"Shattering Myths to Help the Climate"

[applegrove]

Shattering Myths to Help the Climate

By ROBERT H. FRANK at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/upshot/shattering-myths-to-help-the-climate.html?ref=us&_r=1&referrer=

"SNIP......................



Myth 2: Slowing the pace of climate change would be prohibitively difficult.

Reducing CO2 emissions would actually be surprisingly easy. The most effective remedy would be a carbon tax, which would raise the after-tax price of goods in rough proportion to the size of their carbon footprint. Gasoline would become more expensive, piano lessons would not.

The functional equivalent of that — a cap-and-trade system — worked spectacularly well when Congress required marketable permits for discharging sulfur dioxide (SO2) in 1995. Acid rain caused by SO2 emissions quickly plummeted, at about one-sixth the cost predicted. Once people have to pay for their emissions, they find ingenious ways of reducing them.

Myth 3: A carbon tax would destroy jobs.

If a carbon tax were scheduled to be gradually phased in once the economy recovered, its mere announcement would create jobs right away. As with any policy change, there would be winners and losers. But because an impending carbon tax would render many existing energy-using processes obsolete, it would create strong incentives for corporations to put their mountains of idle cash to work. Spending on development of more efficient processes, with attendant hiring, would be expected to begin immediately.


Myth 4: The cost of reducing CO2 emissions would be prohibitively high.

Because a steep tax on emissions would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue, you might assume the policy would entail big costs for ordinary people. But every dollar raised by a carbon tax is a dollar by which other taxes can be reduced. The actual cost of reducing CO2 emissions would be only those costs associated with the cleaner processes we’re led to adopt, and they promise to be low. Experience in other countries, for example, suggests that a carbon tax that doubled the price of gasoline would result in cars that are more than twice as efficient as today’s.



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[NYC_SKP]

1. The only thing worse than these "prohibitive" measures is doing nothing at all.

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[applegrove]

2. I passed it on to my email and facebook. I hope Obama can do more

on climate in the next two years.