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Sustainability goals for the U.S. dairy industry

Last week, we witnessed the dairy industry hold their first ever Sustainability Summit for U.S. Dairy. The week long conference culminated in the announcement of an industry-wide commitment and action plan to reduce milk's "carbon footprint" while simultaneously increasing business value (translation: profit) from farm to consumer. But how truly "green" are their efforts?

Lugar calls for end to tariff on Brazilian sugarcane ethanol

Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) stopped by ($ub. req’d) the American Enterprise Institute yesterday to give a speech arguing that Congress should lift the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol. “To demonstrate leadership the United States should lift its tariff on Brazilian ethanol that now shelters the U.S. industry,” Lugar told the AEI crowd. Many politicians — […]

Cheap materials, lax government standards at fault in toxic FEMA trailers

The toxic trailers used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house thousands of homeless Gulf Coast residents after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were found to be troublesome to occupants’ health due to cheap building materials and lax government standards for RVs, scientists said Wednesday. “Manufacturers of travel trailers and the government agencies that influence […]

War and stagflation — surprisingly cute!

“As you all probably know, in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty.” — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), self-styled “Godfather of Green“

Seven green leaders reveal their favorite reads

Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bad books bite. Photo: margolove Which books and magazines are tempting today’s environmental movers and shakers to keep the CFLs burning late into the night? Grist asked seven movement leaders for their recommended reads. (Been burning the night oil yourself? Add your own favorite reads in the comments […]

30,000 farmed salmon escape off B.C. coast, endangering wild stocks

Some 30,000 farmed Atlantic salmon have escaped from their pen off the coast of British Columbia into the Pacific Ocean. Farmed salmon can harm wild salmon stocks — which are already declining on the west coast — by competing with them for food as well as spreading disease. In this case, the escaped salmon are […]

Drilling offshore vs. fuel efficiency

Over at CEPR, Dean Baker makes a somewhat cutesy but still quite illustrative comparison: the barrels of oil per day we could get by 2027 through offshore drilling (when production rate will max out) vs. the oil savings we would have gotten per day if we’d continued ramping up the CAFE standard at roughly the […]

Obama, transportation policy, and the highway bill

Great story in CQ this week on bike politics. Did you know that Obama met a few weeks ago with 160 cycling advocates and promised them his support? I didn’t. The 600-pound gorilla in transportation politics is the 2009 negotiation of a new highway bill, which according to CQ “is already being touted as embodying […]

How to reduce California auto emissions faster than Pavley

Last update: 7/22/2008

In my last post I touted the benefits of a fully refunded emissions tax. Let's take a look at how it could work in California.

When it comes to a refunded tax, more money for industry doesn't mean less money for consumers. Case in point: Today's gasoline prices in California are averaging $4.58/gal, which equates¹ to $536/MT-CO2e. That's how much California drivers are currently paying to emit CO2 -- and how much they could save from fuel economy improvements.

The same approach used by the Swedish program could be applied to motivate efficiency improvements in vehicles, consumer appliances, etc., by employing feebates, which can be implemented as a kind of refunded emission tax. The tax would be applied to projected lifecycle emissions (direct or upstream) and would be refunded in proportion to some measure of economic utility (e.g. refrigeration capacity, illumination output, etc.). The tax and refund together would incentivize lower emissions per unit of economic utility. Feebates could be used as an alternative to traditional performance standards, or could be used to effectively impose a price floor on a tradable standard.

BLM reverses stance on solar-project moratorium

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has reversed its recent moratorium on new applications for solar-energy projects on public land, allowing companies to keep submitting proposals for new solar projects. The solar-project freeze had been instituted in late May while the BLM began conducting a two-year study on the potential environmental impacts of solar projects […]