Climate Change

Archive for Climate Change

Climate Change and Captain Kirk

For some time now I’ve been trying to convey just how ludicrous it is that the US government’s anti-carbon policies are based on computer simulations of the global economic/climate system through the year 2300. A recent piece by David Kreutzer and Kevin Dayaratna (an economist and computer programmer, respectively, at the Heritage Foundation) is the […]

Are Climate Change Mitigation Policies Like a Form of Insurance?

I argue no. Or at least, if they are, they’re really expensive and very few people would buy them voluntarily. I walk through the numbers here, but a quick sampling: Now ask yourself: Suppose someone from an insurance company came to you in the year 2050 and said, “We’ve run computer models many thousands of […]

Immediate Reaction to the Latest IPCC Report

I will be writing tons on this topic in the coming weeks, but my immediate reaction to the IPCC AR5 Working Group II report that came out Monday is now up at IER. An excerpt: Now the reader should understand the hole into which the climate alarmists have dug themselves. They can’t have the IPCC […]

Let’s Be Careful With “Spreading Out” Damages

Lately at his blog, David Friedman has been doing a great job challenging the “the science is settled, we need a big carbon tax NOW” dogmatism. However, in a recent critique of an older piece by William Nordhaus (which I myself criticized at IER when it came out), Friedman makes a move that seems rather […]

IER Comment on the “Social Cost of Carbon”

If you are a true nerd about the global warming stuff, you should definitely get a cup of coffee some morning and spend a half hour carefully reading the Institute for Energy Research (IER) formal “comment” (submitted to the government) on the Social Cost of Carbon. However, if you have a shorter attention span, in two […]

Heritage Confirms My Intuition on “Social Cost of Carbon” Calcs

I can’t remember mentioning this here at Free Advice so… In a recent IER post I walk through the results when a programmer at the Heritage Foundation’s ran Richard Tol’s FUND model to calculate the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) using a 7% discount rate. A 7% discount rate is one of the required parameters […]

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 […]

Clarifying the “Tax Interaction Effect”

David R. Henderson favorably reviewed Ross McKitrick’s presentation (at IER’s Carbon Tax conference last summer) on the “tax interaction effect,” and then in a follow-up post David pursued Greg Mankiw’s writings on the topic. In the comments of David’s second post, someone wrote: If my microeconomic intuition — that taxing harmful externalities will enhance net […]