Articles by Alan Durning

My worries about PHVs have mostly abated

In my post last fall on Rob Lowe’s plug-in hybrid, I argued that in the absence of a cap on greenhouse gas emissions, switching to plug-in hybrids might actually be […]

How to actually deliver green-collar jobs to those who need them

Over the next few decades, converting the Pacific Northwest to a place of compact, walkable communities that run on superefficient, renewable energy system — a climate-safe economy — will be […]

Five ways BC’s carbon tax shift can strengthen Cap and Trade

The Vancouver Sun gives some ink to a cluster of issues that I've been pondering of late: how BC's carbon tax shift fits with Cap and Trade. I'm famously infatuated with carbon tax shifting. I'm also a zealot for auctioned Cap and Trade.

The good news is that with careful policy design, Cap and Tax can be better than either Cap or Tax. The Tax toughens the Cap, the way steel rebar strengthens concrete. The bad news is that without careful design, the two could weaken each other.

The challenge for policy makers is gaming -- firms' aptitude for subverting market rules established with good intentions. Remember how Enron and its ilk manipulated the California electricity market in 2001? The interaction of a carbon tax in British Columbia with a regionwide carbon Cap-and-Trade system in the West could open channels for such profiteering. In the worst case, gaming could both undermine and discredit the policies, risking their political survival. Fortunately, such gaming is preventable, as I'll explain in a moment.

First, though, the upsides:

The only obstacle to more state carbon taxes is politics

One of Washington State's conservative think tanks has just proposed a carbon tax shift. Interesting. (Read it here.)

The Washington Policy Center has garbed its tax shift proposal in anti-government clothing. Some of the rhetoric makes my skin crawl.

But the proposal itself is sensible if modest. It includes a starter carbon tax that pays for a small sales tax reduction. As a bonus, it throws in a business and occupations tax reduction on all capital investment. It's not goofy. It's the kind of thing I was hoping we might get about a decade ago, when energy and climate issues weren't front-page news.

Today, I hope we can do better: a comprehensive, auctioned, regional cap-and-trade system with built-in buffers for working families.

I'm guessing that the political chances of WPC's proposal are somewhat slimmer than the odds for my preferred climate pricing policy. So rather than engage in a fight over the rhetoric, I'll use it as a springboard to answering four questions that I've had from readers and from people at my speeches on climate policy.