Kenneth Green (AEI) on the Carbon Tax: From 'For' to 'Against'

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 19, 2012

“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”

– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.

Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.

F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.…

Climate Change: The Anti-Industrial Agenda (eternal viligance necessary)

By E. Calvin Beisner -- July 18, 2012

“When I attended the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the most common sign I saw carried by the 40,000-plus protesters in the streets (of whom the two largest groups were the International Socialist Youth Movement and the Community Party) said, ‘System change, not climate change’—i.e., give us global socialism, not global free markets!”

If you believe global warming is cyclical and mostly natural; human contribution is minor and not dangerous; and attempting to prevent human influence by cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions would cost trillions of dollars, trap billions of people in developing countries in poverty, and so do more harm than good, then you must be armed and prepared to act in our political times.

President Barack Obama, indeed, has warned us by saying that “the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change.”…

Energy ‘Rebounds’ and ‘Backfires’: An Introduction and Literature Overview

By Robert Michaels -- July 17, 2012

Much of today’s energy policy assumes that regulations mandating greater energy efficiency will reduce energy use. But that isn’t always the case, and energy efficiency improvements are seldom as large as promised by engineering calculations because of “rebounds.” Such is the most general conclusion from hundreds of studies pertaining to the effects of energy efficiency, whether market or nonmarket.

Such is the message from my literature review published by the Institute for Energy Research (pictured here):

For example, people who install lighting that is 50 percent more efficient frequently leave the lights on longer, negating some of the energy savings from greater efficiency. This is called an energy efficiency rebound. Sometimes these mechanisms even bring about net increases in energy use known as backfires.

Rebounds have a direct implication for energy efficiency mandates and incentives.…