A carbon tax will prolong the climate crisis

The UK's Richard Murphy has a good post on the folly of the carbon tax. Actually, it is not  a folly,  it is rather what government is all about (see left). (underline and bold by me)

Carbon taxes and carbon pricing are not solutions to the climate crisis

I have for some time resisted writing about why I found the issues of carbon pricing and carbon taxation so difficult. I think the time to address those issues has arrived.

At its core the reason why I dislike both those notions is that they miss the point of the climate crisis. What they presuppose is that we can price our way out of an emissions crisis that we now know threatens the future of life on earth. And the simple fact is that we can’t do that. There is no way we can be priced out of this issue. We can only solve the emissions crisis by stopping emissions. And taxing them won't do that, any more than taxing tobacco has ever stopped smoking. Other measures - like bans - have been needed to make progress on that goal. That is even more the case for carbon.

As importantly, the essence is that what both carbon tax and carbon price arguments suggest is that business can carry on supplying products emitting carbon as before, but that those products will simply suffer a price differential when compared to lower or non-carbon emitting products and what we are then supposed to rely on is the price mechanism of the market to alter consumer demand. I suggest that logic is wrong.

First, this assumes that none of the responsibility for the climate crisis rest on the manufacturers of the products that have get us into this mess. That's definitely wrong. They are primarily to blame. They have known for decades what they have been doing with regard to carbon emissions, and have carried on doing it regardless. And we can be quite sure that they will carry on doing so into the future if they can pass the blame to us as consumers who, they will say, clearly indicate we still want their polluting and life-threatening products if we still buy them after carbon taxes are added. What this ignores is the fact that much of that demand will be driven by an absence of alternatives, which business will have no incentive to promote if there are carbon taxes, and that consumer behaviour is anyway heavily influenced by supplier behaviour through advertising and other market-distorting activities.

Second, this assumption presumes that we, as consumers, know as much about the products that we buy as those who sell them do. It is presumed, therefore, by the proponents of carbon taxes and carbon trading that we can make rational, informed decisions on this issue after tax is added to a price.  That, though, is clearly absurd. The makers of products known massively more about the carbon impact of what they are doing than a consumer might ever do. The asymmetries between the two are enormous. In that case to presume that the consumer can make an informed choice on such an issue, even after a tax is added, is just wrong.

And third, there is no market for carbon. There has never been. It’s a fictional creation that pretends that something is being done when that is not true. No one wants to buy or sell carbon. It’s an externality that cannot be priced. That’s partly because no one wants it. That essential quality of a market - a willing buyer - does not exist.  But it’s also because you cannot price something that we know has to be unavailable to any market. A market presumes that there will be demand. The reality is that we have to eliminate that demand to ensure there can be life on earth.

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Carbon taxes also shift the whole blame for carbon consumption from the manufacturers, who willfully create the carbon outputs, to consumers, who are offered few or no alternatives to polluting products.

In addition, carbon taxes, by shifting the blame to consumers, put no responsibility for innovation or change on manufacturers. The result is that they will still sell polluting products, knowing they will still be bought.

read on at RM