carbon tax

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The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

More important in this context, Mankiw was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush. The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago polled an ideologically diverse group of prominent economists about their views on a carbon tax; 96 percent of the economists polled answered either “agree” or “strongly agree” that a twenty-dollar-per-ton tax on carbon emissions would be better for the U.S. economy than an income tax increase that raised the same amount of revenue ($150 billion annually).27 Why do economists, including conservatives such as Mankiw, advocate for putting a price on carbon?

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As a result, economists across the political spectrum have embraced pollution taxes, such as a carbon tax, as a better way to raise government revenue than taxing productive activities like work, savings, and investment. Gary Becker—a Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago, a disciple of Milton Friedman, and one of the most articulate contemporary proponents of free markets—is on record as favoring a carbon tax. So is former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan (who was a close friend of Ayn Rand while she was alive). Another persistent and persuasive advocate for some kind of carbon tax is Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who is the author of one of the most popular economics textbooks in America.

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The most logical way to balance growth and environmental responsibility is to build the price of pollution into the activities that cause it. Rational people respond to prices, and rational prices should reflect the true “social cost” of any activity. Coal is not a “cheap” source of energy when its environmental impacts are taken into account. Pollution taxes, particularly a tax on carbon emissions, would encourage cost-effective conservation; consumers and companies can respond in whatever ways make the most economic sense to them. Any tax on pollution would also make cleaner sources of energy more economically viable. The market is a remarkably powerful phenomenon for creating sane environmental policies—if we give participants the right price signals, which we have failed to do so far.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

First, WTO rules do in fact allow for environmental adjustments, and so the border tax on carbon, tied to an explicit environmental target, and applied on the same basis domestically, would probably be fine. Second, the WTO faces far greater challenges to its authority anyway from the US/China trade wars. It is hard to imagine that, in its current dire state, it would want to legally challenge one of its members for taking action on carbon imports, and especially given the UN-led Paris Agreement which sets the overall global objectives. Not to tax carbon is to distort world trade. Carbon border taxes level the playing field, provided they are applied at the same rates to imports and domestic production.

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In practice, however, governments struggle to persuade the electorate even to vote for proposals to raise enough tax to cover expenditure, and are instead forced to borrow to plug the spending gaps. Carbon taxes are likely to be used for additional revenue and not to displace other taxes. One implication of this is that carbon taxes may be introduced and raised not because the government of the day is convinced that they are needed, but because it has run out of other taxation options. Better the right outcome for the wrong reasons than the wrong outcome. The alternative approach is to hypothecate the carbon tax revenue. Some argue that when it comes to climate change there is a get-out-of-jail-free card: we could tax carbon, but then hand the money back to all of us.[11] The relative price of carbon-intensive goods goes up, but our incomes are propped up by handing back the tax revenues.

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There are three possibilities: using the carbon taxes; creating new green infrastructures; and buying international credits. A carbon tax is the obvious way of imposing the polluter-pays principle, and hence improving the efficiency of the economy by internalising all the costs of economic activities. Polluters, faced with the consequences of their actions, will reduce their emissions. In the example above, the oil company might be paying for the natural sequestration through tree planting to offset the carbon tax it would have paid for the emissions had it not offset them. If the company had instead paid the carbon tax, the government could use that revenue to plant the trees.

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

And yet the idea has never gone far in the United States—despite the surprising popularity of the 2016 Sanders campaign—because major financial institutions argue that it would stifle the securities industry and make investing more expensive for everybody. And major financial institutions tend to get their way on tax issues in the U.S. Congress. — ANOTHER NEW FORM OF TAX that has been tested around the world in recent years is the carbon tax—that is, a tax on carbon-based fuels and emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As with the soda pop and financial transaction taxes, the carbon tax has two purposes: it would raise revenue for government, of course, but it should also serve to offset the production of greenhouse gases (mainly, carbon dioxide) that promote climate change and accelerate global warming.

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The federal debt-to-GDP ratio—already (at 73 percent) well above historical levels—is projected . . . to rise over the medium to longer term because of higher interest costs and growing spending for Social Security and the government’s major health care programs. . . . A carbon tax—that is, a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels (or on their carbon emissions)—could help address both of these problems. Carbon taxes are potentially the most effective and cost-effective policies for reducing CO2 emissions. . . . These taxes could also raise substantial revenues for easing fiscal pressures and/or funding reductions in other taxes.5 Carbon taxes come in various shapes and sizes, but there are basically three ways to tax CO2 emissions. The emissions tax measures how much CO2 pours out of the smokestacks of major producers, such as power plants and factories, and then imposes a tax on each ton of the stuff that is poured into the air.

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Carbon taxation uniquely has the potential to address both.” Summers’s conservative Harvard colleague N. Gregory Mankiw, an adviser to many Republicans and chief of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, agrees: “There is little doubt in my mind that for dealing with global climate change, the best policy includes a tax on carbon emissions.”6 But bipartisan backing from academic economists doesn’t necessarily make a difference when it comes to tax policy in the United States. In the U.S. Congress, the word “tax” is the kiss of death for almost any new idea, particularly among Republicans. Thus most efforts to create some form of a national cap-and-trade (or “cap-and-tax”) scheme in our country—Bill Clinton tried it in 1993, and Barack Obama proposed it again in 2010—have been rejected.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

And it would provide revenues that would enable governments to cut other taxes, rather than providing corporate handouts to polluters as ETS emissions permits do. A tax on carbon consumption would be better than both the ETS and a tax on carbon production because it would actually reduce Europeans’ carbon emissions, rather than shifting them overseas (or achieving very little). While taxing carbon production would have a similar impact if the whole world was doing it, taxing carbon consumption is much more effective if only Europe and a few others are going ahead first. Better still, it doesn’t put European companies, or production in Europe more generally, at a disadvantage.

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The next step is to jettison the ineffective, corporate boondoggle that is the ETS and replace it with a tax on carbon consumption. A carbon tax that rose steadily over time would provide some predictability for businesses, enable them to better plan long-term investments and encourage them to try to develop new low-carbon technologies. It would also give clean-tech companies a good idea of the price target they need to achieve to be competitive, allowing them to raise funds and have a go at developing promising technologies. Importantly, governments wouldn’t be trying to second-guess the best technologies or pick winners among the many clean-tech companies. A carbon tax would be flexible: it could be raised or lowered at will, depending on how conditions evolve.

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For example, they could axe harmful subsidies339 – such as the handouts the French government gave to Peugeot, a heavily loss-making carmaker, in 2013 or that Germany gives it to its coal industry each year – and plough the savings into higher public investment.340 Countries could also create arms-length public investment banks for that purpose. Raising the pension age by three months a year while removing the disincentives to keep working could provide increased funding for education and training. Costly subsidies for renewable energy and environmentally dubious biofuels ought to be replaced with a tax on carbon consumption (see Chapter 10). Governments could then cut taxes on labour, creating jobs and boosting living standards. At the EU level, the budget for 2014–20 agreed in 2013 was a missed opportunity to reorient the Union’s spending priorities. While David Cameron trumpeted a headline cut in the budget, the real issue is how the money is spent.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Since then, the idea has languished in political limbo. Revived interest in taxing carbon is partly due to the determination of Republicans to cut personal and corporate income taxes. Of all potential revenue sources, a carbon tax strikes many conservatives as among the least objectionable. This leads some pundits to believe that a “grand bargain” is possible around a carbon tax, with liberals backing it for environmental reasons and conservatives accepting it if it allows other taxes to be cut. Like an upstream cap with all permits auctioned, a carbon tax would be collected from the first sellers of carbon-based fuels and would be simple to administer.

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THE DEFEAT OF CARBON CAPPING IN 2010 has rekindled interest in carbon taxing. As noted earlier, the idea of taxing pollution—or any activity that externalizes costs to society—was first proposed nearly a century ago by British economist Arthur Pigou. It’s akin to taxing alcohol and tobacco with the goal not of eliminating them—prohibition is the way to do that—but of discouraging them, while at the same time raising revenue for government. Though the idea of taxing carbon has been around a long time, it hasn’t gotten far in practice. A modest carbon tax has been enacted in a few countries (Sweden, Norway, Australia) and one Canadian province (British Columbia), with modest results.

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Consumers would pay it indirectly because the price of goods they buy would rise in proportion to the amount of carbon used to produce them. In any plan to tax carbon, the tricky question is what to do with the revenue. One possibility—the conservative favorite—is to cut corporate and personal income taxes. Some liberals support a tax shift but would prefer to cut payroll rather than income taxes.14 Another possibility is to earmark carbon revenue for specific purposes such as investments in clean energy. Of all the possible ways to structure a carbon tax, the most beneficial to the middle class is what climatologist James Hansen, its leading proponent, calls “fee and dividend.”

What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth by Chris Goodall

blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, decarbonisation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, food miles, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, hydroponic farming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Ocado, ocean acidification, plant based meat, smart grid, smart meter

Meantime, the rise in oil prices will increase the speed of a global switch to electric cars, increasing the demand for electricity and thus probably improving the prospects for offshore wind. WHY DON’T WE HAVE CARBON TAXES? Why, then, isn’t implementation of a carbon tax more widespread, or a significant demand for campaigners? And why have carbon taxes proved so controversial and difficult to raise to levels that affect decision-taking? One answer is that a carbon tax means rising prices. Its very intent is to raise the price of things that emit greenhouse gases in manufacturing or use. So a tax will, for example, raise the price of petrol and make driving more expensive.

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Another would be to levy a carbon tax only on activities not facing international competition, such as the supply of gas to homes. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would help to reduce emissions. Lastly, a carbon tax is not popular among politicians, because it does not encourage their favoured new technologies or advance their constituents’ businesses. It is easier to argue for a subsidy for solar panels to please an installation company in their home town than it is to vote for a carbon tax that might have the same effect, but through a much less visible mechanism. Nevertheless, a carbon tax has many strengths, and we should push our leaders to implement it, alongside well-considered schemes to compensate the less well-off.

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The combustion of a tonne of coal puts about 3 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, meaning that a $100 carbon tax should result in a levy of $300 for its use. Compare that figure to the current (late 2019) price of coal on world markets of around $70 a tonne. A $100 carbon tax would therefore more than quadruple the price of using coal. The percentage impact is much less severe on oil and gas, as the table below shows. For comparison, I have also included an approximate estimate of the impact on beef prices. IMPACT OF $100 CARBON TAX ON PRICE OF FOSSIL FUELS Coal + 430 per cent Gas + 110 per cent Oil + 60 per cent Beef + 55 per cent (June 2019 prices, oil at £50 a barrel, gas at 40p a therm, coal at £70 a tonne, Tesco beef patties at £4.50 a kg) Despite enthusiastic support from economists, the use of carbon taxation (or carbon pricing, as it is sometimes known) is barely discussed by environmental campaigners, who tend to prefer action plans which directly target specific causes of pollution.

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

The pioneering Swedish measure was introduced almost thirty years ago as part of a comprehensive tax reform package aimed not only at instituting a carbon tax but also at modernizing the nation’s tax system. The tax on carbon emissions went from €27 per metric ton in 1991 to €120 per metric ton today, one of the highest rates in the world. It needs to be kept in mind, however, that the price of reform was reducing marginal tax rates for the wealthiest, a concession to political reality that undermined the new system’s claim to be progressive. The increase in carbon tax rates was nonetheless accompanied by large-scale public investments in low-carbon energy infrastructures, which provided taxpayers with alternatives when emissions reached high levels.

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A number of experts have studied the question and come to the conclusion that such a measure would not be contrary to either the letter or the spirit of international trade law, since Article 20 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which is binding on the World Trade Organization (WTO), permits violations for the sake of protecting the environment and human life.13 A carbon tax of this sort has been long proposed by member countries of the European Union at summit meetings but has never won formal approval because of a lack of common political will (Germany, for example, is reluctant to annoy its trade partners outside the European Union). To circumvent this obstacle, countries that favor the measure could begin by imposing taxes on the consumption of goods having a high carbon content (cement and steel, for example), on top of existing taxes on carbon-based fuels, such as the ones discussed in Chapter 6.

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Few expected the social unrest that was about to come.19 Because the planned rise in carbon tax revenues had not been accompanied either by additional compensatory mechanisms to offset the burden on low- and middle-income households or by a significant increase in energy transition investments, however, millions of households had no low-carbon transport or heating alternatives. In the absence of any meaningful financial assistance, rising carbon tax rates were bound to trigger popular discontent. This is what finally happened in 2018, when the new center-right government of Emmanuel Macron ratcheted up the carbon tax as part of a broader plan to scrap the wealth tax and reduce tax rates on capital incomes.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Louis–based Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, told the New York Times that “coal with carbon capture and storage is the low cost, low carbon solution and has fantastic implications for the nation’s energy security.”60 The myth that the United States can (or will) substantially cut its carbon dioxide emissions is closely related to the belief that placing a tax on carbon will ignite a revolution in alternative-energy technologies. And that belief leads to the next myth-busting opportunity: Any scheme to tax carbon is doomed to failure. The better strategy: taxing neurotoxins. CHAPTER 16 Taxing Carbon Dioxide Will Work FORGET IT. No matter how many times world leaders meet in places such as Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Mexico City, or Tulsa, the countries of the world will never agree on a global scheme to tax carbon dioxide. The disparity between the wealthy countries and the developing countries—particularly when it comes to the availability of electricity—is simply too great to expect that the developing countries, such as China, India, and Indonesia, will agree to policies that will effectively restrain their economic growth.

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Boone Pickens Has a Plan (or a ClHue) CHAPTER 12 - Wind Power Reduces the Need for Natural Gas CHAPTER 13 - Going “Green” Will Reduce Imports of Strategic Commodities and ... CHAPTER 14 - The United States Lags in Energy Efficiency CHAPTER 15 - The United States Can Cut CO Emissions by 80 Percent by 2050, and ... CHAPTER 16 - Taxing Carbon Dioxide Will Work CHAPTER 17 - Oil Is Dirty CHAPTER 18 - Cellulosic Ethanol Can Scale Up and Cut U.S. Oil Imports CHAPTER 19 - Electric Cars Are the Next Big Thing CHAPTER 20 - We Can Replace Coal with Wood PART III - THE POWER OF N2N CHAPTER 21 - Why N2N? And Why Now? CHAPTER 22 - A Very Short History of American Natural Gas and Regulatory Stupidity CHAPTER 23 - It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas CHAPTER 24 - America’s Secret Google CHAPTER 25 - Gas Pains CHAPTER 26 - Nuclear Goes Beyond Green CHAPTER 27 - A Smashing Idea for Nuclear Waste CHAPTER 28 - Future Nukes PART IV - MOVING FORWARD CHAPTER 29 - Rethinking “Green” and a Few Other Suggestions Vigorously Support the IAEA End Iowa’s Monopoly on the Presidential Primaries Elect More Engineers and Push Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Emulate Iran and France Ban Mountaintop-Removal Mining Quit Wasting Natural Gas!

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The disparity between the wealthy countries and the developing countries—particularly when it comes to the availability of electricity—is simply too great to expect that the developing countries, such as China, India, and Indonesia, will agree to policies that will effectively restrain their economic growth. Policymakers should forget about attempting to tax carbon dioxide or limit emissions of that gas. Instead, they should aggressively pursue taxes or caps on the emissions of neurotoxins, particularly those that come from burning coal. The rationale here is simple: Many scientists and policymakers can, and will, argue about the relative dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, but no one in their right mind is willing to stand up and say, “We need more mercury and lead in our ecosystems.”

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

CFCs were simply phased out by the Montreal Protocol, and SO2 and other forms of particulate pollution were greatly reduced by cap-and-trade programs in the United States and elsewhere. A tax on carbon, which is one of Nordhaus’s main proposals, is even more straightforward than a cap-and-trade program. Such a tax would make products and energy sources that generate a lot of carbon more expensive and so cause many buyers to shift to lower-carbon alternatives such as wind-, solar-, and nuclear-generated electricity. Increasing the tax gradually over time would give buyers ever-stronger incentives to shun carbon-heavy producers and also allow these producers time to clean up their acts. A “revenue-neutral” carbon tax is an interesting variant on the basic idea.

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Nordhaus worked with the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia on a revenue-neutral carbon tax that went into effect in 2008; it established an initial tax of ten Canadian dollars per ton of carbon dioxide and returned the money to BC residents in the form of tax credits and income tax reductions. In January of 2019, an all-star collection of American economists (featuring Nobel Prize winners, Fed chairs, treasury secretaries, and others) signed an open letter advocating that the United States adopt a revenue-neutral carbon tax. More and more carbon taxes have been put in place in recent years, including in Chile, Mexico, South Africa, and Ireland.

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Nordhaus, The Climate Casino (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), Kindle, location 65. “We also are likely to encounter surprises, and some of them will be nasty”: Ibid., 66. revenue-neutral carbon tax that went into effect in 2008: “British Columbia’s Carbon Tax,” British Columbia Ministry of Environment, October 3, 2018, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/climate-change/planning-and-action/carbon-tax. signed an open letter: “Opinion | Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/economists-statement-on-carbon-dividends-11547682910?

Financing Basic Income: Addressing the Cost Objection by Richard Pereira

banks create money, basic income, behavioural economics, carbon credits, carbon tax, income inequality, job automation, Lyft, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, quantitative easing, sovereign wealth fund, Tobin tax, transfer pricing, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Wall-E

Charging rent for use of the atmosphere as a dump for waste helps to reduce emissions, due to increasing the price of fossil fuels, and can also provide revenue to mitigate the impacts. 2011–2012 carbon taxes increased from $4 billion to $18.2 billion by moving the petrol and diesel excise taxes to the source, meeting efficiency outcomes according to the report. The recommendation is that carbon tax revenue should be raised by a carbon tax based on the heat content burnt as measured by the British Thermal Unit (BTU). However, this method favours dirtier fuels because coal, for example, produces far more pollution per unit of CO2 than oil or natural gas. It is better to charge per tonne of carbon, which favours the cleaner fuels. Recommendations for carbon taxes around the world vary from $10 to $100 per tonne.

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A 40% resource rent is proposed on these earnings, which delivers $17.317 billion in rent for the value of a banking license. Revenue would increase with the inclusion of the rest of the banking industry (Fitzgerald 2013: 41). TOTAL ECONOMIC RENTS OF AUSTRALIA AS A SOURCE FOR BASIC INCOME 95 CARBON TAXES At the time the TRRA report was written the carbon tax was in effect. It has since been repealed. It is listed as existing government revenue, but is really rent for use of the atmosphere as a sink for waste. In the past the impact of Carbon dioxide (CO2) on the climate was unknown, but it is now obvious that the climate is changing due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4).

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The price of carbon will most likely depend on the severity of the climate crisis. 2015 greenhouse gas emissions in Australia were 549.3 Mt CO2-equivalent according to the department of the environment.15 At a rate of $10/ton the revenue would be total $5.49 billion and at $100/ton it would be $54.9 billion. In previous discussions of carbon taxes with policymakers in Vermont, the figure of $100/ton evokes a somewhat shocked response that this is an inordinately high figure. To put it in perspective, consider that $100 per ton of carbon on a molecular weight basis is equivalent to almost $1 per US gallon of petrol (89c). According to the OECD the average petrol tax among the 34 advanced economies is $2.62 per gallon, and goes as high as $4.32 in Turkey.16 So that is equivalent to a carbon tax of $294–485 per ton. From that perspective $100/ton of carbon is rather modest.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

A rate of $35 a ton on CO2 emissions in 2030 would double the price for coal and boost prices for electricity and gasoline by 10 and 25 percent, respectively, the IMF estimates.51 That’s the good news. Taxing carbon at $35 a ton would not stem global climate change, says Nordhaus. “I have worked on models that suggest a current carbon price in the range of $40 per ton of CO2, rising over time,” he says. “This policy would lead to eventual warming of around 3°C above preindustrial levels.” A serious effort to keep increases below 2 degrees C means a carbon tax rate closer to $200 per ton of CO2 emitted.52 Few countries impose a national carbon tax. Notably, the United States has no national policy. California and other states tax carbon emissions and must battle in courts to maintain those unpopular taxes.

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To accelerate a transition toward renewable energy, carbon taxes must replace historical subsidies for fossil fuel producers. That of course spells yet higher prices for gas and oil. Ending fossil fuel subsidies won’t be easy. They are large and widespread. An IMF study estimates that “global fossil fuel subsidies amount to around $6 trillion in 2020—this is 6.8 percent of global GDP. More than 70 percent reflects undercharging for environmental costs.”50 Reducing, let alone eliminating, such subsidies is politically very arduous. Economists agree on the efficiency of carbon taxes to end fossil fuel addiction, yet politically, such taxes stir worldwide opposition.

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It spurred a massive grassroots political revolt among motorists, the “yellow vests” revolt. Introducing new carbon taxes while energy prices are high and rising looks like political suicide to politicians who want to keep their jobs. In early 2022 extreme violence erupted in Kazakhstan as the government doubled the price of fuels. Only a brutal crackdown by that authoritarian government kept the regime in place, for better or for worse. All over the world in 2022 governments started to cut energy taxes rather than raising them to deal with the popular anger about rising energy costs. If enacted, carbon taxes that accelerate the switch from fossil fuels to renewables may hurt.

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Yet, without urgent and decisive action, we will hit the critical 1.5°C temperature rise from pre-industrial levels by 2030. Rapid decarbonization is the only way forward. One necessary measure is a substantial increase in carbon taxes. A statement issued at the UN Climate Summit in Poland in December 2018 by a powerful group of multinational investment funds managing $32 trillion of investors’ money called for ‘meaningful’ taxes on carbon and an end to fossil fuel subsidies. According to calculations by Schroders, one of the signatories, failure to keep the rise in global temperatures to 2°C would cause long-term economic damage on three or four times the scale of the 2007–08 financial crash.73 A consensus is building.

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That would be 50% more effective in cutting greenhouse gases, enabling Britain to come close to meeting its Paris Agreement pledge.74 It is imperative that we move in that direction. There are two problems: taxes are unpopular and a carbon tax by itself would be regressive, since it would take a higher proportion of Slaying Giants with Basic Income 35 income from poorer households. President Macron in France has found that raising fuel tax without complementary measures can bring social strife and political instability. But experience in Canada and Switzerland shows that those problems can be overcome if the revenue gained from the carbon tax, or much of it, is then paid out as a dividend to everybody. In Switzerland, every household receives a dividend from the carbon levy as a rebate on their compulsory annual health insurance premiums.

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The new federal scheme will rebate 90% of the revenues back to individual households, 70% of which will gain more from the rebate than they will pay in higher fuel prices. Households will receive hundreds of dollars a year in dividends, which will tend to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.75 In Ireland, the Taoiseach in January 2019 endorsed a carbon tax with all funds raised to go in direct cash dividends. Something similar should be done in Britain. Reinforcing the case for doing so, an American study found that, whereas a levy on CO2 emissions would be regressive if used to cut personal income tax, it would be progressive, benefiting nearly all the bottom half of the population, if the receipts were recycled as universal lump-sum payments.76 It would be even better if the receipts were placed in a national Commons Fund, from which quasi-universal dividends, a form of basic income, could be paid.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

The ExxonMobil forecasters made additional assumptions about the rate at which hybrid cars were likely to be adopted, the rate at which office buildings and refrigerators would become more energy efficient, the rate at which wind farms and nuclear power plants would be built, and the rate at which governments around the world would impose taxes on carbon-based fuels or caps on greenhouse gas emissions. They concluded that worldwide energy demand would grow by about 35 percent overall by 2030 and that demand for oil and gas liquids would rise by about 22 percent, to 108 million barrels per day. Far from a green or clean energy future, they foresaw that energy-poor countries would burn fossil fuels increasingly as they industrialized.

