Not if it’s a mature forest (that is, one where the total biomass has reached its equilibrium level and is no longer changing). Think of it this way: If it were taking carbon out of the atmosphere, where is that carbon going? If the forest is not yet mature and is still growing, then atmospheric carbon is getting turned into more tree, but when the amount of tree is constant, no more carbon is taken out of the atmosphere. Trees merely existing doesn’t remove carbon; what removes carbon is trees growing. And if you want more tree growth to occur, then you have to take out the already full-grown trees and stash them somewhere to make room for more trees to grow.
The biggest problem with cap and trade is that in most places where it’s been implemented it only covers industrial emissions. Which is good politics. When we think of pollution we think of industry. But something like half of the CO2 emissions comes from agriculture and individual consumption. Plus, cap and trade is easy to game, easy to carve out exceptions. Our own cap and trade bill is filled with loopholes for coal companies and coal utilities.
A carbon tax would affect EVERYONE who emits, whether the consumer, industry, or farmer. Politically, it’s untenable because you can’t tax consumers and get away with it. Which is why governments are unequal to the task of mitigating global warming.
Of course, some Republicans do have the idea of a carbon tax REPLACING the payroll tax. Al Gore supports that idea too. A revenue neutral carbon tax would be politically viable, but why would politicians support that? No opportunity for graft or centralized control. cap and trade is a bonanza for politicians who want to hand out favors in exchange for campaign cash.
Again, a big problem with a carbon tax is that, in order for it to reduce carbon emissions over time, you’ve got to increase the tax on a regular basis. And there’s really no way you can build in a schedule in advance: if we want to reduce carbon output 80% by 2040, who the hell knows what the carbon tax would need to be in 2040 in order to do that? We’d have a pretty good idea by 2037, and a vague idea in 2032, but no clue in 2010.
Raising taxes is politically very difficult. A system that will require Congress to pass several separate hikes to the same tax over the next four decades to accomplish its purpose seems totally untenable.
But the virtue of a carbon tax over cap and trade is that you’d get an immediate short term reduction, whereas cap and trade phases things in very slowly. I believe most economists will say that the carbon tax is more efficient as well.
I’m not sure cap and trade is workable. It requires more enforcement than a carbon tax and again, there are more political favors to hand out, and they have already been handed out, especially to coal states. Instead of auctioning the permits, they are giving the bulk of them away.
To be honest, I don’t think the governments of the world are capable of handling this problem. Either we’re saved by technology, or we aren’t. No way in a million years government edicts reduce emissions by 80% by 2050.
Depends on the immediate level of the tax. If an actual carbon tax passed Congress, you think it would be substantial right away? I don’t believe it.
What you said about the economists: the ideal cap and trade bill is more efficient than the one that passed Congress. The same thing would have been true of a carbon tax.
Yeah, the bill that passed the House really sucked in comparison with what I’d have liked. But it’s still better than nothing.
As far as workability is concerned, I don’t see the difference between the workability of applying a tax to X, and requiring a certain number of permits for X.
There’s no impetus to come up with technological solutions unless they result in cost savings. If it doesn’t cost any more to dump carbon in the air than to not do so, there’s no incentive to do things in a less carbon-intensive way, so no incentive to develop products and technologies that would enable that. Why would you develop products that nobody had a reason, beyond total altruism, to buy?
Only government edicts can create the incentives. With sufficient incentives, we should be able to save ourselves. Hell, we could make a pretty big dent in the problem with off-the-shelf technology right now; I don’t think either particularly exotic solutions or particularly significant sacrifices in lifestyle will be necessary. What’s needed is incentives to do what we’re already capable of doing, but don’t currently have sufficient economic reason to do.
Absent those incentives - absent government edicts - there will never be sufficient economic reason.
I should say, by the way, that although I think that cap-and-trade is better than a carbon tax, I think that either is vastly preferable to just doing nothing. A carbon tax would, I contend, work less efficiently than cap-and-trade, but better something that works inefficiently than something that doesn’t work at all.
Depends on the immediate level of the tax. If an actual carbon tax passed Congress, you think it would be substantial right away? I don’t believe it.
