As is his wont, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman recently chided Bret Stephens, who had been lamenting the intellectual downfall of American conservatism. Krugman agreed with Stephens that today's right-wing personalities are no substitute for the late Bill Buckley, but Krugman argued that there really never was a "golden age" of conservatism. These guys have always been morally bankrupt and low-brow thinkers, in Krugman's book. He went on to list four key policy areas in which conservatives, according to Krugman, have either fumbled the ball or have been awful all along. One area in which Krugman thinks conservatives have regressed is environmental policy. "The use of markets and price incentives to fight pollution," Krugman wrote, "was, initially, aconservative ideacondemned by some on the left. But liberals eventually took it on board--while cap-and-trade became a dirty word on the right."
On his popular blog, economist Tyler Cowen pushed back against Krugman, with the apparent intent of defending conservatives' intellectual honor. But rather than herald the sophistication of conservative critiques against cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, Cowen countered Krugman by dismissing the notion that conservatives oppose those measures. Oddly, Cowen argues that "[c]onservative intellectuals never have turned against the idea of a carbon tax, as evidenced by Greg Mankiw's leadership of the Pigou Club." But here, Cowen is simply mistaken. Plenty of conservative (and libertarian) intellectuals have indeed publicly come out against carbon taxes, and some of these are academics with more training in environmental economics than Greg Mankiw.