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If Tillerson and his Management Committee could write their own foreign and energy policy for the United States, it would involve, first, an acceptance of the interconnectedness of global oil markets—and an end to fantasies about national “independence” from those markets; and second, a recognition that carbon-based fuels would be central to the energy economy for decades, even if a significant tax on carbon was imposed eventually to address the risks of global warming. From those premises, ExxonMobil’s executives would construct a deliberate, country-by-country strategy to maximize oil and gas supply through free-market competition and to enforce the sanctity of commercial contracts to support that effort.

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The near-bipartisan deal on climate policy in Congress during 2009 suggests that America will likely enact some carbon price, but only a relatively modest one, and only after the American economy recovers from recession and stagnation, which may take five or more years. In Washington, higher taxes on carbon-based fuels will inevitably come later than they might have due to the resistance campaigns funded by oil and coal corporations—particularly ExxonMobil’s uniquely aggressive influence campaign to undermine legitimate climate science during the late Clinton administration and the early Bush administration.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Climate justice: Foreman 2013. 52. Klein vs. carbon tax: C. Komanoff, “Naomi Klein Is Wrong on the Policy That Could Change Everything,” Carbon Tax Center blog, https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2016/11/07/naomi-klein-is-wrong-on-the-policy-that-could-change-everything/; Koch brothers vs. carbon tax: C. Komanoff, “To the Left-Green Opponents of I-732: How Does It Feel?” Carbon Tax Center blog, https://www.carbontax.org/blog/2016/11/04/to-the-left-green-opponents-of-i-732-how-does-it-feel/. Economists’ statement on climate change: Arrow et al. 1997. Recent arguments for the carbon tax: “FAQs,” Carbon Tax Center blog, https://www.carbontax.org/faqs/. 53.

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Instead, decarbonization needs to be helped along with pushes from policy and technology, an idea called deep decarbonization.73 It begins with carbon pricing: charging people and companies for the damage they do when they dump their carbon into the atmosphere, either as a tax on carbon or as a national cap with tradeable credits. Economists across the political spectrum endorse carbon pricing because it combines the unique advantages of governments and markets.74 No one owns the atmosphere, so people (and companies) have no reason to stint on emissions that allow each of them to enjoy their energy while harming everyone else, a perverse outcome that economists call a negative externality (another name for the collective costs in a public goods game, or the damage to the commons in the Tragedy of the Commons). A carbon tax, which only governments can impose, “internalizes” the public costs, forcing people to factor the harm into every carbon-emitting decision they make.

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Ausubel 2007, p. 230. 72. Carbon plateau, GDP rise: Le Quéré et al. 2016. 73. Deep decarbonization: Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project 2015; Pacala & Socolow 2004; Williams et al. 2014; http://deepdecarbonization.org/. 74. Carbon tax consensus: Arrow et al. 1997; see also “FAQs,” Carbon Tax Center blog, https://www.carbontax.org/faqs/. 75. How to implement a carbon tax: “FAQs,” Carbon Tax Center blog, https://www.carbontax.org/faqs/; Romer 2016. 76. Nuclear power as the new green: Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015; Ausubel 2007; Brand 2009; Bryce 2014; Cravens 2007; Freed 2014; K. Caldeira et al., “Top Climate Change Scientists’ Letter to Policy Influencers,” CNN, Nov. 3, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html; M.

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

Congress in the late 1980s, says he’s 99 per cent sure, but that’s still not 100 per cent, so why should we pay more by way of a carbon tax to address a problem that may not exist? True, a report prepared by M.K. Jaccard and Associates for the David Suzuki Foundation, titled “Pricing Carbon: Saving Green,” argued persuasively that a carbon tax is an effective tool for bringing emissions down, and governments, scientists, and economists around the world agree—but what if they’re wrong? Never mind that countries such as Sweden, which implemented a carbon tax in 1991, have proven that such measures are effective and that they actually produce economic benefits; why should we change if we don’t have to?

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If the majority of the world’s climate scientists are right and we fail to act, we face ecological, social, and economic catastrophe on a scale beyond anything we can imagine. Consider also that carbon taxes are often tax shifts. The money collected from individuals, businesses, and industry can be returned in the form of cuts to personal and business taxes. Often, the increases in gas prices with a carbon tax are minuscule compared with market increases, and the tax can help us move away from continued reliance on increasingly scarce and costly fossil fuels. Whether it’s called a tax shift, a revenue-neutral tax, or a new tax, it will get people worked up.

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The ludicrous aspect is that while resisting even a small tax hike, these groups are silent about the enormous taxpayer subsidies to fossil-fuel and related industries that make windfall profits. Together with measures such as a cap-and-trade program, a carbon tax can use money from industries that are not energy efficient to create economic benefits and incentives for those that are wiser in their energy use. The income generated by a carbon tax can be used to cut income taxes, build more public transit, upgrade trains, develop renewable-energy sources, and retrofit homes and buildings with energy-efficient technology. For more than twenty years, scientists have warned of the need for urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

It could also raise revenues for governments that could be used to offset the harmful macroeconomic effects – reduced employment and investment – of higher energy prices, according to a very readable December 2019 article for the IMF journal Finance & Development, which calculates that a $35 per tonne tax on carbon dioxide emissions in 2030, for example, would typically increase prices for coal, electricity and gasoline by about 100, 25 and 10 per cent respectively. A $35 tax would not be enough to keep emissions below 2 per cent, though – for that, the IMF paper says that a global average of $75 a tonne would be needed.

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An analysis by the consultancy Oliver Wyman conducted before the pandemic-related oil price crash warned that oil and gas companies would be two to three times more likely to default on their debt if even only a $50 a tonne carbon tax were introduced. The report, published in February 2020, said that at that time, not one single bank had devised a satisfactory strategy of measuring climate change risk in corporate debt. Many professional investors believe that more regulation via a carbon tax will start to make it easier to assess the climate risk of portfolios. ‘Far too few people in the investment industry have focused on really trying to understand the question of what impact carbon prices have on the value of different investments,’ says Andy Howard, global head of sustainable investment at Schroders.

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Morgan boss Jamie Dimon – who has come under pressure from environmentalists concerned about his bank’s financing of oil and gas companies – told the Financial Times it would ‘generate significant emission reductions, promote innovation and protect Americans from rising costs’. The Climate Leadership Council, a US-focused policy institute founded in 2017 to promote the idea of a carbon tax, set out a roadmap for such a tax in February 2020, arguing that if followed, it could cut US emissions in half by 2035. Some of the world’s largest polluters, including BP and ExxonMobil, are part of the council, along with J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The carbon pricing discussions were set to be revived at the 26th UN climate summit, COP26, which was due to be held in Glasgow in 2020 and was delayed to the following year thanks to the pandemic.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

America’s regressive tax system—where those at the top pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than those who are less well-off—is not only unfair but also weakens the macro economy, destroying jobs. So too for the myriad of loopholes, tax dodges used by the super-rich: they not only increase inequality, but also distort and weaken the economy. Some taxes prove beneficial to the economy—some can even stimulate the economy. Imposing a tax on carbon emissions would encourage firms to make investments in emission-reducing technologies; firms would have to retrofit themselves to reflect the end of the massive carbon subsidy that they have, in effect, been receiving.27 And the economy would receive a triple benefit: a better environment, with revenues that could be used to address some of the country’s long-term needs, and increasing demand leading to more jobs and higher growth.28 Even when there are fiscal constraints arising from worries about the deficit and the national debt, appropriately designed fiscal policy can be used to stimulate the economy.

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Now, a large fraction of savings goes into land rather than into productive assets (investments in research, plants, and equipment). Taxing the capital gains on land and rents would encourage more savings to be directed toward productive capital.55 There are other taxes that can simultaneously increase economic performance and raise revenue. For instance, a tax on carbon emissions reminds households and firms that we must reduce our carbon emissions.56 In the absence of such taxes, individuals don’t take into account the social cost of their carbon-emitting activities. Such taxes would also incentivize investments and innovation that reduce carbon emissions, and could play a central role in achieving important goals set forth in international meetings in Paris (2015) and Copenhagen (2009) limiting global warming.57 Without such a tax, it will be hard for these goals to be reached; and the costs of not reaching them are enormous—already in 2017 the world experienced a record number of losses from weather-related natural disasters, including a $245 billion loss resulting from hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, a manifestation of the predicted increase in weather variability associated with global warming.58 The increase in sea level will also have enormous costs on coastal states; much of Florida and Louisiana will be under water or suffer from much more frequent tidal flooding.

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Some have advocated a carbon tax, along the lines of the recommendation by the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices, which I cochaired with leading British economist Lord Nicholas Stern, but suggested that the revenues be returned to taxpayers. The advocates of such a policy ignore our important warning about the scope of new investment, including public sector investment, that greening the economy requires. (We had been tasked by a global business-government consortium headed by, at the time, France’s environmental minister Ségolène Royal and a leading Dutch businessman, to ascertain the carbon tax that would be required to achieve the goal of limiting global warming to the 1.5°C to 2°C increase set in the international agreements of Paris and Copenhagen.

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future by Chris Goodall

barriers to entry, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land tenure, load shedding, New Urbanism, oil shock, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, statistical model, undersea cable

With a few exceptions, governments are avoiding dealing with the obvious need to substantially improve older buildings. Nevertheless, there is reason for optimism. Unlike some of the technological innovations in this book, many domestic energy-efficiency measures make financial sense even in the short term. We don’t need further technological improvements or a high tax on carbon emissions. For example, at today’s energy prices, it is often sensible for the homeowner to very significantly improve the insulation standards of the home, especially in the countries where winter temperatures are very low. International experience, particularly in Germany, is that a wide-ranging program of education, encouragement, subsidy, and cheap loans can successfully push landlords and homeowners into taking action.

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So the Algerian plant is providing a useful prototype of how we can make CSP an integral part of the power grid. Algeria alone is talking about installing 6 gigawatts of CSP capacity, equivalent to three very large coal-fired power stations. Most assessments of CSP agree that the costs per kilowatt-hour are likely to decline to below the figures for fossil fuel plants. A substantial carbon tax on all fossil fuel power stations will likely improve the position further over the next few years. But will concentrated solar power beat nuclear electricity on price? Optimistic forecasts see nuclear plants delivering power at 3.5 or 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. But these figures assume that the construction of nuclear plants can be done to the cost and timetable set out by the contractors.

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Although the precise cost is not yet known, it is likely to work out at more than $35 for each ton of carbon dioxide, adding over 3 cents to the cost of generating a kilowatt-hour of electricity, increasing coal generation costs by 40 to 50 percent. Without a substantial and guaranteed financial incentive, no power station owner will likely voluntarily move to CCS . Forward-looking coal-fired power station operators are almost pleading with governments to ensure high carbon taxes in order to create such an incentive. Make carbon emissions costly enough, and profit-maximizing power stations will have an incentive to install capture equipment rather than pay for their carbon dioxide pollution. “I am a carboholic,” wrote David Crane in the Washington Post. Crane is the head of NRG , a U.S. electricity generator with a portfolio of coal-fired stations.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Of course, this is just one of many potential scenarios for raising the funds necessary to deploy the federal government’s contribution to a Green New Deal scale-up over the next two decades. There are many other possible combinations that could be brought to bear. For example, a small percentage of the proposed universal carbon tax revenue could be used to help finance both the federal and the state governments’ contributions to the Green New Deal rollout, with the rest of the revenue being distributed to American families so that the burden of carbon taxes remains in the hands of the fossil fuel industry. But the point is this. All of these numbers are readily actionable without significant compromise to the vast wealth of the super-rich, Pentagon preparedness, and the financial well-being of millions of American families.

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See also Google American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) infrastructure report card apartheid divestment movement Apple apprenticeships, green Arias Cañete, Miguel artificial intelligence (AI) Ashton, Kevin AT&T autonomous (self-driving) electric vehicles AXA Balsillie, Jim Bank of America Bank of England Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) Barber, Randy Barbier, Edward Bernhard, Wolfgang Bernstein Research Big Data Bilicic, George bio-based materials biosphere consciousness Blair, Tony blockchain technology Bloomberg, Michael Bond, Kingsmill Booker, Cory Boston Tea Party Bowser, Muriel Brattle Group Brown, Jerry Buffett, Warren building sector decoupling from fossil fuel industry nodal IoT buildings retrofits Bulc, Violeta Burger King Burns, Larry Burrow, Sharan Buttigieg, Pete Byrd, Harry Caldecott, Ben Canada and liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline and natural gas Toronto waterfront smart city project capital market capital pension capital public capital social capital capitalism and near-zero marginal costs and pension capital pension fund divest/invest campaign and Sharing Economy social capitalism and socially responsible investment (SRI) carbon bubble carbon capture and storage and agriculture sector limitations of process of carbon tax Carbon Tracker Initiative Carney, Mark Castro, Julián Cavoukian, Ann Changing Wealth of Nations 2018: Building a Sustainable Future, The (World Bank report) China. See People’s Republic of China Cisco Citigroup Claassen, Utz climate change and freshwater and history of the Green New Deal and peer assembly governance and poverty and public health and stranded assets and wealth See also global warming; greenhouse gas emissions climate change policy and leadership climate-neutral 2050 game plan (European Union) Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Paris Agreement on Climate Change 20–20–20 mandate (European Union) Climate Corps climate strike (March 15, 2019) Clinton, Bill coal and carbon capture and storage as centralized source of energy costs of and First Industrial Revolution and Germany and Hauts-de-France (Green New Deal roadmap) and pension capital debate (1946) and railroads and South Korea and stranded assets and US public land Cohn-Bendit, Daniel cold war Commonwealth Edison Communication Internet Condorcet, Nicolas, Marquis de ConocoPhillips Conservation Corps Consoli, Angelo Cook, Tim Copenhagen Climate Summit Council of the European Union German presidency of Slovakian presidency of CPS Energy creative destruction Currie, Helen cyber war and cyber-attacks Daimler Trucks & Buses Data for Progress Davos (World Economic Forum) DC Infrastructure Academy De Blasio, Bill Di Lorenzo, Julie digital natives digital rights DowDuPont Inc.

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Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary and president emeritus of Harvard University, spoke for the group, saying, “The gravity of the climate change problem concentrates minds and leads people to put aside differences. People who agree on little seem to agree on this. And that’s striking.”13 The signers said that the proposed carbon tax would send “a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future” and “promote economic growth.” They recommended that the tax “should increase every year until emissions reductions goals are met and be revenue neutral to avoid debates over the size of the government,” because “a consistently rising carbon price will encourage technological innovation and large-scale infrastructure development and accelerate the shift to low and zero carbon goods and services.”

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

A tax avoids the messy and contentious process of allocating allowances to countries internationally and among companies domestically. For example, nations could negotiate a much more transparent treaty than the Kyoto Protocol and establish a system of globally harmonized domestic carbon taxes. Harmonized taxes offer relative price stability, and taxes on carbon emissions can be raised gradually and predictably over time so that governments, industries, and consumers can all see what the price of carbon-based fuels will be over future decades and can make investment and purchase decisions accordingly. Nordhaus further argues that carbon markets are “much more susceptible to corruption” than are tax schemes.

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The extra cost would get passed downstream to all subsequent consumers. Thus carbon taxes would encourage conservation and low-carbon energy innovation. Since the tax is levied on how much carbon a fuel contains, it would make fuels like coal less attractive compared with low-carbon fuels like natural gas or even renewable energy like solar and wind power. Ideally, carbon tax revenues would be used to cut domestic taxes such as the payroll tax or the individual income tax, thus offsetting some of the pain of higher energy prices. Internationally, one of the big advantages of a carbon tax is that it avoids the baseline quandary that bedevils carbon markets.

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And British and German consumers paid more for their electricity on top of that. One way to correct the most egregious flaws in current cap-and-trade schemes would be to adopt cap-and-auction instead. Auctioning permits is very much like imposing a carbon tax. In this case, the government sets an overall emissions limit and emitters have to buy allowances from the government every year. The chief difference between a cap-and-auction scheme and a carbon tax is that the price of the allowances will vary from year to year. Once again, this variability in permit prices introduces uncertainty in the infrastructure planning of firms. A 2011 report by the Swiss bank UBS concluded that the Emissions Trading Scheme will cost European consumers $277 billion for “almost zero impact.”

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

This argument, often described as the tragedy of the commons, implies that people will have too many children, and it has long been a key plank of the argument for population control. There are various ways around the tragedy of the commons. Economists like to use prices to solve such problems, and it will sometimes be possible to use a tax to make people pay attention to a social cost that they would otherwise ignore. A classic example is a global tax on carbon, which would do much to combat global warming. But that strategy also illustrates the problem, which is that setting such a tax would require a degree of political agreement that is hard to achieve. Local problems—access to firewood, the use of the commons, who gets water rights—can be dealt with by local political agreement.

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., 179–80, 185, 188 Bushell, Roger, 2 Canada, lung cancer mortality rates in, 134–35, 134f cancer: breast, 139, 140, 141; colorectal, 140, 141; lung, 66, 131, 134–35, 134f; mortality from, 134–35, 134f, 140–41; prostate, 140, 141; screening tests for, 141–42; treatment of, 141 Cape Verde, foreign aid received by, 277 carbon taxes, 242 Card, David, 197 cardiovascular disease: mortality from, 31, 111, 136–37, 136f, 139–40, 141; smoking and, 131, 137; treatment of, 130, 137–40, 148; in women, 139 Carter Center, 105 Census Bureau, U.S., 179–80, 185, 188 censuses, 15–16, 72 Center for Global Development (CGD), 316 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 66 CGD.

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., 234 South Africa: foreign aid received by, 296; HIV/AIDS in, 40; inequality in, 34–35, 40 Stevenson, Betsey, 50 Stone, Richard, 229 Suez Canal, 297 Summers, Robert, 222 Sweden: life evaluation scores in, 48; life expectancies in, 67–68, 70; mortality rates in, 68–70, 68f, 72; smallpox in, 84; vital registration system of, 72 Szreter, Simon, 97 taxes: carbon, 242; in democracies, 295; income, 199–200, 203, 204–5, 212; progressive, 199–200, 261 Taya, Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed, 301 technical assistance, 278, 321–22 technological change: in medicine, 99; skill-biased, 191–93; wages and, 194–95; wellbeing increased by, 327–28 Terry, Luther, 131–32 Thomas, Keith, 55 Tinbergen, Jan, 191 tobacco, 7, 66, 131–35, 137, 152 Togo, 48, 296 Tonga, 277, 278 trachoma, 98–99, 103 trade, 313, 322, 323.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

In June 2016, however, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a resolution to condemn such a tax. Here’s how Bloomberg explained it: “The House strategy, pushed by Majority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, and backed by Koch Industries Inc., used the symbolic measure to lock in votes against a tax on carbon dioxide emissions blamed for climate change. The tactic was designed to weaken the ability of a future president and Congress to levy [a carbon tax] to help pay for a broad overhaul of the US tax code, said Republican strategist Mike McKenna.” Sears was also right about Exxon going public with its climate change studies. The company’s scientists had published peer-reviewed papers and spoken at conferences about the effect a warming planet would have on the industry and humanity.

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At a conference in May 2013, he was asked if he had a message for the nation’s oil companies. Musk replied that it’s hard to ask oil companies to act against their best interests. The incentive structure of the prevailing system, he noted, applied no penalty to dumping carbon dioxide into the oceans and atmosphere. He said he was in favor of a carbon tax that would encourage better behavior, just as cigarettes and alcohol are heavily taxed because of their bad health effects. A couple of minutes later, after a digression about the necessity of taxes, Musk did raise one complaint. “I guess where I have an issue with the oil and gas guys is where they sometimes engage in nefarious tactics,” he said, “or things that are somewhat insidious, like funding academic studies that people can then point to as though they have some credibility, and it’s some prominent professor somewhere—but that person has been paid off by the oil industry to write that study.”

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The Kochs have an extensive history of using their money and power to influence politics and government. They are strong opponents of government regulation and subsidies, particularly as they pertain to environmental policy. They have also demonstrated an ability to obstruct regulation that would address climate change even through market-based means, such as a carbon tax. Looking at Koch Industries’ businesses and past troubles with the regulatory sector, it’s not hard to see why the brothers—each worth about $50 billion and among the top ten richest people in the world—might object to government action on carbon emissions and other pollution. For example, the Kochs own more acres of Canada’s tar sands than any other non-Canadian company, including Exxon, Chevron, and Conoco.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

What does this have to do with climate change? Every Economics 101 student is taught that the efficient way to deal with pollution is to put a price on it, say with a carbon tax. And some of my colleagues seem fixated on a purist approach: we should have a carbon tax and only a carbon tax. Meanwhile, some progressives have been calling for a so-called Green New Deal, which would mix climate policy with other objectives, and would rely heavily on other policies besides a carbon tax. In the last article here I argue that a Christmas tree approach to climate policy—lots of things for various interested parties—would in fact be O.K.

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Because it encourages people to reduce their carbon footprint in all possible ways, from using renewable energy, to conservation, to shifting consumption away from energy-intensive products. A carbon tax is, however, a tax—which will upset the people who have to pay it. Yes, the revenue from a carbon tax could be used to cut other taxes, but convincing enough people that they will be better off overall would be a very hard sell. And claims that a carbon tax high enough to make a meaningful difference would attract significant bipartisan support are a fantasy at best, a fossil-fuel-industry ploy to avoid major action at worst.

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It’s not entirely clear, which is what makes it a good slogan: it could mean a number of good things. But the main thrust, as I understand it, is that we should make a big move to tackle climate change, and that this move should accentuate the positive, not the negative. In particular, it should emphasize investments and subsidies, not carbon taxes. But wait, shouldn’t we be considering a carbon tax? In principle, yes. As any card-carrying economist can tell you, there are big advantages to discouraging pollution by putting a price on emissions, which you can do either by imposing a tax or by creating a cap-and-trade system in which people buy and sell emission permits.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

This seems like a radical proposal indeed, but given the spread of multinational corporations and offshore profits, can multinational taxation be far away? Other models might include a value-added tax (VAT), a luxury tax, or, better yet, a carbon tax. The more you consume, the more you pay. It would be hard for either companies or individuals to hide from a global carbon tax, particularly if the tax was collected at the point where the carbon was mined or drilled rather than at the point of use. Using the revenues from a global carbon tax to protect and reinvest in the environment, as well as provide for national basic incomes, could compensate for damage to the environment we all share.

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Many factors play into this payback, including local weather, the cost of electricity, various federal and state tax incentives, local utility provider rebates, regulations, and policies.29 So, given a period of five to fifteen years, the cost of conversion from fossil fuel energy to solar energy is basically free. This means that we, citizens of the world, are also getting these reductions in CO2 for free. Which leads me to my favorite platform for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: a carbon tax. Each of our many billions of consumption decisions, trillions of dollars’ worth, could be multipurposed to include investment in a low-carbon world. In a 2012 study, analysts determined that 60 percent of the urban areas we will need by 2030 have yet to be built.30 If we build that infrastructure with the real cost of emissions taken into account, we address the problem of emissions in buildings and transport infrastructures for as long as they stand.

