AN OLDIE, BUT GOODIE!
Why Carbon Taxes Are Anti-Growth, Anti-Consumer, and Politically Dangerous for Conservatives
Study
Marlo Lewis, Jr. • 12/01/2021
Energy and Environment
Photo Credit: Getty
View Full Document as PDF
A tax on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, contrary to its advocates’ claims, is a market-rigging policy, not a free market one. Its purpose is to drive investment into renewable energy sources not by lowering their cost or improving their performance but by handicapping competing technologies.
Carbon taxes would inflict substantial losses on GDP, job creation, and household income. Even the most aggressive CO2 tax would have negligible climate effects, and costs would far exceed benefits. A realistic assessment of the potential economic damage must also consider the costs created by adding CO2 taxes to a panoply of other policies targeting the fossil-fuel industry. A CO2 tax would exacerbate rather than replace the costs of other less efficient climate policies.
The broader NetZero agenda, which aims to eliminate all U.S. CO2 emissions beyond those absorbed by U.S. forests and other natural “sinks” by 2050, sets the stage for epic policy failure. The global mining and processing infrastructure needed to replace an energy system chiefly reliant on combustible fuels with one reliant on wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles—which require much larger mineral inputs than conventional power generation and vehicles—do not exist. Moreover, the federal permitting system is too slow and litigious to allow completion of the hundreds of renewable energy projects required to replace all coal and gas power plants within 15 years and support massive vehicle electrification. The so-called clean energy transition could become a transition from abundant and affordable to scarce and unaffordable fossil fuels. A related potential downside is a growing dependence on Russia and OPEC for hydrocarbons and China for energy transition minerals.
Neither the “social cost” of CO2 (SCC) nor the alleged “climate crisis” justifies imposing new taxes on fuels that supply 80 percent of U.S. energy. The SCC—a guesstimate of the cumulative climate damages from an incremental ton of CO2—is too speculative and easily manipulated for political ends to justify either taxes or regulations that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars in costs across the economy. The climate crisis is a political narrative spun out of unrealistic models and emission scenarios, unreasonable pessimism about human adaptive capabilities, and sheer political hype.
https://cei.org/studies/why-carbon-taxes-are-anti-growth-anti-consumer-and-politically-dangerous-for-conservatives/
