A recent NYT article discussed a proposal by economist Ross McKitrick to tie CO2 taxes to global temperature increases. McKitrick’s overall aim is to offer a compromise that, he argues, should satisfy those who think the government needs to take drastic action and those who think carbon emissions pose no serious long-term threat. Although McKitrick’s idea is clever, it has theoretical difficulties and (in my opinion) would certainly not work in practice.

McKitrick’s Proposal to Tie CO2 Taxes to Temperature

The NYT story does a good job summarizing the idea:

[McKitrick] suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear.

With thousands of politicians and environmentalists meeting in Copenhagen to discuss ways to achieve major cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions, one might assume that the need for drastic increases in nuclear power capacity would be an obvious solution – a path forward upon which factions on both the Left and the Right could agree.

Alas, that is not happening. Instead, the Green/Left in the US continues its decades-long opposition to nuclear, all the while insisting that the only way forward is through greater use of alternative energy sources like solar and wind.

Los Angeles Times: Now and Way Back Then

Consider the unsigned editorial published by the Los Angeles Times on November 28. The piece, titled “No new nukes – plants, that is,”[1] declares that nuclear energy “is not a reasonable solution because plants take too long to build and cost far too much.”…

The European Union is very concerned about climate.

But its concern is not principally about the scares emanating from the assumption-driven (Malthus in/Malthus out) studies regarding man-made climate change. The EU’s leaders fear that the Old Continent’s self-declared “leadership” in the “world war against climate change” might not be joined–and thus will be rendered ineffective in the global context. And the politicians know that all-pain/no-gain climate policy will increasingly trouble the voters, who must be placated.

This is a bitter pill given that the U.S. presidential elections brought into office the environmentally oriented Barack Obama and the alarmist dream team (Carol Browner, John Holdren, etc.). Europe felt like its efforts to curb emissions would enter a new phase, where the rest of the world would have progressively joined forces and leveled the playing field on pricing carbon emissions.…

July 17, 1955, was the first time electricity generated by a U.S. nuclear power plant flowed into a utility grid. In what then was an experiment, Utah Power & Light plugged in the Argonne National Laboratory experimental boiler water reactor, BORAX-III.

The plant produced merely 2 megawatts for more than an hour, as planned. Since then, the U.S. nuclear industry has steadily improved their ability to effectively manage the operations and maintenance of nuclear power plants. Now,  more than 50 years after that first nuclear power supply, America lags far behind even developing nations in new construction. New roadblocks threaten to further erode progress in the U.S. Whether this is good or not I will leave to the reader, but here is a snap-shot of the situation facing the U.S.

Significant Global Growth

Today, 436 nuclear power plants are in operation in 30 countries with a total capacity of 370 GW, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).…