Articles by David Roberts

The game plan: regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act

This element of Obama’s impending energy policy hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. If he does it right, it could be the secret weapon that kills new coal plants for good — with far greater certainty than a middling cap-and-trade program. Obama has always said, to those who were listening closely, that he plans […]

A price signal in the vehicle market is best applied to the vehicle

Proponents of raising the gas tax -- and the chattering class is littered with them these days -- have a simple, central argument: gas taxes create a market signal that pushes all vehicle consumers in the direction of fuel efficiency.

Indeed, some conservatives (and car companies) go further: they say that CAFE standards are bad policy because they force automakers to create products for which there's no demand. It's no good making fuel-efficient cars if nobody wants to buy them! (Americans love big, powerful cars. "Everybody knows" that.) Higher gas taxes should replace CAFE, because they create create demand instead of forcing supply.

A moment's thought reveals a serious flaw in these arguments. Fuel costs are a relatively low portion of total vehicle costs -- maybe 10-20 percent. There's maintenance, insurance, parking, but most of all, the price of the car.

And when the time comes to buy a car, people don't behave like the rational interest maximizers of economic myth. They rarely calculate out future costs like fuel. They consider the number on the price tag in front of them: the price of the car.

It follows that if you want a market signal, you should put it where it will have the most effect: on the price of the car.

As it happens, we have a policy like that! Let's hand the mic to John Heywood, who has headed the Sloan Automotive Laboratory since 1972:

I think we need a purchase tax, a feebate system, like the French have instituted fairly recently. Fees for high-consuming vehicles and rebates for low-consuming vehicles. That will help reinforce consumer response to CAFE requirements by providing a market incentive.

There you go. A clear price signal, applied at the point of maximum effect, supplementing rather than replacing fuel efficiency standards. CAFE standards push automakers to make fuel-efficient cars; feebates push consumers to buy them. (Oh, and unlike gas taxes, feebates aren't regressive.)

How is this not a preferable policy, both economically and politically? What am I missing?

Freaky

Conservative columnist lies to millions of people, again, ho hum

George Will is supposedly one of the reality-based conservatives, who eschews the willful know-nothingism of some of his ideological co-travelers. Yet today, as he has many times before, he uses his perch on the Washington Post editorial page to lie to readers and reduce their knowledge of the facts.

It's hard to believe, but he wheels out the "scientists said there would be global cooling" myth again. See it refuted here in our How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide. Or see Brad Plumer for yet another refutation.

But at this point it seems futile to refute it yet again. The question here is not about the facts, but about sociocultural norms. Why is Will permitted to lie to millions of readers every week? At what point do the editors of the Washington Post feel that it's their job to step in and stop him from misleading people? Is there any such point? Is there anything Will could say that would cross the line?

Addendum: Meanwhile, segregated over in the "green" section of the paper: "Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates." And so it goes.