If it’s revenue neutral, in other words other taxes go down, I don’t see why it couldn’t be pretty steep.
As far as workability is concerned, I don’t see the difference between the workability of applying a tax to X, and requiring a certain number of permits for X.
The problem with a permit system is that practically, they’ll only be able to go after big industries. France has had some success with this, but are now realizing that it won’t get them near their goal so they have to find a way to reduce consumer emissions.
The virtue of a carbon tax is that it not only hits producers, it hits end users. If you hit producers and shield end users from the cost of emissions, which is what the cap and trade bill attempts to do, then you probably won’t reach the goal. It’s similar to the Drug War. If the demand still exists, someone will supply it illegally. The only way to reduce demand is to increase prices at the consumer level. Carbon taxes are the best way to do that.
There’s no impetus to come up with technological solutions unless they result in cost savings.
I agree completely. I just don’t think that government edicts can get an 80% reduction. We need a technological save to make this happen, and only the market can provide that. We are either saved by the market or we die by the market.
Thus the carbon tax is superior, because it not only gives the producer the proper incentive, but also the consumer.
The cap and trade bill seeks to shield consumers from the costs of the bill. But you can produce all the electric cars you want, to cite one example, consumers will never buy them if gas is under $3/gallon. Consumer resistance has historically been very tough to overcome when it comes to cars.
That might be a valid criticism of the specific cap-and-trade bill working its way through Congress, but it’s not really relevant to a comparison between a carbon tax and cap-and-trade. Politically, any carbon tax that had a chance of getting passed would probably also have to shield consumers from the costs, too. You can compare an “ideal” cap-and-trade plan to an “ideal” carbon tax plan, or you can compare a politically-feasible cap-and-trade plan to a politically-feasible carbon tax plan, but it’s a bit disingenuous to compare the politically-feasible version of cap-and-trade to the ideal version of a carbon tax.
Two points about having to shield consumers from costs of emissions reduction:
If it’s revenue neutral, you can probably talk the people into accepting it. They pay less payroll tax, they pay more carbon tax. And unlike the payroll tax, which you can only reduce by making less money, you can reduce your carbon taxes. One thing I don’t get is why politicians and pundits think that public opinion is fixed, that it’s not worth appealing to the voters. If it’s unpopular, Congress tries to rush it through when no one is paying attention, if it’s popular they make a big deal about it. I remember a time when politicians used to get a national debate started BEFORE starting the legislative process. Now they just start the legislative process and try to handle the outcry as it comes.
Assuming you can’t ever get consumers to accept higher energy costs, then it proves that governments cannot solve the global warming problem.
The crux of the political dilemma is not how to approach carbon reduction. It is how to garner broad enough support to pass anything at all of substance.
How have we done so far acting for the greater good of the world and its future population? Well, we’ve done a reasonable job cleaning up pollution in our own backyard affecting ourselves, but…
I haven’t seen us here in the US be particularly concerned about the rest of the world or future generations. I have not seen us, for instance, pay much more than passing attention to pollution elsewhere or to the costs of items that pay for our comfort being passed to future generations.
I do not see the US unilaterally passing legislation which puts a unilateral cost on our economy, goods or services if the benefit of that is not concrete, current and local. And all politics are local: local geographically and local in time. These are wonderful and interesting coffee-cooler conversations but they will not translate to meaningful intervention, although cap and trade has the potential to create some interesting markets…
We will not act unilaterally, and I suspect our enthusiasm to act in concert with the rest of the world will parallel our enthusiasm for Kyoto.
We will act substantively only when every one else acts (and even that’s a maybe). And if you think elaborating specific, enactable policy here in the US is “wicked complicated” (borrowing Kimstu’s term), wait until every nation gets a voice in what we should do. Lotta talk. Lotta Expression of Very Very Serious Concern. Back on our jets to get back home. And like, Kyoto, anything that does get signed is not likely to be executed.
