The Biden Administration just approved ConocoPhillips’ Willow project, a huge oil drilling enterprise on Alaska’s North Slope. The Climate Reality Project, one of the climate groups I follow, described it in a statement by Al Gore, its Founder and Chairman, as “recklessly irresponsible” because of its threat to native Alaskan communities and its incompatibility with the goal of a net zero future. The Climate Reality Project’s response is to fire up a campaign to stop the drilling.
Each effort to shut down a project builds a cadre of activists but each individual effort has to be repeated endlessly. I’m frustrated. It’s time to turn to a carbon or petroleum tax large enough to discourage drilling, refining and selling the stuff.
Will it cost us money? Someone will pay, of course. But that’s the point – in order to turn us away from carbon-based fuels and plastics, we need to make it painful to invest in and buy those products. The most effective way is to impose an across-the-board cost to discourage the drilling, refining and use of the stuff; otherwise these projects keep popping up and new equally obnoxious uses of petroleum keep hounding us and testing our resilience in stopping them.
Can we do that and still lead decent lives? Of course we can. Targeted tax relief can balance the cost so people’s incomes are fine but they still have a financial incentive to avoid oil and gas because the tax would make the alternatives cheaper. And we can control the prices consumers pay with direct controls to stop price increases cold, or impose excess profits taxes to discourage oil companies from milking us for what we need to put in our gas tanks, all in addition to the market’s reaction to higher taxes on fossil-based fuels.
What did we do? Instead of taking action targeted against oil and gas, which underlie much of the problem of inflation, Congress and the Federal Reserve have been lumping it into inflation generally, slowing the entire economy by raising interest rates which get in the way of all efforts to make goods available more cheaply. That puts the burden on working people, drives many out of jobs, leaving them desperate for ways to survive, and puts pressure on the wages of those on the bottom of the income scale so the whole burden of countering inflation, oil and gas included, is on the most vulnerable, many of whom are essential workers that we all depend on. Pardon my sarcasm but how nice and fair. And it does nothing to solve or even lessen the damage of carbon-based fuels.
The only question is our will to solve the problem. If we’re not willing to tax ourselves and our suppliers, then we’re not willing to save ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. What kind of parents and grandparents are we if we won’t lift a finger to protect our offspring?
The alternative is extinction – the extinction of our children and grandchildren, indeed of the human race. It’s time to stop this profit-based carnage.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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