Jim Manzi assesses U.S. conservatives, climate change, and carbon taxes and neatly states the political problem for carbon taxers on either side of the border right up front:
. . . no matter how much global-warming activists feel as if they have won all the debates in think-tank meetings, editorial pages, and faculty lounges, it is going to be a tough battle to convince the voting public to make huge sacrifices based on the evidence that we have now. After all, Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates has estimated that implementing even the limited emissions abatement envisioned for the United States under the proposed Kyoto Protocol would cost the average U.S. family about $225 per month. Ongoing polling conducted by researchers at M.I.T. suggests that the median U.S. family would be willing to pay $21 per month to “solve global warming.” That’s quite a bid-ask spread.
Manzi believes a carbon tax, even if it were to be implemented globally, would be ineffective in actually solving the problem (he would find well-reasoned opposition to this position from many academics) but this paragraph, though written with John McCain and the Republican Party in mind, could have been written for Stephen Harper's Conservatives:
. . . conservatives should keep in mind a few central facts. First, global warming is real—but it is a problem that is expected to have only a marginal impact on the world economy. Second, while it is economically rational to reduce (slightly) this marginal impact through global carbon taxes, such a global carbon-tax regime would be very unlikely ever to be enacted—and even if it were, the theoretical benefits it might create would probably be more than offset by the economic drag it would produce. And finally, a far better course—one much less costly to implement and much more commensurate with the likeliest risks—would be to invest in new technologies that could help avert the worst potential impacts of global warming.
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