Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

From the op-ed (by William G. Gale)

It would be foolish to ignore a set of options with all of these benefits, but that is exactly what policy makers are doing. Currently, tax laws not only miss huge opportunities to clean up the environment, they also actively lead to worse environmental outcomes.

The first step should be to remove subsidies that damage the environment. Federal rules provide enormous tax preferences for oil, mining, timber and sport utility vehicles, among others. These subsidies create incentives for overproduction of these goods and they stifle incentives for development of better or cleaner technologies.

Even the mortgage interest deduction is at fault. It may encourage people to build larger primary residences. As Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense points out, the deduction also applies to second homes. many of which are built in environmentally sensitive areas. A thorough cleaning of the tax code with an eye toward environmentally damaging subsidies could generate billions of dollars per year in added revenue.

All well and good, but SustainaBlog does make a few good points:

One thing that isn't mentioned here (or elsewhere, generally) is the political feasibility of such taxes, and, IMHO, they could be a relatively easy sell. Conservatives have labeled the income tax as counter-productive for years, and green fees proponents shares this belief. With high polling numbers for environmental protection, I would think that the general public would find environmental taxes appealing for a number of reasons. Of course, the corporations that stand to pay the most through such taxes would use their considerable economic resources and political weight to squelch even the discussion of such a notion. And, I have to wonder if the long phase-in period necessary to mitigate the most regressive aspects of a consumption tasks wouldn't set most Americans' eyes aglaze.

All in all, I think the idea is great, and I'm not one for tax increases. As I've said before, though, what I would like to see is a significant decrease in taxes going to the military's overexpenditures and illegal wars and a shift towards instead paying for education, healthcare, and environmental stewardship. It will be a long haul to get even our government, not even considering the difficulty with the corporations, to accept these ideas. However, if they did, I bet it would make a huge difference.