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But I can’t close this chapter on how Peers Inc structures are the response of choice without mentioning a price on carbon, again. I closed the last chapter with it. A price on carbon is the ultimate, largest, and most far-reaching platform for participation we could develop. Excess capacity resides in the fact we are going to buy goods and services and houses and infrastructure anyway; adding a carbon tax multipurposes the value of that spending, and the carbon price can help inform our choices. It does the platform’s role: A price on carbon organizes the efforts of all the stakeholders and every purchaser, and it simplifies our decision making by incorporating it directly into the price. This is an action that governments alone can do (the Inc), sticking to what they do best.

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

That’s no way to curb our oil appetite.” By using less gas, the country would spend $645 billion less at the pump from 2017 to 2030, assuming gas costs $3.50 a gallon, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Once we put in place steadily rising efficiency standards across the nation, a price signal—a tax on carbon and/or an increase in the federal gasoline tax—would reinforce them. People would have even greater incentives to look for more efficient homes, cars, and appliances, which the market would have made available thanks to the performance standards. “Then you have this huge market signal pulling you where the government is pushing you,” said Harvey.

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Adopting new technologies and reallocating resources in response to changing conditions is precisely what America needs to do. The fossil fuel lobby (aka Big Oil and Big Coal) has consistently opposed the clean-energy policies needed to respond to the challenges of climate change and America’s oil addiction. The most important such policy is the imposition of a higher price on carbon-based fuels—through a tax on carbon—so that non-carbon sources of energy can become commercially competitive with them. This would hasten the transition from fossil fuels to clean-power technologies and, by weakening our oilexporting adversaries, would make America stronger and more secure internationally. But the oil, coal, and natural gas industries, as well as the U.S.

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A significant majority of Democratic senators were ready to pass such legislation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, in President Obama’s first two years, but even though the Democrats had a sixty-vote majority, they could only muster from fifty to fifty-two votes, because oil-state and coal-state Democrats could not be brought on board. Surely, however, they could have found ten Republicans who would support such legislation or offer their own simpler alternative to cap and trade, such as a carbon tax, could they not? After all, as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Tom in an interview in February 2007, when this legislation was being debated, it was vital for the country and his party to help produce some clean-energy legislation. “I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are thirty or younger this climate issue is not a debate,” said Graham.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Shultz said a carbon tax “would achieve substantially greater reduction of greenhouse gas emissions” than any proposed regulation, while “being best for economic growth, which explains why prominent companies are backing the idea.” Such a proposal coming from elder statesmen would, under forty-four of America’s forty-five presidents, have been received with deep seriousness. Trump was too busy playing golf to evince interest in eminently sensible public policy. But Trump and his well-dressed lightweights will run their course: then, a carbon tax should be a priority. Not only would a carbon tax discourage something society does not want (pollution) rather than something society needs (labor and capital), but would do so without adding yet another layer of government.

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a coalition of conservative establishment figures: James Baker et al., “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends” (Washington, DC: Climate Leadership Council, 2017). Jerry Taylor, head of the libertarian Niskanen Center… switched to supporting carbon taxes: Jerry Taylor, “The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax” (Washington, DC: Niskanen Center, 2015). as Amy Harder has written: Amy Harder, “Exxon Touts Carbon Tax to Oil Industry,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2016. Chapter 10 In 1990, some 67 percent of Chinese citizens lived: Global Count of the Extreme Poor: Data Issues, Methodology and Initial Results: (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015).

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A bill titled the Other Districts Budget Cuts Act would do well in today’s House of Representatives. “Tax” is not a hugely popular term in any democracy. Many modern political leaders won’t say the word: the Western political class employs euphemisms such as “resources” and “revenue” to avoid speaking of the policy that dare not say its name. But a tax on carbon emissions could be just what the doctor ordered to create a profit incentive for inventions and innovations that constrain greenhouse gases. Today the United States and European Union assess duties on labor, capital, and commerce, through income and corporate taxes, sales and excise taxes, and value-added taxes.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

A value-added tax could easily raise a trillion dollars. A well-designed carbon tax would raise about $100 billion a year. Moreover, a wealth tax, such as a hefty levy on estates over $3 million, could raise hundreds of billions. That opens the door to dividend policies like Alaska’s. A panel of Republican statesmen—among them former secretaries of state James Baker and George Shultz, as well as former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson—have proposed sending each and every citizen a quarterly Social Security payout funded with a tax on carbon. And the economist James K. Boyce and writer Peter Barnes have found that the country could grant $200 a month to everyone with levies on carbon, financial transactions, and energy extraction.

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Summers, “Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2012. financial transactions tax: Josh Bivens and Hunter Blair, “A Financial Transaction Tax Would Help Ensure Wall Street Works for Main Street” (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, July 28, 2016). well-designed carbon tax: William G. Gale, Samuel Brown, and Fernando Saltiel, “Carbon Taxes as Part of the Fiscal Solution” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, Mar. 12, 2013). James Baker and George Shultz: James A. Baker III, Martin Feldstein, Ted Halstead, N. Gregory Mankiw, Henry M. Paulson Jr., George P. Shultz, Thomas Stephenson, and Rob Walton, “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends: How a New Climate Strategy Can Strengthen Our Economy, Reduce Regulation, Help Working-Class Americans, Shrink Government & Promote National Security” (Washington, DC: Climate Leadership Council, Feb. 2017).

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Such a program would cost about $200 billion a year, almost exactly the same amount as spending on the EITC, Supplemental Security Income, housing aid, food stamps, welfare, and the school-lunch program. A somewhat more generous program would cost an estimated $400 billion a year, easy to finance with a carbon tax, a wealth tax, or a financial transactions tax. That said, the conversation about how to create and build and implement sometimes feels stuck in the fine print. A UBI is a lesson and an ideal, not just an economic policy. We can’t just talk about how to construct a UBI; we need to talk about how to make what we already have work better, be fairer, be less paternalistic, and support more people.

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

Nevertheless, according to an interview in Nature magazine, David Keith estimated the costs of CO2 capture in commercial plants could be as low as $100–200 a tonne. But why would anyone ever decide to pay that amount of money? The reason most often proposed is that if the world ever decides to impose a tax on carbon, CO2 capture would qualify as offsetting, or counterbalancing, other sources of emissions. So a power plant, for example, could reduce its carbon tax by drawing in CO2 from the air to counterbalance the emissions from burning fossil fuels. However, it seems unlikely that the tax would ever be high enough to make it worthwhile to reduce a company’s net liabilities. For my money, the reason why air capture of CO2 will eventually take off is that the world will eventually find it cheaper to make liquid fuels from CO2 than to use oil.

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The idea is that when electricity is cheap, such as at night or at times of seasonal surplus, the carbon dioxide from cement plants could be piped through the Electrochaea reactor for conversion to methane. Doris thought this might mean that the Electrochaea system would be used about 60 per cent of the time at most of the sites they are looking to sell to. But to make financial sense, she commented, this would probably require a full-scale carbon tax, something the world is only hesitantly moving towards. When this happens, the owners of an Electrochaea plant would be paid to absorb CO2, because this delivers a valuable global benefit. Doris Hafenbradl with the Electrochaea reactor, which in April 2016 produced its first batch of methane.

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There are many ‘ifs’ here, but if direct CO2 capture becomes very cheap and the world could manufacture solar fuels based, for example, on the Joule Unlimited technology, the inventions of Berkeley’s Professor Yang or Electrochaea’s methane-producing bugs, then it is perfectly possible that direct capture of CO2 would become financially viable, even without a carbon tax. This would be helped considerably if the carbon capture from the air was done using very low cost electricity at times of grid surplus. Running through this book is a consistent theme: that the conventional view of renewable energy as inherently more expensive than fossil fuels is mistaken. Energy from the sun is becoming cheaper than other sources and in a couple of decades’ time it will be much cheaper still.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

It would be a stable source of tax revenue—since national income does not vary much from one year to the other—which is important to fund the core, long-run missions of the social state. Occasionally it’s argued that a carbon tax could provide some of the funding for health or childcare, but that’s a mistake. Carbon taxation is, of course, necessary to fight climate change. But its goal should be only this: fight climate change. It should not aim at collecting revenue in the medium run, but instead aim at eradicating future carbon emissions. A successful carbon tax should eventually yield zero revenue. If the national income tax is such a great idea, why hasn’t it been proposed and implemented before?

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But tomorrow’s greatest innovations aren’t likely to come from the heirs of successful founders, nor from companies that for years have topped the Fortune 500 ranking. This is the theoretical case for going beyond Laffer. Extreme wealth, like carbon emissions, imposes a negative externality on the rest of us. The point of taxing carbon is not to raise revenue but to reduce carbon emissions. The same goes for high tax rates on the very highest incomes: They are not aimed at funding government programs in the long run. They are aimed at reducing the income of the ultra-wealthy. They prevent or impede the various forms of rent extraction associated with extreme and entrenched wealth and with the reality of the market economy in unequal societies.5 What’s the point of negotiating a $20-million salary, of earning millions by creating zero-sum financial products, of spiking the price of patented drugs, when out of any extra dollar earned, 90 cents will go the IRS?

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This insight is essential for understanding the history of taxation, from the tax revolts of the Middle Ages to the 2018 “yellow vests” movement in France. It will likely remain relevant in the future.1 Take environmental taxes. Putting a price on carbon is critical to combat climate change, but since spending on fuel and other carbon-intensive goods absorbs a greater share of income for the poor than for the rich, carbon taxes are typically regressive. To offset this pain, fighting climate change will require additional progressive taxes. Governments that forget this basic truth will learn it the hard way. Or take health care. In the United States, two of the most comprehensive efforts to introduce universal health insurance—the Clinton proposal of 1993, and the Vermont single-payer health care project of 2014—failed not for lack of general support, but largely because there was no palatable, fair funding solution.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

I believe that after a considerable debate on these alternatives, the world will ultimately agree to phase in a set of industrial standards (for power, automobiles, cement, steel, and other key sectors) augmented by a gradually rising tax on carbon emissions, a subsidy for sequestration, and perhaps some limited use of a tradable permit system. It is worth noting that revenues from a carbon tax or from auctioning carbon permits could be used to finance public goods or perhaps to offset other distortionary taxes. LIVING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE Climate change is already upon us, and it will get worse. The planet will continue to warm even without any further emissions, and further emissions are certainly on the way.

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Most directly, the world (or individual nations) might agree to industry standards, for example, that every power plant built after a target date must emit no more than a specified level of CO2 per KWh of electricity produced. The plant would be free to select a nonfossil fuel energy supply (for example, hydro, wind, solar, or nuclear) or to use a CCS approach. Mileage standards could be imposed on automobiles in the same manner. An alternative would be to tax carbon dioxide emissions and to subsidize any CCS activities. Such a tax could be easily collected by taxing the underlying carbon-based fuel and then offering a subsidy per ton of CO2 that is sequestered. A certification process would be needed to verify the sequestration. Yet another mechanism, as we’ve discussed, would be a tradable permit system.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Alexander Krenek and Margit Schratzenstaller, “Sustainability-Oriented EU Taxes: A Carbon-Based Flight Ticket Tax,” Journal for a Progressive Economy, no. 8 (2016): 44–49. 29. The yellow-vests movement in France has shown that in designing carbon taxes, governments will need to be sensitive to distributional concerns even if overall a carbon tax is progressive, for instance because transportation constitutes a much higher proportion of consumption for poor people compared to the rich. The high prices levied on gasoline imply that the carbon tax already levied is high; focusing on increasing the carbon tax in other areas might not have had the same political backlash. See Corbett Grainger and Charles Kolstad, “Who Pays a Price on Carbon?

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A good tax can increase economic efficiency and create a more shared prosperity; a bad tax can distort incentives and increase inequality. A poll tax—levied on anyone who wishes to vote—distorts democracy because only people with enough money can participate in the electoral process. A tax on inheritances can help prevent the creation and maintenance of an inherited plutocracy. A tax on savings or work may discourage both. A tax on carbon emissions may help save the planet by discouraging pollution. The sheer magnitude of taxation in Europe, at an EU average tax ratio of over 35 percent of GDP, underscores the importance of the right tax framework. As economists have debated the effectiveness of various taxes, several principles have emerged.

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In the EU, the share of environmental taxes in overall tax revenues has been stagnating since the mid-1990s, when it went down in the 15 countries that joined the EU before 2004.26 Environmental charges for carbon emissions, for instance, is an efficient way to discourage carbon emissions. Indeed, the recent Stiglitz-Stern Report27 highlights the important role a moderate carbon tax (in the range of €60 to €100 per ton) can play in reaching the goals set in the Copenhagen and Paris agreements, to not allow an increase in temperature of more than 2 degrees Celsius. There are many other environmental taxes that can or should be imposed, such as a carbon-based plane ticket tax,28 or a tax on jet fuel.29 Harmonization of environmental taxes is as or more important than the harmonization of corporation taxes discussed earlier.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Rather, an ideal policy portfolio for smartly promoting clean energy in the United States would direct a substantial fraction of the proceeds from a nationwide carbon tax to boost funding for technological innovation. This policy would be a grand bargain that would exchange ineffective mandates and clean-energy subsidies with a single carbon tax. (Importantly, environmental regulations, such as pollution controls on coal power plants—which are justified by health concerns—should remain.) This new approach could still be politically palatable, with substantial funds left over to compensate those who might be hardest hit by a carbon tax. It is crucial that support for energy innovation is prioritized in such a grand bargain.

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The goal of solar policy should be to encourage financial, technological, and systemic innovation that enables a sharply rising share of solar energy to decrease customer costs and carbon emissions at home, while providing an example of what works to the rest of the world. Today’s policies do not accomplish this. And even widely endorsed proposals to tax carbon emissions are not policy silver bullets; a carbon tax would need to be paired with support for new technologies to stimulate innovation most effectively. At present, the largest federal subsidy for solar power is the investment tax credit, worth 30 percent of the up-front cost of a solar installation. In 2015, the federal government extended this credit through 2020, at which point the tax credit steps down to 10 percent over the next two years.

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More recently, an all-star delegation of senior Republican statesmen paid a visit to the White House in 2017 to convince President Trump of the merit of a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Their plan would apply a price on carbon emissions across the U.S. economy, scrap the entire patchwork of clean energy deployment subsidies and mandates that drive conservatives crazy, and deliver a politically attractive tax break to working-class families.44 This solution would seem to be elegant and efficient, right? Probably not on its own. As the MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues argue, a carbon tax solves one important market failure but leaves another unaddressed. It corrects the market’s failure to put a value on the damage from carbon emissions, which levels the playing field between clean and dirty sources of energy.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He joined the boards of Ceres (which pushes companies to disclose emissions and other environmental risks), Climate Central, Resources for the Future, the Woodwell Climate Research Center, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Stanford Natural Capital Project. He also chaired the board of a Washington D.C. center-right think tank, the Niskanen Center, which advocates for a tax on carbon emissions. As Litterman was boning up on the nuts and bolts of climate-change economics, he realized the field had a big problem. No one had figured out how to price the risks posed by global warming. Those who’d tried had done an amazingly bad job of it, he believed. I know how to price risk, Litterman thought.

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The report, released in the midst of the 2020 presidential election, ongoing fear about the pandemic, and nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, attracted almost no attention. Litterman wasn’t surprised. But he hoped it would serve as a blueprint for future approaches to solving the problem. He also believed the fossil fuel giants on the CFTC committee were sincere when they said they wanted to help. Many were publicly calling for a carbon tax, although none condoned a tax remotely close to the $100 a ton recommended by the EZ model. “I think they’ve changed,” Litterman told me. “I actually do think they’re sincere. They see it coming, they want to be involved.” Senator Whitehouse, who’d chaired the Senate hearing to which Litterman had offered testimony in March, had his doubts.

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Even though the fossil fuel companies say they support pricing emissions, their lobbying organizations oppose it behind the scenes, the senator told Litterman. At least part of the truth was revealed in June 2021 when Greenpeace UK released a secret recording of an ExxonMobil lobbyist named Keith McCoy bragging about how the oil giant’s support for a carbon tax was “a great talking point”—but it would never happen. “Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans,” McCoy said. “And the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that.” CHAPTER 20 THE GAMBLE On January 27, 2021, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists said its Doomsday Clock stood at one hundred seconds to midnight—unmoved since the previous year.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Because self-interest features prominently in economic models, economists exhibit a bias toward incentive-based solutions to public problems. Consider climate change and the question of how to address carbon emissions. Public opinion varies greatly, but economists are virtually unanimous: they recommend either taxing carbon or implementing a close equivalent, a quota on carbon emissions with trading of emission allowances among producers.‡ In both cases the aim is to make it more expensive and hence less profitable for firms to use carbon. To economists, the policy is the correct one because it acts on the relevant margin.

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Firms fail to take into account the environmental effects of their decisions, so the right response is to force them to “internalize” the external costs by paying for carbon. This remedy does not sit well with many noneconomists. It appears to turn a moral responsibility—“thou shalt not despoil the environment”—into a cost-benefit calculus. Going further, some would say that a carbon tax or emission trading legitimizes pollution. The message to firms seems to be that emitting carbon and contributing to climate change is OK as long as you pay a fee. The Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel has been a vocal critic in recent years of what he thinks is economics’ harmful effects on public culture.

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But they would continue to regard this extension not in moral terms, but in terms of relevance and efficacy. For example, does the lesson of the Israeli day care speak also to carbon control? Is it realistic to think that power plants operate in a moral universe regarding the climate-change imperative that will be substantially affected by the imposition of a carbon tax? Are public education campaigns, consciousness raising, or moral exhortation likely to have a greater impact on carbon emissions? To economists, these are empirical and not moral questions. What about Sandel’s broader charge that markets breed “market values,” that they make us exchange things on markets that shouldn’t be?

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

There is a social cost associated with any activity that emits greenhouse gases, which those engaged in the activity do not pay. That is why, of course, they emit too much. The simple solution: make people pay for the full costs of what they do; that is, make them pay for their pollution. The way to do this is to have all the countries of the world impose a common tax on carbon emissions (that is, taxing the externality of emissions) or, equivalently, a tax on oil, coal, and gas at rates reflecting the emissions they generate when burned. Firms and households would respond to this tax by reducing usage, and thereby emissions. The tax would be set high enough to achieve a global reduction in emissions equivalent to that envisaged in the common targets approach of Kyoto.

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It makes far more sense to tax bad things, like pollution, rather than good things, like work and savings. I have delivered speeches around the world in the last year putting forth this argument and suggesting that it may be easier to agree on a set of common incentives and basic standards—with all countries agreeing, for instance, that they should impose similar taxes on carbon emissions—rather than an agreement on how much each country should reduce its emissions. This analysis has resonated with politicians and citizens alike in many parts of the world. As the recognition that something has to be done about global warming has grown, so too have the fears about the competitive advantage that firms in countries, like the United States, that refuse to do anything about it will have over firms in countries, like those in Europe, that have made commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

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Each country would keep the revenue it receives from the tax, rather than having to give the money to another country. As a result, the costs of pollution reduction are relatively small. In fact, the country as a whole might be better off; it can use the revenue from the carbon tax to reduce other taxes, such as those on savings, investment, or work. These lower taxes would stimulate the economy, with benefits far greater than the cost of the carbon tax. This is consistent with a general economic principle: it is better to tax things that are bad (like pollution) than things that are good (like savings or work).23 Of course, the energy industries in almost every country will not like this.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

Entrepreneurs, we are assured, will find new green technologies that will move us away from fossil fuel dependence without government intervention. But in many cases, these innovations involve high-tech green solutions that are only accessible to the rich. At the same time, truly global solutions are rejected, even when, as in the case of taxing carbon, they are ostensibly “market” solutions. The initiatives that excite the eco-capitalists are, instead, fanciful projects of “geoengineering” that attempt to manipulate the climate, despite the uncertain efficacy and unknown side effects of such procedures. As with the Koch brothers and their denialist ilk, the eco-capitalists are concerned primarily with preserving the prerogatives and lifestyles of the elite, even if they put a more environmentalist veneer on this agenda.

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Indeed, it is the very visibility of the planners that makes projects like this controversial among those who take their right to free parking for granted and who oppose policies like congestion pricing that would mitigate traffic by charging drivers for entering busy areas. This is also part of what makes climate policies such as a carbon tax vulnerable to right-wing attack: whatever its “market-based” costume, everyone knows that the policy begins with government lawmakers and bureaucrats. The real failing of LA Express Park and all systems like it is that they exist within a dramatically unequal capitalist society. In such a society, $6 for a parking space means less to a rich person than to a poor one, and so the system is inherently unequal.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Most people are counting on technology to pull off that trick. Even non-Cornucopian economists, who tend to see technological change more as a tortoise than a hare, are getting upbeat about clean energy. The new conventional view is that climate change can be solved by innovative technologies and market incentives such as a price for (or tax on) carbon. There’s palpable excitement about plug-in hybrids, smart grids and smart homes, renewable energy, and reflective roofs, as well as a significant government role for turning these ideas into realities. There’s reason for optimism, and not just on energy. The last few decades have witnessed enormous progress in the first stage of a sustainability revolution employing ideas such as zero waste, eco-efficiency, and biomimicry (the practice of applying nature’s own parsimonious and evolutionary wonders to manufacturing and design).

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And with soaring demand, we’ve had soaring emissions. Carbon dioxide from these two sectors has risen 40 percent, twice the rate of the larger economy. When the goal is emissions reduction, there are ways to circum-vent rebound effects. Keeping the price of energy high is key. But even this isn’t a panacea. If there’s a tax on carbon, and those tax receipts are spent, they too create demand for products and, by extension, for more emissions. Even if we manage to shift out of fossil fuels altogether, so that energy use does not create greenhouse gases, the economic boost from these new technologies will spur demand for natural resources of all sorts.

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What may be most surprising is the validation of the point I made above: income per head can improve without expansion of the overall size of the economy, through higher investment. This in turn raises productivity and well-being. It’s how efficiently we produce, not how much we produce, that determines how well off we are. Victor also worked through scenarios for taxing carbon, and showed that emissions can fall even as the economy produces rising GDP per person, declining unemployment and poverty, and a reduction in government debt. Victor’s model doesn’t incorporate a shift out of polluting energy and our industrialized food system. If it did, the results would be even stronger, because nature-saving technologies and patterns of consumption open up additional possibilities for achieving well-being without fast growth.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

I’ve read Matt Miller’s The Two Percent Solution, Bill Clinton’s Back to Work, and Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum’s That Used to Be Us, and suggest you do the same. I heartily endorse their calls to get America’s fiscal house in order, have the wealthy pay higher taxes, simplify the tax code, impose a tax on carbon emissions, create financing mechanisms such as an infrastructure bank to improve infrastructure, support alternative energy, invest in and reform public education, and make health care more efficient and affordable. Their proposals are eminently reasonable, technocratic, and logical—and will, of course, never happen, thanks to our constipated political system and the general unwillingness of the current Republican Party to engage in large-scale, forward-looking legislation that doesn’t involve massive tax cuts for the rich.

