… mere continence will do well enough, it seems.
In copping to the silliness of the Democrats’ sustainability extravaganza, Ezra Klein does as good a job as one could hope for of illustrating the difference between liberal progressive approaches to government and conservative (and indeed classically liberal) ones:
The more Democrats present their environmentalism as a call for personal austerity or individual rectitude, the less likely they are to succeed. But that’s not what a cap and trade proposal does. It’s a market-based attempt to accurately price carbon in products, so that the economic incentives naturally point in a direction that doesn’t end up scorching the planet. It’s not about banning meat or keeping people from driving. It’s just about eliminating the silent subsidy that makes meat, gas, and other elements of a carbon-intensive lifestyle look much cheaper than they really are. But the key here is that cap and trade won’t ask people to “do” anything differently. They’ll just have to do what they always do: Decide what they need and then figure out the most cost-effective way to get there. In other words, shop. What they’re not being asked to do is personally figure out carbon counts and chart a low-energy lifestyle. Democrats should stop implying otherwise.
In the first place, the idea that the only way to realize a low-energy lifestyle is to begin by counting carbon is just preposterous: there are all sorts of extraordinarily simple things* that people can do, and do quite easily and often at considerable savings and with only minimal inconvenience to themselves, to achieve this, and any environmentalist agenda that hopes for political and on-the-ground success had better find a way to package such a lifestyle in an appealing form. It’s not, in other words, about “austerity” or “rectitude”, but about living a healthy, responsible, human-sized life in ways that honor the goodness of the world around you. And I can promise you that policies packaged as ways to make “carbon-intensive lifestyles” (whatever that means to the average American) more expensive than they already are are going to be politically disastrous: until more Americans – who are, by the way, a decidedly moralizing lot – come to see the many ways in which what can seem like very small choices are nevertheless significant in something approaching the grand (cosmic or supercosmic) scheme, there will be very little possibility of ever getting a “market-based” approach to emissions reduction in place. Put slightly differently, Cap’n Trade policies obviously will end up requiring people to “do” different things: the cost-minimizing and value-avoiding dimensions may still be there, but the upshot will be a markedly different way of life for quite a lot of people, and they’re not going to sign on to it unless they’re given positive reasons to do so. Quite a lot of practical reasoning does not proceed according to strictly economic principles, and so failing to articulate environmentalist policies in ways that appeal to deeper values than that of the bottom dollar is a sure route to going nowhere fast.
Secondly, the problem with the Democrats’ hysterical and self-congratulatory attempts at conventional greenery throwing a green convention is not that they were in any meaningful sense “austere”, but rather that they were so obviously hypocritical. Hiring a Director of Greening (no, really) who insists on three-or-more-colored meals and American union labor-produced, organic cotton fanny packs for the tens of thousands of back-slapping party loyalists and access-buying corporate donors who are flying their way to the middle of Colorado for a meaningless celebration of whoop-de-do party-hood is in no way an example of responsibility or “rectitude”; it is, rather, another perfect symptom of the same sort of disease that leads moralizing bureaucrats to dine on 19-dish meals shortly before heading off to inform the leaders of developing countries that their people will have to postpone the realization of the sort of economic growth from which the fine-dining bureaucrats have so greatly benefited. Whether or not the Democrats’ convention turns out to be “carbon neutral”, it will remain the case that all of their self-serving “greening” could have been much more appropriately directed to higher ends, and that Denver 2008 will be the sort of only-in-America, show-stopping circus of self-celebrating absurdity that simply is not sustainable in any meaningful sense. If this were the Super Bowl, it would be one thing, for then at least it would be an event with genuine cultural and spiritual significance that outweighs the ecological costs – but the pinnacle gala of a political party, and indeed a political party that makes so much of a thing out of environmental responsibility, is the sort of occasion that simply demands an all-out trimming with endless garlands of much-publicized greenery, lest the hollow extravagance of the underlying premise should lie exposed. The Democrats do not, in other words, look silly because they’ve made greening look so hard, but rather because the comic scale of their ecological nit-picking brings out the hugeness of the event, and the self-righteousness behind the desire for a showoff-y carbon neutrality.
