Articles by Adam Stein
Adam Stein lives in Chicago.
All Articles
-
A love of delicious farm votes beef crosses ideological boundaries
In December, ranchers fell into a panic over a nonexistent EPA proposal to tax methane emissions from cows. By February, panic was replaced by giggling: how could they every have worried over something so crazy as a "cow tax"? And now, to demonstrate how badly misplaced their fears were, a Democratic and Republican Senator have joined together to enshrine in law the sacred principle that American cows shall never be taxed. Smell the bipartisanship.
Including cattle in a cap-and-trade system is, of course, a fine idea. From an environmental perspective, cattle are a major source of a wide range of ills: methane emissions, land use changes, nitrous oxide emissions, ammonia emissions, etc. If you tally up the negative impacts of beef on human health and productivity, the societal cost of cows climbs even higher.
From an economic efficiency perspective, it generally doesn't make sense to exclude sectors from a carbon cap. We want emissions reductions to come from the fastest, lowest-cost sources available, and it's hard to imagine anything cheaper or lower-cost than reduced beef consumption. It takes decades to shut down a coal plant. It takes no time at all to not eat a strip steak. Moreover, energy is a primary input to just about every sector of the economy. The same can hardly be said for tender, delicious short ribs.
-
A mileage tax may be the best idea that everyone loves to hate
This sort of flew under the radar, but a few weeks ago a federal commission floated the idea of eventually replacing the gas tax with a tax based on the number of miles driven each year. What happened next was odd: progressives, conservatives, and wonks banded together to proclaim a mileage tax to be a stupid idea.
A mileage tax is not a stupid idea. It may prove to be unworkable for technical, political, or even cultural reasons, but at root a mileage tax is both a very good idea and also possibly a necessary one as we undertake a shift away from the internal combustion engine. It's no surprise to see politicians (like Obama) run screaming from this proposal, but why are the pundits piling on?
Before delving into the specific arguments for and against a mileage tax, it's worth noting that the entire country of Holland is doing exactly what commentators have deemed stupid or impossible: starting in 2011, the Netherlands will phase in a vehicle-tracking scheme that applies dynamic pricing to every mile driven. Pricing will vary by vehicle type, time of day, and location, in order to curb both congestion and carbon emissions. The program is designed to be revenue-neutral, and because the government is simultaneously phasing out a steep motor vehicle tax, the plan should end up reducing the burden on low-income drivers. I mention this not to suggest that the U.S. can or should do exactly as Holland does, but just to point out that the concept isn't quite as crazily unworkable as some seem to think.
-
The NYT asks: are we shaming our politicians about their lifestyles enough?
Eager to find new ways to trivialize the warming of the planet, the New York Times has been reporting on the carbon footprint of individual politicians and legislatures.
They are abetted in this effort by Terra Eco, a French environmental magazine that has calculated British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's footprint to be -- quelle horreur! -- 8,400 tons of CO2 per year. By my calcs, that's about 0.0001 percent of America's carbon footprint, so as soon as Brown buys a bicycle, we should have the climate problem pretty well licked.
In the meantime, I applaud Terra Eco's work on this important issue, and look forward to their upcoming report on the size of Al Gore's swimming pool.
-
$80b per year in carbon revenue to go to clean energy, tax payer rebates
President Obama recently announced a plan to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term, in part by raising revenue through the auctioning of carbon permits under a cap-and-trade system. In one sense, there's no new information here. Obama campaigned heavily on cap-and-trade and he's always favored auctioned permits, so the plan is just a restatement of some prior campaign pledges. Right?
Sort of, but this is still a very big deal. The new budget has at least four big implications.
The first is purely political. By including carbon revenue in his budget projections, Obama is not only presenting cap-and-trade as a fait accompli, he's also casting it as a matter of fiscal responsibility. Deficit reduction is the ultimate bipartisan fetish object, and with this announcement Obama has performed an effective flanking maneuver on opponents who are going to try to worry a climate bill to death over economic concerns. Don't get me wrong: the political battle over cap-and-trade will be bruising. But the rhetorical ground on which it will be fought just tilted more heavily in the favor of environmentalists.