This was the topic of a rather heated post-Thanksgiving discussion for my clan…
It is my contention that, if AGW is a serious problem and the AGW construct is correct, inefficient/partial-mitigation solutions are a barrier to an ultimately successful intervention. First, they give an appearance that something has been done. We’re on it. But that appearance distracts from something substantive being done, and simply wastes time when time is of the essence. Second, when the “something” fails, there’s no political capital left to try the next thing–particularly if the first something was rolled out to fanfare, cost political capital, and was passed using reassurances that the promoters of the solution understood the problem and understood how to correct it.
I’m not saying that only a grand pie-in-the-sky, un-passable, magic bullet should be attempted, and that we must ignore the good until we find the perfect, but I do think any significant legislation (significant in terms of complexity and cost) had better have a palpable and measurable effect the first time around.
If it costs us a boatload of money and political capital to shoot ping pong balls at a speeding locomotive, no one is going to want to try again to stop the train, even if it can be argued that the ping pong balls mitigated the train’s acceleration. The discussion and effort will shift to accepting that the train is out of control and mitigating the consequences but not the train itself. This is especially true if the train will be causing most of its damage somewhere else and at some future time.
Neither our national attention span nor our patience are likely to allow for more than one costly shot at a solution, IMO.
One advantage of cap and trade is that it is countercyclical: during a recession the price of credits will automatically fall with demand thereby reducing the burden. During a boom the opposite will happen. This is exactly what you want in terms of smoothing the business cycle. Kevin Drum has a nice postabout this and also a link to a longer article on the topic.
BTW it’s not really correct to say that a cap-and-trade system creates a market distortion. The status quo is a distortion because the externality of greenhouse emissions isn’t being correctly priced. Cap-and-trade as well as a carbon tax merely corrects this distortion pushing the market closer to the optimum. Of course in practice these policies won’t be perfect but they are a hell of a lot better than the status quo.
On the politics of cap and trade, this pagehas the results of numerous polls on global warming. I won’t go through the individual numbers but I think it’s fair to say that they indicate reasonable public support for policies to combat global warming including cap and trade. Passing cap and trade will be difficult but it is within the bounds of the possible contrary to what some MSM pundits say.
Everybody wants/needs food, water, heat and a few toys. You get 6G consumers going on a 2G infrastructure and you find out the the planet can no longer support the rich.
*** WAG ***
(too lazy to do the math)
Global warming is inevitable. It should be clear by now that (whatever the human contribution to our present condition proves to be) any responsible govt would start moving inland and welcome a refreshment of our shores.
On the politics of cap and trade, this page has the results of numerous polls on global warming. I won’t go through the individual numbers but I think it’s fair to say that they indicate reasonable public support for policies to combat global warming including cap and trade. Passing cap and trade will be difficult but it is within the bounds of the possible contrary to what some MSM pundits say.
The public supports “doing something” about global warming, but only if it doesn’t impact prices. Once the cap and trade bill starts getting seriously debated in the Senate and they start doing polling, I expect you’ll see support fall to about 40%. perhaps even as low as 25%.
The public supports health care reform too, but once you attach a price tag, that focuses some minds a little better.
I agree. But that’s not the subject of this thread. I started it in order to lift the specific question of carbon tax v. cap-and-trade out of the larger discussion and hash it out separately.
We’ve had plenty of broader AGW threads, and we’re sure to have plenty more. Hell, you could start one yourself.
Because the industries most negatively affected by an immediate, steep tax (e.g. coal) would raise holy hell. And I can see their point: it would be a wrenching, overnight change to their cost of doing business. Sure, they knew it was coming, but all at once?
No way that would have a prayer in Congress.
How’s that? If you can’t make someone buy a permit, then how will you make them pay a tax?
This doesn’t even make sense. If the cost of electricity from a coal-fired plant goes up 25%, whether because of a tax or because of the cost of permits, then they’re not going to absorb that cost themselves. They might absorb some portion of it, but most of it will get passed on to their customers - you and me.
You don’t have a market that rewards the technological fixes, absent the government edicts that apply a cost to failing to implement them.
And until the market rewards those fixes, the market’s going to play no role in bringing them about.
It’s like expecting the market to ensure an optimal set of mods on the Dope, when there’s no indication that the variation in the quality of the mods over time has made the least bit of difference in the Dope’s bottom line.