drplokta

I agree that taxing carbon is the simplest and most effective way to go. But if we're going to do it, we need to get over the conservative ideological opposition to any and all taxation. That's made a carbon tax a non-starter in the US. There's also the reality that the next best solution, cap and trade, can be structured so it's a vast subsidy for all sorts of industries that succeed in lobbying to get themselves classified as non-polluting. It's going to be hard to get people to look past such a splendid opportunity for corruption and do what is right. I'm actually a bit more hopeful now because of the huge volatility we're experiencing in energy prices. The proposed carbon tax is very modest compared to the factor of four increase we had in the price of oil. And now that the economy has crashed and the price of oil has gone down with it, taxing carbon would be taxing something that has become very cheap again and that we're not using much of.