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fraywatch: What's happening in our readers' forum.

Low-Carbon DietThe merits of a global tax on CO₂output.

Compiled by Adam Christian
Updated Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007, at 2:26 PM ET

Anne Applebaum's dismissal of the Kyoto Accords in favor of a global carbon tax gave scientists, economists, urban and family planners all something to talk about in Foreigners. Sure, the Fray had its share of negationists, but most were concerned with the specifics of Applebaum's proposal.

LuxLawyer considers the carbon tax's distributive effects:

[Applebaum's proposal] betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of elasticity. If there are a "wealth of innovations," then the amount of revenue raised by the tax won't be that great. That, for example, is why a lot of people believe that the US's CAFE standards are a better approach than a gas tax to reducing gasoline use: demand is (short term) inelastic, so a tax just increases costs and raises revenue without changing behavior. And if that's true, it again means that there will be a significant increased cost to consumers, resulting in a more regressive tax system.

Similarly, Breaker criticizes the tax for its failure to be Pareto efficient by allocating "compensation … worldwide in proportion to the harm." Vepxistqaosani3 brings attentions to Third World contributions to the global carbon load. MicheleG takes issue with the focus on Europe, where high taxes on energy already incentivize consumers to be efficient. For Human, the current paralysis in solving the global warming crisis indicates the ultimate failure of nationalism: "Why would the Germans want to harm their economy by imposing a carbon tax that helps all the other, non-taxing countries just as much? ... The world is too interconnected now, economically, socially, and environmentally… International problems require international solutions, with international enforcement."

To combat global warming, Madai envisions a utopic community of mixed-use skyscrapers in which "at most you'd have a horizontal walk of 1/8 of a mile to get to any basic middle class amenity." konark_girl calls unchecked population growth the elephant in the room:

Here's the crux -- you can reduce per capita carbon emissions, but if the number of people keep on going up, so will overall carbon emissions. And you cannot possibly deny third world people the chance for a slightly better life (not when the first world has luxurious lifestyles!), but any improvement in their lifestyles also up carbon emissions.

Absolutely no solutions will work unless there are massive campaigns to strongly curb population growth (before nature does it for us thru catastrophes, starvation, disease, or we do it through war and genocide).

But that's a proposal that's dead on arriavl, because religious right won't hear of it, and nor will soft-hearted lefties. On this topic all sides are equally pig-headed and deliberately obtuse, so of course, no politician dares mention it.

Daniel Engler's related discussion of the "statistical rhetoric" surrounding global warming also generated some heated words. not_abel cautions against the use of meaningless percentages in public debate:

The scientists just don't have any means of determining the probability that the simulations they're doing are accurate. Language is being used without regard to, even in contradiction of, scientific meaning for the purpose of creating a sense of urgency. That is the plain meaning of quantifying "subjective judgements".

If you are going to criticize those who question the science behind the consensus on global warming, you would do well to make sure that the standards that make it "science" are not bent to the purposes of propaganda when the science is communicated to the public.

For the_slasher14 here, the apocalyptic thinking around global warming paradoxically gives polluters a spiritual out:

as long as it is cheaper to pollute than to not pollute, the numbers and/or the noise-level of the rhetoric don't matter… There are people who figure that they'll be dead by the time global warming becomes catastrophic and in the meantime they're getting rich off of fossil fuels or whatever else they're up to which warms the planet. They are the spiritual heirs of James Watt, who said (as Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, no less) that the Second Coming was just around the corner and therefore, since the world would end then anyhow, there was little need for conservation.