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London’s traffic-battling congestion-pricing scheme, under which motorists pay for the privilege of driving into central London, was rejected in New York, where such a plan could do wonders. Germany’s passive-solar homes, which maintain constant temperatures without using heat or air-conditioning; Scandinavia’s aggressive gas and carbon taxes, which encourage fuel efficiency and the development of alternative energy—the bien pensant view all of these small-living initiatives as necessary to avoid economic erosion. All are alien to, and politically impossible in, America’s consume-at-all-costs society. But the notion that Americans simply can’t do better, that they can’t do more with less, is a myth.

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Driving a Hummer fifty miles to Walmart from an exurban 4,200-square-foot McMansion, which costs a ton to heat, didn’t make much sense in the first place; it made even less sense in 2009 and 2010, with unemployment high and gas and heating oil at $4 per gallon. The addiction to foreign oil, and our inability to quickly remake the systems that rely on it, contribute to the sense of helplessness in the face of decline. And yet the American economy has shown a significant capacity to do more with less, even in the absence of a carbon tax or other government mandates. All we have to do is try a little. Large businesses have found they can reap significant savings from efficiency when they focus on it. In recent years Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and its largest private sector employer, has hit a wall in the United States.7 Its lower-end consumers, who were hit hard by the recession, haven’t participated fully in the recovery.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As the Global Risks report suggests, communities severely impacted by climate change have made several attempts to use the courts to sue for damages, but so far they have been unsuccessful. A steep carbon tax would be a straightforward way to get a piece of the profits, as long as it contained a generous redistributive mechanism—a tax cut or income credit—that compensated poor and middle-class consumers for increased fuel and heating prices. As Canadian economist Marc Lee points out, designed properly, “It is possible to have a progressive carbon tax system that reduces inequality as it raises the price of emitting greenhouse gases.”45 An even more direct route to getting a piece of those pollution profits would be for governments to negotiate much higher royalty rates on oil, gas, and coal extraction, with the revenues going to “heritage trust funds” that would be dedicated to building the post–fossil fuel future, as well as to helping communities and workers adapt to these new realities.

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George Monbiot, “Preparing for Take-off,” Guardian, December 19, 2006; Dan Milmo, “Brown Hikes Air Passenger Duty,” Guardian, December 6, 2006; “Euro MPs Push for Air Fuel Taxes,” BBC News, July 4, 2006. 58. Jean Chemnick, “Climate: Branson Calls Carbon Tax ‘Completely Fair’ but Dodges Question on E.U. Airline Levy,” E&E News, April 26, 2012; Gwyn Topham, “Virgin Atlantic Planning Heathrow to Moscow Flights,” Guardian, July 2012; Richard Branson, “Don’t Run Heathrow into the Ground,” Times (London), June 30, 2008; FOOTNOTE: Roland Gribben, “Sir Richard Branson’s 5bn Heathrow Offer Rejected,” Telegraph, March 12, 2012. 59. “Branson Criticises Carbon Tax, Backs Biofuels,” PM, ABC (Australia), July 6, 2011; Rowena Mason, “Sir Richard Branson Warns Green Taxes Threaten to Kill Aviation,” Telegraph, December 16, 2009; FOOTNOTE: “Behind Branson,” The Economist, February 19, 1998; Juliette Garside, “Richard Branson Denies Being a Tax Exile,” Guardian, October 13, 2013; Branson, Screw It, Let’s Do It, 113-116. 60.

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., could raise $46 billion annually.51 • Slashing the military budgets of each of the top ten military spenders by 25 percent could free up another $325 billion, using 2012 numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (Granted, probably the toughest sell of all, particularly in the U.S.)52 • A $50 tax per metric ton of CO2 emitted in developed countries would raise an estimated $450 billion annually, while a more modest $25 carbon tax would still yield $250 billion per year, according to a 2011 report by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), among others.53 • Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies globally would conservatively save governments a total $775 billion in a single year, according to a 2012 estimate by Oil Change International and the Natural Resources Defense Council.54 If these various measures were taken together, they would raise more than $2 trillion annually.55 Certainly enough for a very healthy start to finance a Great Transition (and avoid a Great Depression).

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

As if to underline just how sensitive the airlines are to the price of jet fuel, Ryanair gave some justification to everyone who fears flying when it was reported in The Times (of London) that management had sent a memo requiring pilots to cut back on the emergency fuel they carried. To save on costs, the newspaper reported, pilots would be allowed to carry only 300 kilograms of extra fuel, or enough to stay in the air for about five minutes. And if soaring fuel costs weren’t enough for struggling airlines to contend with, taxes on carbon-spewing airline travel could soon become the new sin taxes of the 21st century. The emissions per passenger from a round-trip airline flight from New York City to London are as bad as the fuel consumption. If we move to put a price on carbon emissions, air travel may soon be taxed at the same rate as tobacco and alcohol.

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All that is required is that the US apply the same carbon standard to its own domestic industries. After all, you can’t call carbon emissions an unfair trade subsidy until you collect on those emissions from your own producers. There are basically two ways you can put a price on carbon emissions in your economy. The first is through a carbon tax. This works just like a sales tax. You can apply it on just about anything whose production involves burning carbon and hence emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That means you can apply it to gasoline, or to coal-fired electric power, or even to plastics or fertilizer, since, like so many things today, both are made through burning oil or natural gas.

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Led by California, one of the largest energy markets in the world, most state legislatures in the US have already passed legislation to regulate their own carbon emissions. Most, if not all, have effectively banned the construction of new coal-fired generating capacity. The story has been the same in Canada, where the province of British Columbia defied political wisdom by implementing a carbon tax while the federal government watched from the sidelines. Other provinces, including Ontario and Quebec, are also moving on the carbon front while the federal government waits to see what course a new administration in Washington will take. Historically, when the US states lead, the federal government eventually follows when it comes to setting new environmental standards, so it is a good bet that the United States will soon be joining Western Europe in setting a price on its own carbon emissions.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In a recent article on the topic, Time pointed out: “The red-hot renewable industry — including wind and solar — last year attracted $71 billion in private investment, the nuclear industry attracted nothing,” then quoted energy expert and chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute Amory Lovins on the subject: “Wall Street has spoken — nuclear power isn’t worth it.” Obviously, a carbon tax or more government handouts could change this picture, though the National Resource Defense Council computed that we would have to tax carbon at $40–$60 per ton for nuclear power to be competitive. That said, these numbers are based on a ten-year timetable for nuclear plants construction at a cost of $6–10 billion per gigawatt. General Electric just completed two nuclear plants in Japan; the first was done in thirty-six months, the second in thirty-nine.

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., 11, 111, 207, 209–10, 211–12, 213, 214, 217, 238, 261 Butcher, Grace, 37 Calder Hall, 110 Calfee Design Factory, 99 California Cryobank, 249–63 California Health Span Institute, 185 Cameron, James, 27 cancer. See also end-of-life care genetically targeted treatments for, 224–25, 240–41 stem cells in treatment of, 205–6 Canseco, 183, 184, 187–88 Captain Capsid, 222 Carbon Mitigation Initiative, 114 carbon taxes, 113 Carter, Jimmy, 116 Catholic Church, 260 cattails, 90–91 Celera, 228 Challenger space shuttle, 129 The Changing Body (Fogel, Floud, Harris, & Hong), 54–56 Charo, R. Alta, 207 Chernobyl, 110, 112, 118 Chicago Pile-1, 109 China coal-related deaths in, 112 nuclear energy in, 119, 121 synthetic biology in, 237–38 China Syndrome, 110 Church, George, 232 Cierva, Juan de la, 102 The City and the Stars (Clarke), 27 Clarke, Arthur C., 27 Clean Air Act, 84 climate change, 111–14, 119 asteroid mining and, 145–46 insect-borne illnesses and, 134 Clinton, Bill, 84, 118, 207 Clinton, Hillary, 224, 230 cloning legislation against, 215–16 stem cells and, 208, 214–15, 217–18 coal, 112, 114 cochlea, artificial, 26 Cochrane, Peter, 25–27, 28, 30–31 Cochrane, Thomas, 117 Cockcroft, John, 109 Colbert, Stephen, 143 Collins, Rick, 194 Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), 84, 88–90 Conrad, Alfred, 51–52 consciousness downloadable, xv, 23–31 fear of death and, xv–xvi, 29–30 oneness with the universe and, 46–47 in out-of-body experiences, 35–40 psychedelic drugs and, 155–81 true nature of, 28 Consolmagno, Brother Guy, 143–44, 147–48, 149, 152 Controlled Substance Act, 169 ConvAirCar, 100 Corliss, Lindsay, 157, 165–66 Costa, Dora, 52 Cravens, Gwyneth, 112, 115, 116 Cray supercomputer, 226 C-reactive proteins, 198 crowdsourcing, 221–23, 235–36 culture and science, xiv cummings, e. e., xv Cures Now, 214, 216 Curtiss, Glenn, 100 Daily Mail (newspaper), 224 d’Aquili, Eugene, 45 Darwin, Charles, 49, 54 Daschle, Tom, 214 Davis, Gray, 212 Day-Glo protein, 138 death anxiety over, xv–xvi, 26–27, 175 definition of, 210 end-of-life care and, 159–61, 162–63, 175–77 fear of, 42–43 near-death experiences and, 37–43 PTSD after brushes with, 43–45 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 15, 18 de Kruif, Paul, 193, 204 Democritus, 109 dengue fever, 133, 134 The Denial of Death (Becker), xv–xvi, 29 Department of Health and Human Services, 195, 210 depression, 44–45 desalination, 121 DHEA, 186, 198 diabetes, 206, 213–14 Diamandis, Peter, xi–xiii, 141, 145, 148, 150 Di Pasquale, Mauro, 188–89, 190 Disabled Sports USA, 15 disruptive technologies, xiv–xvi, 31, 152 DIY Drones, 243 DMT, 161 DNA testing, 255–56 Dobelle, William, xiv, xvi, 61–77, 247 Dobelle Institute Artificial Vision System for the Blind, 67–75 Doblin, Rick, 162–64, 171–74, 176–77, 179–81 Doheny Eye Institute, 76–77 do-it-yourself biology (DIY Bio), 229, 243 Dolly the Sheep, 208 Donor Eligibility and Determination Labeling, 261 Donor Semen Archive, 256 Donor-Sibling Registry, 256 Donor X Project, 256 Donor Y Project, 256 The Doors of Perception (Huxley), 169 dopamine, 42 Dow, Albert, 8–9, 20 Down syndrome, 57 Draper, John, 235 dreamlets, 41, 43 Drug Enforcement Agency, 195 drugs out-of-body experiences produced by, 36–37 psychedelic, 155–82 steroids, 183–200 war on drugs and, 161, 169–70, 173, 183–84, 188–89, 193–95 Dullnig, Michael, 196 DuPont, 232 Dyson, Freeman, 263 Earth systems research facility, 89 EBR-I nuclear reactor, 109, 117–118 ecosystems ecological niches in, 54 lack of knowledge about, 91–95 rebuilding the Everglades, 81–95 terraforming, 81–95 Ecstasy.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

But pragmatic approximations may make sense at a national level, and they would be guided by the same logic as the one flowing from the equal ownerÂ�ship of the earth. In the United States, estimates of the level of basic income that could be funded out of the proceeds of a carbon tax vary from 0.7 to 2 Â�percent of GDP per capita.33 In all Â�these cases, the payment of the rent by the appropriators may look like a tax—Â�the “Georgist” single tax on land, the carbon tax, and so forth—Â�but is in fact rather a fee paid in exchange for the right to use a collectively owned asset. The second version of the proposal to fund a basic income out of publicly owned natuÂ�ral assets consists of banking on the revenues from the sale of nonrenewable natuÂ�ral resources.

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A first reason is no doubt that if one cares above all for a better environment, one can think of many useful Â�things to do with scarce public resources other than to disseminate them unconditionally, from caring for natuÂ�ral reserves to investing in energy-Â�saving technologies. In parÂ�ticÂ�uÂ�lar, for “dark green” Â�people, it would be a shame if the proceeds of energy taxes, carbon taxes, or land taxes Â�were not earmarked for such uses. A second reason is that if one cares above all for the fate of Â�future generations, one should advocate methods of production that use less natuÂ�ral resources and therefore, nearly unavoidably, more Â�human Â�labor. It does not look like a brilliant idea, from this standpoint, to allocate an income even to Â�those who are not willing to do any work.

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Furthermore, by being initially strongly biased in Â�favor of richer countries in which life expectancy is higher, it Â�will increase the probability of the scheme’s being accepted while paving the way for a smooth increase in transfers from richer to poorer countries as the ratios of old to young gradually converge. As a quick and rough calculation with easily accessible data suffices to show, however, one needs to be careful about the choice of cutoff age. (See Â�Table 8.1.) If the proceeds of a carbon tax are shared in proportion to total population, the US, China, and the EU Â�will be big net contributors, and Africa a big beneficiary. If instead the proceeds are shared in proportion to the population over sixty-Â�five, Africa’s net benefit Â�will shrink dramatically, 229 BASIC INCOME while the net contribution of China will Â� be reduced slightly, that of the US reduced greatly, and that of the EU turned into a net benefit.

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Such a pricing approach would be an overarching policy and would spare the government from having to implement piecemeal environmental laws while wrestling each time with different interest groups and lobbyists. It could also impact our approaches in broader policy issues. For example, India would have found it easier to push through the nuclear deal with the United States if it had had a tax on carbon in place—such a tax would have made alternative energy options more important from both an economic and a business perspective. Nevertheless, we cannot diminish carbon pricing as a political challenge. Carbon pricing and inclusion of resources such as forests and water bodies into markets are massive changes to make.

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Stern is well aware that the Stern Review has added significantly to the raucous global debate on carbon pricing and the concerns around “effective mitigation.” “There are champions for both cap and tradeda and carbon taxes when it comes to environmental pricing,” he says, “but I prefer a combination.” Taxes and cap and trade policies, he points out, fit snugly into different parts of a sensible policy that would emphasize “reduce, recycle and reuse.” Carbon taxes are particularly effective in pricing environmental impacts in sectors that have a “large number of small emission and pollutant sources.” This is typical of the transport sector, as well as commercial establishments.

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Business opportunities around the ecosystem strongly favor India’s rural, poor and marginal communities, whose livelihoods center on natural resources and processing waste. For example, India’s recycling and waste management industry is dominated by microenterprises run by poor communities—Bombay’s Dharavi slum has a recycling industry worth $1.3 billion annually. Policies such as carbon taxes in the organized sector would enable businesses to build strong linkages with such informal enterprises to manage recycling and waste reuse activities, and at the same time create new sources of income for these communities. Some of our most powerful grassroots protests, including the Naxalite insurgency, the Narmada Bachao Andolan and most recently the protests in Singur, have been rooted in disputes for natural resources.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

We should not allocate rights to emit greenhouse gases industry by industry, and in response to special interests and lobbying from environmental groups and industries – since this will destroy the incentives for research and development that might lead to emission-free production. Instead of all such regulatory initiatives, we should introduce a flat-rate carbon tax. The more you emit, the more you pay. Moreover, this tax should be imposed on products regardless of their origin. Carbon-intensive products should be taxed at a rate that reflects the amount of carbon exhaled in their production, regardless of whether they are made in Britain, America or China, and the government should use the tax to finance research.

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The research needed to overcome the clean energy problem will be extensive, will involve scientists around the world, and will assuredly not be sufficiently funded by private companies.370 Nor will it be funded by states governed by tightly knit and self-interested elites, like those that govern China. A sensible environmental policy must, therefore, concede an important role to the state: taxing carbon emissions, and funding the research needed to reduce them. But if the funding is supplied by the taxing, the research will be jeopardized by its own success. Here is one of those policy knots that are difficult to untie – like the knot made by tobacco taxes, which fund government campaigns against the habit that funds them.

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The cost of the energy consumed in transport does not, at present, fall on the consumer. By explicit and hidden subsidies, it is dispersed across the whole of society, the unborn included. Returning the cost to the consumer should be the first priority of any government. To some extent this can be achieved through mileage taxes on the use of roads, and the carbon tax on fossil fuels. In the end, however, nothing will solve the problem of transport that does not redress the balance in favour of the local economy, not least the local food economy, which has been damaged by the hidden subsidies enjoyed by the supermarket chains and by the heavy hand of the state on the practice of agriculture.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

For example, some environmentally inclined economists (and economically minded environmentalists) want to bolster GDP by adding a metric for carbon—that is, a measurement of how much carbon dioxide the U.S. economy generates for every dollar of economic output—and tie that metric to a tax on carbon. In theory, by making carbon more expensive, the market then automatically begins to search out low- and no-carbon technologies. Granted, such a tax is still a stretch in the current political climate. But many economic policy experts, including such prominent conservative economists as former Reagan adviser Arthur Laffer and Romney adviser Gregory Mankiw,7 expect that a carbon tax will eventually emerge as the most practical way to curb CO2 emissions while encouraging a boom in next-generation energy technologies.

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And in so doing, in shutting off the echo chambers and the toxic assumptions of incompatibility and rediscovering the areas of common interest and the politics of the middle, perhaps we will begin to realize, most of us, that we’re not quite so red or so blue after all. You can see how this virtuous pattern could play out in other arenas and how other national issues could resolve in a similar top-down, bottom-up way. On climate change, for example, we’ve stalled out on a national level. Efforts to enact a carbon tax have been thwarted by a financialized political system that enables the energy industry to avoid the risk of change—a classic Impulse Society pattern. At the same time, however, there is movement at the state and local level that, properly marshaled, could translate into a national movement. In California, for instance, residents’ much closer proximity to the ravages of a changing climate—drought, fires, dust storms—has helped translate local concerns into constructive state policies—policies that could become a model for other states and, eventually, for the federal government, much as a Massachusetts’ health care system evolved into a national program.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

The most recent simulations by MIT’s respected Integrated Global Systems Model, for example, estimate a 10 percent chance that the average global surface temperature will rise by more than 12°F by 2095.4 An increase of that magnitude would spell the end of life on Earth as we know it. That threat could be eliminated by simple policy measures like a steep tax on carbon dioxide emissions. If it were phased in gradually, we could adapt to such a tax without painful sacrifices. Any rational political process would address this problem with dispatch. But House leaders in charge of energy policy stubbornly deny that there’s even a problem. Seasoned congressional observers say there’s virtually no chance that meaningful climate legislation could win passage in the U.S.

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Some of the revenue from the tax could be used to send checks to low-income families to ease the burden of higher gas prices. Portions of it could help pay down debt and rebuild crumbling infrastructure, or reduce other taxes. In 2009 the House of Representatives actually passed an energy bill that included a comprehensive carbon cap-and-trade system, the functional equivalent of a carbon tax. Although many Republican legislators had long advocated cap-and-trade legislation as a framework for mitigating environmental externalities, the movement libertarian / Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has come out foursquare against such policies, denouncing them as social engineering. Of course they’re social engineering!

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But unlike those of previous generations, who were mostly religious fanatics, ours are the planet’s most distinguished scientists. They tell us there’s a good chance we’ll burn up if we don’t act forcefully and quickly to reverse global warming. The policy THE LIBERTARIAN’S OBJECTIONS RECONSIDERED 215 instrument that would accomplish that goal is simple and well understood— essentially some variant of a stiff carbon tax. The costs we’d have to bear would be modest. Yet it appears we’ll take no action. What stands in our way are antitax, antigovernment zealots driven by a philosophy that, on close examination, collapses under its own weight. They’re in control of the conversation at the moment, but they’re not invincible.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, suggests that at a minimum, long-term capital gains treatment should begin at three years rather than one, with a declining rate for each additional year that an asset is held. We could even institute a wealth tax such as that proposed by Thomas Piketty. And if we were to tax carbon rather than labor, rather than starting by substituting a carbon tax for income taxes, it might be better to substitute a carbon tax for Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes. These rule changes might be costly to some capital owners but might well benefit society overall. These are political decisions as much as they are purely economic or business decisions.

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If most humans are out of work, a brief exercise of “If this goes on . . .” thinking would quickly lead us to realize that personal income taxes can no longer be the primary source of government revenue. Some other source will be needed, so why not start thinking about it now? What would happen if we postulated a zero income tax for earned income? If there were no income tax, what about replacing it entirely with so-called Pigovian taxes, taxes on negative externalities? A carbon tax is one of those ideas. A financial transactions tax or other form of tax on the massive redirection of corporate profits toward financial speculation and away from investment in people and the real economy might be another. (The problem of Pigovian taxes, though, is that they tend to reduce the production of whatever negative externality they are feeding on.

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This may be about to change, if we can move beyond the old left–right divide on the issue. The Climate Leadership Council, an organization led by a Who’s Who of conservative economists and former government and business leaders, recently came out with a report titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” calling for a carbon tax whose proceeds would be rebated directly to all Americans, as a kind of citizen’s dividend similar to those discussed in the previous chapter. So many of our problems come from being stuck in a bad map that we are unwilling to rewrite, even though it’s clear that it no longer matches reality. There is enormous opportunity in transforming our energy economy.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Most often, it’s what’s best for their reelection. They’re not economists, they’re politicians. They want to please donors and voters. Protecting nature, or future generations, isn’t foremost in their minds. Hence, pollution taxes will never be as high as they need to be. Consider a real example here—carbon taxes. A tax on carbon emissions could, in theory, reduce global warming. But in order to make a difference, the tax would have to get extremely high. This means Congress would have to raise the prices of gasoline, natural gas, and electricity year after year, hitting every business and consumer in the pocketbook.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

So that’s what I’m focused on, and I hope that everybody else is thinking about that too. Many people are, and as they do, we’re seeing a rekindling of the kind of utopian dreaming that has been sorely missing from social movements in recent decades. More and more frequently, immediate, pressing demands—a $15-an-hour living wage, an end to police killings and deportations, a tax on carbon—are being paired with calls for a future that is not just better than a violent, untenable present, but…wonderful. In the United States, the boldest and most inspiring example of this new utopianism is the Vision for Black Lives, a sweeping policy platform released in the summer of 2016 by the Movement for Black Lives.

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The key tools included: ending fossil fuel subsidies (worth about $775 billion globally); getting a fairer share of the financial sector’s massive earnings by imposing a transaction tax (which could raise $650 billion globally, according to the European Parliament); increasing royalties on fossil fuel extraction; raising income taxes on corporations and the wealthiest people (lots of room there—a one-percent billionaire’s tax alone could raise $45 billion globally, according to the United Nations); a progressive carbon tax (a $50 tax per metric ton of CO2 emitted in developed countries would raise an estimated $450 billion annually); and making cuts to military spending (if the military budgets of the top ten military spenders globally were cut by 25 percent, that would free up $325 billion, according to numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

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We declare that “austerity”—which has systematically attacked low-carbon sectors like education and healthcare, while starving public transit and forcing reckless energy privatizations—is a fossilized form of thinking that has become a threat to life on earth. The money we need to pay for this great transformation is available—we just need the right policies to release it. Like an end to fossil fuel subsidies. Financial transaction taxes. Increased resource royalties. Higher income taxes on corporations and wealthy people. A progressive carbon tax. Cuts to military spending. All of these are based on a simple “polluter pays” principle and hold enormous promise. One thing is clear: public scarcity in times of unprecedented private wealth is a manufactured crisis, designed to extinguish our dreams before they have a chance to be born. Those dreams go well beyond this document.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Still, there’s something sad about the entire project – most of these designs have never been carried out, because the architects lacked the political savvy or influence to get them adopted by relief agencies or national governments. When there’s a disaster, relief agencies still haul out the canvas tents. There’s another way of saying what is missing here. Almost every idea that might bring us a better future would be made much easier if the cost of fossil fuel was higher – if there was some kind of a tax on carbon emissions that made the price of coal and oil and gas reflect its true environmental cost. (Gore, in an important speech at New York University last month, proposed scrapping all payroll taxes and replacing them with a levy on carbon.) If that day came – and it’s the day at least envisioned by efforts like the Kyoto Treaty – then everything from solar panels to windmills to safe nuclear reactors (if they can be built) would spread much more easily: the invisible hand would be free to do more interesting work than it’s accomplishing at the moment.

