Tax global warming

Kitchen Linker loves this idea to impose high carbon taxes to the extent there is evidence for anthropogenic global warming, quoted via EconLog, as the original source is behind a paywall, so they don't get linked into the kitchen:

climate models predict that, if greenhouse gases are driving climate change, there will be a unique fingerprint in the form of a strong warming trend in the tropical troposphere, the region of the atmosphere up to 15 kilometres in altitude, over the tropics, from 20 degrees North to 20 degrees South. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that this will be an early and strong signal of anthropogenic warming. Climate changes due to solar variability or other natural factors will not yield this pattern: only sustained greenhouse warming will do it.

...Suppose each country implements something called the T3 tax, whose U.S. dollar rate is set equal to 20 times the three-year moving average of the RSS and UAH estimates of the mean tropical tropospheric temperature anomaly, assessed per tonne of carbon dioxide, updated annually. Based on current data, the tax would be US$4.70 per ton...

This tax rate is low, and would yield very little emissions abatement. Global-warming skeptics and opponents of greenhouse-abatement policy will like that. But would global-warming activists? They should -- because according to them, the tax will climb rapidly in the years ahead.

The IPCC predicts a warming rate in the tropical troposphere of about double that at the surface, implying about 0.2C to 1.2C per decade in the tropical troposphere under greenhouse-forcing scenarios. That implies the tax will climb by $4 to $24 per tonne per decade, a much more aggressive schedule of emission fee increases than most current proposals.

Really neat idea, but Kitchen Linker still supports high carbon taxes, now, for two reasons: 1) prevention better than cure and 2) a carbon tax would be a big improvement over production taxes even if global warming did not exist.

Branson's billions putting brains to work for the earth

Richard Branson's investments in biofuels were welcome but not exciting, as biofuels are marginal at best (and environmental suicide via politics at worst).

With the Virgin Earth Challenge (and some instruction from Al Gore?), Branson's money is working smarter. Very very cool.

The Virgin Earth Challenge is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges' satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.

Dealing with (climate) change

Thought provoking post by James Annan, not a climate change skeptic: Is (climate) change bad?

Good to think about because change is happening and frankly, dealing with it is more than half the battle at this point.

All the news on global warming points in one direction...

Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories makes one interesting point:

It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always “bad” or “good”; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science.

That rings true in a general sense. I would not be surprised if much of the "bad" news about global warming coming out every day is false, or at least hype. But the rub is that global warming is essentially true and probably was underhyped for a long time.

And even if global warming was false, the good policies and innovation that are needed to combat it are generally beneficial policies anyway, so they ought to be pursued, i.e., pollution tax and new energy technologies -- they're more efficient (at taxing and creating energy) and wean us off fossil fuels.