"Pay me now or pay me later"
by Tom Sullivan
Fram oil filters for decades ran TV commercials featuring auto mechanics touting the basic economics of preventative maintenance. Pay a little now to maintain your car or pay a whole lot later to repair it when things break. That message went down the memory hole in Washington what seems ages ago.
Economists long have seen carbon pricing as the most efficient way for reducing greenhouse gases that induce global warming. The problem is, as the old joke suggests, efficient is not necessarily effective. Actually getting things done gets lost in our obsession with getting them done in the most efficient manner possible.
Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican climate official with years spent as a United Nations climate official, tells David Leonhardt, “An economist would probably argue that the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gases is to put a price on carbon. But efficient is not always what can be attained from a political perspective. I would rather move now on what we can do than wait for economists’ perfection.”
What once seemed like an idea that could draw bipartisan support is dead, Leonhardt explains, because stalled earnings mean voters have less tolerance for costs added to their energy bills, and because increasingly tribal Republicans reject bipartisan compromises "as a matter of course." Pressing a few states to adopt more clean energy — performance standards — may be less efficient, but may actually produce better results and leverage Washington from the outside. Tom Steyer's NextGen is focused on results.
Leonhardt writes:
The key political advantage is that performance standards focus voters on the end goal, rather than on the technocratic mechanism for achieving it. Carbon pricing puts attention on the mechanism, be it a dreaded tax or a byzantine cap-and-trade system. Mechanisms don’t inspire people. Mechanisms are easy to caricature as big-government bureaucracy. Think about the debate over Obamacare: When the focus was on mechanisms — insurance mandates, insurance exchanges and the like — the law was not popular. When the focus shifted to basic principles — Do sick people deserve health insurance? — the law became much more so.What's in it for me? is what voters need to know, not just how do we get there and how much will it cost. Framing is key. Steyer's group focused on getting clean energy initiatives on the ballot in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada. In the Nevada case:
The messages were simple and powerful. They focused on the immediate benefits from clean-energy use, like fewer health problems, lower medical costs and more jobs that pay well. As Steyer said to me, “If you don’t talk about health issues and jobs, then you’ve got nothing to talk about.” In one ad, a white-coat-clad doctor in Carson City describes the damage air pollution does to the lungs and brains of her patients in northern Nevada. “It’s just a disaster, health-wise,” she says. In another ad, a woman named Jennifer Cantley becomes teary-eyed when talking about having to check the air quality each day before letting her son, who has asthma, go outside to play with his friends.Opposition did not evaporate, but the initiative passed 59 percent to 41 percent.