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Pigouvian taxes are just a more granular way of discouraging something instead of outright banning it. Sure, you do need to know the sign, but even if you're wrong on the magnitude, a wrong Pigouvian tax is usually going to be better than doing nothing. There's a wide range of estimates? Pick something in the middle and be done with it.
As for the sign of the impact of climate change, arguing that it might be beneficial at this point, given the evidence we're seeing, seems a bit like arguing "maybe smoking is good for you, actually".
But I think one of the strongest arguments is that, if you don't know what's going to happen when you fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition, then be conservative and don't fuck irreversibly with the earth's atmospheric composition. We know what the climate is like now -- it's not perfect but it's alright. So it makes sense to take some effort to NOT fuck with it, even if there's some economic cost.
Being unnecessarily cautious and certainly weakening our economies to perhaps protect some aspects of the climate or the environment is a recipe for making irrelevant those who choose that path, and giving power to those who do not. We irreversably fuck with everything. It's a given. You can't stop it. Nothing will remain untouched. If alterating the atmospheric composition is actually as bad an idea as some claim, then we will just have to find out about it the hard way, because reducing human economic activity will not happen.
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That's how they're used, but that means they're not Pigouvian.
No, if you know the sign but don't know the magnitude, you can overshoot and end up with much worse.
That's just the Precautionary Principle, and it's a recipe for nothing but death.
Yes, you're correct, I mean in the sense that we should try to match them to the cost of the externality - which a ban doesn't do. I was just trying to draw a contrast with banning things, which involves far more deadweight loss, in the case where the thing being banned is useful. In the case of extremely addictive drugs, they're almost never good even for the person using them, so a ban makes sense, while for fossil fuels, they have a big benefit but also this externality, so a Pigouvian tax is a good fit. I just worded it clumsily and confusingly and didn't make the point I was trying to.
My point is that even if we think that the damage caused by carbon emissions is somewhere between $5/ton and $2000/ton, a $50/ton carbon tax is much more likely to be beneficial than no tax.
Isn't the Precautionary Principle more about only allowing things once we're sure they're safe? That would have been like not allowing fossil fuels to be burned at all back when they were discovered. We have piles of evidence that what we're doing to our atmosphere is already fucking us over.
I'm not some sort of neo-luddite or de-growth advocate. Yeah, there are some things we could have avoided like leaded gas and CFCs (even for CFCs I don't think we probably should have prevented their use until we had a non-ozone-destroying alternative, given the benefits of refrigeration), but we've really screwed up by not allowing nuclear power to flourish, and on the whole, technology and building new things is good. I just think that for carbon taxes, at this point the debate should be at what level they should be, not whether we need them at all.
Yes.
If you want to end fossil fuel burning, you most certainly are.
Yes, and a car salesman thinks the debate should be about how much profit you'll give him on the car sale and not whether you are going to buy the car at all. This is just a tactic.
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Smoking might actually be good on the margins. Sure, the more you smoke the more likely you’ll die sooner. But smoking also comes with good effects (eg social). There is a case where it is okay used marginally.
What signs are there that climate change is negative? The greening of the planet?
I agree re precaution principle but you can take that too far. For example, we could get rid of all oil uses tomorrow. Society would collapse but perhaps that would be better for maintaining the environment (or perhaps not — people might burn wood).
I don't disagree, though maybe once most people don't smoke, being a smoker is actually negative socially. So nobody smoking is better than everyone smoking a little bit, probably. If you're in a society where everyone already smokes, smoking socially might be the right thing for you though, assuming you don't hate the experience.
The greening of the planet isn't actually good for agriculture. Most plants are what we consider weeds, so faster growing weeds means more pesticide use. And the big issue is really instability more than heat, as you get crazy weather, where the growing season starts early but then there's a frost, or severe droughts and heat waves, or floods, all sorts of stuff like that. Predictability is really good when in comes to farming, and the weather unpredictability caused by a warmer planet more than makes up for any benefit you might get from a longer growing season and more CO2 for plants to consume, in most places.
No disagreement on that point. I think a carbon tax of somewhere between $30 and $100 / ton CO2 is anything but taking things too far, though. A $100/ton tax would add about $1/gallon on the price of gas.
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