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Climate change thread. @TedNordhaus — whose uncle won a Nobel Prize for his work on carbon pricing — writes in @ForeignPolicy that carbon taxes are just too hard. Specifically, taxes are salient for energy users. foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/cli…
2. Energy users might willingly pay more for greater efficiency in energy use or new, low-carbon energy sources, but only if the cost they must pay is concealed. What @TedNordhaus calls “quiet” or incremental policy measures are, in his view, the only way forward.
Washington Governor @JayInslee, now running for President on addressing climate change as the nation’s top priority, understandably disagrees.
4. @JayInslee cites @UCSBPoliSci professor @leahstokes, who argues in this thread that the surest way to promote urgently needed measures is through major reform packages and public advocacy.
5. To @leahstokes, the long and bitter opposition of Republicans in Congress to doing anything about climate change, plus the vast resources of the fossil fuel & other industries that profit from the status quo, argue that incrementalism will never work.
6. University of Toronto professor @greenprofgreen insists climate change is a political problem, not a technical one — a global conflict between rich and poor — in this thread. She also rejects incrementalism.
7. Green does invite discussion as to incrementalism among other climate activists.
8. My own view: climate change bloody well is a technical problem, since no political solution that fails to greatly slow its progress — no matter what else that solution accomplishes or how many people it makes happy — will get mankind out of the soup.
9. My interest in transforming societies as part of a plan to fight climate change is pretty minimal. Achieving the essential goal will bring plenty other changes with it no matter how it’s done; we should strive to protect the most vulnerable as best we can, but that’s it.
10. I return to the argument @TedNordhaus begins with, that carbon taxes are not the only piece of this puzzle. The engine is not the only piece of a car; good luck getting anywhere without one.
11. If energy, from any source, is cheap people will use more of it. The only way to prevent that is to get very, very lucky — e.g. by discovering a very cheap low-carbon energy source — or through a massive and utterly impractical expansion of state power to compel...
12....people to use less energy. Why impractical? Because climate change is a global problem. Compulsion enforced by dozens of governments around the world is barely conceivable even in theory.
13. Carbon taxes are the small-government approach to climate change. Their salience for energy users — which I believe William Nordhaus recognized, and @TedNordhaus is not wrong to point out — will have to be overcome in some way.
14. I believe that climate change incrementalism and radical reform proposals are burdened equally in the United States by the obdurate refusal on the part of one political party even to recognize the problem, let alone to do anything about it.
15. 20 years ago I’d probably have been on @TedNordhaus’s side of this argument. But we don’t have enough time any more for incremental policy changes to do what we need them to do. It’s big reform or bust — and bust is an outcome too grim to contemplate. [end]
