Richard Murphy — The Washington Post is leading the right wing backlash to the Green New Deal, and have got almost everything wrong

I haven't linked to the WaPo in some time since it is seriously compromised. Now it is paywalled, too. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are also on this list.

The one aspect I think worth debate, which Noah Smith has previously brought up, is the issue of whether to craft a comprehensive bill that addresses all issues or to create a comprehensive proposal and craft many separate bills to address the complexity involved.

This is a political issue that involves strategy. Thus, it will depend on vote counting, both in the legislature and the next election.

I that the most democratic way to proceed is to craft separate bills to address separate issues. But this needs to be based on a comprehensive proposal recognizing that the design problem is systemic and a viable solution cannot be addressed piecemeal either, since there are overlapping issues.

For example, if it is possible to crafted a good bill on taxing carbon that can pass quickly, by all means do it. But don't conclude that therefore the job is done, as the WaPo argument seems to suggest. Taxing carbon alone won't do it, although taxing negative externality is need to arrive at true price based on true cost in order to preempt socialization of externality through market prices that don't reflect true cost. This is a form of preempting extraction of economic rent.

Tax Research UK
The Washington Post is leading the right wing backlash to the Green New Deal, and have got almost everything wrong

Richard Murphy

Maximilian Auffhammer — Why the Pope is wrong on markets

Should be "Why I think the Pope is wrong on markets." Is the reason for that type of thinking ideologically and cognitively biased. Pope Francis's economic advisors have convinced him it is, and that's my view, too. The neoliberal bias is over-reliance on markets. How has that worked out?  Why would it change suddenly enough to make the needed difference?

In may view, markets could be one of the tools employed but relying completely on markets seems to me to be unrealistic in that there are so many and diverse vested interests in preserving market imperfections already created and culturally accepted. 

Radical action is required to shift energy sources away from carbon-based sources to clean renewable sources. This will require both institutional change that only governments can mandate quickly. It will also require public investment in clean renewable energy as a public utility. 

This means recognizing and acknowledging that a healthy and sustainable environment is a public good and that living in a healthy sustainable environment is a natural right included in the right to life. This falls to government to ensure as the guarantor of good order and security in a society. The rule of law must be used toward this end rather reliance on market forces by attempting to reduce or eliminate market imperfections.

Economists who assume that market forces are the solution to all social, political, and economic problems are just blinkered by ideology.  

The Berkeley Blog
Why the Pope is wrong on markets
Maximilian Auffhammer | George Pardee Jr. Professor of International Sustainable Development at UC Berkeley

ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Jeff Spross — Bombshell IMF Study: United States Is World’s Number One Fossil Fuel Subsidizer

Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

Climate Progress
Bombshell IMF Study: United States Is World’s Number One Fossil Fuel Subsidizer
Jeff Spross

As Warren Mosler says, a subsidy is a negative tax. Now we learn that it is necessary not only to eliminate the subsidies but to increase taxes and regulation (which increases costs) in order to save the home planet.

But developing an inexpensive, renewable, clean source of transportable energy is of the highest priority to avoid severe culling of the species.

Joe Romm — Must-Read Hansen: ‘Climate Change Is Here — And Worse Than We Thought’

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Read it at Climate Progress

Must-Read Hansen: ‘Climate Change Is Here — And Worse Than We Thought’
Joe Romm

Joe Romm doesn't know anything about monetary economics tho. For example, Romm thinks that the tax should go toward paying down the deficit. Hansen would return it to the public, whatever he means by that.