Global Warming Response

Time for a carbon tax?

It balms my bleeding liberal heart to witness a conservative president from Texas and a Republican governor of California promoting renewable energy. Also known as alternative energy, it was widely advocated by environmentalists after the 1970s energy crisis and heartily embraced by President Jimmy Carter and Gov. Jerry Brown. But President Bush’s oil-patch friends ridiculed renewable energy as impractical, and it faded from the national agenda during the Reagan years — to be resurrected only recently. Perhaps the time has finally come to revive yet another radical idea: a carbon tax, which charges anyone who burns fossil fuels for the problems that ensue.


Of course, the word “tax” sends shudders across the political spectrum, but it shouldn’t, especially when the only good alternative is another hot-button word, “subsidy.”

During the late 1970s, tax credits and other subsidies encouraged ill-considered technologies, such as solar-heating panels on roofs, that didn’t make much economic sense. Some renewable-energy advocates argued that governments should not subsidize any sources of energy — whether fossil fuel, solar, wind, biofuels or nuclear. Just get out of the economic way and let market forces determine the outcome — and penalize detrimental energy sources by taxing them accordingly.

Today, a different dynamic is operating. Global warming, then regarded as a distant possibility, is widely accepted in scientific — and, increasingly, business — circles as a looming threat that we must confront. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a majority of the U.S. population regards global warming as fact, caused by human introduction of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. All of us are contributing by burning fossil fuels, and we are just beginning to witness the terrible consequences.

San Francisco Chronicle