Hansen and the cost of carbon
Apr 13, 2012
Bishop Hill in Climate: WG3

I was in Edinburgh last week, for the ceremony to award James Hansen the Edinburgh Medal.

Hansen's speech after the event was not much to write home about, but one or two things made me take note. Among these was Hansen's much trailed call for a carbon tax in the USA. This in essence was to be a Pigou tax, with a cost per tonne of CO2 collected at source and redistributed equally among US citizens.

In Hansen's last slide, he mentioned a paper he and a bunch of the usual suspects have submitted to Science, setting out their case. Apparently the paper is struggling to find its way through peer review, although I have to say that if the excerpt we were shown was anything to go by the overwrought tone of the authors' prose would give any reputable journal pause for thought.

I was intrigued, however, by one name on the author list. Frank Ackerman appeared briefly on BH, when I noted his extraordinary inflating of the cost of carbon dioxide from the generally cited $20-30 per tonne to something more along the lines of $1000 or even higher.

Now Americans use 18 tonnes or so of CO2 per capita per year. So that's a minimum of $18000 of redistribution of income per year.

That's a lot.

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