Environmentalists oppose carbon tax proposition in Washington State

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

I mentioned this in the US politics thread, but it doesn't seem like anyone is really reading that thread. And I think this is separate enough from general US politics that it deserves a thread of it's own. This is probably own of the more detailed articles on the topic.

http://www.vox.com/2016/10/18/13012394/i-732-carbon-tax-washington

Maybe it's just my econ major background, where Pigovian taxes with offsetting subsidies are basically porn, but it all just seems so...stupid. My impression that a lot of the opposition is due more to personal, and coalitional animosity than anything substantive.

But for the substantive concerns, part of it's a perfect is the enemy of the good conundrum, but it still baffles me. Why can't you support something that 'just' reduces CO2 emissions without marrying it to a whole bunch of other, some related, some not, reforms? This whole thing very much damages my confidence* that these broad progressive coalitions will be able to accomplish much.

*not that it was ever very high, to be fair.

[Kalbear]

I think this is the answer to your question:

Quote

White people who work with other white people — and the white people who write about them — tend to slough off this critique. What matters, they insist, is the effect of the policy, not the historical accident of who wrote it down

I love the article - it's a great super detailed reach into some really dark spots in politics. I think that calling it a perfect vs. good thing isn't correct, however. There are some legitimate complaints about it - the biggest one being that just a carbon tax alone doesn't help support cleaner energy going forward or any real, legitimate change. It doesn't really do anything; all it does is shift tax burdens around. It doesn't put pressure on corporations all that much (again: revenue neutral). It does help the poor, but didn't talk to the poor about what they actually needed or wanted. 

I guess that's sort of my biggest problem with 732 - it is the theoretical way of getting a carbon tax. That's its goal. And it works to do that - but it isn't actually helping reduce carbon emissions or improve clean energy or even help damage anywhere. All it is is a carbon tax. 

[Squab]

We had a carbon tax in Australia for 2 years from 2012 to 2014. It may have had an impact on coal power generation but the reductions seen were in line with the trend seen outside of carbon taxing.  There was an increase in electricity costs but it was hard to tell how much was directly attributed to increasing generation costs or just a nice excuse to raise pricing.  There is little doubt that some of it was fair but how much is still under review.

A much more effective reduction on emissions was done by the state of South Australia.  Unfortunately this has led to the highest electricity prices in Australia, manufacturing leaving the state and a recent state wide blackout. Unfortunately due to its unreliable energy, South Australia has to rely on the dirtiest power generator in the oecd to keep the lights on.  Its ok because its in another state leaving South Australia so green you don't even need lights to see it, and with such a warm feeling you no longer need heating.

[Altherion]

This is a Tragedy of the Commons variant in which things have gotten bad enough that some groups have decided that they are going to care about the commons after all... but not quite so much that they would be willing to fix the problem at all costs. Each side is only willing to do it in their favorite way -- one which usually ends up benefiting them personally. This usually results in precisely the situation described in the fable about the Swan, the Pike and the Crab: everyone pulls in their own direction and nothing gets done. Based on the article, I would guess that this 732 thing will fail this year and whatever the rival group manages to come up with for 2018 (assuming that they actually get their act together) will also fail.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

White people who work with other white people — and the white people who write about them — tend to slough off this critique. What matters, they insist, is the effect of the policy, not the historical accident of who wrote it down

Honestly, that there are people who disagree with that statement is what pisses me off the most about the modern progressive-ism.

[The Brandon Stark]

I'm sorry, but please explain what white people working with white people has to do carbon emissions?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

13 minutes ago, The Brandon Stark said:

I'm sorry, but please explain what white people working with white people has to do carbon emissions?

It's in the article. One of the critiques of the carbon tax proposal is that it was written by a committee of mostly middle or upper-middle class white* people.

*I assume. I noticed that when progressives critique a group for being too many white people, they often count Asians as white for some reason. I'm flattered, I guess. But it's entirely plausible that, in this case, white means white, since Asians are less likely to be involved in environmental causes.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Philosophically speaking, cap-and-trade looks to be better than carbon taxes, since the former actually sets emissions goals. In the latter, the emissions are set by the market and I tend to be skeptical of such mechanisms. Without knowing the details, if a carbon tax now hinders the introduction of cap and trade in the future, then I'd probably be opposed to the former.

