SUBTLE SHIFTS

RECENT MONTHS HAVE SEEN SOMETHING OF A TURNAROUND in the conventional wisdom about how to address climate change. In December, on the weekend before the Swedish Academy presented the Nobel Prize to my uncle, the economist William Nordhaus, for his work on climate change and carbon taxes, France’s yellow vest movement flooded into the streets, shutting down Paris and other cities across the country and forcing President Emmanuel Macron to rescind the carbon tax he had recently imposed on transportation fuels.

A month earlier, voters in Washington state, as environmentally minded a place as you will find in the United States, soundly rejected a ballot initiative that would have established a carbon tax in that state. Meanwhile, residents of New York’s 14th District elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, promised to return the Democratic Party to its working-class roots with a Green New Deal that would combine massive public subsidies for clean energy with universal health care and a government jobs guarantee. She explicitly contrasted her proposal with market-based efforts to price carbon, which she dismissed as a sellout