<
https://freedium.cfd/https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/carbon-pricing-is-a-big-broom-that-sweeps-up-a-lot-of-climate-problems-cb9792e107bf>
"Pricing our global greenhouse gas emissions isn't the only answer to
addressing climate change, but it's a requirement for any serious climate plan.
And large parts of the world have stepped up, including most of Europe, big
parts of North America and China. 39 countries and 33 sub-national
jurisdictions have a carbon price.
Let's look back a bit to a prescient economist, Arthur Pigou of Britain. His
insight was that while markets were great at making things efficient and
cheaper, transaction costs didn't include everything. His focus was on those
externalities. Some externalities are positive, which is why so many airports
keep being funded by cities even though they operate at a loss. The city's
business and tourism increases are positive externalities.
But a lot of externalities are negative. They have varying degrees of
unpleasant impacts on people, society or the environment. Pigou came up with
the quintessentially conservative approach to dealing with those impacts, which
was to add them to the transaction cost and let the market sort out the rest.
Pigouvian taxes have been applied to many different things in our society,
including tobacco and alcohol products.
The logic for applying them to the negative externalities of greenhouse gas
emissions is clear, aligned with conservative economic principles as well as
the market economics of the vast majority of the world and has an excellent
history of precedents to draw upon. This is, of course, why the large
greenhouse gas emitters tend to fight tooth and nail against pricing carbon.
It's also why purportedly economically conservative politicians are bending
over backward to pretend that a conservative economic policy is actually not
fiscally conservative in many parts of the world.
What's an appropriate price for carbon? That's a difficult question to answer
for a few of reasons, but we have a good answer regardless."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
