My Friend Josiah and the Carbon Tax

My friend, Josiah Neeley, recently published a piece, “Confessions of a former carbon tax skeptic.” In it, he professes his belief in taxing carbon and then evangelizes conservatives with the gospel of carbon taxation in an attempt to convert us.

Except Josiah doesn’t actually share much good news about the carbon tax with us. Instead, his argument is mostly negative. He attempts to dissuade us from having concerns about a carbon tax without actually making the case for why we should have a carbon tax in the first place.

Although, to be fair, he does at least try to explain why a carbon tax is better than other taxes:

A revenue-neutral carbon tax offers the benefit of redirecting taxation away from things we want more of — like work and investment — and toward things we want less of (or at least don’t care so much about).

Herein lies much of the folly (though there is plenty to be found elsewhere) of the argument in support of the so-called carbon tax. Because while assessing carbon emissions may be the means of collecting money from American citizens, what the tax actually does is tax energy. It turns out that the carbon tax is actually an energy tax. Yet we never are told why it is a good thing to tax energy, you know that stuff that powers our cars, our refrigerators, our factories, our air conditioners, our phones, our hospitals, our tractors, our airplanes, etc.

So with this insight, let’s try that quote again:

A revenue-neutral carbon tax offers the benefit of redirecting taxation away from things we want more of — like work and investment — and toward things we want less of (or at least don’t care so much about), like energy.

Remember those air conditioners we were talking about? That use electricity to keep us cool? Or the heaters that keep us from freezing in the winter? We don’t really need them so much. We can just follow Jimmy Carter’s lead and set our thermostats at 55 (in the winter, of course). And those MRI machines that allow doctors to diagnose and cure our illnesses? We don’t really need so many of those, do we?

It is also folly to believe that taxing energy is not a tax on work and investment. Energy is used to build and operate our offices and factories, our machinery and equipment, and our transportation and communications. A tax on energy is a tax on work, investment, productivity; in fact, a tax on energy is a tax on life itself. Because it takes energy to sustain life, to provide even the basic things we need to survive like food, water, and shelter.

Further, it is folly to base one’s faith on something as discredited as Michael Mann’s hockey stick (see above).

The effect of this completely discredited graph, which purports to show that global warming is an entirely modern–and thus man-made phenomenon, cannot be overstated. Almost all the work proclaimed today as evidence for anthropomorphic global warming and future apocalyptic scenarios are grounded in the assumption of Mann, etc. that produced the hockey stick: that man–not nature–is the cause of global warming. The modeling and projections of future temperature increases emanating from “the 97% consensus” are based on this.

Climatologists Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry expose the flaws of this consensus in their new study. In it, they conclude that the Earth’s “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) to more atmospheric carbon dioxide is as much as 50% lower than climate alarmists have been claiming. In other words, alarmists’ projections for future temperature increases are based on models that are vastly inflated.

But even Lewis’ and Curry’s projections are inflated because they assume that the climate system was in “energy balance” in the late 1800s and thus the warming since then has been caused by human activity. But as Dr. Roy Spencer (Principal Research Scientist in Climatology at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for NASA’s satellite global temperature monitoring program) explains:

“We have no good reason to assume the climate system is ever in energy balance, although it is constantly readjusting to seek that balance. For example, the historical temperature (and proxy) record suggests the climate system was still emerging from the Little Ice Age in the late 1800s. … If indeed some of the warming since the late 1800s was natural, the ECS would be even lower.

I love Josiah Neeley and will continue to do so throughout all eternity. However, I will not join him in his belief in a “carbon” tax. Taxing energy, the stuff that keeps us alive, was never a good idea. And now that the myth of anthropomorphic global warming has been exposed, it is clear that a carbon tax is nothing but folly.