THE CARBON TAX CITIZENSHIP TEST

It's almost too much to resist: newly allied national governments acting in mutual sacrifice on behalf of the environment, appealing for response in kind from governments elsewhere. Nature, after all, knows no national boundaries. International citizenship is the thing.

Dec. 23, 1991

3 min read

The European Commission seems determined to tax carbon in fuels burned in European Community nations. It sees this as a remedy for global warming. Coming as it does during touchy discussions over intramural EC trade and economic policy, this is indeed a heart-warming and timely demonstration of international citizenship. Europeans unite to save the planet.

Guess who's next.

THE U.S. SHARE

Already, the communal finger points westward across the Atlantic. Europeans can't cool the globe by themselves. The U.S. ought to do its share. Are Americans international citizens or not?

Such will be the pressures when American environmentalists get focused on this latest quest to curtail human activity in the name of helpless ecosystems. They will be difficult pressures to resist. Yet the wrong outcome-a carbon tax-would seriously damage the industry's markets and the country's economic vitality.

Will company and government officials stand up to charges of poor international citizenship in order to resist the threat? Or will they rely on recessionary tax aversion to keep it in check for a while? The U.S. recession notwithstanding, taxation of the carbon in fuels is a live proposition on both sides of the Atlantic, however wretched the idea. And on both sides of the Atlantic it must be strenuously resisted.

Companies should welcome two new studies of the issue: one by W. David Montgomery of Charles River Associates Inc. under a grant from American Petroleum Institute, the other by the Department of Energy. Like everything related to global climatology, the studies are complicated. They try to measure phenomena that involve the unpredictable interreactions of innumerable and often unseen variables. But they reach common conclusions: Efforts, like carbon taxes, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would impose enormous costs yet promise little if any reduction in global warming.

The government study has special appeal. In it, DOE responds decisively to a prospective environmentalist threat to U.S. energy and economic interests. Industry should applaud all such acts of advocacy by DOE on behalf of energy in conflict with environmentalism-even when they come at congressional prompting, as this one did.

As both new studies point out, the costs of action to reduce CO2 emissions are much more certain than the science of global atmospheric phenomena. Warnings about climate change come from computer models that can't take account of all natural adjustments.

SPOTTY RECORD

The spotty forecasting record of those models so far provides reason to doubt the popularly assumed link between rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and increasing average temperatures this century. It also provides reason to doubt that future temperature increases will be as great as predicted or that they will occur at all.

There is no reason to panic over global climate change, which is part of nature with or without human activity. To try to slash CO2 emissions by taxing the carbon content of fuels would be monstrously expensive. The effort, in other words, would hurt people. And it might not affect global warming at all.

Responsible governments do not impose huge burdens on taxpayers unless and until they are certain that benefits outweigh sacrifices. Good international citizens do not press neighbors to join them in their mistakes.