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12 Mar 2007 09:17 am

Chill, Everyone

Jon Rauch urges calm in the climate change debate. It's not an emergency, but it is a problem. Happily there is an obvious and not-too-difficult solution:

The most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions. "At around $30 per ton of CO2 over a 25-year horizon, experts seem to think this is the kind of price that will encourage the kind of technologies that are necessary," says Billy Pizer, an environmental economist at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. That would translate into an additional 27 cents or so on a gallon of gasoline and about a 20 percent increase in residential electricity bills (more like 34 percent for industrial users). Unpleasant, but hardly radical. Perfectly do-able, in fact.

So let's do it, ok? Taxing carbon will prod the private sector to come up with new energy sources - no government-run Manhattan project, please - and the effect will be gradual but effective in the long run, i.e. the next century. Taxing carbon is good policy anyway, as Glenn Reynolds has pointed out. I know this sounds like a massive suck-up, but easily the best piece I have read recently on climate change is by Gregg Easterbrook in the current Atlantic. He lays out what the likeliest actual effects will be in the next few decades - who will benefit? how? and what difference will it all make? Canada and Russia are in for boom-times. The already poor and equatorial: not so much. There's an interview about the piece by Tim Lavin here.

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