Carbon tax.

It's of a piece with the rest of his approach to problems - propose a long-run solution that involves giving lots of money to corporate interest, and that doesn't impinge on any of their current operations, and set the payoff date for long after Bush is out of office. This New Energy Subsidy is a winner on several fronts:

1) Bush gets to shovel more federal dollars to his buddies at the oil companies.

2) They don't have to change a single thing or incur a single expense in the process.

3) There'll be no oversight or accountability - five years from now, you think anyone's going to even remember that this generous cash bounty to Big Oil ever existed

4) It gives the appearance of doing something about a problem.

Of course, the downside is that nothing gets done, and the future gets even more perilous, but hey - eggs, omelets, etc.

His other big plan for energy independence was hydrogen, which was very similar to this one: same oil companies get a big subsidy to develop pie-in-the-sky technology, all while avoiding doing anything costly or inconvenient (like rasing CAFE standards) in the present. After the Sago mine collapse a few weeks ago, I remember hearing the President propose technological solutions - spend money to develop long-lasting air tanks and whatnot - instead of, you know, actually enforcing mine safety standards (which might inconvenience one of his campaign contributors) and preventing them from happening in the first place.

Nice racket there. Republican policy causing problems? Don't change anything - just throw a whole bunch more money at Republican-aligned companies to develop a vague technological fix!  

It really struck me that the "solutions" he discussed were all corporate supply-side solutions.  No mass transit.  No small-scale power generation (something vague about wind and solar).  No efficiency initiatives. As I listened, I meditated on how a short summary of this administration would be:  direct the flow of our hard-earned tax money into the pockets of corporations as efficiently as possible.  Do not worry about policy, but do worry about spin.

 

Incredible. 

I'm with Matt on it being a bad idea to hand out subsidies to alternative forms of energy (AND alternative forms of transportation, while we're at it).  By all means, let's let the market sort it out rather than have congress pick winners and losers, because if congress gets into that the 'winners' are going to be politically connected concerns snapping up big new government handouts subsidies.  We'll end up with pork in the form of unproductive research and uneconomic forms of energy (Archer Daniels Midland and ethanol from corn anyone?)  And absurdly over-priced mass-transit systems that hardly anybody rides and where revenues can't even cover operating costs let alone construction.

I'm a big fan of the driving less approach, BTW.  I do most of my work for companies thousands of miles away and commute no farther than down the stairs to my home office.  I highly recommend the savings in fossil fuels, time, and money to anyone who can work it out.  (And what percent of 'knowledge work' really *couldn't* be done wholly or mostly this way if we were all properly 'incentivized'?)

But then Matt snaps back into lefty mode and seems to equate 'stopping subsidies to oil companies' and 'raising gas taxes' as if the two were one in the same.  Now, I think a carbon tax (not a gas tax) would be a good idea.  But the abscence of a carbon tax is not a 'subsidy' to greedy oil companies.

 

 

The debate over market-based solutions versus direct environmental regulations is for some reason stuck in a pre-Clinton-era time warp.  Once upon a time, liberal supported retaining direct environmental regulation and conservatives argued that such regulations were inefficient compared to market based solutions. The wonks of the Clinton adminsitration, however, embraced market-based incentives.  The doomed BTU tax is long forgotten, but it was the only serious effort made in the past twenty years to corral energy consumption. 

Once liberals embraced market-based incentives, conservatives suddenly grew cool to the idea.  Conservative support for market-based incentives has been exposed time and time again as merely a cover for deregulation.  

Bush's people have done a brilliant job of making it appear like he is now serious about energy policy reform - getting the line about America's addiction to oil on the front page of every paper.  Dems need to launch a massive counter-offensive, pointing out at every opportunity that Bush's proposals are little more than paper promises, rather than a serious approach to the problem.

I think higher taxes on gas at the pump would be more than sufficient to cause the market to adjust itself. The problem is that this is also the least politically popular way to go about things.

The good news is that higher prices will occur regardless of whether new taxes are imposed, so the market will have to find alternatives anyway.