Santorum 2012!

Climatecrocks points to this eloquent call for a carbon tax from a conservative icon, none other than Arthur B. Laffer:

We need to impose a tax on the thing we want less of (carbon dioxide) and reduce taxes on the things we want more of (income and jobs). A carbon tax would attach the national security and environmental costs to carbon-based fuels like oil, causing the market to recognize the price of these negative externalities.

Nuclear power plants would then compete with coal-fired plants. Wind and solar power would have a shot against natural gas. Trains would compete with trucks. We would clean the air, create wealth and jobs through a new technology boom and drastically improve our national security.

The United States can’t solve climate change alone. The Kyoto climate treaty was rightly rejected by the Senate because China and India weren’t subject to its provisions. If China and India join the United States in attaching a price to carbon, their goods should come into this country without a carbon adjustment. But if they do not, every item they place on our shelves should be subject to the same carbon tax that we would place on our domestically produced goods, again offset by a revenue-neutral tax cut.

If World Trade Organization rules entitle members to an unwarranted exemption from such a carbon tax, then we should change them. Outliers should not be allowed to frustrate the decision-making of the countries that are trying to prevent the security and environmental train wrecks of this century.

Former Representative Bob Inglis, interviewed above, co-authored the piece quoted.

Inglis and Laffer illustrate why we need more conservatives on the right side of this issue, and need them front and center. Their arguments effortlessly hit a number of the major hot-button concepts needed to connect with conservatives and low information voters of all stripes. Fairness. Competitiveness. Climate change migitation imposed by American power, not conceded to an international agreement:

If China and India join the United States in attaching a price to carbon, their goods should come into this country without a carbon adjustment. But if they do not, every item they place on our shelves should be subject to the same carbon tax that we would place on our domestically produced goods, again offset by a revenue-neutral tax cut.

I love this. Instead of a hypothetical multinational agreement, you have instead a hypothetical international trade war with hypothetical punitive tariffs. (Notice that the possibility of an agreement with other powers is there, but deemphasized -- essentially, and agreement is reduced to "They are going to do their share and pull their weight or they'll pay the price (assessed and exacted by us).

This is good. Yes! I'm not kidding. Hopefully the belligerence gets taken down a notch in the execution, but we need proposals that make Americans feel empowered, not impeded; like leaders, not followers, leveling the playing field, not meddling in the market. These are the only sorts of programs that have any chance of coming to fruition.

Obviously the conservative radicalism in this country is going to have to take a pretty epic faceplant in national elections -- maybe a couple -- before strong action on climate change has a chance to be recognized as the essentially conservative program that it is. Michigan Democrats for Santorum, godspeed.

The tragedy of the commons, illustrated

By the inestimably great xkcd:

Markets do works -- if they didn't, we wouldn't be living in an age of almost unimaginable prosperity, relative to what came before. But when people use a resource they do not own, things get more complicated. As in the case of Black Hat guy, unowned resources allow us to privatize the benefits of a destructive act while socializing the losses, spreading them out over many people. Ownership prevents this from happening by providing someone in control of a resource who has a natural incentive to maximize its value, which includes not letting it be ruined by overuse or misuse.

What if you have something no one can own, like the ocean, or the atmosphere? Well, then you need collective political action to create a pseudo-ownership, either through regulation or a Pigovian tax that creates a "price" for damaging the resource, correcting the market incentives to account for the unowned resource without otherwise distorting the market. In the case of climate change, what we need is a carbon tax.

This is not a leftist/Marxist/back-to-nature/anticapitalist idea. Even that beloved saint of blog-libertarian crackpots, Hayek, is on board:

“Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation.  In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.  But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.”  (Hayek, 1944)

 H/t Dan Kearny, who has a sentence by sentence analysis of the passage.  Pielke (Junior not Senior) is with us. At low levels, a carbon tax would likely pay for itself in terms of reduced lung disease alone.

We ought to get serious about this. We can't feast forever on invisible meat.