Economist Channel

The WSJ has two good and related opeds on energy and transport subsidies recently, Randall O'Toole on Last Stop on the Light-Rail Gravy Train and Lee Ohanian and  Ted Temzelides write on energy and transport subsidies

O'Toole:

Last month, Nashville Mayor Megan Berry announced a $5.2 billion proposal that involves building 26 miles of light rail and digging an expensive tunnel under the city’s downtown. Voters will be asked in May to approve a half-cent sales tax increase plus additions to hotel, car rental and business excise taxes to pay for the project.

Just in time for self-driving Ubers to arrive.

I love trains. But we have to admit practicalities. One transportation economist summed all there is to know about transit with "Bus Good. Train Bad." (With a few exceptions, such as Manhattan.)  And light rail, worse. Trains are expensive, and once built, immobile. If people want to go somewhere else, tough. Rolling stock lasts around 50 years, meaning they bake in technical obsolescence. Trains carry far fewer people per lane-mile than busses. And a fleet of self-driving Ubers linked by computer will be able to use bus lanes.

Actually, even buses are more and more questionable. As I wait for the interminable lights on El Camino to cross to Stanford (on bicycle), I have taken to counting passengers on the well-subsidized bus line. The modal number is zero.

As Randy has pointed out elsewhere, the main beneficiaries of light rail are suburban largely white commuters with a nostalgia thing for trains. The main people paying for it are inner city minorities who don't get bus service anymore.

To pay for new light-rail lines that opened in 2012 and 2016, Los Angeles cut bus service. The city lost nearly four bus riders for every additional rail rider.

Congestion got you down? Real time tolling, adjusted minute by minute, will either cure traffic congestion forever, or will bail out indebted local governments with massive revenues, or both. Or, let people live somewhere near where they work!

Lee and Ted consider the transition from horse to auto and truck,

‘In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under 9 feet of manure.” With this 1894 prediction, the London Times warned that the era’s primary source of transportation energy—the horse—would soon create an environmental crisis. ...

The enormous demand for a cleaner and more efficient source of energy led to remarkable innovations in the internal combustion engine. By 1920 horses in cities had been almost entirely replaced by affordable autos and trucks...

And to be honest, horse manure replaced by auto exhaust -- but as bad as auto exhaust is, it's a lot better than horse manure.

Suppose governments in the 1890s, desperate to replace the horse, had jumped on the first available alternative, the steam engine. Heavy subsidies would have produced more steam engines and more research on steam technology. This would only have waylaid the development of the far superior internal combustion engine. 

Source: Obtainium works.

(Actually, the government did subsidize railroads a good deal, and perhaps by doing so did stall the development of the truck.)

More than horse manure, I love the image of an alternate reality steampunk America...At left a cool  steampunk RV. (Image source)

Which brings us back, I'm afraid to the main force behind rail subsidies, which Randall has pointed out before: Nostalgia. Nostalgia for what seems like a simpler age. I understand that too. I love trains. But that doesn't make them practical, especially at billions of dollars per mile.

If we're doing nostalgia, how about doing it full time -- high speed stagecoach lines? Bring back the horse! It's all renewable!'

Now that 30 days have passed I can post the full Wall Street Journal climate change oped with David Henderson. The previous post has more commentary. A pdf is here.

By David R. Henderson and  John H. Cochrane
July 30, 2017 4:24 p.m. ET

Climate change is often misunderstood as a package deal: If global warming is “real,” both sides of the debate seem to assume, the climate lobby’s policy agenda follows inexorably.

It does not. Climate policy advocates need to do a much better job of quantitatively analyzing economic costs and the actual, rather than symbolic, benefits of their policies. Skeptics would also do well to focus more attention on economic and policy analysis.

To arrive at a wise policy response, we first need to consider how much economic damage climate change will do. Current models struggle to come up with economic costs commensurate with apocalyptic political rhetoric. Typical costs are well below 10% of gross domestic product in the year 2100 and beyond.

That’s a lot of money—but it’s a lot of years, too. Even 10% less GDP in 100 years corresponds to 0.1 percentage point less annual GDP growth. Climate change therefore does not justify policies that cost more than 0.1 percentage point of growth. If the goal is 10% more GDP in 100 years, pro-growth tax, regulatory and entitlement reforms would be far more effective.


