Hoover Institution fellow Michael Spence comments on zero interest rates and propping up economies.

A number of people in the United States argue for increasing the number of electric vehicles as a percent of the automobile stock.

There are several problems here. First, even if we agreed that government (as opposed to private) payments for tree-planting made sense, it doesn’t at all follow that the revenue should come from a carbon tax. In general, raising a dollar of revenue from a tax on carbon content hurts the economy more than raising a dollar from taxing labor or consumption. (My article on the “tax interaction effect” gives the economic intuition behind this point.)

As hurricanes become more intense, flooding more common and wildfires more deadly, Americans — regardless of their party affiliation — are dying from extreme weather events and are seeing their livelihoods damaged. The searing experience of Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017 might not have prompted Republican politicians to fight “climate change," but perhaps they can have a rational conversation about “rising ocean levels.”