Big oil ‘friends’ the carbon tax
The ice did not break. There was not peace in the valley on Monday because the American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s premier fossil-fuel lobby, revealed that it’s leaning toward supporting a carbon tax.
Don’t expect a revolution. Ten years from now, maybe. But the Obama-Biden left long ago lost any interest in this favorite nostrum of economists. This is one of the tragedies of climate politics in our era.
We have leisure to remind ourselves that climate-related models are always an elaboration of a hypothesis; ultimately only the real world can yield the data that tell us if a hypothesis is correct. That said, a timely new model from José Luis Cruz Álvarez and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg of Princeton allows that human behavior, including reproductive behavior, will adapt to future climate changes as indeed it has since early man sought out cave openings that pointed away from the prevailing winds.
