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Opinion | Climate Politics Are Worse Than You Think [1]
['Paul Krugman']
Date: 2022-07-18
Let’s talk about the political economy of climate policy.
It has long been painfully obvious that voters are reluctant to accept even small short-run costs in the interest of averting long-run disaster. This is depressing, but it’s a fact of life, one that no amount of haranguing seems likely to change. This is why I’ve long been skeptical of the position, widely held among economists, that a carbon tax — putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions — has to be the central plank of climate policy. It’s true that emission taxes are the Econ 101 solution to pollution, but realistically they just aren’t going to happen in America.
The good news is that spectacular technological progress in renewable energy may offer a foundation for an alternative political strategy, one based on carrots rather than sticks. The idea — which underlay President Biden’s Build Back Better plan — was to rely not on taxes but on subsidies and public investment to encourage a transition to clean energy. That way climate action could be framed not as sacrifice but as opportunity, a way to create jobs wrapped up in a broader program of much-needed public investment.
The theory, which I naïvely subscribed to, was that such a strategy, while it might be less efficient than one centered on carbon taxes, would be much easier to sell to the American people and that there would be at least a few Republican politicians willing to sign on to policies that promised concrete rewards for workers, contractors and so on without imposing new burdens on their constituents.
But Republicans — and, of course, Manchin — were unmoved. I don’t think they were solely motivated by the desire to see Biden fail. They’re just deeply hostile to clean energy.
There’s an obvious parallel between the politics of green energy and the politics of Covid-19. Many people chafed at the restrictions imposed to limit the pandemic’s spread; even mask requirements involve a bit of inconvenience. But vaccination seemed to offer a win-win solution, letting Americans protect themselves as well as others. Who could possibly object?
The answer was much of the G.O.P. Vaccination became and remains an intensely partisan issue, with deadly consequences: Death rates since vaccines became widely available have been far higher in strongly Republican areas than in Democratic areas.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/opinion/climate-politics-manchin.html
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