If I don't take good care of myself, then in a health care free market (which we don't have, but that's another topic) the insurance company would capture that externality by charging me a higher premium, much as the car insurance company charges a higher premium if I have a lot of accidents and speeding tickets.
If I dump my trash on someone else's property, that externality is captured by an angry property owner seeking some kind of redress.
But when it comes to carbon emissions, or any kind of air pollution, the challenge is that nobody "owns" the atmosphere, and I don't see how even the most dedicated libertarian might theorize a model of private ownership of the atmosphere. That quantifying the damage possibly done by carbon emissions is difficult and subject to being hijacked to serve other agendas does not mean that there may not be some actual damage that needs mitigation.
And if mitigation, however imprecisely quantified, is needed, I think that a carbon tax would be the least and most efficient of many evils, in that it would rely on market forces, rather than central planning and regulation, to find the most cost-effective reduction in emissions.
Don't you see, you're doing the very thing I talk about here?
Three questions have to be answered:
Will it work?
At what cost?
Will the cure be worse than the disease?
What will a carbon tax accomplish, if it's not truly global? There's no mechanism for imposing it on sovereign nations against their will, there's nothing to force China and India and Brazil and Russia and all of Africa and all of the Middle East and the rest of South Asia and Central and South America to accept, impose, and collect it, and none of those nations will impose the economic hardship on their citizens that such a tax would be.
This isn't an extra nickel on the price of an iced caramel macchiato, it'd be a substantial hit on everyone's living standards. In poor nations, it'd mean more deaths, shorter and more miserable lives. It's a really big ask.
And, to what end? A tenth of a degree in reduction, that could more easily be achieved via simply getting out of the way of natural gas and nuclear power?
Without quantifying everything, and without applying proper actuarial analysis to the tax-today vs adapt-next-century, all we'd be doing is imposing pointless harm.
I enjoyed that!
If I don't take good care of myself, then in a health care free market (which we don't have, but that's another topic) the insurance company would capture that externality by charging me a higher premium, much as the car insurance company charges a higher premium if I have a lot of accidents and speeding tickets.
If I dump my trash on someone else's property, that externality is captured by an angry property owner seeking some kind of redress.
But when it comes to carbon emissions, or any kind of air pollution, the challenge is that nobody "owns" the atmosphere, and I don't see how even the most dedicated libertarian might theorize a model of private ownership of the atmosphere. That quantifying the damage possibly done by carbon emissions is difficult and subject to being hijacked to serve other agendas does not mean that there may not be some actual damage that needs mitigation.
And if mitigation, however imprecisely quantified, is needed, I think that a carbon tax would be the least and most efficient of many evils, in that it would rely on market forces, rather than central planning and regulation, to find the most cost-effective reduction in emissions.
Don't you see, you're doing the very thing I talk about here?
Three questions have to be answered:
Will it work?
At what cost?
Will the cure be worse than the disease?
What will a carbon tax accomplish, if it's not truly global? There's no mechanism for imposing it on sovereign nations against their will, there's nothing to force China and India and Brazil and Russia and all of Africa and all of the Middle East and the rest of South Asia and Central and South America to accept, impose, and collect it, and none of those nations will impose the economic hardship on their citizens that such a tax would be.
This isn't an extra nickel on the price of an iced caramel macchiato, it'd be a substantial hit on everyone's living standards. In poor nations, it'd mean more deaths, shorter and more miserable lives. It's a really big ask.
And, to what end? A tenth of a degree in reduction, that could more easily be achieved via simply getting out of the way of natural gas and nuclear power?
Without quantifying everything, and without applying proper actuarial analysis to the tax-today vs adapt-next-century, all we'd be doing is imposing pointless harm.