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We Americans haven’t needed our neighbors for anything important, and hence 74 chapter 3 : The Limits to Growth neighborliness – local solidarity – has disappeared. Our problem now is that there is no way forward, at least if we’re serious about preventing the worst ecological nightmares, that doesn’t involve working together politically to make changes deep enough and rapid enough to matter. A carbon tax would be a very good place to start. Notes 1. See Jim Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” The New York Review, July 13, 2006. 2. “‘The Threat to the Planet’: An Exchange,” The New York Review, September 21, 2006. 3. A short essay of mine, which describes the Brazilian city of Curitiba and its efforts to integrate design and architecture into citywide planning and development, is appended to the end of the book.

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Acadia National Park in Maine is one of my favorite areas, but there are so many places to love. If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be? Based on the theory that some human behavior can be changed by rewarding good choices and punishing bad ones, I would institute a carbon tax at the federal level. I think that the biggest challenge humans face in saving our planet is that there isn’t much incentive for the individual to significantly change behaviors, because each of us contributes such a tiny bit to a huge problem. Taxing consumption based on its carbon impact might help people make a connection between their choices and the impact those choices have on global warming.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

Yet Michael Mastrandrea and climatologist Steven Schneider write: It is possible that some thresholds for dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system are already exceeded, and it is likely that more such thresholds are approaching…despite the great uncertainty in many aspects of integrated assessment, prudent actions can substantially reduce the likelihood and thus the risks of dangerous anthropogenic interference.4 In other words, it’s too late to avoid changing our world, but we still have time, if good policy is implemented, to avoid disaster. Good policy, in Mastrandrea and Schneider’s model, means a carbon tax of US $200 per tonne, implemented by 2050, which is sufficient to reduce the probability of dangerous climate change to zero.5 Perhaps a more useful way of looking at the problem is to quantify rates of change that are dangerous. After all, life is flexible, and if given sufficient time it can adapt to the most extreme conditions.

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Australian households pay 12&nd;20 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, while aluminium smelters pay around 2 cents, which means that a significant part of everyone else’s power bill is a direct subsidy payment to the smelters.19 With such unfair distortions in place, it’s not clear that exporting such industries would be a bad thing for either the environment or the national economy. Furthermore, it is imperative to get the smelters to pay a fair price for their power; otherwise market forces can never induce them to limit their emissions. Given Kyoto’s manifest problems, it may seem best to tax carbon emissions at the smokestack, yet this simple and effective solution finds no favour in Australia or the US. It is of paramount importance to understand that the Kyoto Protocol is the only international treaty in existence created to combat climate change. For those who urge abandonment or who criticise Kyoto there are two questions: what do you propose to replace Kyoto with, and how do you propose to secure international agreement for your alternative?

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It’s pretty clear.’13 Believers in the efficacy of the free markets have suggested that governments should butt out of the regulation of greenhouse gases because market forces will see industries voluntarily reduce their emissions. Despite the efforts of the re-insurers, this view has two serious counts against it. First, in the real world we see little sign of this happening. Secondly, consider how this ‘solution’ would work if applied to taxation. Why would a voluntary approach to a proposal that adds up to a carbon tax do any better? With so many analyses demonstrating that rising greenhouse gas emissions are a serious threat to our Earth, and with the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions evidently small, you might wonder again why there is such resistance to ratification from the US and Australia. Part of the answer, I think, entails philosophical differences between these countries and Europe.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

Some would respond that there is no way to achieve significant deficit reduction while raising taxes only on the rich: they don’t have that much money. That was once true, but no longer. One upside of growing inequality is that we can raise enormous amounts of money while increasing tax burdens only at the very top of the scale. Taxing carbon emissions is another way we could raise substantial amounts of money while improving the overall performance of our economy. The most basic principle in economics is that firms should pay the costs that are incurred in their production processes. This is what enables the price system to guide the economy toward efficiency.

…

Monetary policy (under my good friend Haruhiko Kuroda) was remarkably successful. Fiscal policy unfortunately wavered. Initial expansionary policies were followed by a tax increase; and the tax increase had the predicted effect: growth was thrown off track. Other policies might have worked far better—a carbon tax would have raised money and stimulated firms to make energy-saving investments, thus actually helping the macroeconomy. But the politics seemingly did not allow this. The structural policies were far slower to get off the ground. Some of them were perhaps more symbolic than real (though they might have real effects on particular industries).

…

The challenge for its leaders is to devise effective regulatory regimes that are appropriate for its stage of development. That will require the government to raise more money. Local governments’ current reliance on land sales is a source of many of the economy’s distortions—and much of the corruption. Instead, the authorities should boost revenue by imposing environmental taxes (including a carbon tax), a more comprehensive progressive income tax (including capital gains), and a property tax. Moreover, the state should appropriate, through dividends, a larger share of SOEs’ value (some of which might be at the expense of these firms’ managers). The question is whether China can maintain rapid growth (though somewhat slower than its recent breakneck pace), even as it reins in credit expansion (which could cause an abrupt reversal in asset prices), confronts weak global demand, restructures its economy, and fights corruption.

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

To achieve the reduction the government could require everyone to halve their emissions. It could even ban the burning of coal. Nordhaus says that by using principles of economics, governments can achieve the reduction at lower cost: they could get people to reduce their emissions by putting a tax on carbon. The idea is to make the costs of carbon have a greater influence on people’s economic decisions. The government should set the tax at the level that ensures that society produces only half as much pollution as before. The tax-based method is cheaper because some people can reduce their emissions more easily than others.

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absolute poverty (i) acid rain (i) adaptive expectations (i) adverse selection (i) advertising (i) agriculture (i), (ii), (iii) aid (i) Akerlof, George (i) alienation (i) Ambrose, St (i) animal spirits (i), (ii), (iii) antitrust policies (i) Apple (i) Aquinas, St Thomas (i), (ii) Aristotle (i) Arrow, Kenneth (i) ascending auction (i) Asian Tigers (i), (ii) Atkinson, Anthony (i), (ii) auction theory (i) auctions (i) Augustine of Hippo, St (i) austerity (i) balance of trade (i) banks and entrepreneurs (i) and interest rates (i) and loans (i) and monopoly capitalism (i), (ii) and speculation (i) see also Britain, Bank of England; central banks; independent central banks; World Bank battle of the methods (i) Becker, Gary (i) behavioural economics (i) benevolent patriarch (i) Beveridge, William (i) big push (i) Black Wednesday (i) bonds (i) bourgeoisie (i), (ii), (iii) brand image (i) Britain Bank of England (i) inflation (i) pegged currency (i) Second World War (i) war with China (i) war with South Africa (i) bubbles (i), (ii) Buchanan, James (i) budget deficit (i) Burke, Edmund (i) capabilities (i) capital (i) and growth (i) Marx on (i) Capital (Marx) (i) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty) (i) capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) and entrepreneurs (i) and governments (i) and the Great Depression (i) and the Great Recession (i) historical law of (i) Marx on (i) world (i) see also communism Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman) (i) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter) (i) capitalists (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and imperialism (i), (ii), (iii) Marx on (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) carbon tax (i) carbon trading permits (i) Carlyle, Thomas (i), (ii) Castro, Fidel (i), (ii) central banks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) central planning (i), (ii) chaebols (i) chain of being (i), (ii) Chamberlin, Edward (i) Chaplin, Charlie (i) Chicago Boys (i) Chicago school (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) China, war with Britain (i) Christianity, views on money (i) Churchill, Winston (i) classical dichotomy (i) classical economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) coins (i), (ii) Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (i) colonies/colonialism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) American (i) Ghana (i), (ii) commerce (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) communism (i) and the Soviet Union (i) Communist Manifesto, The (Engels and Marx) (i), (ii) comparative advantage (i), (ii) competition (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Condorcet, Marquis de (i) Confessions of an Economic Heretic (Hobson) (i) conspicuous consumption (i) constitution (rules) (i) consumers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) contagion, economic (i) core (i) Corn Laws (i), (ii) Cortés, Hernan (i) cost (i) creative destruction (i) Credit Crunch (i) crime, economic theory of (i) Cuba (i) currency (i), (ii) see also coins currency markets (i), (ii) currency reserves (i) Debreu, Gérard (i) demand law of (i) see also supply and demand demand curve (i) democracy (i), (ii) Democratic Republic of the Congo (i) dependency theory (i) Depression (Great) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and economic growth (i) and the US central bank (i) descending auction (i) developing/underdeveloped countries (i), (ii) development economics (i) Development of Underdevelopment, The (Frank) (i) diminishing marginal utility (i), (ii) diminishing return to capital (i) discretion (i) discrimination coefficient (i) distribution of income (i), (ii) diversification (i), (ii) dividends (i) division of labour (i) doomsday machines (i) Drake, Sir Francis (i) Drew, Daniel (i) dual economy (i) economic value (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) economics defined (i) normative (i) Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson) (i) economies of scale (i) economists (i), (ii), (iii) efficient markets hypothesis (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) efficient/inefficient economic outcome (i) see also pareto efficiency; pareto improvement Elizabeth I (i) Elizabeth II (i) employment, full (i) Engels, Friedrich (i) England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (Mun) (i) entitlement (i), (ii) entrepreneurs (i), (ii) equilibrium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) exchange of goods (i), (ii) exchange rates (i) expectations, adaptive/rational (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) exploitation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) exports (i) and poor countries (i), (ii), (iii) externalities (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (MacKay) (i) failure, market (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Fama, Eugene (i) famine (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) feminist economics (i) feudalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) financial systems (i), (ii) Finer, Herman (i) first price auction (i), (ii) First Welfare Theorem (i), (ii) First World War (i) fiscal policy (i), (ii) floating exchange rate (i) Florence (i) Folbre, Nancy (i) Fourier, Charles (i) framing (i), (ii) France agriculture (i) economic models (i), (ii) revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and taxation (i) Frank, Andre Gunder (i) free choice (i), (ii) free-market economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) free trade (i), (ii), (iii) Friedman, Milton (i), (ii), (iii) full employment (i) game theory (i), (ii), (iii) general equilibrium (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes) (i) Germany, infant industries (i) Ghana (i), (ii) Gilded Age (i) Global Financial Crisis (i), (ii) global warming (i) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (i) gold (i), (ii) Golden Age (i) goods and services (i) government, and economies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Great Moderation (i), (ii) Great Recession (i) Greece (i), (ii), (iii) gross domestic product (i) growth (i) and dependency theory (i) of government (i) and the Great Moderation (i) and Pakistan (i) and population (i) theory (i) Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ (i), (ii) guilds (i) Hamilton, Alexander (i) Hansen, Alvin (i) harmony, system of (i) Hayek, Friedrich (i), (ii) hedge funds (i) herds (i) Hicks, John (i) historical law of capitalism (i) HIV/AIDS (i) Hobson, John (i) Homobonus, St (i) human capital (i) human development (i), (ii) Human Development Index (i) imperfect competition (i), (ii) imperialism (i) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin) (i) imports (i), (ii), (iii) income (i), (ii) and bank loans (i) and capitalism (i) and communism (i) distribution of (i), (ii) and growth (i), (ii) national (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) income per person (i), (ii) independent central banks (i) Industrial Revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) inequality (i), (ii) infant industries (i) inflation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) information economics (i), (ii), (iii) injection of spending (i) innovations (i), (ii) insurance (i), (ii) interest rates (i) British (i) and monetary policy (i) and recession (i) and usury (i) International Monetary Fund (i) investment (i) and the big push (i) and recession (i), (ii) invisible hand (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) iron law of wages (i) Irrational Exuberance (Shiller) (i) Jefferson, Thomas (i) Jevons, William (i) just price (i) Kahneman, Daniel (i), (ii) Kennedy, John F.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY What are the impediments to implementing a basic income? While the problem of funding UBI appears immense, most research in fact suggests that it would be relatively easy to finance through some combination of reducing duplicate programmes, raising taxes on the rich, inheritance taxes, consumption taxes, carbon taxes, cutting spending on the military, cutting industry and agriculture subsidies, and cracking down on tax evasion.122 The most difficult hurdles for UBI – and for a post-work society – are not economic, but political and cultural: political, because the forces that will mobilise against it are immense; and cultural, because work is so deeply ingrained into our very identity.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Poor countries, many of which have substantial populations that lack even basic medical provision, need to be helped by rich countries to provide adequate facilities, particularly in fast-expanding cities, and to educate generations of healthcare workers. The way wealth is distributed in societies must be transformed through policy, using tools such as inheritance tax, wealth tax and land tax. A carbon tax and water pricing would help preserve ecological assets, too. There is no justification for billionaires in societies where many struggle to feed themselves – this pathological accumulation of wealth could be far better used by society with no harm to lifestyle. We are still a long way from achieving economic growth without environmental destruction, but there are ways of getting there.

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Kung peoples; lack of water resources; low levels of migration to; migration from as relatively low; poor infrastructure and city planning; population rise in; rainfall due to Indian irrigation; remittances from urban migrants; and restoring of planet’s habitability; Transaqua Project of water diversion; transatlantic slave trade; transport infrastructure in; urbanization in African Union agoraphobia AI and drone technology aid, development/foreign air-conditioning/cooling airships or blimps Alaska algae Aliens Act (UK, 1905) Alps, European Amazon region Americas Anatolia Anchorage, Alaska Anderson, Benedict animals/wildlife; global dispersal of; impact of fires on; impact of ice loss on see also livestock farming Antarctica; ice sheet Anthropocene era; four horsemen of Aravena, Alejandro Archaeology architecture/buildings: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; energy-efficiency retrofits; floating infrastructure; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-carbon concrete; prefabricated and modular housing; in successful migrant cities; wooden skyscrapers; zero-carbon new-builds Arctic region; first ice-free summer expected; opening up of due to climate change Argentina Arrhenius, Svante Asia: cities vulnerable to climate change; drought-hit areas; extreme La Niña events; extreme precipitation in monsoon regions; Ganges and Indus river basins; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; huge populations of South Asia; lack of water resources; rivers fed by glaciers; small hydropower installations; urbanization Aswan High Dam asylum-seekers: Australia’s dismal record on; Britain’s proud history on; dominant hostile narratives about; drownings in English Channel; limbo situation due to delayed claim-processing; misinformation about see also refugees Athens Australia: Black Summer (2019–20); energy-supply economy; impact of climate emergency; indigenous inhabitants; low population density in; migration to; and mineral extraction in Greenland; renewable power in; treatment of asylum-seekers; White Australia Policy aviation Aztecs Babylon bacteria, in food production bamboo Bangkok Bangladesh; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; Burmese Rohingya refugees; impact of climate emergency; migration across Indian border; population density in; relocation strategies; training for rural migrants Bantu people Barber, Benjamin Barcelona Beckett, Samuel Belarus Belgium Bergamo, Italy Bhutan Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam) biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; coral reefs as probably doomed; crash in insect and bird populations; depletion of fish stocks; due to agriculture; due to farming; four horsemen of the Anthropocene; and human behaviour; Key Biodiversity Areas; links with climate change; and marine heatwaves; and overuse of fertilizers; restoring of; species extinction; and urban adaptation strategies see also environmental sustainability bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) biotech industry birds black soldier flies black-footed ferrets BoKlok (IKEA spinoff) Bolivia Borneo Bosch, Carl Boston, Massachusetts Boulder, Colorado Brazil Brexit Brin, Sergey British Columbia Brown, Pat bureaucracy Burke, Marshall Burma business/private sector Cairo California; forest fires in Cambodia Cameroon Canaan Canada; and charter cities model; Climate Migrants and Refugee Project; economic benefits from global heating; expansion of agriculture in; first carbon-neutral building in; forest fires in; indigenous populations; infrastructure built on permafrost; regional relocation schemes Capa, Robert, capitalism Caplan, Bryan Caprera (Italian warship) carbon capture/storage; BECCS; ‘biochar’ use in soil; carbon capture and storage (CCS); direct capture from the air; by forests; in grasslands; Key Biodiversity Areas; in oceans; by peatlands; by phytoplankton; vegetation as vital carbon pricing/taxing carbon/carbon dioxide: amount in atmosphere now; Arrhenius’ work on; and biomatter decay in soil, ‘carbon quantitative easing’; continued emitting of; decarbonizing measures; effect on crop growth; emissions cut by building from wood; emissions from farming; emissions from human energy systems; emissions from urban buildings; geoengineering to remove; during last ice age; Miocene Era levels; new materials made from; ocean release of; released by wildfires; tree-planting as offsetting method; in tropical rainforests Carcassonne, France Card, David Cardiff Castro, Fidel Çatalhöyük, ancient city of Central African Republic Central America Chad ‘char people’ charcoal (‘biochar’) Chicago children: childcare costs; deaths of while seeking safety; ‘invisible’/living on the margins; left behind by migrant parents; and move to cities; numbers at extreme risk; in refugee camps; and sense of ‘belonging’ Chile China: adaptation for heavy rainfall events; Belt and Road Initiative; cities vulnerable to climate change; demography; desertification of farmland in north; economic domination of far east; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; extreme La Niña events; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; Hong Kong–Shenzhen–Guangzhou mega-region; hukou system; integrated soil-system management; internal migration in; migrant workers in Russia’s east; and mineral extraction; net zero commitment; small hydropower installations; South-to-North Water Diversion Project; ‘special economic zones’; Uyghur Muslim communities in; and water scarcity; ‘zhuan‘ documents Chinatowns Churchill (town in Manitoba) Churchill, Winston cities: adapting to net-zero carbon economy; city state model; coastal cities; as concentrated nodes of connectivity; ‘consumption cities’ in Africa; control of migration by; deadly urban heat; demand for cooling; devolving power to communities; in eighteenth/nineteenth-century Europe; entrenched assets; and extreme flood risk; flood defences; as focal points for trade networks; food production in; genetic impacts of; in high altitude locations; large megacities; merging into mega-regions; as particularly vulnerable to climate change; phased abandonment of; population densities in; private gardens in; relocation of; relocation strategies within; sprawling shanty towns in; strategies against impact of heat; zero-carbon new-builds see also migrant cities; migration, urban citizenship; patriotism of welcomed migrants; ‘UN/international passport’ idea Clemens, Michael climate change, historic: Cretaceous–Palaeogene meteorite impact event; in late-bronze-age Near East; and migration; in Miocene Era; and transition to farming climate change/emergency; 3–5° C as most likely scenario; as affecting all of Earth; cities as particularly vulnerable to; destruction of dam infrastructure; enlisting of military/security institutions against; every tenth of a degree matters; extreme weather events; global climate niches moving north; global water cycle as speeding up; greenhouse gas emissions as still growing; impact of cities; impact on lives as usually gradual; inertia of the Earth’s climate system; lethality by 2100; links with biodiversity loss; near-universal acceptance of as human made; net zero pledges; Paris Agreement (2015); path to 3–4° C-hotter world; situation as not hopeless; slow global response to; as threat multiplier; warming as mostly absorbed by oceans see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse; drought; fires; floods; heat climate models: future emissions scenarios; heating predictions; impact of 4° C-hotter world; IPCC ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs); optimum climate for human productivity; threshold for mass migrations coastal areas: coastal cities; migration from; retreating coastlines; seawater desalination plants cochineal scale insect Colombia colonialism, European Colorado Columbia Concretene construction industry copper coral reefs Cornwall Costa Rica cotton Covid-19 pandemic; cooperation during cross-laminated timber (CLT) Crusaders Cruz, Abel Cuba cultural institutions/practices: cultural losses over time; diversity as improving innovation; migration of; in well-planned migrant cities cyclones Cyprus Czech workers in Germany Dar es Salaam Death Valley Delhi Democratic Republic of Congo demographic changes/information: and decline of nationality viewed in racial terms; depopulation crisis; elderly populations in global north; GenZ; global climate niches moving north; global population patterns; global population rise; ‘household formation’; huge variation in global fertility rates; migrants as percentage of global population; population fall due to urban migration; population-peak projection; post-war baby boom; and transition to farming Denmark Denver, Colorado desert conditions Dhaka Dharavi (slum in Mumbai) diet and nutrition: edible seeds of sea grasses; genetically engineered microbes; global disparities in access to nutrition; and Haber–Bosch process; insects as source of protein and fats; loss of nutrition due to heat stress of crops; move to plant-based diet; vitamin D sources; zinc and protein deficiencies dinosaurs direct air capture (DAC) disease; waterborne Doha Domesday Book (1086) Driscolls (Californian berry grower) drone technology drought; as affecting the most people; in Amazon region; impact on farming; in late-bronze-age Near East; and rivers fed by glaciers; and sulphate cooling Dubai Duluth, Minnesota Dunbar, Robin economies; Chinese domination of far east; economic growth; forced move towards a circular economy; GDP per capita measure; Global Compact for Migration; global productivity losses due to heat; immigrant-founded companies; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; migration as benefitting; mining opportunities exposed by ice retreat; and nation state model; need to open world’s borders; new mineral deposits in northern latitudes; northern nations benefitting from global heating; ‘special economic zone’ concept; taxing of robots see also employment/labour markets; green economy; political and socioeconomic systems; trade and commerce education: availability to migrants; as key to growth; and remittances from urban migrants; systems improved by migration Egypt; Ancient electricity: current clean generation as not sufficient; decarbonizing of production; electric vehicles; grid systems; hydroelectric plants; and net zero world; renewable production Elwartowski, Chad employment/labour markets: amnesties of ‘illegal’ migrants; and arguments against migration; and automation; controlled by city authorities; and global labour mobility; and the green economy; impact of heat on jobs; indentured positions; and influx of low-skilled migrant workers; jobs in growth industries; jobs restoring diversity; jobs that natives don’t want to do; mechanization/automation slowed down by migrant workers; migrants bring greater diversity to; need for Nansen-style scheme; occupational upgrading of locals due to immigration; refugees barred from working; role of business in migrant integration; rural workers moving to cities; skilled migrants; support/access for migrants; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in USA; workforce shortages in global north energy systems: access to in global south; air-conditioning/cooling demand; and carbon capture; ‘closed-loop’ radiator construction; decarbonizing of; and economic growth; geothermal production; global energy use as increasing; new dam-construction boom in south; nuclear power; oceans as source; poor grid infrastructure in global south; power outages; power sharing as not equitable; reducing growth in demand; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; transmission/transport see also electricity English Channel Environmental Protection Agency, US environmental sustainability: decarbonizing measures; decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions; and economic growth; heat- and light-responsive materials; low-energy plastic recycling methods; and migrant cities; need for open mind in planning for; phytoplankton as hugely important; replacement of inefficient heating/cooling systems; zero-carbon new-builds see also biodiversity loss/ecosystem collapse environmentalists; negative growth advocates; opponents of geoengineering equatorial belt Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Europe: 2003 heatwave; depopulation crisis; eighteenth/nineteenth-century shanty towns; impact of climate emergency; medieval barriers to movement; Mediterranean climate moving north; migrant indentured labour in; migration of women working in domestic service; small hydropower installations; three mass migrations in Stone and Bronze Ages European Union: free movement within; fund for aid to Africa; Green New Deal; no ‘asylum crisis’ within; nuclear power in; open-border policy for refugees from Ukraine; as popular migrant destination; seeks quota system for refugees; as successful example of regional union; war against migrants Fairbourne (Welsh village) farming: in abandoned areas in south; in Africa; ancient transition to; bad harvests as more frequent; barns/storehouses; benefits of warming in Nordic nations; biodiversity loss due to; cereal crops; closing the yield gap; early nineteenth century expansion of; ever-decreasing, sub-divided plots of land; expanded growing seasons; fertile land exposed by ice retreat; genetic research to produce new crops; genetically modified crop varieties; global disparities in food production; Green Revolution; greenhouse gas emissions from; in Greenland; Haber–Bosch process; heat-tolerant and drought-resistant crops; high-yielding wheat and rice variants; impact of climate emergency; indoor industrial systems; modern improvement in yields; nutrient and drip-irrigation systems; pre-twentieth-century methods; relying on new forms of; Russian dominance; salt-tolerant rice; smallholder; and solar geoengineering; solar-powered closed-cycle; urban vertical farms; use of silicates; and water scarcity; wildflower strips in fields see also livestock farming Fiji Fires fish populations: artisanal fishers; boost of in Arctic region; and decommissioned offshore oilrigs; fish farming; future pricing of fish products; as under huge pressure; insects as farmed-fish feed; land-based fish-farming Five Points slum, New York floods; flash floods; low-lying islands and atolls; sea walls/coastal defences; three main causes; in urban areas; water-management infrastructure Florida food: algal mats; carbon-pricing of meat; impact of soaring global prices; insect farming; kelp forest plantations; lab-grown meats; meat substitutes; for migrant city dwellers; move to plant-based diet; need for bigger sources of in global north; need to cut waste; photosynthesizing marine plants and algae; plant-based dairy products; reduced supplies due to temperature rises; refrigerated storage; replication of Maillard chemical reaction; sourced from the oceans see also diet and nutrition; farming; livestock farming food security Ford, Henry forests: advance north of in Nordic nations; deforestation; impact of climate emergency; ‘negative emissions activity’; replanting of; Siberian taiga forest fossil fuels; carbon capture and storage (CCS); as embedded in human systems France Fraser, Sean freedom of movement French Polynesia Friedman, Patri Gargano, Gabriele gas industry Gates, Bill gender: heat related inequalities; physical/sexual danger for female migrants; women in domestic service in Europe; women rejoining workforce genetic modification genetics, population Genghis Khan geoengineering; artificial sill proposals; cloud-brightening idea; as controversial/taboo; and ideal temperature question; possible unwanted effects; proposals for dealing with ice melt; to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide; solar radiation reduction tools; sulphate cooling concept; thin-film technology; tools to reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth geology GERD dam, Ethiopia Germany; Syrian refugee resettlement in Ghana Glasgow climate meeting (2021) Global Parliament of Mayors global south; benefit of solar cooling idea; capital costs of deploying new renewables; cutting of food waste in; future repopulation of abandoned regions; global income gap as rising; little suitable landmass for climate-driven migration; migration to higher elevations with water; need for improved infrastructure; need for sustainable economic growth; new dam-construction boom in; new domestic sources of energy; population rise in; remittances from urban migrants; resource extraction by rich countries; and vested interests in the rich world see also Africa; Asia; Latin America and entries for individual nations golf courses Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Gothenburg Grand Inga hydroelectric dam project (Congo River) Granville, Earl grasslands Great Barrier Reef Great Lakes region, North America Greece; Ancient green economy; and building of fair societies; Green New Deals; migration as vital to; multiple benefits of see also environmental sustainability; renewable power production; restoring our planet’s habitability greenhouse gas emissions; charging land owners for; in cities; emitters trying to avoid/delay decarbonization; from farming; national emissions-reductions pledges; underreporting of; unfair global impact of see also carbon/carbon dioxide Greenland; ice sheet; potato farming in Gulf states Haber, Fritz Hangzhou Hawaii health: climate change as threat multiplier; dementia care; diseases of poor sanitation; healthcare in successful migrant cities; heat related inequalities; lethality of extreme heat; and life in cities; mental illness and migration; migration as benefitting social care systems; pathogens in frozen tundras; rural living as single largest killer today; and smoke pollution heat: 35°C wet bulb threshold crossed; climate model predictions; cloud and water vapour feedbacks; combined with humidity; and demand for cooling; extreme hotspots; global productivity/work hour losses; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact on farming/food supplies; infrastructure problems due to; lethality by 2100; lethality of extreme temperatures; Paris pledge of below 2°C; solar radiation reduction tools; subtropical climate spreading into higher latitudes; temperatures above 50°C; threshold for mass migrations; ‘threshold of survivability’; urban adaptation strategies; urban heat island effect; ‘wet bulb’ temperature calculations Held, David Hernando, Antonia HIV Höfn, southeastern Iceland Holocene epoch Honduras Hong Kong horses, domestication of housing: Aravena’s ‘partial houses’; controlled by city authorities; equitable access to; floating infrastructure; in flood-affected areas; and heat related inequalities; and migrants; planning and zoning laws; policies to prevent segregation; prefabricated and modular; twentieth-century social programmes see also slum dwellers Hudson Bay Huguenot immigrants human rights, universal Hungary hunter-gatherers hurricanes hydrogen ice age, last ice loss; as accelerating at record rate; in Antarctica; in Arctic region; artificial reflective snow idea; artificial sill proposals; and flash floods; loss of glaciers; permafrost thaw; reflective fleece blankets idea; retreat of ice sheets; rising of land due to glaciers melting; tipping points for ice-free world Iceland ICON, construction company identity: accentuation of small differences; and ancient transition to farming; borders as ‘othering’ structures; language as tool of self-construction; mistrust of outsiders; pan-species; sense of ‘belonging’; social norms of ‘tribe’; social psychology; stories crafting group identity see also national identity immigration policies: bilateral or regional arrangements; deliberately prejudicial policy; development of since later nineteenth-century; and harnessing migrant potential; immigrant inclusion programmes; immigration lottery schemes; move needed from control to managing,; points-based entrance systems; poorly designed; quota systems; responses to terrorist incidents; restrictions as for people not stuff; restrictive border legislation; Spain’s successful policy Impossible Foods India; crop irrigation in; emigrants and knowledge-flow; emissions as still rising in; falling fertility rate in; Ganges Valley; and heat ‘survivability threshold’; impact of climate emergency; internal migration in; lime-washing of roofs in; Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA); National River Linking Project; population density in; young population in indigenous communities Indo-European language Indonesia industrial revolution inequality and poverty: and access to reliable energy; benefit of solar cooling to south; climate change as threat multiplier; climate migration and social justice; and demand for cooling; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; and environmental destruction; and European colonialism; as failure of social/economic policy; and geoengineered cooling; global disparities in access to nutrition; and global food prices; global income gap as rising; heat related; and impact of flooding; increased by ancient transition to farming; as matter of geographical chance; migration as best route out of; and modern farming; and national pride; need for redistributive policies; the poor trapped in vulnerable cities; and post-war institutions; rural living as single largest killer today; slow global response to crisis of; superrich and private jets; tribalism as not inevitable; and vested interests in the rich world insects; collapsing populations; farming of; as human food source insulation insurance, availability of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Energy Agency (IEA) International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) International Labour Organization Iquique (Chile) Ireland iron, powdered Islam islands, small/low-lying Israel Italy Ithaca, city of (New York) Jakarta Japan Jobs, Steve Johnson, Boris Jordan kelp Kenya Khan, Sadiq Khoisan Bushmen Kimmel, Mara King, Sir David Kiribati knowledge and skills: better environment for in rich countries; ‘brain drain’ issue; channelled through migrant networks; diversity as improving innovation; global knowledge transfer; Global Skill Partnerships model; impact of European colonialism; migrants returning to origin countries; and Nansen-style schemes; need for rapid transference of; and points-based entrance systems Kodiak Island, Alaska krill Kuba Kingdom, West Africa !