I also have this feeling that carbon taxes can and will be passed on to individuals (and in my limited understanding) cap-and-trade need not be.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

1 hour ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I also have this feeling that carbon taxes can and will be passed on to individuals (and in my limited understanding) cap-and-trade need not be.

That's a benefit in my mind. People should be incentivized to drive their cars less.

I think this is a good breakdown of cap and trade v carbon tax

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2014/08/12/pricing-carbon-a-carbon-tax-or-cap-and-trade/

[IheartIheartTesla]

They should be incentivized to lower their individual carbon footprints.

However, this year I have worked on carbon mitigation projects, and the one thing that has stayed with me is how much more dramatic the impact of industry is. For instance, if you shut down a coal plant for 1-2 months, that's about the same as 100,000 cars not driving for a year. So which is easier, changing the behaviors of 100k people, or mandating a company to change its behavior?

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

17 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

They should be incentivized to lower their individual carbon footprints.

However, this year I have worked on carbon mitigation projects, and the one thing that has stayed with me is how much more dramatic the impact of industry is. For instance, if you shut down a coal plant for 1-2 months, that's about the same as 100,000 cars not driving for a year. So which is easier, changing the behaviors of 100k people, or mandating a company to change its behavior?

That depends on the scale. If you're working with a population of 3 million people, then that's the equivalent of getting them all to drive 12 less days a year, which sounds much less imposing.

But in that sense, I don't get your opposition to market based approaches. The market, with no intentional help from the government, shut down more coal plants than the government ever dreamed of, just by lowering the price of natural gas.

[Kalbear]

5 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

That depends on the scale. If you're working with a population of 3 million people, then that's the equivalent of getting them all to drive 12 less days a year, which sounds much less imposing.

That doesn't work though. People don't drive for funsies all that much; it's a cost they have, period. They might choose to move a bit closer, but most of the time that doesn't work either. 

As an example, in Seattle the urban sprawl and people moving to the suburbs increased tremendously at the same time gas prices rose from 2001 to 2008. It sucked for them and made them poorer, but they still did it. Notably because humans are bad at budgeting, and the pressure of gas going from 3 to 4 bucks a gallon isn't as meaningful as the cost of buying a house for $400k vs $800k. 

Furthermore, you're not improving the things that would make it easier to make them drive 12 days a year with just a carbon tax. You're not funding infrastructure or transportation or anything. So the same reasons that they don't do it now are the same reasons they won't do it then, too. 

5 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

But in that sense, I don't get your opposition to market based approaches. The market, with no intentional help from the government, shut down more coal plants than the government ever dreamed of, just by lowering the price of natural gas.

Market-based approaches can work, but tend to be a 2nd or 3rd order solution to a problem. If you want clean energy and less polluting, making that the actual thing you're doing instead of saying 'this costs more now' is a more direct approach. The problem with market-based solutions is that the market has incentive to figure out other ways around higher costs. We've seen this a lot of times before, where taxes on externalities are either simply ignored, are paid down in other ways, or are subtly influenced so that they don't apply in this one case.

[zelticgar]

Holy shit, I got through the first part but once I got to the "What I-732 would do, and why" section it took me 4 times of reading through it to figure out what the hell they were talking about. Why are tax laws so confusing? And yes, i'll admit I'm not the brightest guy in the room but they really need to work on making this stuff less complicated. 

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

As an example, in Seattle the urban sprawl and people moving to the suburbs increased tremendously at the same time gas prices rose from 2001 to 2008. It sucked for them and made them poorer, but they still did it. Notably because humans are bad at budgeting, and the pressure of gas going from 3 to 4 bucks a gallon isn't as meaningful as the cost of buying a house for $400k vs $800k.

In your example, human beings are actually great at budgeting: even if the $800K house was right next to everywhere they wanted to be (i.e. they didn't have to drive at all), to make up the $400K difference, they'd need to drive 100K gallons worth of gas at $4/gallon for the $800K house to be worthwhile. If your car gets 25 mpg, that means driving 2.5 million miles which is not likely to happen before we move away from the combustion engine altogether.

