The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently published a paper which argued in favor of carbon taxes as the economically optimal way to address global warming. CO₂ Coalition Chairman Dr. Will Happer and Director Dr. Bruce Everett take exception to this analysis. Why carbon taxes are a bad idea. The authors conclude that CO₂ has:

• no impact on human and animal health,

• a substantial positive impact on plant growth and crop yields,

• positive impacts from the modest warming observed so far, and

• no empirical support for net damages, which remain a prediction, not an observation.

It’s difficult to extract from this analysis any basis for supporting a Pigouvian tax on CO2. The United States currently emits roughly 5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, mainly from fossil-fuel use. Despite the best hopes of climate activists, renewable energy is too costly and performance-limited to replace the fossil fuel economy.

Read the entire rebuttal here