Jerry taylor tokyo

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address. TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom "He's a snake in the grass, I tell ya guys; he may look dumb but that's just a disguise; he's a mastermind in the ways of espionage. Home My Profile. Comments 3 Trackbacks 0 Leave a comment Trackback. Reply Quote. Bet wrong on a gas-fired power plant, on the other hand, and corporate life will go on because there is less to lose given that the construction costs associated with gas-fired power plants are a small fraction of those associated with nuclear plants.

Investors are also wary of nuclear plants because of the construction delays and cost over-runs that have historically plagued the industry. If nuclear power plants are so uneconomical, how then to explain the blizzard of permit applications for the construction and operation of new nuclear power plants that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received?

Easy: These applications cost little and oblige utilities to do nothing. Industry analysts maintain that federal approvals will not translate into actual plants without a federal promise to private equity markets that, in case of default by power plants, the taxpayer will make good on the full sum of all bad nuclear loans. I would love to tell that story. I do, after all, work at the Cato Institute, and blaming government for economic problems is what keeps me in business. But what stops me is the fact that those complaints are not echoed by the nuclear power industry itself.

On the contrary, the industry in the early s asked for — and got — exactly the sort of safety regulations, permit review process, and public comment regime now in place. Both public and political support for nuclear power is running so high than even a majority of Democrats in Congress are happy to not just tolerate nuclear power, but lavish even more subsidies upon it. And while Yucca Mountain may not be open now or ever, everyone seems reasonably content with the current on-site waste storage regime.

But they do not. Take away the 1. Replace accelerated depreciation tax rules with regular depreciation rules and costs jump another 9 percent. Even zero taxation on nuclear power would increase costs by 6 percent because right now nuclear power enjoys a negative effective tax rate. But the final nail in the coffin for the industry would be if the federal cap on the liability that nuclear power plant owners face in case of accidents the Price-Anderson Act were to be lifted.

Given all of this, how do France, India, China and Russia build cost-effective nuclear power plants? Government officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. The free-market case for a revenue-neutral carbon pricing scheme seems fairly impeccable to me. But instead of organizing its climate change efforts around seeking to ensure that any future carbon pricing plan be as close to revenue neutral as possible, Cato prefers to steadfastly defend the rights of industry to unload air pollution unimpeded.

Unfortunately, Taylor does exactly what Yglesias argues —. While I believe that Jerry Taylor and Indur Goklany make important points, they can hardly expect to be effectual in their efforts to stand against greater federal policy intervention if they ignore the change in political currents and fail to more directly engage obviously sympathetic observers like Matt Yglesias, to establish and build on common ground, or to more forcefully argue on the basis of principles.

Moreover, Taylor rather surprisingly compounds his disengagement by pulling an apparently skewed figure the rather low mode rather than the higher mean from a review of climate change cost-benefit studies by economist Richard Tol , who has conducted further reviews and analyses and this year has come very strongly out in favor of carbon taxes.

There are three implications. Firstly, greenhouse gas emission reduction today is justified. Even the most conservative assumption lead to positive estimates of the social cost of carbon cf. Table 1 and the Pigou tax is thus greater than zero.