Something to remember about COP21

Jeremy Warner is probably right about the outcome of COP21 here, that great gabfest to talk about climate change:

Ever clearer is that the debate on climate change is essentially over. Whether just a modern day delusion or not, virtually all political leaders now buy into the idea of man-made warming, and most of them seem willing to do something about it.

The question, as always, is what should be done. We have long taken the above view: the truth or not of climate change is not the important point. Politics is about what people believe, not the truth. Thus we've been advocating a carbon tax on the grounds that we know they're going to do something so we might as well tell everyone to do what will cure the problem, if it exists, at least cost. Usefully, it's also what every economist looking at the problem has also said, from Stern through Nordhaus to Tol.

However, there's an implication of that:

Much fiercer carbon taxes are coming, driving huge change not just in energy consumption and production, but in all the myriad industries that depend on hydro-carbons, from plastics to automotive, metal bashing and even many service activities, which can be surprisingly energy intensive.

That's actually not true, not here in the UK at least. Because we largely already have a carbon tax. It's not distributed correctly, this is true (too much on petrol, not enough on farming) but overall we're already coughing up about the "correct" amount as calculated by Stern (and more than Nordhaus or Tol would suggest for today). The combination of the fuel duty escalator, the EU's cap and trade, the minimum carbon price and so on, while they're not quite exactly the way it should all be done, do have roughly the right effect and size. According to Stern's numbers the UK should be paying something like £30 billion a year in carbon tax given the roughly 500 million tonnes CO2 a year. We're already paying that much when you tot everything up so we're done.

Yes, it's entirely true that some other people might have a lot of work to do to meet whatever is agreed in Paris. But as far as the UK is concerned we're done, we've already put the correct and recommended policies into place. We've nothing else that we need to do except perhaps a little tinkering here and there. There's most certainly no justification for significant rises in the general tax level, whatever COP21 agrees. Not that that's what we'll be told of course....