Michael Levi sounds almost bemused as he's filleting the authors of this argument for a carbon tax:
These are very smart guys. The puzzle for me, then, is why they believe what they've written. I can't help but think that there's a case of climate change myopia at work. A big slice of the political spectrum has been so invested in identifying climate change as the ur-energy problem that whenever another energy problem arises, they look to climate policy for a solution. High gas prices? Carbon tax. Oil revenues flowing to Iran? Cap-and-trade. People driving gas guzzlers? More wind and solar. No one is stopping to ask a pretty basic question: are these policies well suited to the problems they're being newly touted for? Don't get me wrong: I'm all for strong climate policy. But if people who invoke climate policies as answers to our other energy woes really take those other energy problems seriously, they'll start proposing solutions that actually do something about them, rather than trying to sell climate policy as something it's not.
