Paul Krugman Asks An Excellent Question

Paul Krugman Asks An Excellent Question

Paul Krugman’s column today is on the costs of cap and trade:

“If emission permits were auctioned off — as they should be — the revenue thus raised could be used to give consumers rebates or reduce other taxes, partially offsetting the higher prices. But the offset wouldn’t be complete. Consumers would end up poorer than they would have been without a climate-change policy.

But how much poorer? Not much, say careful researchers, like those at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even with stringent limits, says the M.I.T. group, Americans would consume only 2 percent less in 2050 than they would have in the absence of emission limits. That would still leave room for a large rise in the standard of living, shaving only one-twentieth of a percentage point off the average annual growth rate.

To be sure, there are many who insist that the costs would be much higher. Strange to say, however, such assertions nearly always come from people who claim to believe that free-market economies are wonderfully flexible and innovative, that they can easily transcend any constraints imposed by the world’s limited resources of crude oil, arable land or fresh water.

So why don’t they think the economy can cope with limits on greenhouse gas emissions? Under cap-and-trade, emission rights would just be another scarce resource, no different in economic terms from the supply of arable land.”

Krugman is right. One of the main points of markets is to provide incentives to people to use their ingenuity to solve problems in the most efficient way. Cap and trade is a straightforward market solution to a straightforward market failure. There’s no earthly reason why anyone who believes in the marvelous benefits of markets to decide that when it comes to reducing carbon emissions, those benefits will magically cease to exist.