Yes, the costs are not evenly spread. Some places will do better and some will do worse. The American South might be a worse place to grow wheat; Southern Canada might be a better one. In a century, Miami might find itself in approximately the same situation as the Dutch city of Rotterdam today.

But spread over a century, the costs of moving and adapting are not as imposing as they seem. Rotterdam’s dikes are expensive, but not prohibitively so. Most buildings are rebuilt about every 50 years. If we simply stopped building in flood-prone areas and started building on higher ground, even the costs of moving cities would be bearable. Migration is costly. But much of the world’s population moved from farms to cities in the 20th century. Allowing people to move to better climates in the 21st will be equally possible. Such investments in climate adaptation are small compared with the investments we will regularly make in houses, businesses, infrastructure and education.

And economics is the central question—unlike with other environmental problems such as chemical pollution. Carbon dioxide hurts nobody’s health. It’s good for plants. Climate change need not endanger anyone. If it did—and you do hear such claims—then living in hot Arizona rather than cool Maine, or living with Louisiana’s frequent floods, would be considered a health catastrophe today.

Global warming is not the only risk our society faces. Even if science tells us that climate change is real and man-made, it does not tell us, as President Obama asserted, that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Really? Greater than nuclear explosions, a world war, global pandemics, crop failures and civil chaos?

No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources.

Facing this reality, some advocate that we buy some “insurance.” Sure, they argue, the projected economic cost seems small, but it could turn out to be a lot worse. But the same argument applies to any possible risk. If you buy overpriced insurance against every potential danger, you soon run out of money. You can sensibly insure only when the premium is in line with the risk—which brings us back where we started, to the need for quantifying probabilities, costs, benefits and alternatives. And uncertainty goes both ways. Nobody forecast fracking, or that it would make the U.S. the world’s carbon-reduction leader. Strategic waiting is a rational response to a slow-moving uncertain peril with fast-changing technology.

Global warming is not even the obvious top environmental threat. Dirty water, dirty air and insect-borne diseases are a far greater problem today for most people world-wide. Habitat loss and human predation are a far greater problem for most animals. Elephants won’t make it to see a warmer climate. Ask them how they would prefer to spend $1 trillion—subsidizing high-speed trains or a human-free park the size of Montana.

Then, we need to know what effect proposed policies have and at what cost. Scientific, quantifiable or even vaguely plausible cause-and-effect thinking are missing from much advocacy for policies to reduce carbon emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “scientific” recommendations, for example, include “reduced gender inequality & marginalization in other forms,” “provisioning of adequate housing,” “cash transfers” and “awareness raising & integrating into education.” Even if some of these are worthy goals, they are not scientifically valid, cost-benefit-tested policies to cool the planet.

Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.

Update: 

A good recent summary of the calculations of economic damage of climate change in an NBER working paper:


2.  A Survey of Global Impacts of Climate Change: Replication,
Survey Methods, and a Statistical Analysis
by William D. Nordhaus, Andrew Moffat  -  #23646 (EEE PE)

Abstract:

....the estimated impact is-2.04 (± 2.21) % of income at 3 °C warming and -8.06 (± 2.43) % of income at 6 °C warming.  We also considered the likelihood of thresholds or sharp convexities in the damage function and found no evidence from the damage estimates of a sharp discontinuity or high convexity.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w23646

David Henderson and I wade in to perilous waters in the July 31 Wall Street Journal. We try to stake out a different and more productive conversation than the usual shouting match between alarmists and deniers.

Climate change is often misunderstood as a package deal: If global warming is “real,” both sides of the debate seem to assume, the climate lobby’s policy agenda follows inexorably.

It does not. Climate policy advocates need to do a much better job of quantitatively analyzing economic costs and the actual, rather than symbolic, benefits of their policies. Skeptics would also do well to focus more attention on economic and policy analysis.

As usual, I have to wait 30 days to post the whole thing.

As economists, we both have a healthy skepticism of large computer based forecasting models. The famous 1972 club of Rome forecast that we would run out of resources, and the grand failure of large scale Keynesian models in the late 1970s are two humbling examples. The "climate" models also feature a lot of questionable economics. A crucial question -- how much carbon will the world's economies add on their own, without Paris-accord policies? That's economics, very questionable economics, and not meteorology.

That said, however, the point of the oped is to try to shift the debate away from climate science and mixed climate-economic computer models. Stop arguing about climate, and let us instead investigate costs and benefits of policies. That strikes us as a much more fruitful place for discussion. If you are wary of the climate policy agenda, the costs and benefits of those policies are more fertile ground for discussion than the science of carbon emissions and atmospheric warming. If you only argue about the climate, then you implicitly admit that if the models are right about climate, the whole policy agenda follows. Do not admit that point. They may be right about climate and wrong about policy.


In California, it is seriously suggested that the way to get more water is to build a high speed train, which will save carbon, which will cool the earth, which will... actually, it goes the other way, but never mind. To address an argument like that, you should not get dragged in to whether human-released carbon warms the planet. A simple dollars per ton and tons per inch of water would do.

If it is not clear enough, nothing in this piece takes a stand on climate science, either affirming or denying current climate forecasts. I will be interested to see how quickly we are painted as unscientific climate-deniers. Shifting a politicized debate is hard. That is, if anyone pays any attention.

A few other choice bits:

Global warming is not the only risk our society faces. Even if science tells us that climate change is real and man-made, it does not tell us, as President Obama asserted, that climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Really? Greater than nuclear explosions, a world war, global pandemics, crop failures and civil chaos?

No. Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources.

As something of a conservative libertarian, I do worry about the end of western civilization and our society falling apart. And I worry about the natural environment as part of that. Still, slow warming in the next two centuries, and a sea level rise (much smaller than the one that happened a mere 10,000 years ago), while a worry, is not obviously the top worry.

Global warming is not even the obvious top environmental threat. Dirty water, dirty air and insect-borne diseases are a far greater problem today for most people world-wide. Habitat loss and human predation are a far greater problem for most animals. Elephants won’t make it to see a warmer climate. Ask them how they would prefer to spend $1 trillion—subsidizing high-speed trains or a human-free park the size of Montana

I'm also something of an environmentalist, with a soft spot for people living in terrible conditions and for the awful permanence of species extinction. Starting with wooly mammoths.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “scientific” recommendations, for example, include “reduced gender inequality & marginalization in other forms,” “provisioning of adequate housing,” “cash transfers” and “awareness raising & integrating into education.” Even if some of these are worthy goals, they are not scientifically valid, cost-benefit-tested policies to cool the planet.

When I read the IPCC report, starting on p. 26, I had to check that I was not unintentionally reading The Onion. We cut for space. A longer list (from that p. 26) of the IPCC's policy ideas

Reduced gender inequality & marginalization in other forms…. Improved access to & control of local resources; Manipulation of disturbance regimes; Community-based natural resource management…. Provisioning of adequate housing,… Micro finance; Disaster contingency funds; Cash transfers; Public-private partnerships…Patent pools & technology transfer…: Awareness raising & integrating into education; Gender equity in education; Extension services; Sharing indigenous, traditional & local knowledge; Participatory action research & social learning; Knowledge-sharing & learning platforms… behavioural shifts, or institutional & managerial changes that produce substantial shifts in outcomes. (under”practical” subheading) Individual & collective assumptions, beliefs, values & worldviews influencing climate-change responses.

Again, you do not have to get deep into cloud modeling and ice melt feedback loops to wonder if all of this list necessarily follows. And, for the record, I have no qualm with lots of this list. Gender equality and equity in education? Improved access to resources? Who can object? But this is supposed to be about effective policies to cool the planet, not a grab bag of things that would be nice. (I do have qualms with a lot of the list, of course. It's a rather Orwellian and statist vision. "Public-private partnerships" characterizes much of contemporary Russia.)

I like our last paragraph.

Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable. 

For the record, I favor a uniform carbon tax in place of all the other direct energy regulations and subsidies. (A neighbor just showed me his electric car, purchased in addition to a regular car, for one reason only: you can ride it solo  in the HOV lane, a right worth thousands in California.) The rate on such a tax can be raised or lowered as politics and science see fit. If we're going to do something, and if the health of the economy is a prime consideration, then we must do something economically efficient. (David disagrees, but he can explain his views in his own blog.) As I favor a uniform VAT in place of the idiotically complex income and corporate tax system. I recognize the essential failure of our political system to enact simple transparent reforms, but that's a question for another day.

I do think there is hope however. A while ago I went to a meeting organized by the Niskanen Center bringing together free-market and libertarian types with some large environmental organizations. The environmentalists were concerned about climate change, understand that feel-good policies (like the subsidy for my neighbor's car) aren't going to slow down climate change, and will suck resources away from policies that could. The free marketers were largely a bit skeptical about just how much of a threat climate change is, but appalled at the inefficiency of IPCC style regulations. There is a deal to be had -- we'll do something efficient and effective (say, a carbon tax) in return for eliminating the junk.  We can agree to disagree about the level of that tax. My sense is that environmental groups are not ready to say this in public, for fear of angering allies who want to use the environmental label for a grab bag of policies (see IPCC list!), and the libertarians and free market types don't trust the "get rid of" rather than "in addition to" everything else part of the bargain. But there is a bargain to be made, and strong political leadership could bring it about.

(By the way, we didn't choose the figure caption. We know that Rotterdam is not prone to floods. Much of it is below sea level, and Miami is 9 feet above sea level.)

Update: Ian Martin and Bob Pindyk have a classy AER paper on the subject of "insurance" and multiple potential catastrophes. They go beyond our point -- if you buy overpriced insurance for each catastrophe you exhaust GDP quickly -- and consider the general equilibrium interactions. Catastrophes affect marginal utility a lot, so when you insure against one you change the state-contingent valuations of another. Evaluating policies in isolation is doubly bad.

In case you missed it, this Sunday featured a creditable effort by the NY Times to look out of the groundhog hole. You have likely followed the explosion resulting from Bret Stephens' first column. Likewise, Ross Douthat tried to explain the attraction of Marine LePen.  I'm not a LePen fan, but appreciated his honest effort to explain how the other side say things.

I was interested in Douthat's views on the euro:

But on the other hand, our era’s “enlightened” governance has produced an out-of-touch eurozone elite lashed to a destructive common currency,..

There is no American equivalent to the epic disaster of the euro, a form of German imperialism with the struggling parts of Europe as its subjects... 

And while many of her economic prescriptions are half-baked, her overarching critique of the euro is correct: Her country and her continent would be better off without it.

Douthat does not pretend to be an economist, and I have no beef with his expressing such views. Because such views are commonplace conventional wisdom from our policy elite. And if the euro falls apart, they will bear a lot of blame for its passing. Be careful what you write, people might be listening.  No, when Germany sends Porsches to Greece in return for worthless pieces of paper, it is not Germany who got the better of the deal. And while you're at it, get rid of that silly common meter, and restore proper nationalism of weights and measures too. (Of course perhaps my admiration for the euro is wrong. Then they will deserve credit for the wave of prosperity that flows over Europe once it unleashes the shackles of the common currency dragging it down. )

As a concrete example, consider  Martin Feldstein writing in the Il Sole series on the Euro, (I don't mean to pick on Feldstein. He has been a consistent anti-euro voice, arguing the great benefits for Italy and Greece of periodic inflation and devaluation. But he is just a good sober example of the common view in Cambridge-centered economic policy circles.)


Topic sentences:

Although Italy was an enthusiastic adopter of the euro when the single currency began, the Italian experience of the past decade suggests that was a mistake.

...it seems plausible that Italy’s economy would be in better condition today if Italy, like Britain, had decided to keep its own currency and therefore to be able to manage its own monetary policy and its own exchange rate.

Analysis:

Advocates of adopting the euro argued at the time that members of the Eurozone would be forced by market pressures to converge to a high common level of productivity and a corresponding level of real wages. That never happened. Instead, Germany powered ahead with rising productivity that has resulted in real per capita income 30% higher than Italy’s, an unemployment rate that is less than half Italy's and a trade surplus that is 8 % of its GDP.

Huh? It is a new proposition in monetary economics to me that adopting a common currency forces countries to move to common productivity, any more than adopting the meter forces countries to do so.  Alabama and California share a currency and not productivity. Fresno and Palo Alto share a currency and not productivity.   A common market in products with free movement of capital and labor might force out economic, legal, and regulatory inefficiency, but that would happen regardless of the units of measurement.

The most basic proposition in monetary economics: The choice of monetary unit has no effect on long-run productivity or any other aspect of the long-run real economy. Using the euro vs. the lira has no effect on long-run productivity, any more than using the meter forces Italian tailors to cut Norwegian-sized suits, or that using the Kilo forces Italian restaurants to serve bratwurst and beer rather than pizza and wine.

The countries that adopted the euro never satisfied the three conditions for a successful currency union: labor mobility, flexibility of real wages, and a common fiscal policy that transfers funds to areas that experience temporary increases in unemployment.

This is another repeated truism. In my view the main condition for a currency union was present in the euro and the problem was forgetting about it when the time came. In a currency union without fiscal union, bankrupt governments default just like bankrupt companies. Neither labor mobility (which exists in Europe), flexibility of real wages (doubtful in the US) or common fiscal policy (also limited in the US) are necessary. Europe lived under a common currency -- the gold standard -- for hundreds of years. Sovereigns defaulted.

I suspect Feldstein means by "common currency" far more than I do. I mean, we agree to use a common currency. I suspect Feldstein means far more than that, including that no government debt may ever default and that the ECB must print money to ensure that fact. Like all disagreements perhaps this one simply reflects a difference in meaning of the words. If so, it would be good to say so. Objections to "the euro" are not objections to a common currency per se, but objections to the rest of the legal, regulatory, banking, fiscal, and policy framework that accompanies the euro.

To be fair, there is also a different underlying world view here. In Feldstein's world, national governments and central banks can be relied on to diagnose "shocks," and artfully devalue currencies just enough to "offset shocks" when and only when needed; in the european case likely imposing "capital controls" as well, but to do this rarely enough that investors will still buy government bonds, invest in their countries, and avoid the slide to banana republic inflation, repression, and trade and investment closure. In my world, as I think in the real world of Italy and Greece before the euro, national currencies are not such a happy tool of benevolent dirigisme. The commitment not to devalue, inflate, and grab capital after the fact is good for growth and investment before the fact. A government sober enough to use Feldstein's tools wisely is also sober enough to borrow wisely when offered low rates. A government not sober enough to borrow wisely when offered low rates is not sober enough to artfully devalue, inflate, grab capital "just this once" in response to shocks.

In a remarkable and clear oped "A Conservative Answer to Climate Change" James Baker and George Shultz lay out the case for a carbon tax in place of the complex, cronyist and ineffective regulatory approach to controlling carbon emissions.

A plea to commenters. Don't fall in to the trap of arguing whether climate change is real or whether carbon (and methane) contribute to it. That's 5% of the debate. The real debate is how much economic damage does climate change actually do. Science might tell us that the temperature will warm 2 degrees in a century, with a band of uncertainty. But the band of uncertainty of the economic, social and political consequences of 2 degrees is much bigger. Moreover, the band of relative uncertainty is bigger still. Does "science," as the IPCC claims, really tell us that climate change is the greatest danger facing us -- above nuclear war, pandemic, state failure, and so on?

And most of all, given that our governments are going to do something about climate change, how can we do something much more efficient, and (plea to environmentalists) much more effective? That's the question worth debating.

Both sides have fallen in to the trap of arguing about climate change itself, as if it follows inexorably that our governments must respond to "yes" with the current system of controls and interventions. The range of economic and environmental effects from the "how" question are much, much larger than the range of the effects of the "is climate change real" question.
So, Baker and Shultz lay out in gorgeous clarity the kind of compromise we all hope our governments can still occasionally achieve: Given that we're going to do something, trade a carbon tax for the removal of intrusive regulation. You get more economy and less carbon.

The oped refers to a report from the Climate Leadership Council, which is here and worth reading. The Niskanen Center has also been championing the case, and reaching out to environmental groups.

There is a natural bargain, if our political system can get around its current habit of take-no-prisoners maximalism.


