With COP-26 continuing in Glasgow, the commenters and others are pitching in with their idea. Martin Sandhu, a columnist in the Financial Times, made this suggestion on Monday: He noted that, while Europe’s “intention to decarbonize is genuine … the continent remains highly dependent on natural gas, and would become more so by weaning itself off coal.”1 Mr. Sandhu suggested one solution is to use natural gas as feeder stock for hydrogen. The only problem, he noted, is that all that “is missing is infrastructure and a market.” Which is the problem with so many of the ideas proposed by climate experts and elites.
It is easy for experts and elites to come up with plans to solve the carbon problem. The problem they have is convincing people. As Mr. Sandhu noted in his column, “even a population as climate-conscious as Norway’s has nowhere near a majority for phasing out fossil extraction.”1
The best idea may be some kind of carbon tax (though with a better name) that is refunded on a per capita basis. Instead of using only the knowledge of elites and bureaucrats, a carbon charge would use the knowledge of the market, i.e., everybody, to come up with the most efficient and least costly ways to achieve net carbon zero. Plus, carbon pricing would get us innovations that experts might never come up with.
In any case, the key is for government and climate experts to spend less time talking to each other about grandiose, elite-driven schemes and more time talking to regular people, convincing them of the need for some form of carbon pricing or other idea that will actually get us to net carbon zero at a cost people are willing to pay.
-----------
1 Martin Sandhu, “The Gordian knot of Europe’s gas dependence,” Financial Times, November 8, 2021.
Comments