This is actually not specific to Seattle: one of environmentalism's problems is that the housing near any place which has high-paying jobs tends to be so ridiculously expensive that moving to the suburbs makes perfect economic sense. This would be OK except that very few cities construct large-scale transportation networks anymore so living in the suburbs means driving.

[Erik of Hazelfield]

I think you need both approaches. Want less people to commute by car? Fix good public transportation and bike lanes first so people have an alternative, THEN make it expensive to drive by adding tolls, carbon taxes, what have you. As long as cars are the only viable option people are going to use them regardless of the costs.

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

I think you need both approaches. Want less people to commute by car? Fix good public transportation and bike lanes first so people have an alternative, THEN make it expensive to drive by adding tolls, carbon taxes, what have you. As long as cars are the only viable option people are going to use them regardless of the costs.

Exactly. And that's precisely why the liberals above opposed the Carbon Tax approach.

[IheartIheartTesla]

On 10/21/2016 at 0:04 PM, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

That depends on the scale. If you're working with a population of 3 million people, then that's the equivalent of getting them all to drive 12 less days a year, which sounds much less imposing.

But in that sense, I don't get your opposition to market based approaches. The market, with no intentional help from the government, shut down more coal plants than the government ever dreamed of, just by lowering the price of natural gas.

For the first part, that may be true; however, the difficulty of changing the behavior of 3 million is enormously more than that of 100k. That is, even though they have to make a smaller sacrifice, the fact that there are more of them just makes it non-linearly more difficult in my mind. Human behavior is very hard to change from set patterns.

As to the latter, I don't have any ideological oppositions to market based behaviors. In fact as the supply of fossil fuels diminishes, even the stragglers in industry will be forced to look at alternative routes (I believe Exxon is making a big push for biofuels for precisely that reason). I just think setting an emissions goal is a better route.

[Martell Spy]

 

Quote

 

I think you need both approaches. Want less people to commute by car? Fix good public transportation and bike lanes first so people have an alternative, THEN make it expensive to drive by adding tolls, carbon taxes, what have you. As long as cars are the only viable option people are going to use them regardless of the costs.

 

Definitely agree with this. I live in the suburbs and availability drives my behavior. We have a fairly good system, but there holes, in particular if you need to get somewhere at night, early morning, and/or weekends. I drive all the time right now and it'd be difficult to do otherwise.

I almost always bus when I go into Seattle. It's very easy to get a bus there or out of there. The further you go out from Seattle, the worse it is. More than once I've been trapped at Tacoma at night, simply because they have only one bus leaving there at 3 am.

Rapid Ride is awesome, and should be extended everywhere possible. It really makes people want to use the system.

[Altherion]

On 10/21/2016 at 3:50 PM, Kalbear said:

Exactly. And that's precisely why the liberals above opposed the Carbon Tax approach.

The drawback of insisting on both is that there's a pretty good chance that you will get neither, at least not in a timely fashion. If the current proposal fails, there definitely won't be anything for the next two years. Your chances of getting anything in 2018 for two years are slim for two reasons. First, the midterm elections are likely to be dominated by other concerns which do not favor such a measure. Second, from the article in the first post:

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As the years went by, Bauman and other climate hawks watched impatiently as the climate movement suffered failure after failure. Environmental groups did not put a climate measure on the ballot in 2012 (they didn’t want to put the election of Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee at risk). In 2014, the Alliance focused its energy on helping Democrats retake majorities in the state legislature. That effort failed. In 2015, it focused its energy on helping Inslee get his Carbon Pollution Accountability Act through the Washington legislature. That effort also failed. As of early 2015, it was unclear whether they intended to run a ballot measure in 2016.

The reason for the 732 group's existence is that the traditional groups have failed over and over and over again. The latter is not an accident: they've failed because they tied their cause to a partisan group (which automatically incurs enemies) and not only that, but their cause is not particularly important to that group. Thus, when their group is weak, they're not likely to accomplish much and when their group is competitive, they're not likely to accomplish much either (because the focus is on more important issues).

[Kalbear]

This is a good article on why a revenue-neutral carbon tax might not be a great idea - which is that it has little to no effect on anything. Study was taken from the BC revenue-neutral carbon tax.