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4 tweets,
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1. This may be already obvious to everyone: one of the standard questions posed to politicians or policy people pushing for big programs on global warming is "how are you going to pay for it?" This is completely the wrong question, and should get immediate pushback.
2. Rejoinder should be that the correct question is "who is going to pay for it?" Global warming is going to impose massive costs, regardless of whether there is concerted action (motivation behind concerted action is that carbon reduction and mitigation will lower costs)
3. The point is that someone is going to pay for it somehow, regardless of what the government does right now. So the real question is a distributional one (or in @JeffDColgan and @greenprofgreen terms, an "existential" one). Dealing with distributional fights is never easy.
4. But it cuts through the bullshit implication that a global warming policy is something that would be nice to have, but is optional. We are going to have global warming policies, like it or not. The questions are what they involve, when they start, and who pays. Finis.
