Gar Lipow wrote: > However please note that my article is in opposition to excess focus on a > carbon price, not to a carbon price. The reasons we need a carbon price: > .... > 2) In most sectors of the economy we have measures of emissions efficiency > that allow for fairly simple regulations. ... > But in manufacturing we don't have such a clear > non-market metric. ... > ... ultimately to reduce emissions in industry > you need something along the lines of a carbon tax or auctioned permit > system that specifies ends, rather than means. > > 3) There is also an issue of justice. If there was a means to eliminate > emissions over the course of a year or two without horrible consequences, > then we would not need complicated rules or an emissions price. Our demand > would simply be a date certain by which emissions were eliminated. But > there is no way to eliminate emissions that quickly without the death of > billions. If emissions must be phased out over a decade or longer, then it > is only fair that as the long as pollution continues that polluters pay. >
Gar, I think your critique of Hahnel and polemic against emphasis on the carbon tax is important. But you are wrong when you tlhink you can separate "excess forcus" on the carbon price from the idea that the carbon price is needed to deal with carbon emissions in manufacturing. You write that "it is only fair that as long as pollution continues that polluters pay". But neither the carbon tax nor other means of setting the carbon price mean that the polluters pay. The manufacturing corporations will pass the price along to the consumer. The idea that the carbon price makes the polluters pay inevitably results in making the slogan of the polluters pay into the slogan of making the people pay. Thus with the least influence on industrial policy end up with the most pain - this is not justice. In your interesting article "Carbon Pricing: The Price is Wrong", you note that "Politically, cap-and-trade and carbon taxes have always been policies designed to bring powerful interest groups on board." Indeed! But if policies aimed at higher and higher carbon prices would really make the polluters pay, how is that that their advocates have always hoped that they would bring the polluters on board? Nor are its effects on the environment always benign. Most of the criticism of cap and trade and carbon offsets goes into how corporations can and do get around them. But it's notable that the mechanisms of the Kyoto system also had ill effects when companies obeyed them. It helped, for instance, promote the rush to palm oil, with its notorious results on rain forests. One might argue that this was a defect in the regulations. But this shows that one can't get away from the need for overall environmental planning and regulation. In the past, I had written that one of the reasons why "value" (and hence also pricing) is an irrational means of economic planning (i.e. rational for capitalist profit-making but not rational for human goals) is that various things of environmental importance have zero value. That seemed one of the most obvous examples of the defect of value. But in watching the cap and trade systems, it turns out that the marketplace doesn't simply devastate the environment when environmental goods are given a value of zero. It sometimes devastates the environment even faster when they are given a value. It's not so easy to direct the "invisible hand" of price-directed forces in the direction one wants; harsh experience shows over and over again that the "invisible hand" folllows its own laws. For example, astronomical drug prices in the US haven't resulted in American medicine minimizing the use of drugs, or insisting on the most rational use of drugs, or in making the health monopolies pay, but just the opposite. High prices have instead helped corrupt the practice of medecine as a whole and the system of priorities and research in drugs. The way in which this happens has its own peculiarities, different from other manufacturing, but that's how the "invisible hand" works - it is infinitely creative in circumventing the good intentions of those who think they have mastered it. -- Joseph Green _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