Environmental groups that really care about carbon are starting to realize that the current system produces symbolism at great cost but will never produce the kind of carbon reductions they think are necessary. High speed trains and electric coal-powered cars may make you feel good, but they don't make a dent in carbon. They are also realizing that climate is swallowing up the world's attention for other pressing environmental problems. Endangered species need habitat, now, not 2 degrees cooler in a century. People are dying of dirty water and particulate pollution now. Yes, they'd prefer carbon tax and controls, since they don't trust the tax incentive alone. But given the choice, I've met serious environmentalists who would take the deal.

Alas, the sad fate of the Washington (state)  carbon tax is not encouraging. Maximalism won. Some large environmental organizations are going to have to realize, in the current era, this is their best deal. Perhaps staring in the face that waiting for a progressive uprising that takes back house, senate, presidency, state legislators, governors, and turns back to tide of global nationalist populism, allowing regulations of the scale that actually would cut back carbon --without using nuclear power -- will induce a little deal-making will. It also feels good to be part of the "resistance," but the climate keeps warming while you feel good.

Those on the other side, horrified at the waste, cronyism, and economic damage of our current controls would prefer nothing, and hence keep arguing about the science. But a straightforward carbon tax would be immensely less distorting than what they will get otherwise. This one will not go away. Removing energy regulation, even with Rick Perry in charge of DOE, will be a miserable mess against an entrenched and very politically effective opposition. If you can get them to accept the deal, it will go much more easily than trying to shove no carbon regulation down their throats.

Of course, the major problem in any deal is trust. The environmental side may not trust that carbon taxes will be high enough to abandon command and control. And the market side certainly does not trust that controls will be removed, or not reimposed -- especially given the large amount of money that green subsidy-seekers can get from them.

Minor quibbles: The oped and council report refer to steadily increasing carbon taxes. Ideally, in my view, a big advantage of the carbon tax is that it is easily adjustable -- much more adjustable than direct controls. Implement a carbon tax at say $40 a ton. Keep fighting about the science, and the level of the carbon tax. There is uncertainty about the science, face it. Once in place it's easier to raise if we learn carbon is a bigger problem than thought, and vice versa.

Also, I think it will be much easier to agree on the principle of a carbon tax if each side knows it can keep fighting about the rate than if they have to agree on the principal of carbon tax + deregulation and the rate, and the schedule of future rates. (Generally, I think things would go much better to debate the structure of the tax code separately from the rates.)

Not mentioned, of course, is that it is vital for a tax like this that the law forbid any of the special credits and deductions that people will instantly start asking for. "Family farmers can't pay the carbon tax on their diesel fuel....; low income americans need a break so they can drive to work...." The incentive to make every single tax redistributive is strong.

Second, what to do with the money? Greg Mankiw has, on other occasions, argued that the carbon tax revenue should offset other, more distorting taxes. It is a double-whammy -- most taxes, in order to raise revenue, reduce some desirable economic activity. A carbon tax, to raise revenue, reduces an undesirable economic activity. As a matter of economics, Greg is exactly right.

The Oped and council propose instead that the tax is rebated to Americans, so the tax is revenue-neutral. That is, I think, politically attractive. A $2,000 check to each taxpayer is a nice way to build a political consensus for keeping the carbon tax, much as using the tariff to fund civil war pensions kept a strong pro-tariff constituency in the late 1800s. In a previous post, I suggested carbon rights instead: Each American owns the rights to emit X tons of carbon, which he or she sells on an electronic marketplace. Or throws away, if they want to do their bit. That too gives people a stake in keeping the system going.

But we should be clear when as economists we are treading into political waters. Giving up on a optimal tax in order to produce political support for a project is the kind of tradeoff that we're not as good at as we are at figuring out optimal taxes in the first place, and figuring out compromises between current political groupings is really not our strong point. Perhaps it would be better to outline the possibilities -- rebate if you think it's politically necessary, use to eliminate other distorting taxes if you can -- and let politicians figure that one out.

Quibbles over.

I must add that Shultz is an inspiration. I hope that at 96 I can write opeds half this good. Heck, I wish I could do it now!

Update: A Conservative Case for Climate Action by Martin Feldstein, Ted Halstead, and N. Gregory Mankiw in the New York Times, describing the same plan, also excellent.