But thirdly, and most crucially, there are deep questions to be asked here concerning moral accountability and state paternalism. The cap and trade plan as Ezra outlines it above is the central planner’s dream: simply set a price on all the externalities, open up for business, and let the people go shopping. That the pricing likely cannot be done in a way that accounts appropriately for all the relevant effects is not the only problem here, nor are the regressiveness of the tax in question or the fact that any cap and trade system is likely to become a tool for corporate interests the central issues. Rather, the specific worries I have in mind here are similar to the ones Andrew Sullivan wrote about in discussing Christianity and communism: just as true charity cannot be written into a tax code but must proceed voluntarily from the citizen’s soul, so genuine ecological responsibility – and note well that “personal austerity” and “individual rectitude” are good things – cannot be the product of social engineering. Even if – and this is a huge, almost surely irredeemable “if” – all of the environmental costs of any behavior could be accurately determined and then the immediate prices of engaging in such behaviors made to conform thereto, all we would be encouraging would be the very same set of societal habits that got us to where we are: a nation of shoppers, largely unconcerned with what is right and wrong but instead aiming always to seek out the best bargain in any given situation and just so happening to save the Earth in the process. That Ezra seems quite happy with such a mindset – that he calls for a system in which all of us will “just have to do what [we] always do” – strikes me as deeply revealing. If – and this, of course, may well be an even bigger and less redeemable “if” than the previous one – conservatives and other bottom-up types could manage to turn this message on its head, and put forward a program centering on, and perhaps finding less paternalistic ways** to encourage and reward, personal and familial responsibility and self-restraint, it seems likely to me that they will end up with a program at once more politically sell-able in the short run and more ecologically sound down the line than an approach that tries to tweak the consumeristic market toward greener ends. Bringing our lives more in line with the demands of our planet is something that is going to take a lot of work and depend heavily on individual responsibility; implying otherwise, and making it out as if mere taxation could make things right, simply fails to convince.
So yes, the Democrats’ plans for their convention look ridiculous, and yes, there’s nothing essentially “austere” or mathematically structured about a life lived responsibly. But what’s really wrong with the Denver circus is not that it makes ecological responsibility appear unduly difficult and so covers up the fact that a tax on carbon could take care of all the tough decision-making for us, but rather that it gives an undue appearance of difficulty because a 50,000-person convention poses green-making challenges unlike those that ever exist in private life, and so makes “low-carbon lifestyles” (and other forms of socially and ecologically responsible behaviors) seem like problems for professional statisticians and Directors of Greening when in fact they’re simple matters of practical reasoning and home economics. In any case, a nation that is green only because being green is cheap and easy is not a nation I’m especially inclined to be a part of.
* To name a few: buy a smaller house and a smaller car, seek out a walkable neighborhood, go to the store less often and vacation closer to home, shut off the big screen TV, turn out the lights when you leave a room, unplug appliances at night, use cloth diapers, mow your (preferably non-huge) lawn with a push mower, bike or carpool or take transit to work, compost and recycle, get a solar chimney, homeschool your kids, cook and eat at home instead of going out to eat. In general, it doesn’t take much accounting or expert opinion to figure out that these options are greener than the alternatives.
** For example, and very much of the top of my decidedly unwonkish head: tax credits in exchange for yearly reductions in home energy usage, the use of tolls and similar schemes to pay for road maintenance, pay-as-you-drive automobile insurance, zoning for walkable neighborhoods, tax credits for stay-at-home parents, and cheap and efficient public transit. That these items are not presently at the top of the conservative agenda is not the point; if they were there, I think it would be a better agenda than the tax-driven one with which I’m disagreeing.
Filed under: environment, government/law, morality
What Klein is proposing, in essence, is greenery as an externality of conspicuous consumption, but a certain kind of morally elevated kind of conspicuous consumption, put on display for all to see, as a way of maintaining moral superiority over someone else. Deeply revealing indeed.
To be fair, its the Democratic Convention folks, and not Ezra, who are going in for what you describe here. But yes, it is indeed deeply revealing.
Why not a straight-up tax on carbon instead? (Apart from its political feasibility, that is.) This would seem to jive with the conservative and libertarian (not to mention common sense) notion that you’re responsbile for the consequences of your actions.
Granted, there’s still the calculation problem, but it would seem to have a better chance of avoiding special interest capture than a complicated cap-and-trade scheme. Plus, rebates to offset regressivity would seem to be simpler.
I by no means have a firm opinion on the matter, so I’d be interested to hear your take.
Hi Lee,
Thanks for the comments. My objection to a more straightforward tax on carbon is that, even though it’s far less prone to a certain sort of corruption and insiderism than cap and trade, it would still be pretty deeply regressive, and so my already-stated objections would still apply. To my mind, it’s unfair to make carbon more expensive unless reasonably-priced (and perhaps subsidized) alternatives aren’t already reasonably available. This is why I’m delighted with things like highway tolls, bridge tolls, pay-to-drive schemes, congestion pricing, high parking costs, and so on, as well as – perhaps – taxes on dirty home energy options when cleaner ones are already there. But huge parts of rural America are presently stuck on coal and gasoline, and are already struggling in tremendous ways to make ends meet – to make their present way of life more expensive before we’ve taken some serious steps to offer them a way out of it strikes me as deeply unjust. So there’s my objection to a carbon tax. I remain, however, entirely willing to be talked out of it.
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