Dingell's Deal

Everybody's trying to make sense of Congressman John Dingell's carbon/gas tax proposal. A political darling of Detroit, Dingell never met a fuel economy regulation that he didn't hate, but now here he is trying to push something as unpopular as a carbon tax? Some (including Mr. Dingell himself) have suggested that this is precisely the point; he knows the bill is going down in flames, he's just putting it out there to take attention away from CAFE regulations and, at the same time, call the green lobby's bluff. Carl Pope has some pretty savvy things to say about all this in his latest blog entry. To push the poker metaphor, he sees Dingell's bet, then shows a slightly different hand: The Sierra Club Executive Director says he wants to see both a "cap-and-auction limit on carbon" and stricter CAFE regulations.

For his part, Charles Kamanoff of the Carbon Tax Center gives, as you might expect, given the affiliation, a pretty strenuous defense of the proposed legislation at Grist. In fact, he wants the tax to be much higher -- that is, provided it's also revenue-neutral. (According to the Carbon Tax Center, this means that "little if any of the tax revenues raised by taxing carbon emissions would be retained by government. The vast majority of the revenues would be returned to the American people, with some small amount utilized to mitigate the otherwise negative impacts of carbon taxes on low-income energy users." Sounds good. Hell, it sounds great! But I suspect pandemonium hides in the details of actual implementation.) Most of the follow-up comments are positive.

For his part, Dingell says he plans to make his tax as revenue-neutral as possible, but he's not much of a salesman. What he stresses instead is pain and sacrifice:

A carbon tax is going to carry with it a lot of pain. Something's got to be done, and the only way it can be done is by conservation, forcing a change in people's attitudes and a change in the way the business of the nation is done. ... Changing the economic and personal incentives are the way you do that.

Says Grist's Dave Roberts, "I don't know what his intent is with this carbon tax bill, but I will say that the tenor of his message on global warming is politically disastrous."