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A cap and trade system for people
CO2 skywriting
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: While health care's been the belle of the ball, climate change legislation has been in the Congressional deep freeze for months now. But there does seem to be a bit of a thaw coming. At a meeting on Capitol Hill yesterday, key members of the Senate shared what they've been working on with some business groups. The once and future approach picks up where earlier legislation left off. It is supposed to limit industrial greenhouse gas emissions.
And there's a new twist too: Encouraging individuals to limit their pollution as well. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman reports.
MITCHELL HARTMAN: This proposal uses a market-based system. The government caps emissions and companies trade pollution permits. But it also peppers in something else.
Lou Hayden of the American Petroleum Institute.
LOU HAYDEN: They're looking at a cap-and-trade approach for stationary sources of greenhouse gases, like utilities, some kind of linked fee on fuels.
It's that linked fee that's the new part. And it would cover gasoline, diesel, airplane fuel. Consumers would pay at the pump or the gate.
RON PERNICK: And that may look something more along the lines of a carbon tax, although they won't use the term tax.
Ron Pernick runs consulting firm Clean Edge. He says the goal is to have consumers see the cost directly.
PERNICK: We've gotten very used to low-cost energy, and energy is going to cost more.
AMANDA ROSEN: If you can directly attach a price to the use of carbon, people are going to be much less likely to use it in excess.
Amanda Rosen is a political scientist at Webster University. She says behavior is likely to change in the long run, as more fuel-efficient cars hit the market. But...
ROSEN: If you live in the suburbs and you need to commute into the city to work, you can't just buy a new house in the middle of the city, or change your childrens' schools, and move on a dime because your gas bill got really high. In terms of the short run, the changes you could make are actually pretty limited.
Rosen says people will probably have plenty of time to get ready. The legislation hasn't even been formally proposed yet.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
If our Congress was composed of sensible people, this bill would never get out of committee. Unfortunately, just as soon as global warming has been revealed as an obvious hoax and the public is coming to its senses, Congress is pressing on to, as usual, subsidize what doesn't work and tax what does.
To Amanda Rosen's point... We could lower Americans' income and/or payroll tax before adding a carbon "fee" (or tax )reducing the economic impact of overall taxes on suburbia while still providing an incentive to switch behavior.
Assuming raising taxes on particular behavior would require an overall high tax environment and the cost to families could not be offset elsewhere is a falsehood and a poor reason to reject a carbon tax. Carbon taxes would replace other tax revenue requiring rewiring of the system. Given the political will to reduce energy dependency on foreign oil and the other benefits of a green economy... we may have a chance if this is explained properly and special interests behave themselves.
