Reposted by Paul McKeown
Intriguing new paper finds the US corporate tax code subsidizes CO2. The dirtiest firms pay ~10 cents on each dollar of capital income; the cleanest pay 14.
Why? Machinery and equipment are good collateral, so they borrow more, deduct more interest, and shrink taxable income.
![On this day, October 14 in 1974, a UK Cabinet Office civil servant tells his boss about this climate change issue, after having been told about it by German Professor Hermann Flohn.
“The first example I have found of this route is in 1974. Dr P.T. Warren, a Cabinet Office civil servant, reported a conversation to Dr Robert Press [Robert Press], who was the acting chief scientific adviser between April 1974 and 1976. Warren had been at a meeting examining the forces shaping Europe over the next 30 years (Lord Kennet’s Europe plus Thirty project[Europe Plus 30]). There, he had spoken with Professor Hermann Flohn, a respectable climatologist from Bonn and one of the leading researchers into anthropogenic climate change. Flohn clearly impressed on Warren the necessity of taking the subject seriously.
Warren told Press:
“His organization has now achieved a ‘reasonable’ model for world climate and this leads to some very worrying predictions when data are fed in on the present output of CO2 into the atmosphere. As I understood him, and I should add that he is no over-zealous enthusiast of the doom-watch school but fully aware of all the limits to modelling, the dangers of premature judgements etc, there is a real likelihood that by the year 2100 the polar ice-caps will disappear if the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere continued at its present rate.”
TNA CAB 164/1379. Warren to Press, 14 October 1974
Agar 2015
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 327.28ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – in the aftermath of the 1972 Stockholm conference, more work was afoot about climate modelling (the July-August workshop in Wijk had just happened).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4sjlde4fw4624jwbyzd4s75g/bafkreidxoxec3a3okmey6xttj77qy5l27lzjqoxjb7opnwoc7hfjhex76a)
