BY MICHELLE STIRLING:
In the Wall Street Journal on January 16, 2019, a group of leading economists, including Nobel Laureates issued a statement on their support for a carbon tax, offering the carrot of a carbon ‘dividend’ to citizens, to cushion the impact.
Now, I know you’re saying, “Who are you to question Nobel Laureate economists and policy experts?”
Simple. I’m a taxpayer. They want my money for a dubious cause. Their proposal is not about any S.M.A.R.T. goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-framed. Their proposal is based on a faulty premise – that taxing carbon dioxide emissions will control the climate. Their proposal is open-ended, claiming “A carbon tax should increase every year until emissions reduction goals are met.”
All these Nobel Laureates think “global climate change is a serious problem that demands immediate national action.”
That’s not what astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, Chair of the Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told the German government in the latter part of 2018.
He said “…there is no substantial evidence to support the idea that most of the global warming 
is anthropogenic and that climate sensitivity* is necessarily high. In fact, the evidence points to the contrary. This should be seriously considered before allocating substantial public resources.”[1]
*the warming effect of carbon dioxide
How confusing for the public. On the one hand we have Nobel Laureate economists claiming it is urgently required to tax citizens and industry on an increasing scale until the climate cooperates, and they offer to bribe you with your own money in the form of a ‘carbon dividend’ if you will just agree and on the other hand we have scientists telling us that’s just not true and it would be a waste of public resources.
How can we account for these drastically different views?
Easy. Since 2005, the ClimateWorks Foundation and its billionaire philanthropy partners have been funding environmental groups to push for policies like a price on carbon with a plan to establish a global cap and trade system that would ‘prompt a sea change in the global economy.’
These billionaires have vested interests in wind and solar, price on carbon and cap and trade. Over a decade ago when they set up this plan, according to a Climate Shift commentary by Matthew Nisbet, they were told that we ‘had the technology’ to replace fossil fuels.
Well. We don’t.
But that hasn’t stopped them trying!
Jeff Skilling, originally of McKinsey & Company, was reportedly the creator of the energy-trading firm Enron[2] so many years ago. Enron was key driver of the Kyoto Accord, eagerly looking forward to bags of money from “the biggest money plays: the rules governing emissions trading, the rules governing transfers of emission reduction rights between countries, and the rules governing a gargantuan clean energy fund.” [3] Today we have ClimateWorks which reportedly employed McKinsey & Co to help them come up with their “Design to Win”[4] plan to establish a global cap and trade system, with no government approval from anyone.
For the past decade, the ClimateWorks billionaires have dropped > $600 million a year worldwide to fund ENGOs as their proxies,[5] to drive the climate catastrophe message and ‘carbon price’ solution, hazing and guilting out any corporation or citizen that does not comply. They have funded Greenpeace and WWF, both of which, as Donna Laframboise revealed, have had significant influence on UN Climate Panel (IPCC) reports. They have been associated with or instrumental in setting up the CDP Worldwide, where industry ‘voluntarily’ reports their carbon footprints, and the UNPRI – UN Principles for Responsible Investment, whose guru is Al Gore.
Since 2005, institutional investors that are signatory to the UNPRI have dedicated their efforts to investing in ‘clean-tech’ and you can see that Google, Apple, and others have raced ahead of oil majors like Exxon (#1 in 2007 to #10 in 2017) in market value ranking, ‘cuz they’re ‘clean’ – even though they could not exist without oil! [6]
As Joanne Nova reports in “The Other Side of Climate,”[7] carbon markets are booming for banks and big business, but it all costs you and me, the little guy, way more than we can pay. That’s what the #YellowVests are all about: “The elites are afraid of the end of the world; we are afraid of the end of the month.”
Markets have been skewed. Science has been skewed. And taxpayers and industry are about to get …uh… skewed if they fall for this plan.
So there are good reasons to resist the Nobel Laureate plan.
1) Carbon dioxide is not the control knob on climate – why would you want to enshrine faulty science in a punitive law?
2) Undue influence on markets by tax-free billionaire philanthropies using ENGOs as their proxies to change the global economy without government or citizen approval is something Nobel Laureate economists should question, not promote.
3) The world is not a democracy; few countries are. A global carbon tax could create very unpleasant trade or financial surprises if large UN voter blocs like the 88 countries of la francophonie[8] decide to push an issue (remember, Macron already threatened President Trump with ‘no trade with EU unless he returned America to the Paris Agreement. France – ‘we have no oil, we have ideas.’)
4) Ultimately, tax ‘em and bribe ‘em with their own money is…a road to ruin, for everyone.
Please share our billboard with everyone and read our report “Faulty Premises=Poor Policies on Climate.” https://blog.friendsofscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Faulty-Premises-Poor-Public-Policy-on-Climate-Oct-30-2018-FINAL.pdf
Michelle Stirling is the Communications Manager for Friends of Science Society. This op-ed expresses her personal views. Stirling is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists and the AAAS.