Reddit mentions of Political Environmentalism: Going behind the Green Curtain (Hoover Institution Press Publication)

> Personally, i will argue with anyone until I am blue in the face that energy prices needed to be higher and a carbon tax is the solution. I will vote for politicians that support this policy.

The flaw in this plan is relying on politics to accomplish your goal. One only needs to look at the history of political environmental solutions to notice how those solutions weren't environmental at all, they were mechanisms to assist political cronies. Terry Anderson wrote an excellent book titled Political Environmentalism that covers this subject (even if you oppose free market environmentalism, which Anderson subscribes to, the point this book is trying to make is still valid).

The carbon tax scheme is another one of those supposed political solutions to protect the environment that won't protect the environment but will help political cronies. All the carbon tax does is raise the cost of polluting. This increase in cost is easily soaked up by large established corporations but not new entities entering the market. BP, for example, can soak up the additional thousands or millions of dollars a carbon tax will cost them but a new competitor entering the market will be unable to soak up those costs and will go out of business. So what? What if the competitor is a company that is manufacturing means of producing cleaner forms of energy?

Manufacturing mechanisms to produce clean energy will release carbon, which will be far more expensive under a carbon tax system, and thus will hamper industries involved in producing clean energy just as much as industry involved in producing equipment that runs off of current fossil fuel technologies. The primary difference is that clean energy producers are mostly new and thus do not yet have the capital required to soak up more costs. Carbon taxes effectively restrict competitors to the established fossil fuel industry.

Let's also not forget that until the 1840s and 1850s polluters were accountable for their emissions that landed on another's property:

> Contrary to Pigou and Samuelson, manufacturers, foundries, railroads, etc., could not act in a vacuum, as if the costs they imposed on others were of no moment. There was a “way to force private polluters to bear the social cost of their operations”: sue them, make them pay for their past transgressions, and get a court order prohibiting them from such invasions in future.

> Upholding property rights in this manner had several salutary effects. First of all, there was an incentive to use clean burning, but slightly more expensive anthracite coal rather than the cheaper but dirtier high sulfur content variety; less risk of lawsuits. Second, it paid to install scrubbers, and other techniques for reducing pollution output. Third there was an impetus to engage in research and development of new and better methods for the internalization of externalities: keeping one’s pollutants to oneself. Fourth, there was a movement toward the use better chimneys and other smoke prevention devices. Fifth, an incipient forensic pollution industry was in the process of being developed. Sixth, the locational decisions of manufacturing firms was intimately effected.

> [...]

> But then in the 1840s and 1850s a new legal philosophy took hold. No longer were private property rights upheld. Now, there was an even more important consideration: the public good. And of what did the public good consist in this new dispensation? The growth and progress of the U.S. economy. Toward this end it was decided that the jurisprudence of the 1820s and 1830s was a needless indulgence. Accordingly, when an environmental plaintiff came to court under this new system, he was given short shrift. He was told, in effect, that of course his private property rights were being violated; but that this was entirely proper, since there is something even more important that selfish, individualistic property rights. And this was the “public good” of encouraging manufacturing.

Today, due to the current legal framework, one can get away with polluting so long as the amount of pollution they're emitting is below the state approved level, or if the amount is above the state approved level, the company can afford to permits:

> A BP (BP) refinery in Indiana will be allowed to continue to dump mercury into Lake Michigan under a permit issued by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

> The permit exempts the BP plant at Whiting, Ind., 3 miles southeast of Chicago, from a 1995 federal regulation limiting mercury discharges into the Great Lakes to 1.3 ounces per year.

Before the change in the legal framework it was costly to pollute since the emission of pollution was treated like any other form of property damage. Under such an environment it is in the best interest of everybody to contain any pollution less it land on another's property and cost them a great deal of money in legal and cleanup fees. Now any polluter with enough clout or money to buy off the regulatory bodies basically has free reign to pollute.