.

We argue that corrective green taxes are to their nature temporary and that governments should therefore not treat the income as permanent income fit to fund permanent reforms, but rather use it for temporary tax breaks and subsidies for making the transition away from environmental pollution less costly.

If a government is able to set the corrective tax at it’s “Pigovian” level and by doing so internalize the full social cost in products and services, the income should be used where it could yield the most benefit in a first best scenario. If, however, the tax for different reasons (e.g. industry lobbying or other political pressures) can’t be set at this level, the revenue recycling (the use of the tax income) should be made in such a way that it further encourages emission reductions beyond what the tax itself can produce. For example by giving tax breaks for investments in clean technology, energy efficiency programs in buildings and for purchases of clean vehicles.

Today it rather looks like the income from emission allowance auctions across the EU will be used as a way  fill fiscal gaps in national budgets and for recycling back to industry with no strings attached. This is bad policy and it’s important to now put pressure on policymakers to declare what they intend to use these funds for, some €20bn in total in the EU in 2013 and then quickly growing up towards €40-100bn.

If we are to take global warming seriously, emissions will be almost phased out by 2050 and the funds discussed above will decrease in size rapidly after 2020. Governments should therefore not view this as “free money” but rather shift it intelligently and in order to support the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The best thing? SolarCity help their customers save more on the electricity bill than the monthly rent of the system. Save money and produce you own green energy, can it get any better? You also get free monitoring and repair service and you can follow your own “power plant” on your smartphone. The future is bright, green and great!

For a typical 3-bedroom home with a current electricity bill of $200 per month, we might recommend a medium sized 4 kW solar system.

Your new solar system will generate enough electricity to offset what you are currently paying to the utility company from $200 down to $60 per month.

Your SolarLease payment would be $0 down and $110 per month. So you could actually save $30 per month from day one.

Real-time monitoring on your smartphone.

The IPCC was founded in 1988 and has largely retained the same structure over the years. But as the importance and attention of climate change science have increased exponentially over the years, improvements can and should of course be made to the institutions. Most the proposed changes to the IPCC are suggestions for how to beef-up the institution and employ more people so that the review process, comment consideration and coordination functions can handle the huge task of coordinating thousands of scientists and tens of thousands (probably over 100,000 for the next report) comments.

The review also suggests the IPCC to increase it’s communication capacities, something I strongly support and actually something I and FORES suggested at a seminar about the IPCC earlier this year.

The strongest criticism regarding content concerns the way the second working group has labeled statistical uncertainty. The mission of the second working group, it should be mentioned, is to review science relating to “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and not the scientific basis itself (that’s working group one).

All different reviews undertaken this year has time after time proven that the consensus science is solid and justify strong action to reduce emissions radically. The costs of doing this is dwarfed by the potential massive costs of out-of-control global warming.

By the way, in this great post by Josh Dorfman he reminds us that the public global warming debate is today not so much a scientific challenge as a communication challenge.

Even if you’re Al Gore (and maybe especially if you’re Al Gore), I caution you against arguing the science of climate change. You cannot change the mind of a global warming skeptic by citing scientific facts. The reason is simple; resistance isn’t grounded in facts. Instead, it’s grounded in emotion, political ideology and perceived financial self-interest.

… An innovative approach comes from Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University who in April published a peer-reviewed study on the cost of keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007. Because carriers patrol the gulf for the explicit mission of securing oil shipments, Stern was on solid ground in attributing that cost to oil. He had found an excellent metric. He combed through the Defense Department’s data — which is not easy to do because the Pentagon does not disaggregate its expenditures by region or mission — and came up with a total, over three decades, of $7.3 trillion. Yes, trillion. …

In this talk Sam challenge this notion however, by building on the assumption that ethics and moral isn’t “divine” in the sense that moral judgments just “are”, but is always implicitly or explicitly maximizing some kind of variable. Sam suggests that morality as we use it generally is designed to maximize the welfare (or minimize the suffering) of living beings. There are, Sam continues, often many ways to maximize this welfare, but his point is that how to maximize it (i.e. do the morally right thing in this context) often has an objective answer and thus moral decisions in this sense has a scientific component. If we use morality as a way to reduce suffering, consequently, morality based on feelings or religious arguments can’t be defended if there are scientific evidence that the actions stemming from these arguments is a suboptimal way to reduce suffering. In this way, when morality itself is a means to an end and when science can offer answers to what works in terms of getting to that end, science can (and maybe should) replace non-science based notions of morality.

An obvious and unanswered question is to what extent ethics and morality are just tools to achieve something (like minimal suffering and maximal freedom and welfare) and to what extent ethics is instead universal truths for which the means does always justify the end. This issue has of course been debated for ages, but Sam does offer interesting insights to it. Perhaps, as science progresses it will inevitably conquer more and more domains that up until then we didn’t possess objective knowledge about, and therefore had to base our actions on other principles. How far can science guide us and is it possible to define more precisely the boundaries of science? Watch the talk!

Source

ELF

On June 20 I’m speaking at an event in London organized by the European Liberal Forum. I’ll present alongside some very prominent speakers, as a matter of fact I’m replacing the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Rt Hon Chris Huhne) who had to cancel. Big shoes to fill indeed!

The other speakers are; Tom Burke, E3G, James Cameron, Climate Change Capital and Dimitri Zengelis, Chatham House.

We’ll speak to an audience of politicians about the prospects of achieving “Green Growth” in the EU. This is an outspoken aim of the union, but is it practically possible and does the ambition carry any substance as “Green Growth” is an ill-defined concept? I’m looking forward to the event since FORES is working on these very issues and there is a lot to be said (and done!).

If you are in London next week, drop me an e-mail and I’ll invite you to the seminar.

Health and welfare (180 events)
Climate/environment (159)
Jobs/Unemployment (156)
International issues (144)
Enterprise/Business (135)

I’m taking the ferry to Gotland tonight and will arrive Monday morning. FORES has a packed schedule of events (see program [Swedish]) and I’ll speak on Monday between 16-17 at “Energispektrum” (more info [Swedish]) and on Tuesday between 15:30-16:30 at an event about green taxation (more info [Swedish]).