[lbo-talk] Patrick Bond on climate change strategy

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Tue Apr 24 12:24:38 PDT 2007


On 4/24/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Of course, that's the point of raising hydrocarbon costs. But that's
> what first concerned me about your desire to soak the heavy
> industrial users - the benefits of their work may not be immediately
> apparent. You'd have to do some pretty complex input-output analysis
> to figure out economic contributions, which would make simple energy
> intensity the determinant of the tax rate a very misleading metric.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

That is why I think the simple solution is best: a straight emissions tax refunded in the form of checks to the population. Consumption taxes ultimately do get passed on to consumers, so writing them checks for the total is certainly fair enough. It pretty much eliminates the regressiveness. And it provides incentives throughout the economy to either stop using hydrocarbons or use them more efficienctly.

Of course this is not the whole answer. Energy demand does not have a good elasticity in response to price increases. So you need to supplement this with efficiency regulations where efficiency can easily be measured - which is in a huge portion of the economy. You also need massive public initiatives - creation and maintenance of trains, subsidy of electric cars, building an advanced fault tolerant long distance electric grid with plenty of storage, so you can make use of dispersed variable energy sources.



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