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

If the Republicans were to pursue that goal openly, in earnest, in Congress, it would be political suicide, of course, so they don’t, and instead they take solace in having maximized the wealth of the well-to-do and the power of big business at the expense of everyone else. Beyond shoveling more money to their allies and benefactors and making big new social programs difficult to enact, the blunt tool of the right’s zero-tolerance antitax obsession has had ancillary effects that also serve particular interests, such as making it even harder to tax carbon in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Which might explain, for instance, why the main oil industry lobbying organization is a major funder of Americans for Tax Reform. * * * — The economic right had won. Impossible dreams of the early 1970s had come true in the ’80s and ’90s.

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Andrew Yang’s presidential candidacy was quixotic but also successful—it gave the first extended, respectful national spotlight to the two important truths underlying his campaign: the inexorable automation of jobs, and our need to radically readjust the political economy to cope. Who knows how or when or if a universal basic income could be rolled out, or what its precise funding mechanisms and rules would be? But it’s feasible.*7 The Yang campaign version was $1,000 a month from age eighteen on, funded by a value-added tax and a carbon tax. In a Pew Research survey about automation and economics in 2017, pre-Yang, 61 percent of people were in favor of the government giving “all Americans a guaranteed income that would meet their basic needs” as a way of dealing with “robots and computers [that] are capable of doing many human jobs.”

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Today suddenly everyone deemed it essential for Congress to shovel out trillions to average American citizens by means of new debt and for the Federal Reserve to conjure trillions more by esoteric monetary magic! Tomorrow it could be wealth taxes on the superrich or true universal healthcare or carbon taxes on (cheap) oil or God knows what socialist madness! As the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions,” then people might become convinced that it was “absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low,” particularly after Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s campaigns “pushed progressive ideas into the mainstream of American politics.”

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

A carbon tax of $25 per metric ton is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to generate about a trillion dollars in revenue over ten years.12 And, unlike most sources of revenue, a carbon tax makes the economy more efficient by discouraging something that the market, left to its own devices, overproduces. In contrast, most other taxes discourage things we would rather encourage, like labor effort, savings, and entrepreneurial effort. Third, a carbon tax is an essential part of a tax policy grand bargain, since revenue raised from the carbon tax will help pay for the needs of government without resorting to higher tax rates on individuals or businesses.13 While individuals and businesses will, of course, pay the carbon tax implicitly in the form of higher prices on energy consumption, that tax will not be as salient as the tax that is removed from a worker’s paycheck.

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It would likely be far simpler to simply rely on a carbon tax, which would align consumer and company interests in more fuel-efficient cars. The CAFE standards may not weather the current political climate. President Trump deemed CAFE an “assault on the American auto industry” and promised to work to eliminate them. Still, thanks to global markets, strict standards in Europe and Asia (and in large US states such as California) will keep car manufacturers focused on fuel efficiency. Second, a carbon tax would generate government revenue in a highly efficient manner. A carbon tax of $25 per metric ton is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to generate about a trillion dollars in revenue over ten years.12 And, unlike most sources of revenue, a carbon tax makes the economy more efficient by discouraging something that the market, left to its own devices, overproduces.

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Consistently since the 1980s, a large majority of respondents call for a more even distribution of money and wealth in the country. People are warming to carbon taxes. The majority of Americans find climate change ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important, and 50 percent of American’s now support (strongly or somewhat) carbon taxes, a number that has been increasing steadily over the previous several years. ________________________ 1.  For polling data, see Seth Motel, “5 Facts on How Americans View Taxes,” Pew Research Center, April 10, 2015; John S. Kiernan, “2016 WalletHub Tax Fairness Survey,” WalletHub, September 1, 2016; Gallup, “Taxes,” http://www.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx; and Carbon Tax Center, “August 2018: Yale Maps of Public Opinion on Climate Change and Policy, https://www.carbontax.org/polls/.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

“The forces trying to tackle climate change are in disarray, wandering in small groups around the battlefield like a beaten army,” said one senior British diplomat.16 Many politicians and pundits aren’t even in the right card game. They want to legislate climate change out of existence with a “cap and trade” system or a tax on carbon when evidence suggests that, over the long term, nothing short of a complete reindustrialization of the planet is in order. Getting the economic incentives right is an important start. But among other things, we need to rethink transportation, adopt new manufacturing and shipping practices, pull off a dramatic shift toward greener products and lifestyles, and retool our energy system, all while devoting enormous intellectual and financial resources to protecting the world’s most vulnerable peoples and locations from the effects of rising sea levels and other consequences.

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Given the short-termism that dominates our political systems, our economy, our capital markets, and our individual daily decisions, it is easy to be dismissive of the notion that humankind will suddenly become motivated by a sense of intergenerational justice to make the deep and difficult adjustments that are required to avert global ecological disruption. So how will the world make the historic act of stewardship required to bring greenhouse gas emissions within acceptable levels? Conventional policy wisdom suggests that putting a price on carbon (through a “cap and trade” system or a straightforward carbon tax) will help usher in a new mindset among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators, and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference. Make people and businesses pay the full environmental costs of what they produce and consume and suddenly every investment and purchasing decision made in retail stores, financial markets, and small and large companies around the world will be made in pursuit of the least-cost low-carbon option.

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The Southern Company runs seventy-eight power plants across the southern states and has the dubious distinction of being the largest single source of carbon dioxide in the United States, according to CARMA’s database. Collectively, these plants produce a staggering 206,000,000 tons of CO2 every year. In the very near future, either as a result of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, it will cost power companies like Southern at least $10/ton to emit CO2 into the atmosphere (a conservative estimate given that analysts are speculating the price of carbon emissions in the United States will be closer to $30/ton once the cap-and-trade program kicks in).

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

This dilemma is acute in tax policy since any adequate climate strategy will end up adopting a meaningful carbon tax, and carbon taxes are, by themselves, regressive. A solution is needed that can undo the regressiveness of a carbon tax without removing its incentive for carbon reduction. Such a solution exists. It has been gathering support among US policy makers across political dividing lines, and support is quickly picking up across western Europe. In the United States it goes by the name of “carbon fee and dividend,” and economists have coined the term “carbon cheque,” but the idea is the same: to impose a meaningful carbon tax on all emission sources, from which the entire revenue would be immediately redistributed as a “dividend” to the population on a flat per capita basis, rather than go into the general government budget.

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It would also at a stroke create a constituency in favour of increasing environmental taxes further (and this idea could be extended to other environmental problems than carbon emissions). If that constituency were large enough, it would overcome the culture war. There is every reason to think that it would be large enough, and that the left behind would benefit substantially. The tax revenue from even modest carbon taxes would be substantial. The US Treasury has modelled a $49/tonne carbon tax, significantly less than what an ambitious climate change policy will require but calculated to raise about 1 per cent of US national income.28 At the $91/tonne or higher rates modelled by Nordhaus, that revenue would be commensurately higher: Hansen’s own costing of a $115/tonne tax puts it at nearly 3 per cent of national income.29 Such amounts would give governments huge room for manoeuvre to restore the economic pillar of our broken social contracts.

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The poorest tenth of the population would see their living standards go up by almost 10 per cent, the US Treasury study finds. A large majority would benefit: the dividend would be greater than the higher cost of living caused by the carbon tax for everyone but the 30 per cent highest earners. Similarly, a study by France’s official economic analysis bureau found that a “carbon cheque” that is differentiated by type of region (whether rural or urban) can be designed so that it makes virtually everyone in the bottom half of the income distribution better off even after paying higher carbon taxes on fuel and energy.30 It will not escape readers that a carbon fee and dividend, almost by accident, encompasses a universal basic income/negative income tax.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

And 76 percent said they opposed a $2-per-gallon tax on gasoline.17 There are similar problems with a carbon tax. A carbon tax (which would necessarily include a levy on motor fuel) would hit the poor much harder than the wealthy. It would raise the price of nearly every good and service. Electricity prices would rise because more than half of America’s electric power is produced from coal. And while many economists believe that a carbon tax is the most logical way to address the issue of rising carbon dioxide emissions, the key problem is that carbon taxes need to be imposed internationally so that individual countries are not disadvantaged from a cost-of-energy standpoint.

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In other words, unless everybody joins the carbon tax program, the countries that have agreed to tax energy will need to more than double their carbon tax rates in order to compensate for the countries that are not taxing energy. Nordhaus goes on, saying that for his plan to work, “all countries would agree to penalize carbon emissions in all sectors at an internationally harmonized carbon price or carbon tax.”20 (It’s worth noting that Nordhaus estimates that imposing carbon taxes high enough to continues 262 GUSHER OF LIES What about Fuel Taxes and Carbon Taxes continued achieve a 90 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050—the level advocated by Al Gore—would “impose a tax bill of $1,200 billion on the U.S. economy.”21) So to summarize: Carbon taxes might help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but to achieve those reductions, all of the world’s countries would have to agree to (1) participate in such a program and (2) a price.

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It would also provide more energy security in the event of a supply disruption, as motor fuel from multiple refineries could be shipped to the region suffering shortages. Under the current system, supply disruptions are The World of Interdependence 259 What about Fuel Taxes and Carbon Taxes? Over the last few years, I have written several articles that argue in favor of higher motor fuel taxes. I’ve also supported the idea of a carbon tax, which would impose levies on fuels based on their carbon content; that is, coal would be taxed more heavily than oil or natural gas. Today, I doubt that either motor fuel taxes or carbon taxes are viable. In fact, they may be worse than doing nothing at all. On the surface, higher fuel taxes appear to make sense. Higher prices should lead auto buyers to choose more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It declared that there would be massive economic consequences—“on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century”—if the world failed to act quickly to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.31 The report was significant for its scope and for the eminence of its author, as well as for the way it cast climate change centrally as an economic concern. But what was most impressive about the Stern Review was its holistic approach to action. It recommended that governments do three things at once: (1) tax carbon emissions, auction tradable permits to companies that emit greenhouse gas pollution, and reduce the number of permits over time; (2) dramatically increase investment and incentives for clean-energy research, development, and implementation; (3) prepare and adapt for the impacts of climate change.32 A few months later, in the spring of 2007, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued new warnings of the seriousness of climate change and declared that 90 percent of global warming was caused by humans.

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Nowhere is that more true than in the energy sector, where the government has for years been subsidizing coal, oil, and gas companies and virtually ignoring clean-energy companies. The problem is not that the essential market is being distorted by old energy subsidies and improper accounting, but rather that a market created to serve the old energy economy can no longer serve our present energy and ecological needs. While “internalizing externalities,” whether through carbon taxes or pollution limits, is a part of the solution, without major new investments, it alone amounts to tearing down the old energy economy before building the new one. 8. On January 27, 2005, standing before the Davos World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Tony Blair put at the center of his vision of global interdependence two issues that had never before played such a prominent role in any geopolitical agenda: extreme poverty and global warming.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

Everybody needs to emit less. And the lever to do all those things is a carbon tax that will make all fossil fuels—and therefore also all plastics—significantly more expensive than they are today. An American carbon tax will change behavior not only in this country but around the world. A carbon tax is also a carbon tariff. It can be applied on goods and services as they enter the United States and remitted on goods and services exported from the United States. The tariff would be waived for countries that applied carbon taxes of their own at least equal to the United States. Unlike Trump’s tariffs, carbon tariffs would be legal under existing World Trade Organization rules, which allow tariff barriers to be imposed for environmental reasons.

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Unlike Trump’s tariffs, carbon tariffs would be legal under existing World Trade Organization rules, which allow tariff barriers to be imposed for environmental reasons. A carbon tax-and-tariff would not upend the world trading system. What it would do is raise the price of Indian and Chinese products until those two countries signed up for carbon taxes of their own. A carbon tax-and-tariff would endow the United States with a mighty tool for cooperation and friendship with other advanced democracies. The United States will have the means to say to the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other like-minded countries: If you tax your carbon emissions at the same rate as we tax ours, then your goods and services of course can enter our market tariff-free.

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But I will venture that it will prove way less traumatic than carbon skeptics fear—and substantially less revolutionary than climate radicals hope. Claims that carbon taxes will “take away your burger” are absurd. Americans were already reducing their red meat consumption. In the late 1970s, the average American ate more than 140 pounds of beef and pork per year, down now to under 110 pounds.36 Worldwide, livestock-raising accounts for 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.37 In more developed North America, however, agriculture contributes less than 10 percent to emissions in the United States and Canada; beef production contributes less than 4 percent.38 Carbon taxes will add only a little impetus to trends in progress anyway for other reasons: toward eating fewer animals, more humanely raised.

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

In practice, given the myriad projected impacts of climate change, many of which are unprecedented, coupled with uncertainties about exactly when these impacts will hit and how we should value future costs versus current ones, there is a large range in estimates of the social cost of carbon. A number of countries have a carbon tax. Norway and Sweden introduced carbon taxes in 1991. Many other European countries also have a price on carbon content of fuel. In 2012, Australia introduced a $24 per metric ton carbon tax for major industrial emitters and some government entities. Much of the revenue raised was returned to the public in the form of lower income taxes or increased pensions and welfare payments. By mid-2014, the tax had cut carbon emissions by as much as 17 million metric tons, according to one study.

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Some countries, such as Brazil, have made significant reductions in their net emissions from deforestation. At one point, deforestation and land use policies were responsible for almost 20% of global GHG emissions, but now the number is closer to 10% if we just look at GHG emissions from deforestation and other land-use changes. What is a carbon tax? A carbon tax is a tax on the carbon content of hydrocarbon fuels or on the carbon dioxide emitted by those fuels when they are converted into energy. Hydrocarbons fuels—such as coal, oil, and natural gas—contain carbon, which turns into carbon dioxide after combustion. In economics, the total economic harm caused by a pollutant such as carbon dioxide can be considered an external cost that can be estimated and added to the price of that fossil fuel.

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From 2008 to 2012, one study found that fossil fuel consumption fell 17% in BC (and 19% compared to the rest of Canada).44 Many countries that do not have a significant (or any) carbon price do place a large tax on petroleum-based fuels, such as gasoline and diesel. These taxes are often substantially larger on gasoline than a typical carbon tax would be, but they pay for road repair and offset other externality costs associated with fuel consumption. In many European countries and Japan, the gasoline tax is typically a few dollars a gallon, whereas the vast majority of carbon taxes in place today add a cost to the price of gasoline that is one tenth that size. What are cap-and-trade and carbon trading? Cap-and-trade is a market-based environmental policy aimed at reducing pollution.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Even though a carbon tax has been floating around as a proposal for many years, it’s an idea that has yet to make much political headway. There are a few countries with carbon taxes on small sections of the economy. The European Union has a cap-and-trade scheme, with similar effects to a carbon tax, but the scheme has had teething problems and omits large chunks of the economy. India has a tax on coal, but it is small. No large country has introduced a substantial carbon price across the entire economy, and international negotiations continue to struggle. So let’s step back from the carbon tax idea for a moment, and look instead at what governments seem to have embraced as the alternative: regulations designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the top down. 6 The unexpected consequences of the Merton Rule The ‘Merton Rule’ was devised in 2003 by Adrian Hewitt, a local planning officer in Merton, southwest London.

