Matt Sinclair, writing in Conservative Home's Thinker's Corner column, looks at responses to global warming. The insanity of current policy measures, hardly needs stating, of course, but he goes on to look at carbon taxes and concludes that these will not work either:
Some think that the answer is to replace all that with a nice, neat carbon tax. Pigovian taxation looks great on the economist’s blackboard but will never survive contact with reality. Politicians don’t have the information or the incentives to set the right taxes for negative externalities and subsidies for positive externalities. It quickly degenerates into just another excuse to feed the habits of countless subsidy junkies and impose higher taxes on the rest of us.
That carbon taxes are less foolish (in economic terms) than existing responses is perhaps the only thing that can be said in their favour. I think the idea of a highly politicised scientific establishment setting tax levels for the public also represents a democratic deficit that will make them highly unpopular in practice. In some ways, this is analogous to the UK's relationship with the EU. There is a pretence of democracy ("we can always repeal the European Communities Act") but in reality key decisions cease to be part of the democratic process. We have gone quite far enough down that road already, thank you very much.
Sinclair's focus is on tech solutions:
...instead of investing hundreds of billions to meet environmental targets with the technology available today, we should invest hundreds of millions in putting British scientists and engineers to work developing better alternatives. Prizes are the best way of deploying the money and have been used to steer technological development in useful directions since the Industrial Revolution.
Although he makes no comment on the recent evidence of low climate sensitivity, had he done so his point would only have become stronger.