Wouldn’t you expect thieves to lie?

Most people just don’t believe the environmentalists. They think they’re being had. And they might just be right.

Of the more than 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on climate change in the last three years, less than half endorse, either explicitly or implicitly, the theory of anthropogenic global warming, a new survey has found. While few reject it out of hand, a plurality are neutral on the question.

Among the public, only four in ten Americans think there is evidence that humans cause climate change. and more than half of all Britons, says the BBC, believe politicians and scientists exaggerate global warming “to make money”.

And they’d be right. The very same BBC reports that a study by the UK Taxpayers’ Alliance finds that the government collects almost twice as much in green tax than is needed to pay for the “carbon footprint” those revenues are meant to “offset”. The change the government pocketed? More than £10 billion. Per household, that’s £400 pounds the greens and the bureaucrats are stealing.

Meanwhile, those “offsets” include such eco-friendly efforts as providing foot pumps to replace diesel-driven water pumps in the third world, so rural farmers can do long days of the sort of hard labour that a century ago was outlawed as too harsh for British prisoners.

You’d think that if British environuts are going to exploit third-world slave labour to salve your conscience, they’d at least figure out how to do it at a profit, so you can get a decent tax rebate too. Mind you, I guess someone has to pay for their fancy hybrids, solar panels, hemp fashions and organic artichokes.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance study warns of a long list of taxes, duties and levies on anything from air travel to land fills, with an arbitrary “climate change levy” (I kid you not) slapped on top of it all. The latter, it says, is regressive to boot: poor people pay 35% more in relative terms than rich people. Faux mink and manure doesn’t come cheap, you know.

The supposed goal of such taxes is to offset “externalities”, that ill-defined hold-all shield that is raised against any and all economic arguments about environmental issues. You can argue what you like about the environmental costs people are willing to incur for the sake of development, prosperity and quality of life, but there are always any number of “externalities”, and they justify coercive state action and higher taxes.

For many people and companies, it just doesn’t do to be seen opposing green action, or arguing that the externalities don’t exist, so environmental lobby groups and bureaucrats have an easy time of it expropriating people’s hard-earned money for the good of the environ…ehm, socie…I mean, themselves.

Even if the UK government halved the green taxes, to return its fraudulent behaviour to at least some level of honesty, there’s a second problem, and that is that the point about externalities is badly made. Though superficially intuitive, externalities are not objectively quantifiable.

Let’s take pollution as an easy example. The argument says because some environmental costs do not accrue directly to the account of polluters, they have no incentive to reduce pollution. Yet the market deals with externalities in a number of ways. A farmer will invest in a healthy, productive environment, and when his water becomes polluted by someone else, for example, he can sue for damages. A consumer that doesn’t approve of the polluting factories of a producer can boycott its products. People may choose to tolerate the polluter in return for job creation and economic growth. History shows that as people grow wealthier, their tolerance for negative externalities decreases, and they’re willing to pay for a more pleasant, well-managed environment. Externalities are at least to some extent handled by the choices and actions of individual people in a free market.

The more subtle problem is that though externalities must have some value, it is impossible to determine what that value is. It cannot be calculated, because value is subjective. For example, a piece of land may have a certain market value, but its owner may not be willing to sell for that price, perhaps because his ancestor’s graves are on this land, so it has high sentimental value to him that it wouldn’t have to others. Value can only be determined through a willing-buyer willing-seller transaction. No government tax to counteract “externalities” can be evaluated either as fair or as unfair.¹

No wonder then that taxes to offset externalities are a great excuse to raid the public’s pocket to line the state’s coffers and fund the huge industry that has grown up around climate change.

But even if one concedes that human CO₂ emissions constitute an economic externality that can only be internalised through taxation, the green taxes are far too high. Seems the skeptics are right: it is all about the money, and they are being had.

Update: Walton (see comments) was right: the cartoon was stupid, though not for the reason he said. The intention of the original t-shirt slogan was to play on the libertarian principle that taxes are theft, but a lawyer friend of mine pointed out that without this knowledge, it might be misinterpreted as an accusation of actual crime against an specific organisation, which would constitute libel. It has been changed accordingly.

1. For a thorough treatment of externalities, both positive and negative, see this paper by A. H. Barnett and Bruce Yandle, professors emeritus of economics at Auburn and Clemson Universities, respectively. [↩]