I believe the point was that fossil fuels operate in a market where they are subsidized, which is not really free.

Politicians and legislation are purchased on the free market through lobbying. And then subsidies are merely a return on a smart investment.

I'm not actually sure if what I just wrote is parody or not. Arguments about "free markets" are always weird like that, since everybody seems to work with a different definition and they don't really seem to exist

Yea well "really" free markets don't actually exist so that distinction seems a little silly.

I mean obviously the subsidies are bad but removing them isn't going to solve much of anything by itself.

If you suddenly make using fossil fuels 10x more expensive people will switch off of them ASAP.

> If you suddenly make using fossil fuels 10x more expensive people will switch off of them ASAP.

Yea, this just isn't true. Rich people will just pay more for the same thing. Poor people will just have to pay more to even get to their jobs. It's pure laziness to put this on dogma rather than actually come up with decent policy to shape the market.

Rich people have money, but they aren't stupid: why would they throw their money away on nonrenewable energy when they can just switch to something cheaper?

> Rich people have money, but they aren't stupid: why would they throw their money away on nonrenewable energy when they can just switch to something cheaper?

What alternative is there to a private jet or a yacht? No, you have to get the fear of prison (or worse) in them to get them to act in a socially rational manner.

To begin with, private jets and yachts are a trivial proportion of carbon emissions, so they're not really what matters.

But to actually answer your question, battery-electric yachts or aviation powered by biofuels.

Sure, but it's rather indicative of larger use of carbon emitting technology. Neither of your suggested replacements actually exist in any meaningful way, and virtually every investment comes with significant CO2 emissions.

Battery-electric yachts and biofuels aren't popular because they're more expensive, not because there is any technological barrier to their existence. Make them the less expensive option and market demand for them increases.

Or, we could just make yachts illegal.

Free markets are good at minimizing cost. Currently, emitting CO₂ has no cost, so the market has no incentive to solve climate change.

Not true. If we neutralize externalities the free market will make progress in climate change. Especially because solar and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuels. Probably won't be fast enough, but I don't think that is the same as utterly and demonstrably unable to solve climate change.

You're conflating (dis)incentives with price discovery.

A lot of people seem to think free markets -> anarchy, which is a complete straw man. Prominent Libertarian economists such as Friedman[1] support governments dealing with externalities generally, and the carbon tax specifically.

If all you know about X is the totemic version reverberating through anti-X echo chambers, you probably don't understand X.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2014/10/12/what-wou...

> A lot of people seem to think free markets -> anarchy, which is a complete straw man.

In American political discourse, this is exactly how the "free market" is defined by the political establishment. Taxing externalities is very unpopular among Republican and Libertarian politicians (Gary Johnson flirted with the idea of a carbon tax, but quickly withdrew support) and is relatively popular among Democrats and the Green Party. Which parties are the ones people associate with free markets?

You can hem and haw about appropriate use of the term "free market" all you want, but calling colloquial usage a "straw man" is disingenuous.

You're confusing the terms with the politics.

There is a party which is anti-regulation because its constituents are business owners who incur the cost of it. But they incur the cost of both inefficient wasteful regulation and any legitimate pricing of externalities, so they oppose both. One is free markets and the other one isn't.

Just because politicians representing oil producers support both "free markets" and subsidies for oil companies doesn't mean subsidies for oil companies are a component of free markets. It just means that politicians are hypocrites.

I don't see how I'm confusing the terms. Republican and Libertarian politicians will tell you that the carbon tax (and other forms of taxing externalities) is antithetical to the "free market", and my point was you can't, in good faith, claim "straw man" when someone uses the term that most non-economists in America use.

I also never claimed that subsidies were a component of the free market nor did I claim any politicians think so. I believe that's an actual straw man :)

> my point was you can't, in good faith, claim "straw man" when someone uses the term that most non-economists in America use.

The term for what you're doing is called weak man. It's finding some idiot or hypocrite in the world who is actually advancing the weak position so you can claim it isn't a straw man, and then knocking that down instead of addressing the stronger version being advanced by someone else.

> I also never claimed that subsidies were a component of the free market nor did I claim any politicians think so. I believe that's an actual straw man :)

That's an argument. If "free market" means what anybody who says they're for free markets says they want, that would imply that "free market" means oil subsidies. Which is clearly absurd, ergo so was your claim.

> It's finding some idiot or hypocrite in the world who is actually advancing the weak position

That doesn't really work when my argument is that it's the colloquial usage--not just a handful of "idiots".

> If "free market" means what anybody who says they're for free markets says they want, that would imply that "free market" means oil subsidies.

That's an absurd reduction, but that is how language works. This clearly isn't a productive conversation. Have a good evening.

I think the exact point that was energy production is a massively skewed, un-free market.

I think GP is saying that if companies had to cover the cost of externalities (impractical, how do you measure and price this?) a free market model could work. This is the basis for the carbon tax as I understand it.

"fair market" might be a better phrase.

Spherical frictionless cows in a vacuum are unable to move.

There's always thumbs on the scale. Grandparent is proposing to remove some thumbs (fossil fuel subsidies).

Pigovian taxes are fairly popular among people who consider free markets to be valuable. This is because they retain $free = "can discover prices and conduct trade freely", a more valuable property than $free = "utterly free of any and all governance", which, like real communism, has never been tried.