC, Davos, etc. etc.
Hope you get to read this Benny. Meanwhile – My best regards. We all make mistakes sometimes.🤭👍
cognog: in the last few days I saw a reference to a paper by one of our sceptic stalwarts (name escapes me, Lord ?) arguing that the cost reducing CO2 to net zero would be immeasurable but it implied acceptance that this benign compound is, indeed, a contributor to global warming. What is going on?
Yes Vernon. What indeed is going on? It seems that the CAGW MEME is far more more insidious than we thought. To me it is amazing how very intelligent people can get duped so easily with a bit of clever propaganda, blocking their ability to think clearly.
I had to read this a few times as I am stunned that the GWPF would publish such a ridiculously titled publication. I think it damages their credibility massively. The title detracts from any good that might be in the paper. I also think they are totally wrong to promote the idea of a CO2 tax when Bjorn Lomborg has shown that adaption to any change is the most sensible and affordable response.
A carbon tax is the best method to ensure that adaptation is used where it is a better option than mitigation.
I do wish people would understand what is being proposed (perhaps read the paper first?) rather than launch into these fallacious attacks.
Why tax something that is beneficial and good for the planet? If you want big Govt interference then subsidise it!
While its unproven that CO2 is warming the planet, if it does then thats a boon. A warmer planet will sustain more life.
Phoenix44,
Adaptation you say.
Adaptation to what precisely?
The only adaptation needed here is for the IPCC to face the fact that its climate sensitivity guessimate is too high.
Of course, the guesstimate is high on purpose, since to have a figure that reflects the reality would destroy their models’ alarmist forecasts.
I’m surprised that a great scientific mind like yours is unable to grasp that fundamental fact.
Re your comment on sensitivity Sam, have you seen this?
It is interesting to project the ECS and TCR trend lines out to 2025 – 2030.
https://postlmg.cc/47w6x3Cg
Thanks Cat,
That chart says it all.
If only the pseudoblind would adapt to the reality we’d start to get some sensible policy in place.
Paul’s review was exactly my thoughts on reading this paper. ” The paper appears to be rather muddled”, captures it perfectly. It is an interesting economics discourse, but misses the fundamental point that CO2 is not a pollutant. This is the debate that is needed, as we are inundated with half-truths by Attenborough and the other pushers, we need to get the “Science is settled” out in the open in my view, as well as highlighting the massive cost / zero benefit of “Net zero”. People find it very hard to believe that “luminaries and national treasures” could be like Henny-Penny.
Looks like a load of old donkey droppings to me!
Yes indeed.
And just to cheer you all up, Rishi Sunak is now Prime Minister. The membership of the “Conservative” Party are now apparently free to go hence and perform self-coitus.
Not that I have ever been and now certainly won’t ever be a member of that particular group.
Placing bets!
What odds that Sunak and His Majesty will now attend the Sham El Shake bunfight!?! (Together with an army of bureaucrats and NGO cretins, all at your expense?)
Coincidence is a wonderful concept, but I’m struggling to accept that everything that has been going on over the last few weeks (months? decades?) is just coincidental.
Agreed.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action!
Idiotic suggesting even more taxes. We need the _existing_ ones drastically reduced, ideally scrapped and with refunds to those forced to pay the “green” and “carbon” taxes
CO2 is not a pollutant, but it is a byproduct of the burning of vital and finite resources, most of which have to be imported. Given that something has to be taxed a tax on carbon may make good economic sense, primarily to improve the trade balance. Manufacturing would have to be exempt, to avoid exporting jobs.
There is a fair amount of useful detail in the report, but you need an in depth commitment to carefully read the report, which most casual observers will not do, thus only the headline is remembered . “IT POLLUTES SO TAX IT…need we say more about carbon dioxide”.
Carbon dioxide is a beneficial trace gas, providing all food on the planet, GWPF have made a major error of judgement in not editing, what is actually a useful report. I seem to recollect that they did something similar a few years ago (will look for it later)
6H2O + 6CO2 +Sunlight = C6H12O6 + 6O2. The basis of all plant life, in fact if you do the equation the other way around, you get the sunlight back as energy and it is the basis of all oxygen breathing animals survival.
