The Washington Post has an editorial on the challenges of addressing global warming that contains this passage:
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lessen dependence on fossil fuels, there must be a price on carbon. A cap-and-trade system is the easiest way to integrate into an international regime, but its pitfalls are legion. A gas tax would be simpler and less subject to bureaucratic manipulation and undermining by lobbying interests. It would be the easiest way to change behavior, meet emissions targets and spark the innovation that will produce the next generation of energy production that will save the planet.
Argh.
The first two sentences are inarguably true. The third is arguably true. But the fourth is just false. Straightforwardly incorrect. In error. Is this the state of understanding in the upper echelons of U.S. media? If so we are truly screwed. (Just about everything I say below applies equally well to this piece from Michael Kinsley.)
First: The editors seem to be getting them mixed up (that’s the charitable interpretation, anyway), but a gas tax is not a carbon tax. The former is a subset of the latter. A carbon tax would effect most of the economy, but gas tax would only affect transportation, which amounts to about a third of our emissions, and leave the other two thirds untouched.
Second, in what political world is a gas tax "easy"? Were the WaPo editors around this summer during the drill-now debate? Generally American drivers prefer for gas prices to go down, not up.
Third, fuel costs are a relatively small fraction of total costs for car owners. So why would raising fuel taxes be the “easiest” way to change drivers’ behavior? Why not incentives that address vehicle choices, like feebates? Or incentives that more directly address driving choices, like pay-as-you-drive auto insurance? Or measures that directly take the most polluting vehicles off the road, like junker credits? Or investments that create alternatives, like public transit?
Fourth, why would a gas tax be the easiest way to “spark innovation”? Certainly it wouldn’t have much effect on "energy production," as the editorial asserts. (How would a gas tax affect that in any way?). But just in terms of auto production, why would a gas tax be the best spur to innovation? The government could fund R&D directly. It could mandate higher fuel efficiency. It could pledge to purchase only electric vehicles. It could approve California’s tailpipe emission standards waiver. Any of these would be more of a direct spur to the industry than a slightly higher gas tax.
The WaPo editors—and they are not alone—are lazily echoing conventional wisdom, and for some reason the Very Serious CW is congealing around a gas tax hike. But a modicum of thought reveals hiking the gas tax to be far down the list of efficacious ways of accomplishing our GHG goals. Perhaps it’s worth doing, but it would behoove the mavens of mainstream media to at least give the subject more than a few seconds consideration.
On ‘climategate’
New nukes? A fair shot, not a free ride
Comments
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biodiversivist Posted 3:03 am
16 Dec 2008
Nice post.
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JMG Posted 4:41 am
16 Dec 2008
So gas taxes are just about the worst subset of carbon taxes there are, because they provide so little in the way of the funds needed to get out of the auto trap.
The nice thing about taxing oil at the wellhead/import pier is that it avoids these problems while having the same result as a gas tax (higher pricing for gas use).
The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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JMG Posted 4:46 am
16 Dec 2008
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The 5% Project
Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.
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Charles Komanoff Posted 5:33 am
16 Dec 2008
One point at a time:
The Post editorial didn't say a gas/carbon tax would be easy to pass, rather, that once passed it would be "the easiest way to change behavior" that leads to emitting carbon. Not the only way, and not a sufficient way by itself, but the easiest (as in: quickest, biggest, least expensive) way. Every economist attests to this -- not just ivory-tower guys but applied guys like yours truly who have a lifetime of scars from banging against institutional barriers that weaken but don't come close to obliterating price signals. You know this, so please stop denying it.
Please also ease up on using cars as a proxy for fossil-fuel burning. Passenger vehicles account for just 21-22% of U.S. carbon emissions. But I'm still happy to go toe-to-toe w/ you on that 21-22%. Feebates, pay-as-you-drive insurance, transit, and road pricing (which you neglected to mention) are all terrific transportation policy tools (most of my work these days is on the latter two), but my and just about everyone else's modeling shows that even combined they won't cut passenger cars' CO2 emissions nearly as much as a stiff gasoline tax.
