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米尔顿·弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)的幽灵认可碳的价格

The familiar, shimmering apparition hovered above the room for a minute or two, then left, then reappeared for a bit longer before fading away.

它说:“在某种程度上,当两个人所做的事情影响第三方时,总会有一个案子。”“例如,有一个案例,用于发射控制。”

Nearly a decade after his death in 2006, Milton Friedman — the man the Economist描述作为“ 20世纪下半叶最有影响力的经济学家……可能是所有人” - 回到芝加哥大学,在那里他建立了1976年诺贝尔经济学奖的声誉将他确立为Laissez-Faire Economics的守护神。

But unlike the free-market fundamentalists and Tea Party pontificators who often invoke his name, Friedman didn't see the market as some all-knowing force that operates without governance, and he wasn't opposed to environmental legislation. What he opposed was command-and-control regulation that dictated narrow solutions to complex and evolving challenges, and what he favored was something a bit more nuanced than the simplistic slogans spouted on Fox News.

因此,前南卡罗来纳州国会议员鲍勃·英格利斯(Bob Inglis)和两位芝加哥大学教授恢复了弗里德曼(Friedman),回答了一个问题:“米尔顿·弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)会对气候变化做什么?”

他们利用弗里德曼(Fiery Friedman)在20世纪挑战的视频中的摘录引发了关于污染经济学和与意识形态交流的艺术的有见地,信息丰富,甚至有趣的辩证法 - 在此过程中创造了“外部性,外部性,外部性,外部性,,,,,,外部性”的介绍。“弗里德曼(Friedman)说:“两个人的所作所为影响第三方。”(污染是经典的外部性。)

在他的第一次露面时,虚拟弗里德曼(Virtual Friedman)为他的一天中的烦恼问题提供了解决方案。

“The best way to [reduce auto emissions] is to impose a tax on the amount of pollutants emitted by a car," he said. "[This] make[s] it in the self-interest of car manufacturers and consumers to keep down the amount of pollution."

Steve Cicala, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, then brought us into the logic of Friedman's conclusion with a hypothetical. Let's pretend, he said, that he owns a steel mill that sells its product for $100 a ton. And let's further pretend that co-panelist Michael Greenstone, the university's Milton Friedman Professor of Economics, lives downwind from his mill.

Cicala说:“我必须燃烧煤炭,[绿色]患有哮喘。”“因此,对于每吨钢铁,他的健康费用为20美元。”


Pollution is theft

Cicala is unequivocal on the morality of this situation: "I compensate every one of my other input suppliers," he said. "I have to buy the coal. I have to buy the steel. All of that exchange is based on mutually beneficial, willing exchange, but there's no market for the pollution that I'm inflicting on Michael."

If he doesn't compensate Greenstone for damages — and do so in a way that Greenstone agrees to — then Cicala said he's not a capitalist. He's a criminal.

他说:“不付款的公司犯有盗窃罪。”“如果某人有一种更好的方式来描述[行为]未经他们同意而没有补偿某人的行为,我将很乐意使用该术语。”

英格里斯,一个理性的共和党人驱逐了由茶党叛乱分子在2010年,然后询问教授他们对自己政党中教条的反税言论的看法 - 特别是,他提出了德克萨斯州州长里克·佩里(Rick Perry)的驳回碳税因为它会提高能源率。

Greenstone said the governor probably was correct, but that doesn't make him morally right because greenhouse gasses are "sprinkling around damages in Bangladesh, in Los Angeles, in Houston, and even in Austin, where Gov. Perry works."

And, unlike Cicala's factory, this isn't a hypothetical.

“Those costs are real," he said. "And they're not being reflected in the price I pay when I fill my gas tank or turn on the light."

So, yes, Perry is correct about the cost of energy — at least in the short term, and to immediate consumers — but he's morally wrong to resist an effort to pay for "these innocent parties who are minding their own business and having the climate change around them."

