Price list for polluting - the economics of regulating Carbon Dioxide

A recent article in NY Times discusses issues around Climate Change and regulating carbon dioxide....

The article touches on a very important factor - we must quantify and measure the financial costs of polluting. Money is the driving archetypal language of our current industrial civilization, so when we talk about the perils of pollution as it relates to money, it gets people's attention.

The old adage "money talks" strangely applies in many contexts.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Price List for Polluting

'Setting a real price on carbon emissions is the single most important policy step to take,' said Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard University. 'Pricing is the way you get both the short-term gains through efficiency and the longer-term gains from investments in research and switching to cleaner fuels.'

Some academics see an analogy between a global warming policy and the pursuit of national security in the cold war. In the late 1950s, American military spending reached as high as 10 percent of the gross domestic product and averaged about 4 percent, far higher than in any previous peacetime era. A Soviet nuclear attack was a danger but hardly a certainty, just as the predicted catastrophes from global warming are threats but not certainties.

'The issues are similar in that you pay now so things are less risky in the future — it’s an insurance policy,' said Richard Cooper, a Harvard economist. 'And in the cold war, we taxed ourselves fairly highly to mitigate that threat.' "

Read the whole article on NY TIMES here.