BENEFIT to the use of carbon? Sure is, even if you don’t think about it – turn on the lights, heating your home, driving your care, power for making things – but you never hear the Watermelon Environmentalists about how GOOD it can be for society (even if it is just that the planet is “greening” more and better as atmospheric CO2 rises). I remember when the Obama Administration raised, seemingly just to fit their agenda, the “social cost of carbon” such that they could point to it and go “see!” in justifying their agenda of “decarbonizing” our society (and de-industrializing us at the same time). However, here’s a contrarian point of view / calculation that I bet is going to have some of the “Government must control us to survive” environmentalists (emphasis mine):
Until now, that is. Richard Tol, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental economists, has produced a working paper entitled “The Private Benefit of Carbon and Its Social Cost.” Here’s the dynamite abstract:
The private benefit of carbon is the value, at the margin, of the energy services provided by the use of fossil fuels. It is the weighted average of the price of energy times the carbon dioxide emission coefficient, with energy used as weights. The private benefits is here estimated, for the first time, at $411/tCO2. The private benefit is lowest for coal use in industry and highest for residential electricity; it is lowest in Kazakhstan and highest in Norway. The private benefit of carbon is much higher than the social cost of carbon.
Yes, I’d say that $411 > $40.
Let that sink in: the benefit of using fossil fuels, even accounting for all damages from pollution and prospective climate change, are one order of magnitude higher than the cost of climate change, even using the EPA’s self-serving calculation.
And this:
The private benefit of carbon is large and, in most cases, much larger than the social cost of carbon. But while the social cost of carbon is tied to carbon dioxide emissions and their impact on the climate, the private benefit of carbon is not tied to fossil fuels. The private benefits of carbon are, really, the benefits of abundant and reliable energy – or rather, the benefits of the services provided by energy, such as warm homes, cooked food, travel and transport, information and communication, and so on.
And this shows the utter hypocrisy of the environmental / political world :
India Touts Commitment to Paris Climate Accord, Promptly Invests in Australia’s Largest Coal Mine
Heh!
(H/T: Powerline)
