Two New Converts to Taxing Carbon Are High-Profile, But Are They Truly Onboard? By Charles Komanoff, CarbonTax.org, September 1, 2010. "Last week, Bill Gates. This week, Bjorn Lomborg. With the world's #1 software magnate and the man whom the Guardian labeled 'the world's most high-profile climate change skeptic' both endorsing a carbon tax, is the tide of influential opinion on climate policy and carbon pricing turning? Lomborg... built a lucrative career lambasting climate-change advocates as scaremongers who would consign millions to early death by devoting resources to decarbonizing the world economy rather than fighting killer diseases like malaria. But in a new book to be published next month, the self-styled 'skeptical environmentalist' reportedly will call global warming 'one of the chief concerns facing the world today' and 'a challenge humanity must confront.' According to the Guardian, Lomborg will urge investing tens of billions of dollars a year to tackle climate change, with the funds to be raised through a carbon tax.
"Gates, on the other hand, has long worried about climate change. But in an interview in Technology Review last week, he added a new wrinkle: criticism of cap-and-trade... Gates: 'It's ideal to have a carbon tax, not just a price on carbon, which is this fuzzy term that includes cap-and-trade... with all sorts of markets and options and uncertainties about prices, and traders in the middle, and confusion about who initially gets the most advantage?... Gates' disparagement of cap-and-trade is striking. But neither his 2% carbon tax nor Lomborg's, which appears to resemble Gates' in magnitude and function -- funding energy R&D -- is going to end the reign of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future... They now need to see the next light: to have the necessary impact, a carbon tax can start modestly but must keep rising predictably. Fortunately, we have the example of British Columbia to show that an upward-trending carbon tax of the needed size can be politically popular if the revenue is returned to the public."
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