Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


GREEN ENERGY….Riffing off a piece by Dave Roberts about gasoline taxes (politically hard and not very effective, he says), Ezra Klein muses about carbon pricing:

There’s no doubt that market signals are powerful. But I think there’s fair concern over whether they’re enough. The next issue of The American Prospect will feature a Nordhaus and Shellenberger piece arguing that liberals have locked themselves into a peculiarly conservative frame in which they presume that the swift deployment of market forces can provide a proportional response to the dangers of carbon emissions, when in fact this is the sort of national threat that calls for a heavier dose of central planning and coordinated efforts.

….I’m not sure where I fall on all this, and it’s not clear that investment is in tension with pricing, but as someone versed in the history of health reform, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which the environmental movement launches a massive campaign for a gas tax or carbon pricing that ends in total failure, and five years later everyone wishes they had seized the moment to fight for huge investment expenditures instead. What Roberts is arguing, in effect, is that the harder thing might well not be better here, and if he’s right, that’s an important and unintuitive point.

I just wrote a long piece about carbon pricing which will probably appear in the magazine in a few months (lead times are tough in this business), and my frame was “Ten Things You Need to Know about Cap-and-Trade.” One of those ten things was “It’s not a panacea,” and I think that’s the right way to think about this. A broad-based carbon pricing regime is almost certainly one of the backbones of an effective energy policy, something that encourages conservation, motivates utilities to switch to green energy sources, and provides a revenue stream for research and investment. That’s why it’s worth writing about. But just like a human backbone, it’s nowhere near enough all by itself. If you want cars to get higher mileage, you can do it a lot more efficiently by increasing CAFE standards. If you want better mass transit, you need direct government action to fund and operate it. If you think carbon eating trees are feasible, then you need a federal R&D program to investigate it, since private industry has no incentive to care about such things.

Still, all that said, price signals work. They aren’t the whole answer by a long way, but they work. Raise the price of carbon steadily over the years and it will amplify every other program you put in place. Solar and wind will become more competitive, everyone will be motivated to drive cleaner cars and drive them less, utilities will be motivated to really find out if carbon sequestration is possible, and private industry will have increased incentives to turn basic R&D (from the feds) into actual green energy sources for the real world.

As Dave says, “We need to start thinking at the scale of the problem.” It’s beyond enormous. We need all this stuff, and the sooner the better.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate