Gas prices plummet, gas-tax talk escalates, but climate angle mostly undiscussed
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8093
A gas tax constitutes a carbon tax. A carbon tax figures prominently among measures proposed to combat climate change. Yet the current public debate about raising the federal gas tax involves only limited discussion of the climate dimension.
On 5 January AAA reported that the national average gasoline price has fallen for a record 102 days and noted that the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax hasn’t changed since the early 1990s. Online at NBC, the posting “Gas tax hike support rises as prices fall” never mentions the word “climate” or the phrase “global warming” but reports what’s being widely discussed: “The idea of boosting the current rate has become Washington’s latest political football, as proponents argue that consumers can absorb the hike, and that the money is needed to fund improvements to roads, bridges and tunnels.”
A National Journal headline sums up something else that’s being widely observed: “Gas tax hike looking more palatable to Republicans.” That’s a “shift in Republicans’ tone,” says the political publication The Hill in an article containing this situation-summarizing excerpt:
“I just think that option is there, it’s clearly one of the options,” said Sen. Inhofe (R-Okla.), new chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the third-ranking Senate Republican, also said they were open to the possibility of raising the tax.
Democratic leaders in both chambers of Congress, meanwhile, declared this week that “now is the time” for an increase.
While major obstacles stand in the way—namely the House of Representatives—business groups believe there is a real chance to raise the tax in the final two years of the Obama administration.
Neither article mentions climate. It also stays unmentioned in reports on the new gas-tax debate at Fox News and the Wall Street Journal , media organizations that have had plenty to say about the climate wars. USA Today omitted the public tax debate’s climate dimension from a January news report and from a December editorial endorsing the tax boost, though an October editorial had mentioned it.
At the New York Times, the news and science-news pages report regularly on what the Times as an institution sees as the planet’s climate crisis. Yet a July 2014 editorial —from before the gas-price fall—called for a tax increase purely on infrastructure grounds. The Times‘s 11 January editorial called for an increase on grounds of infrastructure, the federal budget, “and, to the extent that higher taxes encourage greater fuel efficiency, for the climate.” But that was the only climate mention.
A June 2014 Los Angeles Times editorial urged that the gas tax be raised, but left climate unmentioned. So did Washington Post editorials in July , October , November and January .
Even Investor’s Business Daily left the climate dimension unaddressed. IBD editors not only reject scientists’ climate consensus, they mock it . A recent IBD opinion piece opened by charging that “fearmongering ... churns the global warming, or, rather, climate change hysteria” while “reality continues to show that the ‘settled science’ is anything but settled and is actually closer to a lie agreed upon.” Yet a recent IBD editorial never touched on climate in the process of condemning a gas-tax boost as “a truly awful idea” that “might get Republicans kicked out of office” if they support it.
At the business site Forbes.com , though, a piece strongly opposing any hike explicitly brought in the environmental angle:
High gasoline prices are ... the darling of environmental activist groups. [They] claim America is the prime boogeyman in an asserted (but still nonexistent) global warming crisis. Sending gasoline prices through the roof, environmental activist groups argue, will make it very difficult for Americans to drive much, which will in turn lower our carbon dioxide emissions.
The climate dimension has also been addressed in a few other places. Not surprisingly, a 12 January headline at Scientific American emphasized the implications: “Cheap oil means raise the gas T-word: Low oil prices present an opportunity to come to grips with our crumbling infrastructure and the cost of climate change.”
But maybe somewhat surprisingly, conservative Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer cited the climate implications in a call not just for a gas-tax boost but for a big one that would be offset by a cut in the Social Security tax. Recently in his column, he observed that “lower consumption reduces pollution and greenhouse gases” and that “even for global warming skeptics, there’s no reason not to welcome a benign measure that induces prudential reductions in CO2 emissions.” He was echoing himself from six years ago, when his lengthy pro-gas-tax essay in the conservative Weekly Standard included this:
As the consumer market adjusts itself to more fuel-efficient autos, the green car culture of the future that environmentalists are attempting to impose by decree begins to shape itself unmandated. This shift has the collateral environmental effect of reducing pollution and CO2 emissions, an important benefit for those who believe in man-made global warming and a painless bonus for agnostics (like me) who nonetheless believe that the endless pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing.
Unsurprising, but well worth noting about a gas-tax debate that’s short on climate talk, is a recent Financial Times piece by Harvard professor, president emeritus, and former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers. He argued that plummeting oil prices elevate a “compelling” case for carbon taxes into an “overwhelming” one. Somewhat like Krauthammer, he advocates that the proceeds “be split between investments in infrastructure and pro-work tax credits.” He emphasizes that the “core of the case for taxation is the recognition that those who use carbon-based fuels or products do not bear all the costs of their actions” and that “carbon emissions exacerbate the global climate change problem.”
Summers ends by seeking agreement from all sides:
Progressives who are concerned about climate change should rally to a carbon tax as the most important step for mobilising against it. Conservatives who believe in the power of markets should favour carbon taxes on market principles. And Americans who want to see their country lead on the energy and climate issues that are crucial to the world this century should want to be in the vanguard on carbon taxes. Now is the time.
On 15 January, the opinion editors at the Wall Street Journal added their voices to the debate. They forcefully condemned the gas tax itself and called not for raising it but for abolishing it. Neither the word “climate” nor the phrase “global warming” appears in their editorial .
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.