Tyler me-too's Nick's praise of Jonathan Rauch.

In a world in which political discourse tends to veer from insane overstatement (think Ann Coulter) to plodding conventionalism (David Broder) to barely disguised partisanship (Paul Krugman), Rauch's independence of thought is incredibly rare. Whatever the topic, he consistently engages (and typically dismantles) the conventional wisdom.

For example: The Convenient Truth

[C]limate change is real and deserves action, but that the problem is nowhere near as overwhelming as the rhetoric commonly suggests, and the solutions nowhere near as difficult. As problems go, in fact, climate change appears to be one of the most convenient that humankind has ever faced. . .

The convenient truth about global warming, then, is that radicalism is as pointless as it is impractical. Slow-but-steady is not only the easiest approach; it is also the most effective.

Just as conveniently, the most efficient way to get started is also the simplest, albeit not the easiest politically: tax carbon emissions. "At around $30 per ton of CO2 over a 25-year horizon, experts seem to think this is the kind of price that will encourage the kind of technologies that are necessary," says Billy Pizer, an environmental economist at Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank. That would translate into an additional 27 cents or so on a gallon of gasoline and about a 20 percent increase in residential electricity bills (more like 34 percent for industrial users). Unpleasant, but hardly radical. Perfectly do-able, in fact.

Fortuitously, a carbon tax could also reduce the U.S. budget deficit and the geopolitical leverage of sinister "petrocracies" such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. Policy prescriptions don't come any more convenient than that.

Because significant warming is already baked into the cake (excuse the expression), climate change for at least the next 50 to 100 years will be a problem to be managed, not solved. Managing it will require mitigating whatever harms it causes: adaptation, in the standard parlance. This, too, turns out to be remarkably convenient. Few, if any, of the problems that climate change seems likely to exacerbate -- flooding, storms, drought, tropical disease, habitat loss, extinction -- are new or exotic. To the contrary, they are already front and center on the developmental and environmental agendas.

hmmm, well this hardly qualifies as dismantling the conventional wisdom. It's in fact a simplified retelling of the conventional wisdom. And it's bunk.

A carbon tax will not "encourage the kind of technologies that are necessary". It will do absolutely nothing about the problem. It's far too little to matter in that regard. Taxes on carbon, such as the 27 cents per gallon effect cited, are already much higher than that in many places, have been so for a long time, and have not accelerated technological advancement or adoption in any significant way.

Moreover, increasing taxes will not reduce the U.S. budget deficit, they will increase the size of the U.S. budget. Politicians will spend to the limit, no matter how high the limit. The only way to reduce deficit is by accident: unexpected revenue collection - such as the internet bubble, or unexpected cost reduction - such as the end of the cold war. Expected revenues will be distributed until the pork barrel is empty. That's how democracy works: to the spoiler goes the wins.

Where does this nonsensical idea come from? Experts. Based on what? Their long history of success with price controls and other economic fiddles? This isn't economics, or ecologics, or any sort of reasoned analysis. It's merely politics. They think they can sell it to a gullible public, and when it has no effect no one will notice. If emissions go up they have ready made excuses as well as cause to increase taxes further, and if they go down they can claim credit though there is no causal relationship. In either case they "did something". It's feel-good wanking, an expensive placebo at best, but will more likely exacerbate the global problem by shifting activities to less energy efficient locations, as has happened in response to many of Europe's ill-considered fiddles.

Given how neatly adaptation dovetails with the sustainability agenda, and given its immense potential to relieve whatever human suffering that global warming causes, one might think environmentalists would tout it to the skies. Some do, but many seem to believe that reducing harm distracts from the real job, which is to reduce emissions. In a blog post last year (at gristmill.org), an environmentalist named David Roberts made the point with startling candor. "In an ideal, abstract policy debate, sure, I'd say we should boost our attention to adaptation," he wrote. "But in the current political situation, I don't want to provide any ammunition for the moral cretins who are squirming frantically to avoid policies that might impact their corporate donors."

This is like denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. And it is every bit as callous and irresponsible. Where climate change is concerned, the truth -- and this truth really is inconvenient, or at least sad -- is that too many activists and politicians mistake panic for virtue.

Well, that bit is semi-unconventional, but if this is considered to be wise journalism then we have set the bar very low indeed. It's like the special olympics maybe - what more can we expect of journalists given their special abilities?

Don't ever expect to hear sensible things from journalists since the market for such writing is so very small. They can pen foaming screeds so long as they pander to some constituency, but they'll be in the unemployment line if they ever dare to say what everyone knows, but won't say. Who would pay for that? Momentum is building for some sort of tax fiddle as a gesture, and pundits are crawling out of the woodwork to endorse the idea, approving of what they judge to be inevitable, convinced by nothing more than the convictions of others, though there is no real reason to even suspect that this will make any difference at all to climate change.