Forbes Proposes Doubling Gas Prices to Combat Climate Change

An astonishing article in Forbes Tuesday asserts severe measures are needed to effectively combat climate change, including more than doubling the cost of gasoline.

The climate crisis is “a present-day emergency,” writes Nils Rokke, and “we must use every tool at our disposal to combat it.”

One such measure is to force fossil fuel users to pay the “social cost of carbon,” Rokke proposes, without explaining how levying a carbon tax would magically make global warming go away.

Instead, he points to a paper issued last May that made the extraordinary and undemonstrable allegation that “1°C warming reduces world GDP by 12%,” a cost that must be passed on to the greatest offenders.

Applied to automobiles, the real social cost of carbon runs to “approximately $9 per US gallon,” Rokke claims, and thus “implementing the true social cost would more than double current prices.”

“This would be deeply unpopular, yet it’s a sobering reality: fuel taxation is the only area where we’re even close to covering the full social cost of carbon emissions,” he contends with faux reluctance.

Currently, the cost of carbon is paid by everyone, “especially those who are most vulnerable and have the least resources and no government can afford to cover the difference,” he declares.

“The reality is that paying the full social cost of carbon seems unfeasible, but mounting evidence shows that the costs of inaction are even higher,” he asserts.

In other words, the best way to stop people from taking advantage of readily available, affordable fuels — one of the greatest historic factors in lifting people out of poverty — is to make them unavailable or unaffordable.

To underscore his claim that the climate crisis is real, Rokke points to impacts “from rising sea levels to food shortages and uninhabitable land,” which may strike some readers as no argument at all.

“The time to act is now — before we reach the tipping point where recovery is no longer possible,” he warns.

The sage advice of author and Harvard-trained medical doctor Michael Crichton immediately comes to mind.

Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better.

Follow @tdwilliamsrome