In the one instance where the WaPo editorial was off the mark ("A cap-and-trade system is the easiest way to integrate into an international regime") you go along. How, pray tell, would a U.S. cap-and-trade regime become a model for China, India, Europe (or vice-versa)? If our cap were mandated to decline by, say, 2% a year, why should any other country feel obliged to follow suit? In contrast, a U.S. CO2 tax of, say, $50 per ton would have fungibility with a tax in any other country. (Tufts Univ. econ prof Gilbert Metcalf made this point nicely in the Carbon Tax Center's Capitol Hill briefing last week.)
Dave, I don't get why you are digging in your heels for cap-and-trade just when everyone from Big Green to Big Oil can be heard questioning its inevitability and giving carbon taxes a second look.
We should talk. How about swinging by the USA's lowest carbon-footprint city (my NYC) sometime? I'll loan you my spare bicycle and we can play in traffic and hash this out -- soon.
Charles
http://www.komanoff.net
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kjellanderson Posted 6:30 am
16 Dec 2008
Gas tax is regressive. It affects those at the bottom significantly more than those in the middle or at the top.
Gas tax is unpopular. Anyone who paints environmentalists as wanting to implement a gas tax as a primary tool knows that it would be an extremly bad PR move for the green movement.
Alternatives: end subisidies for oil companies. cap and trade.
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David Roberts Posted 6:41 am
16 Dec 2008
It is odd that you give the WaPo a free pass on confusing a gas tax with a carbon tax -- an error that seems to me to reveal some pretty deep confusion -- and then accuse me of "using cars as a proxy for fossil-fuel burning." That is backwards. The obsession of the Very Serious pundit class with gas taxes tells me that they, not me, are using cars as a proxy for GHG emissions. That is part of the problem! That is why the WaPo editors can make such a glaring error -- they think of "gas tax" and "energy tax" as the same thing. And thus they attribute fantastical powers to the gas tax -- I can't see how anyone thinks a gas tax is the "easiest way" to reduce GHG emissions, however you define easy.
My worry is that a gas tax requires enormous political capital -- I sometimes suspect it would require more political capital than a broader carbon tax, though I realize that's tendentious -- for modest pay-off. I don't want it to become the pundit class's lazy proxy for "serious climate policy," and that's what seems to be happening. I want to throw a wrench in that process. It's one thing to think higher gas taxes are, on balance, a good thing, and another to consider them the sine qua non of good climate policy, as WaPo (and Kinsley) seems to do.
Another process I see is the notion that cap-and-trade is hopelessly and intrinsically flawed, and that carbon taxes are Wonder Policies that can't be fucked up and can't help but solve all our problems, rapidly becoming orthodoxy on the left, ahead -- it seems to me -- of sufficient arguments and evidence. So I'm tossing out challenges and arguments in the hopes that someone will come along and convince me. But I must say, a lot of what I'm hearing back has the tenor of a religious sect responding to an attack from another religious sect. You'll understand that when people tell me to shut up because "everybody knows" something that a lot of people I trust seem manifestly not to know, I get suspicious.
I don't have settled views on the C&T vs. tax debate -- distressingly far from it -- and I'm not sure, if permits are fully auctioned like all clueful people want, that there's really that huge of a difference. But I don't see any harm in tossing out arguments for people to push back on -- helps clarify things for people who are trying to make considered judgments.
One final note in this rambling comment: I see climate policy as having three legs -- carbon pricing, public investment, and regulation (slash regulatory reform) -- and despite what Gar seems to think I believe them all equally important. Another gathering orthodoxy that concerns me is the Brookings vintage notion that pricing is the only legitimate or cost-effective or viable policy. Again, people (not you, but some new entrants into these debates) talk about a carbon tax like it will disperse throughout the economy and automagically steer the ship in the right direction. I wish more people were making the important point that pricing of whatever variety is insufficient.
And yeah, I'd love to chat next time I'm in NYC. I'm much less of an ass with a few beers in me. (Or if you'll be in DC for the inauguration, I'll be there too.)
grist.org
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:55 am
16 Dec 2008
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Pangolin Posted 12:25 pm
16 Dec 2008
Put the Carbon Back
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day040209 Posted 12:29 am
05 Feb 2009
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25 Feb 2009
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27 Feb 2009
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