(NOBEL-WINNING ECONOMIST) Stiglitz Calls Climate Talks a 'Charade,' Pushes Plan C CARBON TAX
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-10/stiglitz-calls-climate-talks-a-charade-pushes-plan-c
The liberal economist says voluntary agreements don't work and cap-and-trade is 'doomed to failure'...Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, is trying to persuade global-warming negotiators that they're marching up a blind alley. He says it's probably too late to achieve anything substantial at the long-awaited United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December, so real progress will have to come afterward...That's not a message the negotiators want to hear, but Stiglitz doesn't care. "I’m saying we ought to be facing reality. We have to learn from our failures," he said in a phone interview this week. Stiglitz gave Bloomberg reporters a preview of remarks he was scheduled to deliver today in Paris at the International Scientific Conference, one of the last big conclaves leading up to the December summit. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York, may be the favorite American economist of the developing world, because he often takes its side against the rich countries, particularly the U.S.
Plan A for climate change was a
cap-and-trade system: Set caps on the amount of greenhouse gases that countries could spew into the air, then let those countries trade their emission rights with each other. Emitters that can cut cheaply make the biggest reductions, so cap-and-trade achieves any given amount of emission reductions at the lowest possible cost. But cap-and-trade won't work without enforceable caps, and
countries haven't been able to agree on what those caps should be. Stiglitz says that's inevitable. Giving big allowances to big emitters inadvertently rewards them for having caused a lot of global warming in the past and is "clearly morally and politically unacceptable," Stiglitz says. On the other hand, giving allowances to countries on a per-capita basis would be attractive to poor ones with large populations, but "I don’t see any hope of getting the United States to agree to an equal sharing of carbon space." His bottom line: "Cap-and-trade is doomed to failure."
He isn't impressed with
Plan B, either, which is the
voluntary commitments that countries have been announcing leading up to the Paris summit. "In the absence of more forceful actions, voluntary actions simply don’t solve problems of global public goods," he says. In other words, countries won't do enough if there's no compulsion involved.
Stiglitz's plan is to set a single, global price for carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas. The idea is to make it so expensive to use carbon that consumers and businesses voluntarily use less of it. Countries could raise the price of carbon either with a tax or with a domestic cap-and-trade system, Stiglitz says. In his vision, if a country didn't set its carbon price high enough, hoping to gain a pricing advantage, other countries would be allowed to charge tariffs on its exports. He would throw in a green fund to compensate hard-hit poor countries...
PERSONALLY, I DON'T THINK THIS HAS MUCH CHANCE OF SUCCESS, EITHER. IT WOULD REQUIRE A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT THAT WOULD MAKE STALINISM LOOK LIKE A FREE MARKET.
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and one of her major points is how unlucky we are to be trying to deal with this issue at the same time that the "free market" BS is accepted by governments all around the world. Addressing climate change is a huge problem that has been left to fester for too long, and requires government intervention; the free market is incapable of addressing the issue. No company is going to voluntarily work to put itself out of business. And accepting government oversight or action is anathema to the right, which is a big part of the reason we see a hardening of anti-science denialism: they would have to admit that their entire world view is wrong, dangerous and potentially lethal. It's not going to happen.