Shorter Ezra Klein: taxing carbon will be great because it will make more people learn to live like I do.
Even shorter rejoinder: not if they starve first:
Faced with soaring gasoline prices, agencies around the country that provide services to the elderly say they are having to cut back on programs like Meals on Wheels, transportation assistance and home care, especially in rural areas that depend on volunteers who provide their own gas. In a recent survey by the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging, more than half said they had already cut back on programs because of gas costs, and 90 percent said they expected to make cuts in the 2009 fiscal year.
Yippee. The fact is that no amount of economic gimmickry is going to make this sort of thing go away: the American economy and transportation infrastructure are, as folks like Ezra will be happy to explain to you in detail, heavily dependent on the use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels in ways that are not going to change overnight, and raising the costs of those things to an even greater extent than the market has already raised them (and with already green effects) will only exacerbate the challenges faced by those who cannot simply hop on the subway or ride a bike to work. There is a huge class of people who are going to have to navigate a incredibly steep learning curve in order to get out of their cars and into “transit”, and proposing a new round of taxes that will intensify the economic hardships already faced by these people is a really awful idea. Taking steps, through things like congestion taxes, to increase the cost of carbon for gas-guzzling sub- and exurbanites with the real possibility of doing something different (having a parent leave his or her job and homeschool the kids, by the way, is an extremely low-carbon option) may be justifiable, but making it even more difficult for senior citizens in rural areas to pay for air conditioning and get their Meals on Wheels simply is not. Just add this one to the Healthy Young Urbanites Need to Consider What It’s Like for the Rest of the World file.
Filed under: energy, taxation, transportation
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