The detail is beyond me, I’m just an electrical engineer.
“A mitochondrion is a double-membrane-bound organelle found in most eukaryotic organisms. Mitochondria use aerobic respiration to generate most of the cell’s supply of adenosine triphosphate, which is subsequently used throughout the cell as a source of chemical energy. Wikipedia”
Since nobody seems to have bothered to read the paper, here’s some quotes:
“Another complication for policy is that CO2 is directly beneficial to plants.”
“The major claimed benefit of cutting CO2 emissions is a reduced likelihood of harmful weather events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, heatwaves and deep freezes. The link between CO2 emission reductions and the likelihood of such events is, however, quite uncertain.”
“Unmeasured or poorly understood aspects of the CO2 cycle weaken the link between emission control and CO2 accumulation. There is also substantial doubt about the effects of CO2 accumulation on climate variables, especially at regional levels.”
“A policy with uncertain effects should generally be used more cautiously. Furthermore, the likelihood that uncertainty could be reduced implies there is an option value to waiting, strengthening the case for moderation in the short run.”
“Accumulating evidence suggests that GCMs, which have provided the main cause for concern, exaggerate the effects of CO2 on temperatures and therefore also the effectiveness of CO2 emissions control as a policy instrument.”
“Errors in predicting effects of CO2 emissions on accumulation (Section 2.5), CO2 accumulation on GSTA, and GSTA on the distributions of other climate variables, produce a very uncertain link between emission control and weather. A policy should be used less aggressively when its effect on a desired outcome is more uncertain.”
“The great uncertainty about the link between CO2 emission controls and weather makes emission control a risky investment. Hence, the appropriate discount rate needs to include a risk premium, as all investments with the same risk profile ought to yield the same rate of return. Privileging CO2 emissions reduction relative to other investments of equivalent risk would misallocate scarce capital.”
It is not some pro-climate change, stop CO2, tax everything paper at all.
To summarise. We are not sure about the negative impacts of CO2, but we’ll tax it anyway for good measure.
Excuse me, Phoenix44, I certainly DID read the paper. I also read McKitrick & Lyman’s responses and Hartley’s response to them BEFORE writing to GWPF.
My initial comments to them are on an earlier thread.
To be absolutely clear, GWPF are welcome to publish anything by anybody. Even Michael Mann, if they really want to go out on a ridiculous limb. I don’t want anyone to claim that Climate Realists are not prepared to set out alternative theories and debate them.
I leave all that to the Reality Deniers. And all the Marxist tricks of accusing your opponents of precisely what you are doing yourself. They are shit hot at that, as you will know.
But it is imperative that you make it absolutely clear that if you are publishing blatant nonsense (as Paul does very frequently, quoting charlatans like Stott and Rowlatt) you should also follow in with a disection of the nonsense above (again, as Paul does with panache.)
But for the GWPF to publish a “technical paper” titled “It Pollutes, So Tax It” seemilgly relying on a brief paragraph “Views expressed in the publications of the Global Warming Policy Foundation are those of the
authors, not those of the GWPF, its trustees, its Academic Advisory Council members or its directors.” on page 36, is NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
You think that Bob Ward, or Justin Rowlatt, or Peter Stott will bother to read it and register the quotes you repeat? Don’t hold your breath!
Agreed, it makes some good points, our gripe is the acceptance that CO2 is a pollutant, it is not harmful in anyway, it is used to fizz carbonated drinks and preserve food. There is no real evidence that it controls warming. Are carbon taxes useful? I do not think so, they just put costs up and create a false market for carbon credits from renewables and BEV manufacturers like Tesla.
