claxton6’s Recent Comments

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  wow

  I really like this idea. Which three cities?On Grist pulls a Huck Finn posted 2 years ago 1 Response

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  all well & good

  But ... I think I'm missing the part where some of this winds up in the hands of the local governments that build bikeways. I guess you could say that freeing up money from road work can go toward it, but if the money for that roadwork comes from gas taxes, that may not happen.On Bikeways pay for themselves posted 2 years ago 3 Responses

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  I am not an economist

  but ...

  Tyler Cowen says that carbon taxes may have counterintuitive results, but the paper to which he refers, and his description of it, are so thick with economist jargon that I have only the faintest clue what the point is. Maybe an economist in our audience can translate?

  Just from reading Cowen's summary, I think the paper is looking at some of the odder effects of the US (or any country, I guess) taxing carbon outside of an international system. First, such a tax would lower the price that fossil fuel producers sell at, which would allow other, non-taxing countries to buy more.

  Second, is the "intertemporal Hotelling resource extraction problem"--Hotelling is how economists look at use of a limited resource over time. It looks like one result of a carbon tax would be that there's potentially more pressure to get fossil fuels out of the ground now than there would otherwise be, particularly if everyone knows that the tax is going to increase over time.

  His note at the end suggests that the paper doesn't get into the scale of these effects in relation to the tax's overall effect on consumption, which means that they could be major problems or minor problems. Cowen leans toward minor.

  To me, at the (low) level of sophistication that I understand this stuff at, the take-home is to reinforce the importance of pursuing multiple strategies. There's no magic policy.On Brain food for your day of rest posted 2 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

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  communities

  Both voluntary action and policy changes were crucial to winning the war.

  I generally side with what you're saying--I think small things snowball. But there's still an immense gap to cross, and it's unclear how to do it, and I think we're not even totally comfortable with the language about how to talk about what we need to do.

  I've been pushing "Habits of the Heart" everywhere I can recently, and I think it's particularly useful here. The problem with voluntary action isn't that it isn't useful, it's that we mostly think of it as individual action, and that's where it's limiting. Comparing now with World War II's voluntarism is illuminating, I think. I imagine the World War II effort as being much more broadly supported by the national community than global warming action currently is (except in pockets), not least because it had the support of government propagandists (possibly, probably, enabled by national support for the war effort).

  I look around today, and I see lots of efforts to cohere a movement, but nothing gaining traction like it needs to. We need to make the jump to both broad policies and community standards.On Social scientists respond to Mike Tidwell posted 2 years, 1 month ago 39 Responses

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  voters and not-yet-voters

  The Prius; a product spawned by the market to meet the demands of consumers, saving more gas than all the government bungling combined. Corn ethanol, spawned by government, killing CAFÉ standards and increasing fuel use by a billion gallons annually.

  Heh. I don't think you can harp on the gov't for killing CAFE, without acknowledging that the gov't, you know, created CAFE. So, the fuel saved by that initial gov't bungling probably is more than that saved by Priuses. Also, before I chalk the Prius up to market, I'd want to know more about its genesis in Japan, with respect to the Japanese market, regulation, and gas taxes.  

  That said, I agree that in, at least in matters of urban form, the first step is to get the gov't (here, local gov't) out the way. Sadly, the local gov't is almost never going to do that*, so you need some higher level of government to encourage or force them to. (An example would be, I think, the Portland metro transit area, where to receive a transit stop, the local gov't has to agree to zone to allow density.)

  * Partly because: say you're a local official, in a ward system. The people with an interest in the status quo are your constituents. The people who an interest in change are not, because generally they're not living in your ward yet--the whole point is they want to get in.On Walkable town centers are hip posted 2 years, 3 months ago 45 Responses