GLOBAL WARMING, TAKE 2….Now that I’ve vented my annoyance with Anne Applebaum’s mind reading performance in today’s Post, a reader suggests I should follow this up by mentioning that her substantive position is actually perfectly reasonable:
Any lasting solutions will have to be extremely simple….Fortunately, there is such a solution….It’s called a carbon tax, and it should be applied across the board to every industry that uses fossil fuels, every home or building with a heating system, every motorist, and every public transportation system. Immediately, it would produce a wealth of innovations to save fuel, as well as new incentives to conserve. More to the point, it would produce a big chunk of money that could be used for other things.
Quite so, and virtually every serious analyst I’ve read agrees that a carbon tax is one of the primary building blocks for any effective global warming policy. Considering the results of this poll (see page 2), it’s especially welcome to hear this kind of sensible talk from a conservative.
Of course, this makes the mockery in Applebaum’s opening paragraph even more inexplicable. If she agrees that global warming is real, and that it may have catastrophic consequences, and that serious action is justified to fight it, why was she so dismissive of a newspaper report that implied the exact same thing? Very mysterious.
