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

Women with more children show declining concern for climate change

On the occasion of today's Global Climate Strikes #FridaysForFuture demonstrations this serves as a slight damper.

Eco-Moms and Climate Change: The Moderating Effects of Fertility in Explaining Gender Differences in Concern

Women typically report greater concern for the environment, including climate change, than men. The eco-mom theory-the belief that women have greater environmental concern than men because mothers primarily care about the health and safety of their children, while fathers primarily care about the economic support of their household-is often proffered as an explanation for this difference. 

We look at fertility in relation to concern for climate change using the 2010 General Social Survey. We find no differences in concern for climate change between women who have children and those who do not. Modeling fertility, we find that having more children is associated with less concern for climate change for women but not men. .. , 

Our findings, that women report greater concern for global climate change than men, echo scores of previous studies of environmental concern. However, when looking at a popular explanation for this difference-the eco-mom theory we found no support for the notion that motherhood, in and of itself, explains women's higher levels of concern, even when using a measure of parenthood that is more encompassing than previous studies. Yet, when examining fertility, we find that the number of children a parent has is associated with decreased concern for global climate change for women (but not for men)... 

Other researchers have shown that fundamentalist Christians and Republicans tend to have lower average environmental concern. However, we control for Republican Party affiliation, fundamentalist Christian religious values, and frequency of religious attendance in our models. Even with our broader definition, we find no evidence to support the idea that women are motivated to care about global climate change because they have children, as the eco-mom theory asserts. 

Men's concern for climate change does not vary, regardless of the number of children they have. Thus, to the extent that men are concerned about global climate change, that concern does not appear to be motivated by their role as fathers. Women do demonstrate a relationship between concern for global climate change and number of children, and that relationship is negative. Although we can reasonably assume that those concerned about climate change may limit their fertility, this relationship should not produce gender differences. A more reasonable explanation for our finding is that having more children represents greater salience of traditional gender roles for women. In other words, having children (and more of them) potentially changes gender roles for women more than for men, and these roles are reflected in women’s declining concern for climate change. 

What you think you know about the climate is probably wrong

Tomorrow the Global Climate Strikes are set to start. So this article in 'The Conversation' is more than apt and H/T goes to Richard Murphy.

Here is a snippet:

We humans have a natural tendency to focus on negative stories. We tend to assume things are worse than they really are, and going downhill fast. We forget how bad things were in the past and how far we’ve come.

In reality, the world is often better — and getting better — than we think, something I wrote about in my book, The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything. Murder rates, deaths from terrorism and extreme poverty are all down. Life expectancy, health and education levels are up. And yet, there is one vital, urgent exception to this rule: we still don’t realise how badly wrong our global climate and environment have gone.

A new survey of Britons which tested understanding of some key facts about the environment reveals the extent of environmental misperceptions. Rather than asking people what they thought might happen, this study instead focused on assessing knowledge of the world as it is right now.

One question, for example, was how many of the past 22 years have been the hottest on record?

The answer is 20, but the average guess was just 12. And one in five people guessed five or fewer.

Britons also overestimated some facts, such as how much air travel contributes to greenhouse guesses. The average guess was that 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from air travel, when in fact it only accounts for around 2%. Respondents also assumed that air travel’s emissions are about equal to that of all other forms of transport put together, when in reality, the latter contributes about ten times as much as flights. This is due to the relative rarity of flights compared to other forms of transport.

Misperceptions about the source of greenhouse gas emissions. The Policy Institute, King's College London

Full article here.