The margin was narrow -- 4 percentage points. And 5 percent of those polled didn't choose sides. But a CBS News/NY Times poll released Sunday just might signal the moment when Americans began to grasp the intertwined realities of climate, energy and national security.
The poll [PDF] found that 49 percent of Americans think suspending the gasoline tax this summer is a bad idea, while 45 percent approve of the plan (see Question 49).
If memory serves, this is the first time in at least a generation that the American public expressed a willingness to be taxed more rather than less for energy.
This isn't just economists talking, like the 150 dismal scientists who over the weekend issued a statement calling suspension of the federal tax on gasoline this summer "a bad idea" because, among other reasons, it "would generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers [and] would encourage people to keep buying costly imported oil and do nothing to encourage conservation." No, this is good old, hard-pressed, subprime-scared Americans.
A week ago, when I posted to Grist about Obama, McCain, Clinton and the gas-tax holiday, I didn't imagine that a plurality of my fellow citizens might be ready to embrace my conclusion: that this century's defining energy policy issue is energy prices that tell the truth.
OK, it's just one poll, and a carbon tax isn't necessarily around the next corner. But for someone who has toiled for decades for measures to internalize the external costs of everything from nukes and jet skis to driving and carbon, this poll is sweet indeed.
And this too: that more Americans than not want to hold on to the gas tax in the face of $4 pump prices is due in no small measure to Barack Obama's hammering against the tax holiday. We'll be in a better position to see on Wednesday morning, but it could be that Sen. Obama's appeal to principle and the greater good is standing him in good stead with voters in North Carolina and Indiana.
If that proves true, then it might not be beyond possibility that the campaign's final six months could see serious discussion of a revenue-neutral carbon tax as a climate solution.
Copenhagen talks ready for take off: 5, 4, 3…
Obama administration may (finally) offer greenhouse-gas targets
Comments
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JChan111 Posted 3:27 pm
04 May 2008
-JChan
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Ron Steenblik Posted 4:42 pm
04 May 2008
Even with those revenues (and others, coming from truck-related taxes on truck tires, sales of trucks and trailers, and heavy vehicle use), every several years the U.S. Congress has to find additional money to finance the building of new roads, and to repair infrastructure, like bridges.
So giving a tax holiday would be tantamount to robbing Peter (general taxpayers) to pay Paul (disproportionally, people who drive gas guzzlers, or commute from distant suburbs, often both).
These are only my personal opinions.
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Pangolin Posted 7:45 pm
04 May 2008
That said I must say I'm shocked that 'mericans didn't vote for the offer of a big rock candy mountain just one more time. Maybe we can actually learn that "you pay now or you pay more later" lesson.
Put the Carbon Back
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:19 pm
04 May 2008
He wants to remove the income tax for people with lower income. To target those hurt most by rising prices in all aspects. Gas, Food, Healthcare, etc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/us/politics/04economy.h ...
Hrmm I wonder where he could have gotten that idea...
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/7/16/10514/2839
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cgurkin Posted 12:50 am
05 May 2008
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gzuckier Posted 1:01 am
05 May 2008
Even China with their coal plant a week habit is on the path to a low-carbon economy; their latest five-year plan calls for a 20% improvement in energy efficiency by 2010.
I remember a time when the US was a world leader. So long ago. The US used to lead the world in solar cell production; now our production is actually dropping; not just as a percentage of world output, but total production. And Congress, in its wisdom, decides this is the time to allow the solar and wind power investment tax credits to expire. Not the oil and gas tax credits, though, they're renewed.
Makes perfect economic sense; throw away our lead in a rapidly increasing globally hot technology in order to focus our investment in a rapidly declining technology centered on a raw material of which we do not own enough to even cover our own needs.
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GonzoDon Posted 3:46 am
05 May 2008
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racje Posted 5:07 am
05 May 2008
If the market price doesn't reflect the environmental and social cost, people have to use a lot of mental energy to search out the true costs, and then exercise self discipline to act contrary to the best deal indicated by the prices they face.
Also, when market prices do not align with true costs, the social and environmental costs are getting dumped on someone "external" to the market--future generations, global environment, neighbors downstream or downwind of the coal plant, ecosystems that don't participate in the markets.
Bringing all those external cost-absorbers into the market requires either a very active legal system where they can sue whoever's damaged them, or government regulatory action to make the prices tell the whole truth.
Such as, the carbon tax. Also, a biodiversity tax, an environmental hormone disruptor tax, a noise tax, an ugliness tax on trash and billboards, and so many other adjustments to compensate for the ways in which some industries and consumers wreck others' surroundings.
Well, if we want to make the market work right, we have to make it tell the truth. It's heartening to know that American consumers may be catching on.
I don't think we Americans are stupid. But we have been appallingly misinformed and manipulated. Our wants have been pumped up beyond our needs through an endless drumbeat of advertising, and we have been trained to be afraid and to seek emotional security through consumption. Appropriate pricing may shift our consumption in appropriate directions, but it will not help us to recognize when we have enough. That requires a cultural shift, one that will bring us to identify ourselves as community members more than as consumers.
--
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
--Ursula LeGuin
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Russ Posted 5:54 am
05 May 2008
The willing participants in any transaction pay the FULL costs of that transaction.
ALL externalities be FULLY compensated.
Anything beyond this is simple turpitude, simple infamy.
That this would perhaps render impossible the size and complexity and efficiency and "growth" of the monster is just proof of how it is and can be built only on violence and lies, and how anyone who supports it is a villain.
I am often discouraged how many who claim to care about social and environmental causes neglect this simple philosophical basis, in favor of instrumentalism. But it seems to me if you don't have a solid core, you can't construct an earth around it.
A terminological point, I can't believe how many progressives and environmentalists blithely use such terms as "free" market, "free" trade, "free"way, thereby conceding this critcal propaganda battlefield to the enemy. I see examples every day.
Yes, the Right very much wants people to think everything is flowing logically, freely, morally. That's why they invented this bogus vocabulary.
Why not insist at every point that there is no "free" market, never has been, never will be. If Thatcher and her ilk can say "There's no such thing as society", why not retort with the truth, "There's no such thing as the market".
Although it's hard to find evidence, I'd like to believe that deep down people aren't all bad, just misguided. Well, a good place to start would be to attack this myth of market "freedom", since there's no such thing.
Except of course for free riding.
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kirasaffron Posted 5:59 am
05 May 2008
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