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The polls were conducted in the UK in 2007 and each questioned over 2000 adults. 168 For power companies to build natural gas power stations: the carbon content of various fossil fuels is available here: http://bioenes=00nl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html. Wikipedia’s page on carbon taxes also contains a handy table on the price implications of a carbon tax on different fuels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax, accessed 3 November 2010. 169 The ‘Merton Rule’: conversations with the energy consultant Tim Crozier-Cole alerted me to the Merton Rule and its unintended consequences. Other references include ‘Councils aim to enforce microgeneration targets’, ENDS Report, 28 August 2009; Bibi van der Zee, ‘Renewables rule making green a reality’, Guardian Unlimited, 11 December 2007; Vicki Shiel, ‘Mayor’s city energy policy faces debate’, Planning, 12 October 2007; ‘Golden rule hits backlash’, Planning, 14 September 2007; Emma Clarke, ‘The truth about … the Merton rule’, Climate Change Corp, 30 Jan. 2009, http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?

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This would be, roughly, an extra $5 per barrel of oil, and nearly $40 per tonne of coal.* That decision might appear to have nothing to do with a carbon-calculating phone app, but in fact it has everything to do with it. The carbon tax would piggyback on the system of market prices, which acts as a vast analogue cloud computer, pulling and pushing resources to wherever they have the highest value. A $50 carbon tax would increase the price of gasoline by about 12 cents a gallon, creating a small incentive to drive less, and more efficiently, and to buy more efficient cars. It would increase the price of a kilowatt hour of electricity – by about a cent and a half if the energy came from coal, but only by three quarters of a cent if the energy came from natural gas.

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

For example, a tax of $115 per ton would add about $1 to the price of a gallon of gasoline and 6¢ per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. If the revenues from the carbon tax went into wage supplements, middle- and lower-income Americans would still come out far ahead. A carbon tax would have two additional advantages. First, it would push energy companies and businesses to invest in new ways to reduce greenhouse gases, and in lower-carbon fuels and products; it could thereby lead to the development of cheaper and more efficient sources of energy. Second, by stimulating such investments, the carbon tax would also boost aggregate demand. Higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy. In a nation facing a widening chasm between the very rich and everyone else, it is not unreasonable to expect those at the top to pay a higher tax on their incomes, from whatever source (wages, salaries, or capital gains).

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The taxes for people with incomes of between $90,000 and $160,000 would be 20 percent, whatever the income source. The yearly cost to the federal government of these wage supplements would be $633 billion. The cost of the tax cuts for middle-income families would be billions more. But these lost revenues would be replaced by the following two initiatives: a carbon tax, and higher taxes on the top 5 percent of incomes. A carbon tax. We should tax fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), based on how many tons of carbon dioxide such fuels contain. The tax would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel, and would gradually rise over time in order to push energy companies and users to spew less carbon into the atmosphere.

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I propose that people in the top 1 percent, with incomes of more than $410,000, pay a marginal tax of 55 percent; those in the top 2 percent, earning over $260,000, pay a marginal tax of 50 percent; and those earning over $160,000, roughly the top 5 percent, pay 40 percent. These taxes, when added to the modest amounts contributed by taxpayers who earn between $50,000 and $160,000 under my plan, would raise $600 billion more than our current tax system per year. Added to the $210 billion generated by the carbon tax just in its first year, the total new revenues would be $810 billion initially and would increase as carbon tax revenues increased. These would more than pay for the income supplements and tax cuts I propose. I would use the surplus for additional initiatives listed in the following pages that require funding, and for reducing the federal deficit. Under my proposal, income from capital gains would be treated no differently from income derived from wages and salaries.

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity by Paul Collier

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, business climate, carbon tax, Doha Development Round, energy security, food miles, G4S, Global Witness, information asymmetry, Kenneth Arrow, megacity, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, search costs, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons

One possibility is that each government would simply introduce a carbon tax of $40. This would be the most straightforward approach. It does not imply a heavier overall tax burden. There is no reason for a government to use a carbon tax to raise its total revenue take; rather, a carbon tax might replace other taxes. It is manifestly better to tax a social bad, such as carbon, than to tax something which is socially beneficial, such as work. So a tax of carbon could be offset by a reduction in the taxation of income, or some other tax regarded as particularly irksome. However, agreeing on $40 would not necessarily require a carbon tax. The task of achieving compliance by firms and consumers can be done by whatever means a society prefers.

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However, international cap-and-trade is not the only way that a common price could be achieved. Indeed, it might politically be an extremely difficult way of achieving a common global price. The most straightforward way would be for each government to impose a carbon tax at the same rate—for example, $40 per ton. We will worry later about who should end up paying for global warming; for the present I want to stick to the issue of how we get an efficient response. Were every government to impose a carbon tax of $40, industries and consumers worldwide would coordinate around this price. No activity would have an incentive to relocate to dodge the social cost of its emissions. Nor would some consumers be spewing out carbon wastefully while others were behaving responsibly.

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The most sensible arrangement is for governments to own the rights to control carbon emissions on behalf of citizens. As industries relocated between countries, according to underlying legitimate economic incentives, the amount of carbon emitted would also shift between countries. So if governments imposed carbon taxes as their instrument for enforcing low-carbon growth, the revenues from carbon taxes would also gradually shift between countries. This is not really any different from other natural assets. Each country’s endowment of natural assets changes both as a result of what is discovered and as global technology makes some commodities more valuable and others less.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Even if those taxes do not always prove effective (perhaps China will continue polluting at a very high level), this tax is painful and the tax offers at least some chance of improving the world. And a carbon tax doesn’t have to be anti-business. If we wish, we could offset a higher carbon tax with a lower corporate income tax, thus helping out business in general, while encouraging business to pollute less. Even though the prospects for a carbon tax right now are slim to none, the aging of the American population will put more pressure on government finances. In less than twenty years, probably in less than ten, the debate will be some higher taxes vs.

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For instance the government has to decide that dirty coal requires a higher carbon tax than does an oil well. That is a problem, because governments don’t always get those decisions right. Still, it is a more manageable problem—in terms of both information and motivation—than relying on 310 million American consumers to know which inputs are being used to produce which goods and services. The former problem can be solved to a partial and imperfect degree, but making progress on the latter is unlikely. Ideally a carbon tax should be done in conjunction with other major polluters, most of all China, the world’s number one carbon polluter at the moment.

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(Remember the famous town hall proclamation: “Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare!”) A carbon tax will have a chance only when the Medicare crunch comes, but it will have some chance, no matter how slim the prospects may appear today. As I write in 2011, the United States is still in denial about the need for long-run budget balance and also in denial, at least on the electoral stage, when it comes to climate change. The country needs two wake-up calls at once, and in fact they can, rather propitiously, both come together in the form of a carbon tax. The people who are preaching fiscal austerity—and mean it—are some of the best friends of the environment, whether they know it or not.

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

In that chapter—call it Apprehension—we identified the threat and its consequences. We debated the measures required to keep the planet within the realm of human habitability: a transition from fossil fuel combustion to renewable and nuclear energy, wiser agricultural practices, reforestation, carbon taxes. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. We did not, however, seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for coastlines, agricultural yield, mean temperatures, immigration patterns, and the world economy.

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Nordhaus argued that it was irrational—not just morally, which was materially irrelevant anyway, but economically—to delay action. If human behavior couldn’t be improved, perhaps the market could. His remedy was to make nations pay the true cost of carbon by levying a tax on emissions. By his calculation, the price came out to ten dollars a ton. A global carbon tax, however, required a global tax collector. And that would require an international treaty. Which raised the question: Was a strong treaty possible, even under the most favorable of circumstances? Nordhaus didn’t think so. Nor did Michael Glantz, a political scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

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“The U.S. has to do something to gain some credibility.” “So it is a moral stand,” replied Slade, as if seizing an advantage. “Call it whatever.” Besides, Pomerance added, they didn’t have to ban coal tomorrow. A pair of modest steps could be taken immediately to show the world that the United States was serious: the implementation of a carbon tax and increased investment in renewable energy. Then the U.S. could organize an international summit on climate change. This was his closing plea to the group. The next day, they would have to draft policy proposals. But when the group reconvened after breakfast on Halloween morning, they immediately became stuck on a sentence in their prefatory paragraph declaring that climatic changes were “likely to occur.”

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

For starters: close tax loopholes for individuals and multinationals alike, end deductions that mainly benefit the rich, and tax land (of which the poor have little or none) more heavily. The latter will also spur property speculators to develop more and hoard less. Use taxes to discourage public bads (like congestion, pollution and fatty foods). Taxing income discourages work; taxing carbon emissions incentivizes people to find clever ways to reduce them. Remove perverse energy and agricultural subsidies. They benefit the few, distort trade and are environmentally disastrous. Energy subsidies cost the world’s taxpayers $5.3 trillion (or 6.5 percent of global GDP) in 2015; agricultural subsidies in the OECD cost their citizens $600 billion.32 Ending these subsidies would free up funds for bold investments in infrastructure, education and health, and raise incentives for renewable energy and sustainable farming—all at current tax levels.

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We should help poorer countries—the places where new pandemics like H5N1 are most likely to erupt—to strengthen their public health systems, and we should build and maintain a global “rapid reaction force” that can swoop in and contain an outbreak when local efforts fail. We should reinvest in the World Health Organization, whose current budget of about $2.2 billion per year is only that of a single, big-city hospital.61 We should put in place carbon taxes, which would discourage fossil fuel use and slow climate change, and help save our shared global assets, or “global commons”—the oceans, polar regions and especially rain forests, which are a giant carbon sink and home to 50–75 percent of Earth’s biodiversity.62 We should invest heavily in the world’s poor and the young so that they can take part in the global gains being made around them, by providing free preschool, elementary and secondary schooling, and direct cash transfers to female heads of poor households—conditional upon their children attending school and getting vaccinated.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Green taxation can level the playing field for eco-material vis-àvis nonecological products, it can discourage waste, and it can help create an economy that is more people-intensive than capital-intensive.19 The Scandinavian countries led the way on ecotaxes, with Norway setting up a Green Tax Commission in 1994 and Sweden following suit the following year.20 As indicated in Table 10.3, there is a vast range of possible taxes. We have already considered the carbon tax and the congestion charge as an example of a transport tax (which can also be considered as a commons tax). GREEN TAXATION 165 Table 10.3 Examples of environmental taxes and charges Energy Water Transport Waste Upstream charge on Downstream charge on resource use or resource use environmental emissions Downstream charge on environmental emissions Carbon tax on primary energy Charges on abstractions or emissions by water companies Carbon tax on petroleum producers Energy tax differentiated by fuel carbon content Not possible Landfill tax Energy tax Metered water charges Fuel tax Volumetric waste charges Fuel tax or vehicle excise duty differentiated by emissions Differentiated waste charges Source: S.

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For example the streets of a thriving city belong to all; if only a few choose to use them for private transport then that right can be charged for and the proceeds shared with others through a congestion charge. By a similar argument the right to pollute the Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases, causing economic disaster for others, should be paid for with a carbon tax. 164 GREEN ECONOMICS A carbon tax can be considered a ‘commons tax’, since it attempts to reduce behaviour that adds to the amount of CO2 pollution in the atmosphere, which is a shared commons. There are several variants of the scheme, but the basis of the tax is that it should be a unified tax on the carbon content of fuels to replace the complex array of fuel-related taxes that are in effect in many countries.

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Such a tax would provide a strong incentive for both businesses and individuals to reduce their energy consumption, their driving, and to switch to non-fossil-fuel heating as well as renewable electricity supply. In the mid-1990s the EC considered a proposal to introduce a carbon tax throughout the European Union. This was rejected, although Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark introduced related taxes. The Swedish carbon tax achieved a reduction in CO2 emissions of 7 per cent, while the Danish energy tax resulted in a 10 per cent reduction in energy use.18 Ecotaxes Ecotaxes have two aims: to discourage pollution and to change behaviour, especially behaviour that leads to the unsustainable use of non-renewable resources.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Other Sources of Finance A widely held and appealing idea is to help fund a basic income through the proceeds of a carbon tax to discourage emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change.27 Calculations for the US by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby suggest that a $15 per ton carbon tax could raise $117 billion a year, which, after various adjustments, could finance a yearly dividend of $811 per household ($323 per person).28 A majority of households would gain (the dividend would outweigh price increases due to the carbon tax) and the impact would be highly progressive, with low-income households gaining proportionately more.

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A basic income would make it easier for governments to impose taxes on polluting activities that might affect livelihoods or have a regressive impact by raising prices for goods bought by low-income households. For instance, hefty carbon taxes would deter fossil fuel use and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change as well as reduce air pollution. Introducing a carbon tax would surely be easier politically if the tax take went towards providing a basic income that would compensate those on low incomes, miners and others who would lose income-earning opportunities. The basic income case is especially strong in relation to the removal of fossil fuel subsidies.

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In this double way, low-income citizens would be economically better off. And all would benefit from reduced use of fossil fuels in terms of less pollution, improved health and a better ecological future for the planet. Some advocates, such as climate scientist James Hansen, have argued that 100 per cent of carbon tax revenues should be given out as equal green dividends.15 Others have suggested that companies using fossil fuels for production should be compensated with part of the money collected, at least for a period in which to convert to other sources of energy. Either way, here is a source of funding a basic income, a way of building up the financial base for payment, and justifiable on social justice principles.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

Why does the right tax make us better off? 143 A carbon tax of hundreds of dollars per tonne will disincentivise the high carbon world and simultaneously fund the low carbon world. Overall it will make most people feel richer because it will all be paid out again and it will encourage us to make better use of our resources. Your gallon of car fuel will get more expensive but overall the electric car world will become cheaper. Under a carbon tax, those who manage their carbon carefully will be richer because they will pay less tax themselves whilst benefitting as much as everyone else from the things the carbon tax is spent on. One argument against taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor is that it disincentivises hard work.

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142 5 GROWTH, MONEY AND METRICS How can these essential investments be funded? Every divestment liberates an investment opportunity elsewhere. A carbon tax could also produce a massive fund. In 2013, global investment in fossil fuels stood at over a trillion dollars whilst investment in renewables were just a couple of hundred billion. This is bonkers and none of us should be colluding in it. A trillion dollars for the investments I’ve listed would go a long way. Global carbon dioxide emissions run at around 35 billion tonnes CO2 per year. Imagine, as a thought experiment, a carbon tax of $300 per tonne (equivalent to about a dollar per litre of car fuel) applied to all emissions.

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32, 147–48, 227 big picture perspective 186, 191, 195–97 biodiversity 44, 53–54, 101–3, 102–3, 103–4, 214 big picture perspective 195–96 pressure on land 78–79, 91 Bioregional, One Planet Living 160–62, 162 boats/shipping 114–16, 235–36 Brazil 69–70, 70 278 Brexit 214 Buddhism 193, 208 bullshit 179, 214; see also fake news; truth Burning Question (Berners-Lee and Clark) 4, 92, 215 business as usual 8, 128, 204 businesses 158, 215 environmental strategies 163–64 fossil fuel companies 223 perspectives/vision 159 role in wealth distribution 138–39 science-based targets 164–66 systems approaches 159–62, 161–62 technological changes 166–68 useful/beneficial organisations 158–59 values 159, 174 see also food retailers call centres, negative effect of performance metrics 125–26 calorific needs 12, 242–43 carbohydrates, carbon footprint 23–25, 25 carbon budgets 51–52, 88, 146, 169–70, 201–2, 204–5 carbon capture and storage (CCS) 91–92, 141, 211, 215 carbon dioxide emissions, exponential growth 202–4, 203, 220; see also greenhouse gas emissions carbon footprints agriculture 22–25, 23, 29–30 carbohydrates 25 local food/food miles 30–32 population growth 149 protein 24 sea travel 114–16 vegetarianism/veganism 27 INDEX carbon pricing 145–47, 209–10 carbon scrubbing 211, 216 carbon taxes 142–43 CCS see carbon capture and storage celebrities 182 change, embracing see openmindedness chicken farms 25–26 Chilean seabass (Patagonian toothfish) 33–34 China 216 global distribution of fossil fuel reserves 89–90 sunlight/radiant energy 69–70, 70 choice//being in control 266 cities, urban planning and transport 104–6 citizen’s wages 136–39, 153–54 Clark, Duncan: Burning Question (with Berners-Lee) 4, 92, 215 climate change 3–4, 51, 55, 216 big picture perspective 195 biodiversity impacts 53–54 evidence against using fossil fuels 64–66 ocean acidification 54–55 plastics production/pollution 55–58, 56–57 rebound effects 52, 128, 165–66, 206–7, 206 science-based targets 164–66 scientific facts 51–53, 200–11, 203, 206 systems approaches 159–62, 161 values 169–70 coal 216; see also fossil fuels comfort breaks, performance metrics 125–27 Common Cause report (Crompton) 129 community service 174 Index commuting 217; see also travel and transport companies see businesses competence 266 complexity 189, 191, 221; see also simplistic thinking consumption/consumerism 217 ethical 147–48, 168 personal actions 174–75 risks of further growth 121 values 173 corporate responsibility 219; see also businesses critical realism 176 critical thinking skills 188–89, 191 Crompton, Tom (Common Cause report) 129 cruises 115–16 cultural norms big picture perspective 197 values 171–72 cultures of truth 177–79 cumulative carbon budgets 51, 201–2 cycling 4–5, 99–102, 116, 217 dairy industry 230–31; see also animal sources of food democracy 141, 218, 240–41; see also voting denial 198, 227 Denmark, wealth distribution 130–35 Desai, Pooran 161–62 desalination plants, energy use 94 determinism 95, 218 developed countries 218–19 energy use 93 food waste 13, 39–40, 241 diesel vehicles 107–9, 109 diet, sustainable 219; see also vegetarianism/veganism 279 digital information storage, and energy efficiency 84–85 direct air capture, carbon dioxide 211, 216 distance, units of 243 double-sided photocopying metaphor 219 driverless cars 109–10 e-transport e-bikes 101–2, 116 e-boats 115 e-cars 101–2, 106, 220 e-planes 111 investment 141 economic growth 119, 219 big picture perspective 196–97 carbon pricing 145–47 carbon taxes 142–43 consumer power through spending practices 147–48 GDP as inadequate metric 123–24, 126–27 investment 140–42 market forces 127–30 need for new metric of healthy growth 124–27 risks and benefits of growth 120–23, 121 trickledown of wealth 130–31, 130 wealth distribution 130–35, 131–40, 132, 134 education 173–74, 219 efficiency 219–20 digital information storage 84–85 energy use 82–85 investment 141 limitations of electricity 73–86, 85–87 meat eating/animal feed 212–13 rebound effects 84, 207 280 electric vehicles see e-transport electricity, limitations of use 73–86, 85–87; see also renewable energy sources empathy 172, 186–87, 191 employment see work/employment enablement, businesses 163–64 energy in a gas analogy of wealth distribution 136–39 energy use 59, 87, 95–96 current usage 59–60 efficiency 82–85 fracking 79–81, 81 growth rates over time see below inequality 60, 90–91, 131 interstellar travel 117–18 limitations of electricity 73–86, 85–87 limits to growth 67–69, 68, 94–95, 208 nuclear fission 75–77 nuclear fusion 77 personal actions and effects 97 risks of further growth 120–21 sources 63–64 supplied by food 12 UK energy by end use 62, 62 units of 242–43 values 169–70 see also fossil fuels; renewable energy sources energy use growth 1–2, 60–62, 61, 220 and energy efficiency 84 future estimates 93–94 limits to growth 67–69, 68, 94–95 and renewables 81–82 enhanced rock weathering 92 enoughness 221; see also limits to growth environmental strategies, businesses 163–64 science-based targets 164–66 INDEX ethical consumerism 147–48, 168 ethics see values evolutionary rebalancing 6, 221 expert opinion 221 exponential growth 120, 121, 149, 202–4, 220–21 extrinsic motivation and values 143–44, 170–73 facts 222 climate change 51–53, 200–11, 203, 206 meaning of 175–76 media roles in promoting 179–80 see also misinformation; truth fake news 170, 175, 222; see also misinformation farming see food and agriculture fast food 238 feedback mechanisms 272; see also rebound effects fish farming 33 fishing industry 32–36, 222–23 flat lining blip, carbon dioxide emissions 203–4, 220 flexibility see open-mindedness flying see air travel food and agriculture 11, 50, 222–23 animal farming 16–21, 29 biofuels 44 carbon footprints 22–25, 23–25, 27 chicken farming 25–26 employment in agriculture 44–45, 222 feeding growing populations 46–47 fish 32–36 global surplus in comparison to needs 12, 13 human calorific needs 12 investment in sustainability 48–50, 141 Index malnutrition and inequalities of distribution 15–16 overeating/obesity 16 personal actions 30, 34–35, 40, 43, 50 research needs 49 rice farming 29–30 soya bean farming 21, 22 supply chains 48 technology in agriculture 45–46 vegetarianism/veganism 26–29 see also waste food food imports, and population growth 150 food markets 130–31 food miles 30–32, 230 food retailers fish 35–36 food wastage 40–42 rice 30 vegetarianism/veganism 28 fossil fuel companies 223 fossil fuels 63–64, 216, 223 carbon pricing 145–47, 209–10 carbon taxes 142–43 evidence against using 64–66 global deals 87–91, 161, 205–6, 208–9 global distribution of reserves 89, 89–90 limitations of using electricity instead 73–86, 85–87 need to leave in the ground 87–91, 161, 205–6, 208–9, 223 sea travel 115 using renewables instead of or as well as 81–82 fracking 79–81, 81, 224 free markets 127–30, 172, 228 free will 95, 167 frog in a pan of water analogy 236, 241 fun 224 281 fundamentalism 176, 192 future scenarios aims and visions 8–9 climate change lag times 204–5 energy use 93–94 planning ahead 204–5 thinking/caring about 187, 191, 229 travel and transport 100–1, 109–10 gambling industry 139–40, 152, 265 gas analogy of wealth distribution 136–39 gas (natural gas) 224; see also fracking; methane GDP big picture perspective 196–97 as inappropriate metric of healthy growth 123–24, 126–27 risks of further growth 121–22 genetic modification 45–46 genuineness 172 geo engineering solutions 224–25 Germany, tax system 145 Gini coefficient of income inequality 144 global cultural norms 171–72, 197 global deals 163 fossil fuels 87–91, 208–10 inequity 210 global distribution, fossil fuels 89–91, 89 global distribution, solar energy 69–71, 70, 89 global distribution, wind energy 74, 74 global food surplus 12, 13 global governance 127–30, 141, 225 global solutions, big picture perspective 196 global systems 5–6, 186, 225 global temperature increases 200–1 282 global thinking skills 186 global travel, by mode of transport 100 global wealth distribution 130–35, 132, 132, 134, 144, 145 governmental roles big picture perspective 196 climate change policies 51–53, 200–11 energy use policies 59, 97 fishing industry 36 promoting culture of truth 178–80 sustainable farming 29, 45 technological changes 168 wealth distribution 138 see also global governance greed 225–26; see also individualism greenhouse gas emissions 209 exponential growth curves 202–4, 203, 220 food and agriculture 23 market forces 128 measurement 127 mitigation of food waste 42, 43, 43 risks of further growth 120 scientific facts 51–53 units 243 see also carbon dioxide; carbon footprints; methane; nitrogen dioxide greenwash 215, 226 growth 226; see also economic growth; energy use growth; exponential growth hair shirts 212, 224, 226–27 Handy, Charles 236 Happy Planet Index 126 Hardy, Lew 143 Hawking , Stephen 2, 166–67 Hong Kong, population growth 149–50 INDEX How Bad Are Bananas?

