tax incentives

Fossil fuels keep getting the breaks

Leaders at G20 vowed to phase out oil subsidies. They might as well have vowed to end world hunger, because that is one huge rock to push up the hill

Should electric bike sales be subsidized?

Photo: Flickr via Imnop88aAs I argued in part 2, electric bikes could be forerunners for electrifying the whole transportation sector. They’re sweeping into urban areas in China by the tens of millions. New technologies are improving e-bike performance. And powerful institutions are aligning to speed battery innovations. Many observers now believe e-bikes will grow rapidly […]

A chat with Earl Blumenauer about his ‘carbon audit’ of the U.S. tax code

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.)Tucked away in the frantically assembled and hastily passed bailout bill of Sept. 2008 was a little-noticed provision that would empower the National Academy of Sciences to do a “carbon audit” of the U.S. tax code, scoring tax provisions according to their impact on the national carbon footprint. But the audit — […]

Pollution taxes work

The Environmental Defense Fund’s Fred Krupp threw down the gauntlet to carbon taxers in the Wall Street Journal last month: Environmental taxes have worked well to raise revenue, but without a cap they inevitably become a license to pollute in unlimited amounts. No air pollution problem has ever been solved except by imposing a legal […]

U.S. government paying industry to pollute

Chris Hayes has a blockbuster scoop up on The Nation: “Pulp Nonfiction,” about how the U.S. government will pay the paper industry up to $8 billion this year to emit more carbon dioxide. Yeah, you read that right. The horror begins, as it so often does, with well-meaning efforts by Congress to encourage biofuels. The […]

If sticks don’t work, try carrots

For an $80 billion program, President Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal is very short on specifics. His budget plan [PDF] provides only the briefest policy rationale for cap-and-trade, describing it as “a policy approach that dramatically reduced acid rain at much lower costs than the traditional government regulations and mandates of the past.” The acid-rain program’s […]

Berkeley's program to finance solar systems through property tax assessments is off to great start

The city of Berkeley, Calif. is pioneering a program to help homeowners finance solar systems through property tax assessments. How's that working out?

The first tranche of funds sold out in nine minutes.

And on Friday, the first two checks were handed out to proud owners of new solar systems. Meanwhile, we were able to tweak the federal tax code to ensure that program participants can still use the federal investment tax credit (thanks, Speaker Pelosi). And we are working with partners in eight states and counting to get enabling legislation on the books to allow more cities to replicate the model.

Note that this program can be set up to fund more than just solar electric.  Solar hot-water and energy-efficiency upgrades can and should be included as well.

The game plan: The mother of all energy bills

(hat tip to Joe Romm for the title) The next big green priority after stimulus will be energy. It is possible that some of what I describe below will be broken out into separate bills — for instance, Markey and Platts in the House and Bingaman in the Senate have put forward freestanding Renewable Energy […]

Reducing regulatory interference and barriers to clean energy — all at once

Creating a 21st century electrical grid is finally a priority and the possibilities seem enormous. Despite the grand potential, though, many of the most important decisions will involve painstaking regulatory and tax reform rather than sweeping mandates. What's politically intriguing about these reforms is that at least in principle they ought to appeal across ideological lines: Conservatives like less regulation and more rational tax policy, and progressives like removing barriers to renewable energy, so this seems like fertile territory for odd bedfellows.

In that vein I recommend two pieces, both adapted from reports from the conservative Manhattan Institute.

The first is "Growing NYC's Grid," an excellent piece in the New York Post from Hope Cohen of MI's Center for Rethinking Development. It notes a simple barrier to expanding the city's grid: transformers, the facilities that take high-voltage juice from transmission lines and convert it to lower-voltage juice for distribution lines, can only be built on industrially zoned property, which is increasingly rare and expensive in urban areas.

But today's transformers are smaller, quieter, and cleaner than they were when zoning regs were passed, and can be integrated into the urban landscape. (There's one in the base of 7 World Trade Center.) A simple regulatory change -- allowing transformers in commercially zoned areas -- can boost the reliability and efficiency of NYC's power. Imagine how many more rules and laws there are like this across the country.

For more on this, see Cohen's full report, "The Neighborly Substation: Electricity, Zoning, and Urban Design."