From Greenie perspective, it is the bad C in CO2 that must be taxed as it is a pollutant in their tiny, closed minds. They cannot grasp that CO2 is a beneficial trace gas and the basis of all living things, and indeed more would enhance the greening of this Planet. While CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is by far surpassed by Water Vapor, but that cannot be taxed. Given that us humans and animals are responsible for 3% of global CO2 and the UK is responsible for 1% any action is both stupid and unnecessary. The main problem of today is to reverse the CC propaganda fed to all by CC charlatans; Politicians; Governments; Academics; Media for the past 40 years.
I haven’t read the paper, but will work from this: “from basic economic theory, the imposition of an emissions tax is the best method of reducing CO2 emissions”.
There is nothing to suggest that transferring money from the private to the public sector will reduce emissions. All it will do is transfer emissions (directly or indirectly) to public sector activities.
Economists usually overlook the practical reality that taxation depends on identifying suitable transaction points (“Taxable Events”) which must then be recorded and auditable in sufficient detail to calculate and confirm taxation. To do this for monetary transactions is difficult enough, but to do it for CO2 will need an immense bureaucracy to capture all emissions of CO2 and record them. This is dead money of avoidable bureaucracy.
Economists usually overlook the practical reality that taxation rules and implementation will be complex, resulting in the costs of expensive advisors to ensure compliance. More dead money to spend on avoidable bureaucracy.
For something to change behaviour, it has to “hurt”, creating strong incentives to cheat. Taxing something involves policing and enforcement, and involves giving a criminal record to people who might otherwise have lived law-abiding lives (without the additional constraints on their lives imposed by governments). Economists place no value on this avoidable harm.
As Mike Graham (Talk Radio) asks: if taxing something is a way to stop people from doing something, why do we tax employment?
And that’s without even getting into the question that reducing emissions would have any purpose or value whatsoever, as other commenters have said many times.
Another theoretical economist, Dieter Helm, made the same mistake a few years ago. That somebody should repeat the same mistake is an irritation.
The most effective way of dealing with climate change is to evaluate it with historical perspective, and then realise there’s nothing to tax.
For God’s sake there is a right way and a wrong way to do things and it is a poor fool who can do neither. What really is all this bollocks about subsidies for this and taxes against that other than pure crap? Sorry but publishing this in the GWPF seems more about click bait than anything else and seriously damaging. Give over.
To quote the Oxford Dictionary Of Science (2003), the definition of a pollutant is:
‘Any substance, produced and released into the environment as a result of human activities that has damaging effects on living organisms. Pollutants may be toxic substances (e.g. pesticides) or natural constituents of the atmosphere (e.g. carbon dioxide) that are present in excessive amounts.’
So is carbon dioxide a pollutant? I think we have a problem with the accepted definition:
– I would not agree that carbon dioxide meets the criteria in the first sentence. Can it be either/or, or does it have to satisfy the criteria in both sentences? it is certainly released through human activities but excessive amounts? I guess that is correct if we compare to modern atmospheric concentrations, but certainly not over geological time scales. Excessive means to me an amount that becomes damaging so that is certainly contestable.
– warmer temperatures mean possible higher levels of water vapour in the atmosphere as well as that added through agricultural irrigation, so does water vapour now become a pollutant? Is champagne polluted wine?
I think we have a problem with the definition of the word ‘pollution”!
“Is champagne polluted wine?”
Doubly so, it would seem. H2O and CO2 – especially that froggy stuff.
Come on, John Constable, CO2 DOESN’T MATTER!
Peter Hartley’s argument seems to be that governments can’t pick ‘winners’, and using a carbon tax ‘the market’ will identify the winners. I’ve heard the same argument spouted for many years by Tim Worstall.
The problem with the argument is that modern environmentalism, created by the hippy movement in the late 1960s, is basically about imposing crap technology (or even no technology) on the world. It’s about smashing the ‘military-industrial complex’ and getting rid of the ‘winner’ technologies that have been produced by the military-industrial complex. There are no winners for anybody to pick.
Before the hippy version of environmentalism came along, the people most associated with the idea of environmentalism were the Nazis. But the Nazi version of environmentalism was technology-friendly, hence they were formidable opponents in World War II.
