Last week, Jeb Bush, the willing strangler of Baby Hitler, said this: “Perhaps the most ludicrous comment I’ve ever heard is that climate change is a bigger threat to our country than radical Islamic terrorism.” You would think such utter wrong-mindedness would catapult him to the top of the GOP polls in this clown car of an election season, but apparently even ludicrousness can’t save Jeb from himself. 

In a smart Conversation piece, Christopher Grainger calls for a Space Race initiative to combat climate change. He’s not the first to do so, but it clearly needs repeating. While a carbon tax is a very necessary measure, the writer doesn’t think it will necessarily birth solutions as much as contain badness. I think it might do some of both, the tax perhaps leading corporations and inventors to innovate to preclude paying the tax. Either way, it would be great to find out.

From Grainger:

Many influential economists such as Yale’s William Nordhaus or Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, want to fight climate change with a carbon tax. The problem is taxes do a better job of preventing bad things than encouraging better replacements.

Standard economics simply considers greenhouse gas emissions as an “externality” – an economic consequence experienced by a party who did not choose to incur it. Negative side effects such as pollution can be addressed by putting a price on them and forcing those responsible to pay – if your factory produces emissions, it’ll cost you. This is the idea behind carbon taxes. It is assumed that, by making polluting technologies relatively more expensive, the market will adjust, generating low-carbon innovations.

But innovation isn’t as simple as this. In particular, the development and spread of new technologies depends on what has gone before and you can’t simply expect a jump into renewable energy, for instance, when everything is geared towards fossil fuels. This idea of “path dependence” is fundamental to understanding technological change.•