Washington Post Has A Sad That None Of The Democrats Are Pushing A Carbon Tax

Writing in the opinion section, Catherine Rampell is rather bummed that the 2020 Democratic candidates, all 453 of them, are forgetting to put forth a carbon tax. She should be careful what she wishes for, because what do you think will happen to a company that relies on the use of lots and lots of fossil fuels to gather then news and lots and lots of trees turned into paper?

Why do none of the Democrats’ climate plans include the most important tool?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has a big, bold, multitrillion-dollar plan for addressing climate change. So does her rival Joe Biden. Likewiseformer Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. And, of course, Gov. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), whose entire campaign is structured around the climate crisis.

These candidates, to their credit, have offered thoughtful solutions for addressing the most pressing policy challenge of our time. Their proposals are highly detailed and thorough, often running to dozens of pages in length.

And it’s precisely because they’re so detailed and thorough that it’s so bizarre none of them explicitly mentions the obvious, no-brainer tool for curbing carbon emissions: putting a price on carbon.

A carbon tax (or its cousin, a cap-and-trade system) is almost universally embraced by economists on both the left and the right. With good reason, too. Taxing carbon means pricing in, upfront, the implicit costs that come from using fossil fuels — especially, though not exclusively, the cost of warming our planet.

She is right that none of them are offering up a carbon tax, even uber-Warmist Jay Inslee. Instead, later in the piece, Rampell notes

The plans devote a lot of verbiage to talking about the magical properties of government procurement — that is, using the deep pockets of the government to purchase more energy-efficient products. Warren, for instance, analogizes her own plan, which includes a $1.5 trillion federal procurement commitment, to the industrial policy America previously undertook for the space race and our mobilization against Nazi aggression.

The plans really are all about making government massive and controlling, involving pretty much all aspects of life, much like the nutty Green New Deal. They’re basically left-wing pipe dreams wrapped under the banner of ‘climate change’.

The first is that it immediately nudges consumers and businesses away from purchasing carbon-intensive products, because (duh) those products get more expensive.

Actually, it causes just about everything to get more expensive, and causes “unanticipated consequences”, such as people using lots more wood for things like heating and cooking, just as we see in places like Germany and France, which are importing tongs of woods pellets from America.

The second is that, over the longer run, it motivates entrepreneurs and investors to develop new green technologies, because they know they can make money as customers seek out cheaper, lower-carbon-footprint alternatives. Capital organically moves to wherever scientists and investors actually believe the most promising technologies lie, which might be ones that haven’t even been invented yet.

If this is the case, why aren’t we seeing this from places that currently have carbon taxes? California mostly seems to be just exporting Crazy. European nations do not seem to be developing much in the way of “green technologies” despite long established carbon taxes.

Just because the public sector buys more energy-efficient lightbulbs, electric cars or solar panels doesn’t mean the (much larger) private sector will, absent price incentives. Especially if we add conditions to the production of those green goods that actually increase their costs to consumers, as some of these plans do.

Of course, changing our behavior by force is not what our government was established for (excepting criminal behavior, of course). It’s not there to force us to buy certain products and such. Those who want to do this are, what’s that political system again?