More on regulation, markets, and climate change

This is a followup to yesterday's post in which I said there was no free-market solution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Ezra Klein says that's not entirely accurate — markets can and should have a secondary role:

Even if we were all fairly committed environmentalists, there'd really be no way to effectively evaluate the amount of carbon our various activities generate. And more to the point, we don't want to. [...] Carbon consumption should be in the price of my goods, and then I can do what I often do as a consumer and make decisions based on price signals. The government needs to fix the market failure wherein the price of carbon is not assessed in the cost of products, but we actually do need a high-functioning market to accurately translate carbon information into a form we can easily and quickly work with.

So I guess it's more accurate to say that regulation is a necessary part of any plan to lower the emission of greenhouse gases. But the effect on conservatives is still the same: Problem X can be solved only with new regulations; therefore, Problem X isn't happening.

What is a Free Market? It's an unobtainable asymptotic goal. It's the reason why when ever any Republican policy fails, "free market" pundits can claim that whatever was done, didn't go "far enough". Of course it didn't. The people who enacted the policy were not True Conservatives.

In contrast, I know of no one who has a rational plan for dealing with global climate change who does not rely heavily on market based solutions. The consequences of emitting green house gas need to be rolled into the cost of emitting them. Where "Free Market" fundamentalists see a carbon tax as interference in the market, the "free market" will NOT lead to the optimal solution - which is fundamentally in conflict with free market ideology.

CO2 emissions need to be priced into the market, in order for the market to work. The very need for "government interference" or in other words addressing a market failure, is a counter indication for the validity of their most basic philosophy. An existential threat.