environment

The brewing scandal regarding Solyndra is an opportunity to consider which roles the federal government can and should play in developing alternative energy and which roles it should not.  Take as a starting point the friendly column by Joe Nocera in Friday's New York Times:

But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse. Thus, the real question the Solyndra case poses is this: Are the potential successes significant enough to negate the inevitable failures?

I've noticed recently two pieces on choices that are environmentally friendly that I thought were worth comment.  The first is from Jonah Goldberg's National Review Online post, "Oil: The Real Green Fuel."  The part that caught my attention was this:

Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don’t use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.

“If you like wilderness, as I do,” [author Matt] Ridley writes, “the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power.”

From time to time, I have mentioned a "Green Tax Swap" as an appropriate policy to raise the price of carbon emissions while protecting lower-income workers from the higher costs of the carbon-intensive goods and services that they consume.  Gib Metcalf provides a good discussion of implementation and distributional consequences here.  Some new research by Don Fullerton and Holly Monti suggests that it would be more difficult than is presently believed to make the swap distributionally neutral.  Here's the abstract:

Writing in The American, Lee Lane points out some of the irony in the way the Republicans have been criticizing cap-and-trade proposals:

President Obama and his allies are promoting a tool for GHG control that is distinctly more costly than a simple carbon tax. Yet most Republican congressmen and conservative pundits, instead of pointing out that a tax would be a far better option, are hard at work trying wrongly to convince voters that the current plan is a tax.

He also points out some of the political issues surrounding climate legislation, particularly committee assignments and jurisdiction:

The organization of the Congress is the source of part of the explanation. The congressional committees with jurisdiction over pollution control are not the ones that write taxes. And these committees have little interest in transferring jurisdiction to the tax-writing committees.