Joe Romm Somehow Views a Carbon Tax as a Reward
I will be regularly blogging at the Mises Canada site. It’s run by Redmond Weissenberger, who is an Austrian but with a special focus on the energy sector and climate policy. (In general I do a lot of work for Canadian outlets because oil and natural gas are so big up there.) Redmond is also one of the publishers of The Dollar Vigilante, FYI.
My first of many posts critiques a commentary by Joe Romm:
Those following the climate change policy debate know that the Center for American Progress’ Joe Romm is one of the most vociferous bomb-throwers out there. Romm warns of true calamity from unmitigated climate change, and regularly attributes perfidy to his intellectual opponents. Not surprisingly, he is one of Paul Krugman’s go-to guys when it comes to this stuff.
However, Joe Romm is an actual scientist–he has a PhD in physics from MIT–and so he usually respects technical nuances. Yet in a recent discussion of carbon taxes, Romm gets the issue exactly backwards.
The mystery is revealed at Mises Canada.
Consider: “The free market system rewards people who identify ways to satisfy their wants with less-scarce goods.”
There, I just used “rewards” with basically the same meaning as Joe Romm.