From: llueker@sdcc3.ucsd.edu (Lorna Lueker)
Newsgroups: ca.environment
Subject: Re: Gas Tax Debate on NPR
Date: 30 Jul 92 23:29:46 GMT
Distribution: ca
Organization: University of California, San Diego

[Ely Rabani here, via a different, functioning, account.  Reply to
erabani@ucsd.edu or rabani@sdbio1.ucsd.edu, not llueker@sdcc3.]

In article <14ro5hINNrl1@hal.com> howard@hal.com (Howard Gayle) writes:
>
>Can anyone offer any evidence that politicians and bureaucrats
>will "do the right thing," especially if "the public at large"
>won't?  Both public choice theory and history show that
>politicians will try to allocate resources to further their own
>interests.  If wise and benevolent beings were available to
>allocate fossil fuels, that would solve the problem.
>Unfortunately, the only choice is between having the consumers
>do it (i.e. a free market) and having the politicians and
>bureaucrats do it.
>--
>Howard Gayle

Every now and then, policiticians an bureaucrats blunder or
otherwise settle on something remotely like 'the right thing', but
that's not exactly the right issue.  History also shows us that they
can be dragged into doing sensible things.  Nixon, for instance,
signed some (then) quite progressive environmental legislation.  But
rather than specific evidence, let's concern ourselves with
paradigms of social action--limiting ourselves to only that which
history provides example for is perhaps as likely to doom us to
repetition as is ignorance.  

In terms of paradigms, there are at least a few problems with HG's analysis:

1.  The fossil fuels market as it stands now is nothing remotely
like a free market.  Most large suppliers collude/cooperate on
pricing and supply (OPEC), and significant direct and indirect
subsidies externalize and otherwise redistribute the cost of use.
Further, as is well established, the availability of alternative
energies and alternate modes of transportation have been directly
and indirectly suppressed.  Especially in light of this latter
point, just imagine the howls raised and the distortion to the
general U.S. economy in which $0.25 of every $1 spent is spent on
transportation, if truly free-market principles were imposed on the
energy and transportation systems.  

2.  Even in the free market approach advocated, there are a number
of conditionalites that affect a consumer's choices or options, such
as the kind of car they drive or the local availability/degree of
convenience of mass transportation.  Note that an individual can't
EFFECTIVELY avoid externalizing environmental costs--even if
contributing to the Nature Conservancy or buying a relatively
cleaner car are options--because these externalized costs have much
more to do with the fact that everyone is taking part in a *system*
that externalizes costs and no individual exertion can have more than the most
infinitessimal marginal effect. (Note that this is not an argument
agains such exertions as desirable and perhaps necessary--the point
is  that they are in no way sufficient.)  HG's prefered course assumes  
that individuals--specifically assumed to greater or lesser extent
to be maximizing their narrow, individual interests--will
effectively be able, if they really try hard, to preserve common
goods.  We've heard that song before.  Notice that no municipality
leaves trash collection or sewage to the viscitudes of market
economics or to the choice of individuals (whether or not they
charge user fees based on volume or access.)   

3.  While it is in large measure true that politicians and
bureaucrats (far from monolithic groups in any case) will allocate
those resources they weild influence over in manners that promote
and further thier own interests, those specific interests are
neither fixed nor unalterable.  One way such interests might change
would be strict curtailment of private/corporate/PAC campaign
contributions.  Another would be an informed, concerned, educated
and actually thinking electorate.  At present we have the results of
(quite literally, if one examines federal policy, strategic reserves
and their justification, and--oh yes--military adventurism in the
Persian Gulf) military-industrial complex influence on what is
essentially an oligopoly of producers.  So, HG is right that
politicians and bureaucrats may have a perniscious effect on the
energy and transporations systems, but this doesn't mean that they
necessarily will in all possible circumstances--free market or
otherwise.  Without selecting specific cases, it's clear that most
European countries have saner transportation policies, both from the
point of view of moving people and goods, and of at least slightly
mitigating environmental impact. 

4.  HG includes the conditionality that politicians and bureucrats
aren't to be expected to do the right thing especially if the public
at large won't.  But (a.) the public at large hasn't exactly been
offered the opportunity--since options are considerably
circumscribed and again frustrated by the disconnect between
individual actions and collective outcomes and (b.) for the most
part we only get to vote for representatives and not commissioners
or Department Secretaries:  voting is a package deal, which
considerably limits those options at least as much as sound bites
and the one-party-two-right-wing system does.  So it's not exactly a
failure of individual self-discipline we're dealing with.  The
structure of the game provides disincentives to politicians and
bureaucrats to 'do the right thing' except under extremes of public
attention and the attendant embarassment, and the structure of the
game for individuals either as voters or as consumers is far from
that which permits comprehensive analysis or enlightened choices.
Solutions are therefore not to be expected within any of these three
games, separately or in aggregate, but (if at all) through changes
in the structure of each of these games.  


---

Which brings me to the findings of the Energy Modelling Forum, a
group of mostly economists, *funded mostly by the Fossil Fuels
industries and the DoE*, which were recently reported on NPR's
'Living On Earth'.  Their findings were that the economic impact of
a Carbon Tax were far smaller than argued by the Bush Admistration
(and their sponsors...) could be reduced further if phazed in--all
ignoring any stimulation to the economy that might be effected with
the revenue thus collected.  The group is to formally announce its
findings in September, according to the report, timed intentionally
in advance of the election.

Ely.