Took them 35 years to get there
But more joy in heaven and all that.
The Climate Damages Tax Report claims that we can solve climate change by adding a tax - related to the CO2-e content - to the extraction of fossil fuels:
The Climate Damages Tax report, published on Monday, calculates that an additional tax on fossil fuel majors based in the wealthiest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries could raise $720bn (£580bn) by the end of the decade.
We’ve had to look to an earlier version for the details as they’ve done that naughty thing of issuing the press release before the report, thereby making sure that no independent can analyse. But that earlier version:
A tax on the extraction of fossil fuel: per barrel of oil, tonne of coal, cubic litre of gas, global rate based on CO2e.
Starting at $5 per tonne of CO2e in 2021, increasing $5 each year until 2030 to $50 a tonne, $10 annually after that to $250 a tonne by 2050.
They’ve a few things wrong here. They insist that this would be paid by the fossil fuel companies, which it wouldn't be. Collected by, yes, but the actual burden would be on one of two people. Consumers, if market prices move in lockstep with the tax. Or, more likely at first at least, a reduction in the royalties paid to the governments who currently tax such output.
So, not so much new tax revenue as a diversion of extant.
They say that this should be spent on lovely projects no doubt advised upon, for a fat fee, by the usual suspects. That might not be the way to spend a few hundred billions.
But there’s something we love about this. Which is that this is the Nordhaus proposal for a carbon tax. True, it starts at $5, not that Nobel Prize winning $10, then it grows to $250 not the Nobel $240, but we think it’s fair to say that’s trivia. But it really is that proposal. Solving climate change by a progressive tax upon CO2-e, collected at the well- or mine- head.
Took them 35 years to get there which, given the claimed urgency of the matter seems a long, long, time.
For true piquancy, this is also the proposal supported by Exxon. A progressive carbon tax.
Which does leave us all with something of a question. Given the shrieking that has accompanied the Nordhaus and Exxxon proposals why is it now radical and progressive to suggest exactly the same thing?