格林斯通提醒我们,外部性不是激进的社会主义意识形态的一部分。

他说:“这是经济学的核心思想。”“这是一个非政治的想法。”


烟囱

为什么不禁止这些东西呢?

那么,为什么要专注于制造污染者而不是通过禁止某些污染物或施加标准的法律呢?弗里德曼的幻影回答了:

他说:“我们需要的是一种调整机制,它将使我们能够适应它的发展。”“当然,正如这个房间里的每个人都知道的那样,有这样的系统 - 即价格机制 - 成功地转向了我们从木材到煤炭到煤油到鲸鱼到石油到天然气的几个世纪。”

That mechanism works better than command-and-control, he said, because it promotes solutions that we never could have predicted bureaucratically. Greenstone wholeheartedly agreed.

他说:“现在的价格系统目前在能源系统中不起作用,这正是因为碳的价格为零。”“当公司没有市场时,公司很难筹集资金来提出新的能源创新。”

然后他再次提醒我们,这不是一个疯狂的主意,就在200名最常见的气候科学家中的98%同意气候变化是真实的,危险和人造(尽管气候科学拒绝者尽了最大的努力告诉我们),所以大多数经济学家都会认可碳的价格(PDF)

格林斯通说:“这真是显着,媒体总是向科学家们报道了人类活动对气候变化的影响。”“从弗里德曼(Friedman)开始转向您可以找到的最左翼经济学家开始,最正确的公共政策解决方案是将碳定为碳。”

尽管他后来指出,所有法规都有一个价格,但他可能会夸大碳价上的共识。只是对特定污染物的明确价格更有针对性和高效。

如何设定价格?

Cicala同意,然后提供了两种最常见的方法来设定明显的碳价格。一种方法是帽和交易,这给允许的排放量增加了上限,并使价格波动。另一种方法以价格开头,然后允许驱动金额。

他说:“对于大多数经济学家而言,我认为我们应该有一个限制和贸易体系,我们可以在其中定义……可以进入空中的碳数量。”“然后,通过交易,我们会找出……[减少排放]的成本最低的方式。[在这种方法下],我们不太确定价格是多少,但是我们确定数量。”

第二种方法(从价格开头)本质上是税收的,它具有明确且可能是长期价格信号的明显优势,因此公司知道寻找气候解决方案是值得的。

“But the fear with the tax is that it will keep on going up," said Inglis. "If you start taxing at this price, then how high does it go?"

格林斯通承认了这一点,并提出了一个以“碳的社会成本。”虽然这并没有真正给受害者发言权,但这是朝着正义的一步。问题是:您如何确定这个价格?

“There's emerging science around that," he said, citing research into the impact of plunges in crop yields and other results.

他说:“美国政府实际上有一个官方号码。”“这是每吨37美元。这将为如何设定税款提供出色的指南,并将是一种限制调皮的国会的方式,从而使其与之相关,并使其上升或下降以满足政治上的某些东西。”

在讨论的后面,他说,未能将环境退化的成本嵌入生产成本中,每年为行业的近2400亿美元的大量补贴 - 他通过将美国排放量达到每年60亿吨而获得的数量并乘以每吨40美元。

“我认为在其余经济中没有这样的速度得到补贴。”

(作为附带说明,欧洲委员会还提倡设定价格 - 基于改用低排放技术的成本。其目标价格为每吨30欧元。)

如何实施它?

虽然理论上听起来都很棒,但是您如何实施这种定型价格?

Cicala说:“如果我们是第一个实施税收的人,那么碳强度污染就会出国。”浮动的“边境调整”想法“根据碳含量到达美国的税收货物。“

英格里斯随后说,对他来说,没有边界调整的税收是不做的。

“If I were still in Congress and had a carbon tax that wasn't border adjustable, I couldn't vote for it because of the problem just identified," he said. "We would become double losers. We lose employment and we lose the race to reduce emissions. Then, domestically, there are those who will fight anything that increases taxes in one area without a reduction elsewhere."

