Cap and Trade to Support the Commons

Awhile back I wrote a column for the Science Creative Quarterly titled The Tragedy of the Commons Explained with Smurfs. It was easily the most buzzed-up thing I’ve every written, earning lots of praise from scientists who understood the reality, and lots of scorn from economists, who are easily offended by reality and prefer to believe in invisible hands. The Tragedy of the Commons is the phenomenon where people will exploit a natural resource until it is completely gone and no one may use it any longer, be it oil, fish, clean water, or air. We can see it all around us, and occasionally we institute measures to conserve those resources. That’s what Cap and Trade is all about, making companies factor in the environmental costs selling their product places on all of us through increasing global temperatures.

Sarah Palin’s Washington Post column The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End argues that taxing the oil industry for carbon emissions will bring economic disaster. Instead, we should emulate her state:

In Alaska, we are progressing on the largest private-sector energy project in history. Our 3,000-mile natural gas pipeline will transport hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of our clean natural gas to hungry markets across America. We can safely drill for U.S. oil offshore and in a tiny, 2,000-acre corner of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if ever given the go-ahead by Washington bureaucrats.

The hypocrisy of Palin’s column is that her own state of Alaska profits from a system based on the same principle as cap and trade. Alaskan residents each receive $2,000 a year in return for letting the oil industry have its way with their natural resources. Governor Palin even instituted a windfall tax on oil companies, which the state government turned into an additional $1,200 check to each Alaskan to help them cope with gas prices. What does it say about Palin’s character that she is able to criticize Americans for demanding compensation for the environmental consequences brought on by corporations, while demanding the exact same compensation for her own constituents?

Aral Sea 1989 – 2003 Photo courtesy NASA

Whenever I hear someone complain: Why should I have to pay for someone else’s [Fill in the Blank]??? be it Health Care, Welfare, Public Education, or what-have-you, I immediately wonder why I should have to pay for everyone else’s simple carbohydrates and red-meat addictions through farming subsidies, 12-lane highways so people can take their cars to work rather than take a train, or economic stimulus to preserve the wealth of bankers so the rest of us won’t suffer from their irresponsibility. All of these government expenditures are subsidies, paying for conveniences. We are all paying for one another’s modern lifestyle; we are all on welfare.

But who pays for the mercury saturation rendering fish poisonous from Coal Power plants? Who pays for the expanding dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms flowing into it from the Mississippi River? Who pays for the collapsing fish stocks brought on by over-fishing, which impact all other life in the food chain, including ourselves? Who pays for the uninhabitable desert wasteland produced when farmers drain a sea to irrigate their crops?

Aral Sea Today Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

Anthropogenic Climate Change contributes to all of these deleterious phenomenons, costing people all over the world billions to adapt to the new environment. In addition to exorbitant prices at the pump, the oil companies are also charging us the environmental costs of their industry. They then turn around and spend this savings on distorting science through advertising campaigns and lobbying politicians to write columns and pass legislation defending their industry. There is no injustice in having them put that money towards helping the world clean up the mess our collective oil addiction has made of it. Injustice would be allowing them to push that cost off on us.