But if elasticity is low then it is unlikely that it will be enough. You are not saying this makes a carbon tax more important than public investment or regulation, are you? It actually seems to support my point, that a carbon price is reinforcement for public investment and regulation.
My point is not that carbon taxes do nothing, but that public investment and regulation are at least as important (in my opinion more important). If public discourse by those who claim expertise concentrate on pushing carbon pricing and ignore public investment and regulation then that becomes the "common sense" athat popular movements pick up. Though, I will note that absence of "demands" does not prevent the occupy movement from developing a common sense on this issue in signs and banners and speeches and even sometimes briefly in working group that pushes a bit in this direction - toward diverting military spending and increased taxation of the rich into green public goods among other issues. (And of course, quite rightly the occupy movement is also putting more immediate effort into opposing the XL pipeline and tar sands and such, but what I refer to as public investment is kind in the air). I
Back to your point. Fossil fuels have had generations of subsidies.
Even in terms of future competiveness, it would take a heck of a
carbon tax just to zero those out. For example , subsidies to autos
are essentially fossil fuel subsidies, because autos that run on
anything but fossil fuels are currently trivial exceptions. Right now
parking subsidies in the U.S. are about $4,000 per automobile per
year. I think to translate this into a carbon tax would be around,
head to fuzzy to do the math, but around $80 or more a ton. And that
is just one of the subsidies to automobiles, and does not include any
of the direct subsidies to fossil fuels. And even if you zeroed out
all subsidies of this kind, new industries would have to compete with
industries that had had infrastructgure shaped this way for more than
75 years. The key is phasing out fossil fuels is to put in place
clean public goods to replace dirty public and private goods. Again,
I'm not disputing that a carbon price is needed reinforcement. But
that is the role for it - reinforcement.
>
> Of course, returns to scale and other such benefits these industries
> have accrued as the dominant forces in the energy sector still make
> them much lower cost industries then "clean" alternatives, but a
> carbon tax would be a disincentive to emission increases and be an
> incentive to emission reduction. it is no alternative to public
> expenditure and investment in clean technology but it is a powerful
> weapon to encourage international industries reliant on U.S markets to
> lower emissions and to prevent a Gresham's dynamic from worsening
> emissions. I think it is prerequisite successfully averting the worst
> case scenarios of climate change. It is much easier to find out how
> much carbon taxes a given company is paying then how well they are
> being regulated making it a better tool for political action.
>
> p.s one interesting policy I've heard tossed around is passing an
> executive order for federal buildings to switch over to purchasing
> alternative energy sources. some who work in the industry that that
> would be all that was needed to create the returns to scale to make
> some of these technologies competitive.
>
> --
> -Nathan Tankus
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
-- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Grist Blog: http://www.grist.org/member/1598 Static page: http://www.nohairshirts.com