Once you bring in international players, this becomes a domestic tax. Consumers will buy products from China, and factories will relocate to India.
On the one hand, this is a good argument by classical trade theory. OTOH, the same argument applies to essentially *all* domestic regulations that increase the cost of goods -- which is most of them. World trade manages to stumble along successfully despite that.
That is, you're certainly correct that this would put domestic players at some sort of competitive disadvantage; however, I think you're overstating the end result. It would definitely make things messier, in ways not terribly unlike the way labor regulations do. Like labor regulations, it would become a long-standing bone of contention and argument, would serve as the excuse for periodic trade spats, and most likely would eventually result in some sort of compensatory tariffs if it turned out to make a major difference.
That's not an ideal situation by any means, but I don't see it as especially catastrophic in likely practice. Definitely an argument to make one pause and reflect a bit, and a *fine* argument for trying to craft a system that works at the global level, rather than hacking it at the local one. But waiting for global political change all at once is pretty much the surest recipe to make sure that nothing ever happens; in practice, these things have generally proceeded in fits and starts, beginning in the "first world" and extending slowly outwards from there. I don't see any particular reason to believe this case is likely to be different in the long run.
You have to choose who you're going to trust: Jim Hansen, or Richard Lindzen?
Tsk; strawman argument.
The true answer is that *mostly* I trust The Economist. It's a complex world, and I can't claim to have time to become sufficiently expert on most topics, so like everyone I need to choose my preferred data filter. On a wide variety of topics, I've found The Economist to be calmer, more honest, more balanced and harder to panic than any other source I am aware of. So if we're going to talk about primary influences, that almost certainly counts as my number-one.
On the specific topic of climate change, I've watched over the course of a couple of decades as the magazine has very slowly shifted from being broadly skeptical to broadly certain that *something* is going on here; again, that's based on a broad array of input data from a lot of sources, including the various refutations of the data. I'd summarize their general viewpoint as middle-ground: that the chicken-littles are generally overstating their case, but that it is nonetheless clear that things are broadly warming, and that this is already beginning to have a broad array of side-effects.
I find their presentation consistent with the rest of the information I've found, middle-ground and pragmatic as I generally expect from them, and generally convincing.
Domestic environmental taxes won't end our consumption -- it'll just move the production to someplace with a worse environmental record. How is that a positive thing?
Again, strawman. Nobody's talking about ending consumption. The point here is *reducing* fossil-fuel-based energy consumption, and I suspect the proposal at hand would be moderately successful at that. Yes, there would be side-effects that have to be mitigated (no plan ever survives contact with reality), and no, it's not a panacea. But it's extremely unlikely that *all* of that energy usage would be shifted offshore; indeed, I find it pretty unlikely that more than a modest minority would be, after all the social and political feedback loops play out. So again, I think you're overstating...
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Date: 2010-02-17 06:18 pm (UTC)On the one hand, this is a good argument by classical trade theory. OTOH, the same argument applies to essentially *all* domestic regulations that increase the cost of goods -- which is most of them. World trade manages to stumble along successfully despite that.
That is, you're certainly correct that this would put domestic players at some sort of competitive disadvantage; however, I think you're overstating the end result. It would definitely make things messier, in ways not terribly unlike the way labor regulations do. Like labor regulations, it would become a long-standing bone of contention and argument, would serve as the excuse for periodic trade spats, and most likely would eventually result in some sort of compensatory tariffs if it turned out to make a major difference.
That's not an ideal situation by any means, but I don't see it as especially catastrophic in likely practice. Definitely an argument to make one pause and reflect a bit, and a *fine* argument for trying to craft a system that works at the global level, rather than hacking it at the local one. But waiting for global political change all at once is pretty much the surest recipe to make sure that nothing ever happens; in practice, these things have generally proceeded in fits and starts, beginning in the "first world" and extending slowly outwards from there. I don't see any particular reason to believe this case is likely to be different in the long run.
You have to choose who you're going to trust: Jim Hansen, or Richard Lindzen?
Tsk; strawman argument.
The true answer is that *mostly* I trust The Economist. It's a complex world, and I can't claim to have time to become sufficiently expert on most topics, so like everyone I need to choose my preferred data filter. On a wide variety of topics, I've found The Economist to be calmer, more honest, more balanced and harder to panic than any other source I am aware of. So if we're going to talk about primary influences, that almost certainly counts as my number-one.
On the specific topic of climate change, I've watched over the course of a couple of decades as the magazine has very slowly shifted from being broadly skeptical to broadly certain that *something* is going on here; again, that's based on a broad array of input data from a lot of sources, including the various refutations of the data. I'd summarize their general viewpoint as middle-ground: that the chicken-littles are generally overstating their case, but that it is nonetheless clear that things are broadly warming, and that this is already beginning to have a broad array of side-effects.
I find their presentation consistent with the rest of the information I've found, middle-ground and pragmatic as I generally expect from them, and generally convincing.
Domestic environmental taxes won't end our consumption -- it'll just move the production to someplace with a worse environmental record. How is that a positive thing?
Again, strawman. Nobody's talking about ending consumption. The point here is *reducing* fossil-fuel-based energy consumption, and I suspect the proposal at hand would be moderately successful at that. Yes, there would be side-effects that have to be mitigated (no plan ever survives contact with reality), and no, it's not a panacea. But it's extremely unlikely that *all* of that energy usage would be shifted offshore; indeed, I find it pretty unlikely that more than a modest minority would be, after all the social and political feedback loops play out. So again, I think you're overstating...