然后,他通过指出他现在负责的组织,即保守的能源与企业倡议(共同主持)的组织,他认为任何碳税都应该是“收入中立”,这意味着“一美元”,这意味着“一美元 -在其他地方减税。”他说,如果我们增加碳税,那么我们必须减少另一项税款,以防止政府变得太大,并以令人耳目一新的内省询问,“这是经济学表明的,或者只是我的保守哲学那里?”

Here they floundered a bit — talking about the chance to reduce "distortionary" taxes while ramping up a tax that corrects a market distortion, but not directly taking on the distortionary subsidies given to the oil sector.

抵消和其他缺失的组件

他们在很短的时间内设法涵盖了令人难以置信的领土,但讨论中缺少两个明显的元素。

一个是隐性的:您可以从他们的其他陈述中告诉他们这些绅士对石油部门的补贴。但是,另一个是他们只裙子的裙子:即,如果这是税收,这笔钱会怎么办 - 尤其是如果收入中立是“当务之急”的话,正如英格里斯所说的那样?

如果收入中立意味着您要削减所得税,那难道难道是否会根据社会成本收取税收的目的?毕竟,如果该碳税的收益最终会资助减税,那么这会给气候变化的受害者带来何处?格林斯通(Greenstone)在讨论中提到了向发展中国家的能源转移的讨论中确实涉及了这一点,但是该组织从未掌握过抵押的话题,当时在上限和贸易下筹集的资金直接进入了其他地方的减少计划。我敢肯定,我将在网上找到一些很棒的东西,但是在这里探索这个问题真是太好了。

There's also a weird digression where they talk about the importance of American leadership — this on an issue where the U.S. has been doing globally what the Republicans have been doing domestically: namely, gunking things up. You could also argue, as Greenstone implied, that the global "solutions" developed so far are flawed to the bone, but they don't really address existing global measures or lessons to be learned from their failures.

中国将在2016年之前建立碳交易市场。

全球

尽管如此,或者也许是因为这样做的 - 围绕边界调整的讨论实际上令人着迷,尤其是当Cicola提出了在世界贸易组织中引起挑战的想法时。在他的情况下,将对进口商品的碳税税,以使原籍国同等税抵消的方式。

他说:“这给其他国家提供了更多的动力。”“因为如果我开始收集中国或印度的碳排放收入,他们会想要其中的一部分。”

如果那些国家没有施加碳税on their own exported products?

“我们有机会从非参与的其他国家收取大量收入。”

如何出售它?

Towards the end, Inglis opened a thread that's obviously near and dear to his heart: how to convince idealogues on the right that climate science is real and we need to deal with it. He provided two answers: one is to slowly build a tribe of rational conservatives who are now too afraid to raise their voices lest some pinhead from the Heartland Institute pillories them; the other is to begin with the end in mind — namely, begin with the message that we can fix this mess without creating the kind of bloated bureaucracy that no one really wants.

锡科拉和绿石第一个温暖,但对第二点过度付出了。格林斯通承认奥巴马政府当前的气候战略是一团糟,但他指出,这是必要的一团糟。他说,也许现在是共和党人根据碳价格提供真实计划的时候了,这一计划将比他们自己的顽固性部分所需要的烂摊子要好。

然而,两者都竭尽全力提醒我们,自由市场原教旨主义不是战略。这是一个幻想。在认识到政府效率低下的成本的同时,锡科拉提醒我们,政府是必要的邪恶,尤其是鉴于眼前的威胁。他说:“如果我们决定在文明灾难和政府效率低下之间,我愿意为这一权衡带来一些政府效率低下的效率。”

Greenstone补充说:“认为市场存在是一种虚构的小说。”“它们之所以存在,是因为政府为他们创建了基本规则。”

本文最初出现在生态系统市场。tiananmen Square图像由AXZ700 /Shutterstock

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