Article content continued

Rube Goldberg, by the way, is the famed cartoonist from the early 20th century who drew images of wildly improbable contraptions. In 1931, he produced a pretty good illustration of a “Professor Butts” demonstrating his self-operating dinner napkin, which appears to function in roughly the same way as the climate-fixing carbon price. (The napkin contraption can be found at Wikipedia’s Rube Goldberg entry.)

Canada’s half-baked, go-it-alone deployment of such a regime is doomed

Aside from the twisted problems embedded in the Trudeau-Butts carbon-price scheme, there’s another niggling issue. Any reading of Nordhaus’s work on carbon taxation cannot avoid the conclusion that Canada’s half-baked, go-it-alone deployment of such a regime is doomed.

As I mentioned in a recent column on Nordhaus, the Nobel economist reached a “bottom line” conclusion in a 2014 paper that a carbon tax would require “clubs” of participating nations that would impose “penalties and sanctions on non-participants” to enforce international climate agreements. Unless most or at least a large number of major countries adopted a similar carbon tax and imposed direct tariffs of up to 10 per cent on all imports from non-carbon-tax countries (so-called free riders) then the carbon tax idea will fail — just like the Kyoto protocol, which set out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions back in 1997.

In other words, based on Nordhaus’s own writing on the subject, the Nobel Laureate would have to assess Canada’s carbon tax plan as dysfunctional and ineffectual.

However, in response to my recent assessment, Andrew Leach, a University of Alberta economist and sometime adviser to Alberta’s NDP government, dropped me a tweet: “@andrew_leach Replying to @terencecorcoran my PhD thesis built on Nordhaus’s work. I’ve got a pretty good grasp of his body of work. But, by all means, keep trying to use quotes out of context from a guy who won a Nobel for climate change econ to advance your petty agenda. Just make sure to ignore what he said about BC.”