There’s already been plenty of ink spilled about Perry’s denial on CNBC Monday, so we’ll just highlight two of the best pieces so far. Maria Gallucci at Mashable captures the deja vu we’re feeling about it, and uses Gavin Schmidt’s 2010 “control knob” paper as the perfect piece of evidence to prove Perry wrong. Then, taking a step back, New Republic’s Emily Atkin describes CNBC’s SquawkBox as “Cable TV’s Safest Space for Trump’s Climate Deniers.” Joe Kernan’s program is where both Perry and Pruitt made their now infamous statements denying the science connecting human activity and warming.
We’ll turn now to something that’s not getting near as much attention, but might become the administration’s next rally flag. Koch-funded CEI’s Marlo Lewis Jr. writes about a new “study” (that’s clearly labeled as a working paper, pdf here) that finds the private benefits of carbon outweigh its social cost.
Let’s ignore for now the fact that this paper was written by Richard Tol, so its numbers might be all wrong and carbon costs conveniently turned to benefits by gremlins, and just point out that its premise is, if not deeply flawed, deeply stupid.
Tol counts the price of energy as a value of its worth to the person using it. He then compares this “worth” for 66 different countries and the industry and residential sectors of the coal, oil, gas and power industries to the social cost of carbon. In other words, the money that can be made by private interests from selling fossil fuels is greater than the cost of the public to clean up the mess left behind.
Which seems obvious, on its face. Of course companies make money selling fossil fuels, and of course people find value in having electricity and automobiles powered by them. Was this ever really a question that needed answering?
Somewhat surprisingly, Tol goes on to show that, despite the difference in the private benefits and social costs, a carbon tax wouldn’t be the economic death blow deniers claim. In fact, with a nearly $100 per ton price on carbon, private benefits would rise with the cost. Turns out companies would make more money if their product (that everyone still has to use) costs more. Shocker!
Dumb as it may be, as something that sounds like a simple defense of corporate welfare, this is something the Trump administration might soon pick up on. After all, giving corporations whatever they want, at the public’s expense, is the closest thing to a governing philosophy Trump’s ever shown.
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