The best lies contain a kernel of truth. We have seen that Oil and Gaslighting has to start by throwing coal under the electric bus, and here it is again.
republicEN
We are the EcoRight. We want to solve climate change. We believe the free market is the answer.
Yes? What was the question, then? Oh, wait, I have this. A fantasy answer deserves a fantasy question.
Me: I'll take Alternative Economics for ten trillion, Alex.
Alex Trebek: The Bonus Answer!
Board: The doctrine of the Free Market
Alex: And remember that your response has to be in the realm of Alternative Economics.
Me: What is Milton Friedman's Market Fundamentalism?
In what is often laughingly known as reality,
Free markets are wonderful. We should try them.
Jim Hightower
Now, RepublicEN isn't all bad, and it isn't totally doctrinaire about Free Markets.
Carbon Tax FAQs
Why is a carbon tax needed?
Today’s energy market is broken. Due to subsidies, fossil fuels are artificially cheap, obstructing the market and preventing a level playing field. Industries pollute our skies for free, a massive hidden subsidy in addition to the breaks they received back in the day when the U.S. was trying to promote oil and gas development. Climate damages stemming from carbon dioxide emissions cost the U.S. billions each year and the American public is left to foot the bill. A carbon tax would internalize negative externalities by adding health and climate damages to the price of fossil fuels. This accountability would shatter the illusion that energy from fossil fuels is cheap. Given the correct price signals, consumers and producers would be incentivized to switch, quickly, to cleaner energy alternatives.
They combat many Denialist lies.
Climate Science
The Earth is getting warmer and scientists know why
RepublicEN: Environmental Tax Reform
Special interests and government bureaucracies have assembled a vast collection of overlapping programs, subsidies, and mandates, all intended to rig the energy market in one way and the other. New interventions are often designed to offset the market-distorting effect of some other intervention — in other words, ‘let’s give oil, gas, coal, solar and wind all subsidies!’ And government interventions to ‘green’ the energy sector ineffectually attempt to offset the biggest subsidy that government gives the energy industry: the unlimited right to freely emit greenhouse gas pollution. The status quo is growing government, distorting the market, failing to adequately address environmental risks, and diminishing the ability of the energy industry to make informed investment decisions.
But
RepublicEN: Sen. Sullivan: natural gas is the answer
While we hear frequently from Alaska's Senator Lisa Murkowski on the issue of climate change, junior Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan has climate thoughts too. In an interview with KTUU-TV, the member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions it to "ship clean, burning Alaska natural gas to Japan, to Korea, to Taiwan, to China...That would do more to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions than almost any other thing that we can do."
RepublicEN: Energy Liberty Means Freedom to Choose
Electricity powered by natural gas produces half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal.
Globalizing the American shale-gas revolution is the most meaningful and pro-growth option available for immediately curbing global greenhouse-gas emissions.
The 2017 RepublicEN EnCourage Tour
We’re especially grateful to Marilu Hastings of The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation for making the 2017 EnCourage Tour possible with the major grant. Marilu spoke at Rice about George Mitchell’s spirit of innovation and determination. He, more than anyone else, is responsible for America’s CO2 reductions. By perfecting fracking, he expanded the supply of natural gas, brought down the price and caused electrical generation to move away from coal. He proves our point at republicEn.org: human ingenuity and free enterprise can solve climate change.
RepublicEN: Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend bill introduced
Bill sponsors say the measure would create 2.1 million jobs in ten years and save 13,000 pollution-related deaths a year. "To let the free market price out coal we should consider value pricing carbon," Rooney wrote in a statement. "A revenue-neutral carbon fee is an efficient, market- driven incentive to move toward natural gas and away from coal, and to support emerging alternate sources of energy."
Everbody knows about Market Fundamentalist alternative economics. Few know about the alternative in real economics.
In economics, specifically general equilibrium theory, a perfect market, also known as an atomistic market, is defined by several idealizing conditions, collectively called perfect competition, or atomistic competition. In theoretical models where conditions of perfect competition hold, it has been theoretically demonstrated that a market will reach an equilibrium in which the quantity supplied for every product or service, including labor, equals the quantity demanded at the current price. This equilibrium would be a Pareto optimum.
- A large number of buyers and sellers – A large number of consumers with the willingness and ability to buy the product at a certain price, and a large number of producers with the willingness and ability to supply the product at a certain price.
- Perfect information – All consumers and producers know all prices of products and utilities they would get from owning each product.
- Homogeneous products – The products are perfect substitutes for each other, (i.e., the qualities and characteristics of a market good or service do not vary between different suppliers).[4]
- Well defined property rights – These determine what may be sold, as well as what rights are conferred on the buyer.
- No barriers to entry or exit
- Every participant is a price taker – No participant with market power to set prices
- Perfect factor mobility – In the long run factors of production are perfectly mobile, allowing free long term adjustments to changing market conditions.
- Profit maximization of sellers – Firms sell where the most profit is generated, where marginal costs meet marginal revenue.
- Rational buyers: Buyers make all trades that increase their economic utility and make no trades that do not increase their utility.
- No externalities – Costs or benefits of an activity do not affect third parties. This criteria also excludes any government intervention.
- Zero transaction costs – Buyers and sellers do not incur costs in making an exchange of goods in a perfectly competitive market.
- Non-increasing returns to scale and no network effects – The lack of economies of scale or network effects ensures that there will always be a sufficient number of firms in the industry.
- Anti-competitive regulation - It is assumed that a market of perfect competition shall provide the regulations and protections implicit in the control of and elimination of anti-competitive activity in the market place.
No market is perfect, but the more these conditions prevail, the better markets behave. There are externalities, and one must consider taxing them, as first proposed by Arthur Pigou. A Pigovian carbon tax, for example. There are other forms of market failure that need to be regulated. We can start with points 2, 5, 6, 10, and 13 above. We don't have to worry about point 8, except by preventing monopoly power. Point 9 is beyond our control.
The 5 most important questions about carbon taxes, answered
Carbon taxes are in the news these days [July 2018]. Longtime conservative pollster and wordsmith, Frank Luntz, recently ran a poll on behalf of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a group led by senior Republican statesmen James Baker and George Shultz.
Luntz polled the carbon dividend policy in May. It got two to one support among Republicans, four to one support overall, six to one support among Republicans under 40, and eight to one support among swing voters under 40. Once it was explained to voters in focus groups, most of them got behind it.
Ah, well, another set of Diaries that I should write.