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Because it is a present danger, gradual changes in energy use that promise merely to reduce the rate of emissions are not an adequate response. What is needed is some way of accelerating the search for a technological response that will drive the annual emissions to zero or even below. Yet the Kyoto Protocol might actually do this by impelling the signatory nations to impose stiff taxes on carbon dioxide emissions in order to bring themselves into compliance with the Protocol. The taxes would give the energy industries, along with business customers of them such as airlines and manufacturers of motor vehicles, a strong incentive to finance R&D designed to create economical clean substitutes for such fuels and devices to 'trap' emissions at the source, before they enter the atmosphere, or even to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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The conventional assumption about the way that taxes , tradable permits, or other methods of capping emissions of greenhouse gases work is that they induce substitution away from activities that burn fossil fuels and encourage more economical use of such fuels. To examine this assumption, imagine (unrealistically) that the demand for fossil fuels is completely inelastic in the short run. 9 Then even a very heavy tax on carbon dioxide emissions would have no short-run effect on the level of emissions, and one's first reaction is likely to be that, if so, the tax would be ineffectual. Actually it would be a highly efficient tax from the standpoint of generating government revenues (the basic function of taxation); it would not distort the allocation of resources, and therefore its imposition could be coupled with a reduction in less efficient taxes without reducing government revenues, although the substitution would be unlikely to be complete because, by reducing taxpayer resistance, more efficient taxes facilitate the expansion of government.

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For we then understand that the band of curves in the graph is arbitrarily truncated; that we could have a vertical takeoff say in 2020 that within a decade would bring us to the highest point in the graph. Moreover, against that risk, a technology-forcing tax on emissions might well be effective even if only the major emitting countries imposed substantial emission taxes. If manufacturers of automobiles sold in North America, the European Union, and Japan were hit with a heavy tax on carbon dioxide emissions from their automobiles, the fact that China was not taxing automobiles sold in its country would not substantially erode the incentive of the worldwide automobile industry to develop effective methods for reducing the carbon dioxide produced by their automobiles. It is tempting to suppose that measures to deal with long-run catastrophic threats can safely be deferred to the future because the world will be richer and therefore abler to afford costly measures to deal with catastrophe.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Unlike the Deagel prognosis that sounded horrifying but reasonable, the MIT program results listed two different reasons for the collapse that are very much in line with the agenda of the Globalists: Overpopulation and global warming will be the causes that take down the planet, so to their logic, the only way to save the planet is to depopulate and institute carbon taxes. This has always seemed unlikely because the Globalists finance studies like these in order to scare the hell out of the public – pushing the public sentiment towards supporting their agenda for killing the “useless eaters” and stealing the money from whoever is left through a fraudulent carbon tax scam. Hey, if the weather doesn’t kill people the Banksters will. Deagel’s proposal, on the other hand, proposed the collapse of the United States through the implosion of the financial markets and the destruction of the medical system, two areas that could be seen as not just possible but probable.

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This is not an opinion of what they are doing, these are their own words. It does not matter if the enemy is not even real. It does not matter if there is climate change or not, they are going to use that as their excuse to institute a world government anyway. This carbon tax is planned to be one of the main funding mechanisms of the world government that they are seeking to create. The Carbon Tax Hustle There are few terms that evoke a deep sadness about the way that humanity has let down the planet quite like “Global Warming”. Skinny polar bears clinging to dwindling icebergs is the iconic image associated with the overheating of the planet due to Man’s selfish ways.

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If the President of the United Nations Foundation is not totally sold on the concept of global warming, why the hell should the rest of us? Russia has long said they do not think carbon taxes are based on real science, and they are right. It is meant to shut down all major economies not controlled by the IMF and the World Bank. It has two purposes; neither of them has been made public. The first part of the carbon tax scam is that the IMF and the World Bank will collect taxes from companies that create too much carbon waste. They will set an allowable limit and tax everything over the limit amount unless a company gets an exemption, like all of the oil companies will have.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates

agricultural Revolution, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, fear of failure, Ford Model T, global pandemic, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of air conditioning, Louis Pasteur, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, oil shock, performance metric, plant based meat, purchasing power parity, risk tolerance, social distancing, Solyndra, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, the High Line, urban planning, yield management

Are they talking about grid-scale energy storage, electrofuels, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, and zero-carbon cement and steel? If not, they’re not helping us get on the path to zero emissions by 2050. Here are some specific steps the private sector can take along these lines: Set up an internal carbon tax. Some big companies now impose a carbon tax on each of their divisions. These companies aren’t paying lip service to reducing emissions. They’re helping products get out of the lab and into the market, because the revenue from internal taxes can go directly to activities that reduce the Green Premiums and help create a market for the clean-energy products those firms will need.

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Today, when businesses make products or consumers buy things, they don’t bear any extra cost for the carbon involved, even though that carbon imposes a very real cost on society. This is what economists call an externality: an expense that’s borne by society rather than the person or business who’s responsible for it. There are various ways, including a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program, to ensure that at least some of these external costs are paid by whoever is responsible for them. In short, we can reduce Green Premiums by making carbon-free things cheaper (which involves technical innovation), by making carbon-emitting things more expensive (which involves policy innovation), or by doing some of both.

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Among other things, the government put a lot of money into renewable-energy R&D. They weren’t the only ones who did this (around this time, the United States started working on utility-scale wind turbines in Ohio), but the Danes did something unusual. They paired their R&D support with a feed-in tariff and, later, a carbon tax. Denmark helped lead the way on making wind power more affordable. These turbines are on the island of Samsø. As countries like Spain followed suit, the wind industry started moving down the learning curve. Companies now had the incentive to develop larger rotors and higher-capacity machines so each turbine could produce more power, and they started selling more units.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

In 2012, the total budget of the Egyptian ministry of education for all primary, middle, and secondary schools and universities in a country of 85 million was less than $5 billion.45 A few hundred kilometers to the east, Saudi Arabia and its 20 million citizens enjoyed oil revenues of $300 billion, while Qatar and its 300,000 Qataris take in more than $100 billion annually. Meanwhile, the international community wonders if it ought to extend a loan of a few billion dollars to Egypt or wait until the country increases, as promised, its tax on carbonated drinks and cigarettes. Surely the international norm should be to prevent redistribution of wealth by force of arms insofar as it is possible to do so (particularly when the intention of the invader is to buy more arms, not to build schools, as was the case with the Iraqi invader in 1991). But such a norm should carry with it the obligation to find other ways to achieve a more just distribution of petroleum rents, be it by way of sanctions, taxes, or foreign aid, in order to give countries without oil the opportunity to develop.

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More recently, the French Constitutional Court has apparently come up with a theory of what maximum income tax rate is compatible with the Constitution: after a period of high-level legal deliberation known only to itself, the Court hesitated between 65 and 67 percent and wondered whether or not it should include the carbon tax. 50. The problem is similar to that posed by the return on PAYGO retirement systems. As long as growth is robust and the fiscal base is expanding at a pace equal (or nearly equal) to that of interest on the debt, it is relatively easy to reduce the size of the public debt as a percentage of national income.

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Nevertheless, current low rates are a powerful economic argument in favor of public investment (at least as long as such rates last). 54. Over the last several decades, annual public investment (net of depreciation of public assets) in most rich countries has been about 1–1.5 percent of GDP. See the online technical appendix and Supplemental Table S16.1, available online. 55. Including tools such as the carbon tax, which increases the cost of energy consumption as a function of the associated emission of carbon dioxide (and not as a function of budget variations, which has generally been the logic of gasoline taxes). There is good reason to believe, however, that the price signal has less of an impact on emissions than public investment and changes to building codes (requiring thermal insulation, for example). 56.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist by Ray C. Anderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centralized clearinghouse, clean tech, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, Easter island, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invisible hand, junk bonds, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, music of the spheres, Negawatt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, precautionary principle, renewable energy credits, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, urban renewal, Y2K

Once a dollar figure is attached to anything the game gets a lot more serious, and a tax shift like that could change the world as we have known it, by placing a price on carbon and other pollutants. If your business were paying a carbon tax, you would want to know, for certain, that your competitors were paying the same kind of tax, based on the same metrics, using the same transparent calculations. And if buying offsets allowed you or your business to avoid those carbon taxes, you can also bet that the legitimacy of those offsets would be scrutinized very closely. A single, common certification standard will emerge and be applied across the board. And that will be a good thing.

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In 1995, a kilowatt-hour of photovoltaic electricity cost about fifty cents. By 2005, that number had fallen to twenty cents, and it is still dropping. And keep in mind, as legislation focuses on ways of reducing CO2 greenhouse gas emissions by placing a price on carbon dioxide generation, there will be no “carbon tax,” or greenhouse gas surcharge applied to renewable electricity. As investment costs come down with innovation and ever larger volumes of production, the primary renewable energy costs (the amortization of the investment, spread across the units of energy produced) will drop even more. The risk factor is very different, too.

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Developing countries need energy even more. The gap between supply and demand for fossil fuels is bound to grow. The threat of global climate disruption looms dangerously. And while the chance of government intervention in the form of “cap and trade” legislation (to limit greenhouse gas emissions) or a carbon tax on traditional power sources (to put a price on carbon) is, I believe, all but certain, I’m equally sure that subsidies will be extended and expanded for low- or no-carbon technologies. You can take a look at your own energy bills and determine what that will mean. This is why I believe we are not in a solar bubble, but in the early stages of a solar revolution, a sea change, a paradigm shift away from petroleum (especially imported petroleum) and coal, and toward the opportunities inherent in energy sources that are large, dependable, and more under our control.

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

Whether CCS or renewables or something else (or for that matter, nothing) is the future of zero-carbon energy will depend on a complex mix of economics, technology, and public policy. The last factor is critical: if you want to maximize the odds of hitting ambitious climate targets while also taking advantage of cheap natural gas, you need to use public policy effectively. Carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, or a clean energy standard (CES) could each have the potential to strike the right balance. Carbon taxes are charges that would make coal, oil, and natural gas users pay penalties proportional to their total greenhouse gas emissions. Cap-and-trade would make them buy permits for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, with a similar effect.

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A CES would require that electricity producers derive an increasing fraction of their power from cleaner sources, with partial credit for natural gas. All three admit a wide range of options for cutting emissions: whichever technology is most cost-effective—natural gas, zero-carbon coal, nuclear power, renewable energy, or greater efficiency—is the one that will be pursued. So long as each becomes stricter over time (higher carbon taxes, fewer emissions permits, or more clean energy under a CES), this will encourage the conventional use of natural gas to replace coal at first but will eventually tilt the incentives toward zero-carbon power, including natural gas with CCS. I n early 2011, Robert Howarth, Anthony Ingraffea, and Renee Santoro, three researchers at Cornell University, published a bombshell study with a simple implication: everything I’ve just told you about natural gas is wrong.

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Insofar as the country could afford the sorts of subsidies it handed out to wind and solar over the last decade, affordability would be trashed if the technologies took off considerably further and maintenance of high levels of subsidies continued. This is why people in the “make clean energy cheap” camp have increasingly focused on support for innovation. The idea is to use government support in the near term to permanently reduce the cost of clean energy, ultimately obviating any need for subsidies, mandates, or things like carbon taxes. Some advocates focus on support for research and development (R&D), like the chemistry behind better batteries and the nanoscience that could yield stronger materials for wind turbine blades. This sort of role for government is relatively uncontroversial: Washington has been supporting basic R&D for a long time.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

“Neoliberalism: Oversold?”: This paper, by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, was published in June 2016. something like a fantasy field: Romer published “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” on his own website on September 14, 2016. Nordhaus favors a carbon tax: The Nobel laureate has published widely on the subject of the carbon tax, and he gives the most plainspoken account of the tax level he considers optimal in “Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017, https://www.nber.org/reporter/2017number3/nordhaus.html. $306 billion: Adam B.

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The country was founded on genocidal indifference to the native landscape and those who inhabited it, and its modern ambitions have always been precarious: Australia is today a society of expansive abundance, jerry-rigged onto a very harsh and ecologically unforgiving land. In 2011, a single heat wave there produced significant tree dieback and coral bleaching, the death of plant life, crashes in local bird populations and dramatic spikes in the number of certain insects, and transformations of ecosystems both marine and terrestrial. When the country enacted a carbon tax, its emissions fell; when, under political pressure, the tax was repealed, they rose again. In 2018, the country’s parliament declared global warming a “current and existential national security risk.” A few months later, its climate-conscious prime minister was forced to resign, for the shame of attempting to honor the Paris accords.

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And Paul Romer, later the chief economist of the World Bank, proposed that macroeconomics, the “science” of capitalism, was something like a fantasy field, equivalent to string theory, that no longer had any legitimate claim to describing the workings of the real economy accurately. In 2018, Romer won the Nobel Prize. He shared it with William Nordhaus, who pioneered the study of the economic impact of climate change. An economist, Nordhaus favors a carbon tax, but a low one—his “optimal” carbon price still allows for 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming. At present, the economic impacts of climate change are relatively light: in the United States, in 2017, the estimated cost was $306 billion. The heavier impacts await us. And if, in the past, the promise of growth has been the justification for inequality, injustice, and exploitation, it will have many more wounds to salve in the near climate future: disaster, drought, famine, war, global refugeeism and the political disarray it unleashes.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

And because land is immobile, it would have less distortionary effects on the economy, while redistributing wealth from the current owners of land to a property-owning society. 13.2.3 A Carbon Tax, Aka, Let’s Put a Smile on Greta’s Face For many, perhaps most, people their main existential worry is not worsening dependency ratios or demographic change, but rather climate change, and all the problems that that could bring with it. The declining birth rates (except in Africa), and slowing population growth, is welcomed by climate change activists as reducing the need for fossil fuels. But a carbon tax would serve both causes. It would raise funds to pay for the growing need to care for the old, while at the same time using market forces to reduce fossil fuel usage where it was less valuable.

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In the GGM, the US doesn’t experience catch-up productivity growth, since all catch-up is relative to the US. Also, see Conesa et al. (2019), Laitner and Silverman (2019), and Börsch-Supan (2019), all in Bloom (editor), Live Long and Prosper (2019). While we are not fiscal experts we would make four suggestions where higher tax revenues might be found, i.e. corporation tax; land value taxation; carbon tax; a destination-based cash-flow tax (DBCFT)—the latter having already been mentioned in Chapter 12, Sect. 12.2.2. 13.2.1 Reforming the Basis of Corporation Tax There has been much Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), the latter from international competition, notably via tax havens, especially in the case of companies providing digital services, in recent decades.

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In the USA, differing State taxes on gas cause garages to congregate at certain State borders, but the distortion seems relatively minor. By the same token the tax rate on heating bills could be made to vary conditional on the average temperature. Already in many countries special account is taken of the heating needs of the elderly. What we need is a carbon tax, but one that is more cleverly designed to ease the pressures on the poor, the elderly and those whose way of life prevents them from adjusting flexibly to the new tax. 13.2.4 DBCFT We have already discussed this in the previous chapter (in Sect. 12.2.2), and we keep the discussion brief here.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

Stern, Macroeconomic Time-Series Evidence That Energy Efficiency Improvements Do Not Save Energy (Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, 2019), https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:camaaa:2019-21. 24. J. J. Andersson, “Carbon Taxes and CO2 Emissions: Sweden as a Case Study,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 11 (2019): 1–30; A. Yamazaki, “Jobs and Climate Policy: Evidence from British Columbia’s Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 83 (2017): 197–216. 25. Initiative on Global Markets. Surveys of Economists on Carbon Taxes (University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 2020), https://www.igmchicago.org/?s=carbon+tax; P. H. Howard and D. Sylvan, “The Economic Climate: Establishing Expert Consensus on the Economics of Climate Change,” Institute for Policy Integrity (2015): 438–41; N.

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To make a good cup of tea, it’s necessary to boil at least one cup of water. There’s a fixed and immutable energy cost to get a cup of water to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) that you can’t reduce with efficiency savings: you can’t beat physics. There’s evidence that carbon taxes would help reduce demand for the kind of energy the world needs to cut back on.24 Economists don’t usually agree on anything, but most are in favor of carbon taxes as a way to cut emissions and combat climate change.25 But any serious solution will need to address the supply of energy too. For instance, to fill the gap that will be left if fossil fuels are removed from the mix, the size of scale-up in clean energy we will need is terrifying.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

To answer this energy riddle, you need to look past how power is generated in Denmark and into the prices Danish citizens pay for electricity. Households in Copenhagen pay roughly 30 cents per kilowatt-hour for power. That’s two to three times the average price in North America. In Denmark, government-regulated power prices are laden with carbon taxes, which means electricity isn’t cheap, whether it’s wind powered or coal fired. Not surprisingly, Danes use a fraction of the power that North Americans consume. All those world-famous windmills, it turns out, aren’t behind Denmark’s falling emissions. The real reason for its smaller carbon footprint is its high electricity prices, which put a huge damper on power demand.

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In Canada, subsidies are granted under the guise of protecting one of the country’s leading exports. Danish politicians don’t have to contend with the powerful lobbying efforts of Big Auto or Big Oil. Nor does Denmark have to worry about penalizing hard-working coal miners or assembly-line workers. The country is politically free to impose what are, in effect, huge carbon taxes that encourage energy conservation. While admirable from an environmental standpoint, for a country that’s forced to buy oil and coal from foreign producers, slashing energy consumption also makes a tremendous amount of economic sense. Half a world away, the Japanese are coming to the same conclusion.

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The specter of climate change takes on a very different shape in a world of fuel abundance and robust economic growth than it does when fuel is scarce and economies are faltering. WHY EMISSIONS CONTROLS DON’T WORK To date, attempts to regulate emissions have been driven by a belief that we need to decarbonize our economies. Therefore, governments try to reduce fossil fuel consumption by putting a price on carbon emissions. Some countries do this through carbon taxes, while others try to control pollution using elaborate cap-and-trade systems, which involve shuffling around carbon credits. The rationale behind these policies is straightforward: make emitters pay for emissions and they’ll emit less. The reasoning is sensible enough, but it hasn’t worked in practice.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Quantitative easing thus directed to good work first, then free to join economy however. Mary said, So if you combined this thing with carbon taxes, you would get taxed if you burn carbon, but paid if you sequester carbon. Agreed, and added that any carbon tax should be set progressively, meaning larger use more pay, to keep it from being a regressive tax. Then it becomes a good thing, and feebates can be added that pass some of this tax income back to citizens, to make it even better. A carbon tax thus added to the carbon coin was said by Chen and others to be a crucial feature of the plan. When both taxes and carbon coins were applied together, the modeling and social experiments got much better results than when either strategy was applied by itself.

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She asked to be led through the time element again. Explained how the central banks could simply publish the rate of return that they planned to pay out in the future, no matter what. Investors would therefore have a sure thing, which they would love. It would be a way to go long, and to securitize their more speculative bets. The stick, the carbon tax, also needed to rise over time. With that tax rate and its angle of increase published in advance, and a long-term rate of return guaranteed for investing in carbon coins, one could then calculate the cost of burning carbon, and the benefits of sequestering it. Normal currencies float against each other in the exchange markets, but if one currency is guaranteed to rise in value over time no matter what, then it becomes more valuable to investors.

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If we don’t fund a rapid carbon drawdown, if we don’t take the immense amount of capital that flows around the world looking for the highest rate of return and redirect it into decarbonizing work, civilization could crash. Then the dollar will be weak indeed.” Yablonski nodded, grimly amused. “If the world ends, the dollar is in trouble. But aside from that contingency, we’re here to defend it in the ways we’ve been given. That’s what we’re tasked with. Monetary policy, not fiscal policy. And the carbon tax proposals are gaining momentum, we feel.” Mary said, “But you need a carrot to go with the stick. The modeling shows that, not to mention common sense.” “Not our purview,” Yablonski said. The Europeans nodded in agreement; the Chinese official, an elderly man, looked on more sympathetically. “But maybe it should be,” Mary said.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

The Green New Deal is an attempt to bridge precisely this divide, by emphasizing the fact that building new green infrastructure (solar panels, high-speed railroads, etc.) will both create jobs and help in the fight against climate change. It de-emphasizes the idea of a carbon tax, viewed by many on the left as being too reliant on market mechanisms and, as in France, just another way to make the poor pay. We understand that a carbon tax is not an easy sell (taxes that hit most people never are), but our view is that it should be possible to make it politically acceptable by making it absolutely explicit that the carbon tax is not a way to raise revenues. The government should structure the carbon tax in a revenue-neutral way, such that tax revenues would be handed back as a compensation: a lump sum to all those at the lower end of the income scale, who would therefore come out ahead.

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Economists are more like plumbers; we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience, and a bunch of pure trial and error. This means economists often get things wrong. We will no doubt do so many times in this book. Not just about the growth rate, which is mostly a hopeless exercise, but also about somewhat more limited questions, like how much carbon taxes will help with climate change, how CEOs’ pay might be affected if taxes were to be raised a lot, or what universal basic income would do to the structure of employment. But economists are not the only ones who make mistakes. Everyone gets things wrong. What is dangerous is not making mistakes, but to be so enamored of one’s point of view that one does not let facts get in the way.

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One hope is that research and development efforts might respond to incentives.17 R&D expenditures are strongly influenced by the size of the market for the new innovations they are seeking to finance.18 So a temporary inducement to research clean alternatives to dirty technologies (in the form of a carbon tax that would make it more expensive to use the old technologies and/or direct subsidies to research clean technologies) could have a snowball effect by creating a demand. The clean technology would become cheaper and therefore more attractive, which would increase the demand for it and hence the returns to research.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The difference is that the CO2 from fossil fuel burning is much less visible than is black sludge; and that fossil fuel producers and users don’t yet have to pay the costs of the harm that they cause to other people, whereas our hypothetical doll manufacturers do. But there is increasing insistence that fossil fuel producers or users should be forced to pay up just like Happy Doll makers, e.g., by a tax on carbon emissions or by another method. That insistence is one factor behind the current search for alternative energy sources other than fossil fuels. Some alternative sources appear to be virtually inexhaustible, such as wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectrical, and geothermal energy. All of those sources except for tidal are already “proven”: i.e., they have been in use on a large scale for a long time.

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Even if the world’s 200 other nations with smaller outputs don’t join such a future agreement, just a five-way agreement among the five biggest players could go a long way towards solving the emissions problem. That’s because the five biggest players can then put pressure on the other 200, e.g., by imposing trade tariffs and carbon taxes on countries that don’t adhere. Another route towards solving world problems consists of agreements among a region’s nations. There are already many such regional agreements for North America, Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and other regional groupings. The most advanced set of regional agreements, with the widest range of institutions and agreement spheres and binding rules, is the set for the European Union (E.U.), currently comprising around 27 European nations.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game