It’s not just how much solar and wind power we use; it’s how much fossil fuel we burn. There is no substitute for shutting down the pumps, refineries and pipelines. But will the world deal with it before the heating earth kills us all. The only real solution is to stop it. Government isn’t the enemy – it’s the only real tool to protect ourselves from a quick trip to hell.
But how? The choices are to prohibit, restrict, penalize or encourage.
We’ve been arguing about new drilling and pipelines. But would it help to prohibit or block them? The answer isn’t obvious. Economics can’t be confined to a single site, place or product. People can buy from or invest in other places. Blocking or restricting production of oil and gas in the US may not mean less worldwide production, and will the oil and gas produced pollute more. Globalization has left us with world markets to contend with. We have relatively little control over what is done outside our borders. Even import restrictions don’t necessarily reduce worldwide pollution. That would require restrictions that affect the entire process, not just the portion we import, and it’s harder to do outside our borders. We could regulate and encourage cleaner production within our borders but that will work best if coupled with tariffs to balance any added costs of regulated domestic production.
That’s one reason I have supported taxing fossil fuels. Taxing them could not only encourage the switch to solar, wind and other clean energy, but also, and more importantly, reduce the actual use of fossil fuels. Rising energy demand can block reduction in the use of fossil fuels regardless of our production and consumption of more clean energy. The advantage of taxes is to discourage the use of fossil fuels across the board, including discouraging new demand for fuels that cannot be met by clean energy.
Inflation in fuel prices could have done that, of course, but our political system had little appetite for that solution. We could have adjusted the general level of taxation of the bottom half of the population so people could pay those prices. Again the political system did not respond that way. And we could make investments to keep up the levels of employment and wages if inflation, or anything else, threaten those. In that area, the Biden Administration did make an effort but the political system continues to fall far short of the needs of working-class Americans.
The third choice is to encourage the shift out of oil and gas. Here, the Biden Administration and many of the states have encouraged investment in alternative fuels but it’s clearly not enough.
The consequences of climate change are huge – drought and fires, especially in the West, floods on the coasts, tornadoes inland, death by hotter weather than many humans can survive, and the expenses of dealing with it all. Global warming is not a choice without costs – in facts the costs are enormous – the costs of air conditioning, hospitalization, home insurance or living without it, the costs of becoming refugees in our own land. It’s not just over there somewhere – I know people who’ve been affected, maybe you do too, and the problem is just getting worse.
Of course we might kill each other first fighting over access to power. But attacking global warming would be much more humane and better for all of us. There are ways to discourage the use of fossil fuels and we need to use them all.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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