Nick Stern told us all not to do this

We do learn things:

Giving up two doner kebabs’ worth of meat a week

The average kebab does contain meat, does it? Of a known and named species? Well we never. And now to become jocular:

….will be enough to keep the UK within safe climate limits by the end of the next decade….People would need to change their behaviour in some ways, such as by eating about 260g less meat each week,…

And there’s also this:

…told ministers that ambitious net zero goals can be met only by deterring air travel through measures including a “frequent flier levy” that hits travellers harder in the pocket each time they fly.

It added: “This is a tax that increases with the number of flights an individual takes. As higher-income groups tend to be less responsive to price changes, tax rates would need to be sufficiently high to manage demand.”

This is not the way to do it.

The basic economic analysis of the climate change solution - whether we take that from Bill Nordhaus or Nick Stern - is that we don’t do it by trying to micromanage every interaction in the economy. For the same reason that the Soviet Union’s detailed GOSPLAN ideas did not work. It is not possible to micromanage an economy. There are simply too many things, too many interactions, to be managed.

Instead we put the one crowbar - the carbon tax - into the system and allow the only large scale and also detailed economic calculation machine we’ve got, the entire economy, to chew through to a result.

Handing over the management of society to those who salivate at the thought of running a slide rule over the details of human behaviour just isn’t the way to do it. Measuring grammes of meat consumption? Fractions of a family taking how many flights? Change prices the once, to reflect the externality, and be done with it.

Put the coloured pens back behind the pocket protectors, lads, and go and do something useful with life. Mastering the phrase “You want fries with that?” could be an aid in a new career.

Tim Worstall