It’s not politically durable/ Doesn’t solve populism—individuals are psychologically opposed to the word “tax” even if it solves warming.

Does it matter that carbon taxes only impose economic harms, and not necessarily physical ones? Does the Do No Harm effect apply as powerfully to economic harms as it does to physical harms? Apparently so. Another Do No Harm experiment asked research subjects if, as the trade negotiator for a nation of wheat growers and bean growers, they would accept a final offer of a trade agreement that would decrease the income of one group but increase the cost of the other. Research subjects responded by requiring much larger gains to the one group in exchange for the losses to the other— in exchange for a $10,000 increase in the income of one group, subjects rejected losses greater than $4,000. In order to answer the objection that these losses would be more painful than the gains would be beneficial, research subjects were also asked if they thought the harms were “greater” than the gains. They generally acknowledged that the losses were not as significant as the gains. Baron contends that people were “knowingly nonutilitarian.” 13 Apparently, Do No Harm includes a Do No Economic Harm effect.

That a carbon tax is unpopular because it harms people was most directly tested by Baron and James Jurney in 1993. They hypothesized that voter support for certain reforms might be reduced by the presence of certain norms against coercion. Using six different hypothetical reform proposals, one of which was a gasoline tax to “combat global warming,” Baron and Jurney not only asked survey respondents whether they would vote for a gas tax that would double the price of gasoline, but also asked them if they thought it was a reform that would actually make things better. In different experiments, they found that substantial numbers of respondents believed that the proposal would make things better, but opposed it anyway, because they feared that the proposal would harm people, and thought the proposal unfair. 14 Exactly why respondents thought this and whether they would think this about other climate instruments are subjects for further research, but the implication for carbon taxes seems quite compelling.

Another facet of the analysis of the Do No Harm effect is highly relevant to the climate policy debate: the effect is particularly acute when people think of trading off harms and benefits among groups. Even more than singling out people for harm, people hate to impose harm on specific groups, even if the harm is economic or probabilistic. In the vaccination problem, Ritov and Baron varied the basic scenario to include possibilities that children could be at particular risk of dying from the flu, or dying from the side effects of the vaccine, or both. The findings suggested that when risk groups are identified, people are especially reluctant to make tradeoffs that add to that risk. In the public policy scenario, 57 percent of the respondents answered with a number from one to eight, indicating that they demanded a vaccine with greater safety than the flu itself; 23 percent answered zero, indicating that they would do absolutely no harm in vaccinating; only 9 percent responded with nine of ten, indicating true neutrality. 15 Interestingly, when it was posed that the risk groups for both dying from the flu and dying from the vaccine were the same , subjects became more willing to vaccinate; 47 percent responded with a maximum tolerable vaccine death rate of nine or ten, as compared to the 9 percent when there were separate risk groups. It is as if people were willing to do a costbenefit analysis within one group, but not across groups. People show an even stronger desire to Do No Harm to identifiable groups. This Do No Harm to groups effect has particular salience to the climate policy instrument choice problem because of concerns over regressiveness (as discussed in the previous section, potentially misplaced concerns). The problem of economic inequality has a well-developed discourse that has led to a rule of thumb that holds sway over public policy: there are “poor people” and policies with economic consequences should not exacerbate income inequalities. This may be why, in the Baron and Jurney study that hypothesized an increased gasoline tax to “combat global warming,” many respondents opposed the gasoline tax increase even if it would make things better, because it was “unfair.” But even if this is common perception, what is the basis for this perception? If there is a norm against coercive reform, as Baron and Jurney posit, what if the underlying facts of the thought experiment are based upon a grand mistake? Does that undermine such a norm? This is food for further thought and research. But in the meantime, carbon taxes, like most consumption taxes, are commonly thought to be regressive, even if this is not necessarily so. Thus, a carbon tax has two things going against it: the fact that it apparently penalizes one group disproportionately, and that the group happens to have a strong moral claim against economic hardship.

Again, the possibility that a Do No Harm effect may bias people away from taking action on climate change entirely should be separated from the climate policy instrument choice problem. Doing no harm may cause people to avoid supporting any policy that causes economic hardship, even if the benefits are greater. But the argument made here is that the Do No Harm effect negatively impacts carbon taxes more than it does other instruments.

Carbon taxation’s disadvantage from the Do No Harm effect looms largest when it is juxtaposed with government subsidy programs. Even though public opinion polls seem to show, over the last decade, an increase in public concern for climate change, people remain vigorously opposed to anything with the word “tax” in it. 16 People remain enthusiastic about subsidies to encourage homeowners to replace old and inefficient appliances. 17 Of course, I have argued ad nauseum that there are strong doubts that subsidy programs are broadly effective. But in the eyes of the general public, if there is a Do No Harm influence, the choice could not be more stark: help somebody do something positive for climate change, or penalize a disadvantaged group for not being more efficient. The latter may not be a fair characterization of carbon taxes, but it is a fairly ubiquitous one. And it is almost certain that for those that even bother to think about the costs of government subsidies, the cost seems so diffuse and such a tiny fraction of government outlays, that it is easy to slip into thinking that there is no cost at all. So not only do government subsidies avoid doing harm, they help people! Small wonder, then, that subsidies to assist consumers are so popular; a recent study jointly conducted by OPEC, the US Energy Information Administration, OECD, and the World Bank estimated that worldwide, fossil fuel-related consumption subsidies amounted to more than $550 billion dollars (US) in 2008, 18 nearly 1 percent of 2008 world GDP. 19

A Do No Harm way of thinking also helps sustain, in smaller groups of environmentalists, a command-and-control approach to regulating greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the command-and-control approach makes most intuitive sense if one taps into biases to Do No Harm. With command-and-control regulation, pain is visited upon those that are “causing” the harm— large industrial polluters. There is a very nice sense of corrective justice there, a “polluter pays” principle at work. 20 By contrast, a carbon tax seems to punish the little guy— consumers, all the rest of us, who do not seem as blameworthy for the climate problem as large industries. Some environmental organizations have thus continued to push EPA to regulate under the Clean Air Act, under its command-and-control template, earlier and more aggressively. 21 It is possible, as a strategic matter, that environmental organizations view the Clean Air Act as a worst-case method of reducing emissions, as a form of regulation that is better than nothing. But if these environmental organizations are playing to their base support, it would also be perpetuating two delusions: that only large industrial polluters are responsible, and that costs will not