A carbon tax HAS been tried in Canada. It has been an abysmal failure. It doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions and it makes everything more expensive. The worst of both worlds!! Typical government ‘solution’.
He loses any credibility at the outset with: “the imposition of an emissions tax is the best method of reducing CO2 emissions.”
Come again? Why does he think we need to reduce CO2 emissions? He’s accepted the fake paradigm so nothing further need be read.
It is extraordinary that the GWPF can title a paper “It Pollutes, So Tax It. Need We Say More About Carbon Dioxide?” An unbelievable own-goal.
We need to increase CO2 levels not reduce them. Increasing CO2 promotes plant and hence food growth and prevents famines. NASA data shows that CO2 has fallen 9 times to 180 ppm over the last 800,000 years (including at the last ice age only 11,000 years ago) just 30 ppm above the level below which plants cannot survive. So why would we want to bump along the bottom with such low CO2 levels caused by taxing CO2 emissions?
At the same time poverty can only be eliminated by cheap, reliable energy and the moment this is only possible with fossil fuels. It will eventually make sense to preserve fossil fuels for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, plastics etc rather than burning it but only when we have another cheap and reliable source of energy and then we will need alternative ways to feed CO2 into the atmosphere to counter the sequestration by marine creatures building their shells.
BTW, without CHGs, of which CO2 is only a minor player, the average temperature of the earth would be minus 20 degrees C.
Everyone knows that CO2 is not a pollutant. Before you can even think about taxation surely you have to know what is the optimum level of CO2 in the atsmosphere for the benefit of Planet Earth
Just want to call your attention to this item. Would be interested what you think about it.
If someone could tell me how the climate has changed, which climate, since when and by what indicators, with real evidence not computer models, I would be grateful.
For interest, the date for “pre-industrial” was decided by a UN committee.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/98/9/bams-d-16-0007.1.xml
“The basis for international negotiations on climate change has been to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” (p. 9) using the words in Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC; United Nations 1992). The 2015 Paris COP21 Agreement (United Nations 2015) aims to maintain global average temperature “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” (p. 3).
However, there is no formal definition of what is meant by “pre-industrial” in the UNFCCC or the Paris Agreement. Neither did the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) use the term when discussing when global average temperature might cross various levels because of the lack of a robust definition (Kirtman et al. 2013).
In the absence of a formal definition for preindustrial, the IPCC AR5 made a pragmatic choice to reference global temperature to the mean of 1850–1900 when assessing the time at which particular temperature levels would be crossed (Kirtman et al. 2013). In the final draft, 1850–1900 was referred to as preindustrial, but at the IPCC AR5 plenary approval session, “a contact group developed a proposal, in which reference to ‘pre-industrial’ is deleted, and this was adopted [by the governments]” (IISD 2013).
However, the term preindustrial was used in AR5, often inconsistently, in other contexts—for example, when discussing atmospheric composition, radiative forcing (the year 1750 is used as a zero-forcing baseline), sea level rise, and paleoclimate information.
…some anthropogenic warming is estimated to have already occurred by 1850 (Hegerl et al. 2007; Schurer et al. 2013; Abram et al. 2016) as greenhouse gas concentrations had started increasing around a century earlier. On the other hand, the 1880s and 1890s were cooler than the preceding decades because of the radiative impact of aerosols from several volcanic eruptions, which may have compensated for the earlier anthropogenic influence.
It is therefore plausible that a “true” pre-industrial temperature could be warmer or cooler than 1850–1900, depending on the balance of these two factors. A key question which we will consider is how representative the 1850–1900 period is for preindustrial global average temperature.”
It couldn’t get more fundamental than this, we are “preventing” a rise in temperature from a figure that we don’t know. Without a known baseline parameter, the whole AGW paradigm is on shifting sands, but “the science is settled”. The UK is “leading the fight to save the planet”, but from what?
“The UK is “leading the fight to save the planet”, but from what?”
Going by Christiana Figures’ rants and the objectives of the UN Replacement Migration Program, White Western capitalists and industrialists.