NY Times: Say, What If Every Other Country Put A Tariff On Imports From Non “Climate Club” Countries?

03 Jun, 2015 by William Teach

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In a thinly veiled opinion piece, which appears in the business section, not the science section, writer Eduardo Porter is all about using a big stick on countries, especially the United States, which refuse to implement massive CO2 restrictions

Climate Deal Badly Needs a Big Stick

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Perhaps the word failure fits, however. More than a quarter-century of fruitless efforts to induce the world’s major greenhouse gas polluters like China and the United States to significantly cut their emissions suggests the entire approach may be fundamentally flawed.

Perhaps it does, considering that the majority of Kyoto Protocol signatories failed to meet their targets, all while implementing lots of restrictions and taxes/fees.

What if every other advanced nation, as a way to encourage energy efficiency and spur investments in alternatives to fossil fuels, agreed to put a price of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere? As a tax, that would add some 22 cents to the price of a gallon of gas, something few American politicians — fearing public anger — are yet ready to consider.

That would mean the price of almost everything, not just gasoline, would rise, causing lots of pain to lower and middle class Americans. This is what Eduardo is advocating, and you can bet that most other members of the Cult of Climastrology are right with him, not realizing that this would cause pain in their own lives. Eduardo probably hasn’t considered that the cost of doing business for the NY Times would rise, as they use fossil fueled vehicles to deliver their papers. Twenty two cents might not seem like much, but, it adds up for filling up your own vehicle, and for everyone else filling up theirs.

But if the other advanced nations had a stick — a tariff of 4 percent on the imports from countries not in the “climate club” — the cost-benefit calculation for the United States would flip. Not participating in the club would cost Americans $44 billion a year.

Here we have Eduard and the NY Times advocating for other countries (which will surely fail to meet their own goals) to harm the United States and its citizens, all for the mythical, un-scientific, and nonsensical cultish beliefs of Warmists.

This sort of approach offers perhaps the best chance of preventing a climatic upheaval.

How cute, a new term.

In an article published in April in The American Economic Review, Professor Nordhaus proposed just such a climate club, in which countries committed to reducing carbon emissions would impose a uniform tariff on imports from nonmembers.

Notice, countries that are committed, not ones which are actually succeeding.

“The issue is not whether we will have disastrous effects,” Professor Weitzman told me, “but when climate change will have disastrous effects.”

Given the dearth of alternatives, Professor Nordhaus’s scheme, draconian as it may sound, looks like the only game in town.

It’s interesting that virtually every “solution” from the Cult of Climastrology, a subset of the Progressive (nice fascist) political movement, involves taxation, fees, an artificial cost of living increase, and lots of pain, all based on prognostication that something might possibly maybe happen.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.