I don't agree with everything Jim Manzi says here, but his discussion of the political difficulties facing a carbon tax strikes me as spot-on. So much as such a levy -- particularly combined with some income tax rebate to offset regressivity -- might be a good, or even necessary, idea, I can't figure out the constituency for it. Intellectuals? Economists? Urban residents interested in the subsidy? Which one of these groups brings you to 60 in the Senate? Which one gets Congressmen to vote for higher gas prices? For these reasons, I'm a huge global warming pessimist. I don't think we will do nearly enough, nearly quickly enough. My hunch is that the best chance would be for some President to try and evade the political process by creating an actually bipartisan coalition whose recommendations a critical mass of Senators agree, preemptively, to support. If both parties made the case that this was world historic enough to require drastic action, there'd be no one for voters to blame. So long as one party or the other is willing to seek electoral advantage from the coming climatological catastrophe, however, short term political interests will continually trump the continuing health of the planet.
