Some problems sound very different but have a great deal in common.
Capitalism has been taking advantage of lower fuel costs from wind and solar power to withdraw from coal. That’s important for the environment. But it leaves miners looking for new jobs.
Rising gas prices discourage the use of fossil fuels which, like coal, damage the environment and accelerate global warming. But they stress some budgets.
Rising meat prices discourage the most environmentally damaging part of the food chain, partly because of the resulting greenhouse gases. Feeding corn to cattle, so people can eat beef, burns an enormous amount of energy for the calories we get. But those prices support the people who grow the corn and the cattle.
Driving cars into big city traffic jams spews greenhouse gas into the environment that congestion pricing could mitigate. But some people would have to make major changes to get into the cities.
Notice that all those problems contrast the benefits with the harm of rising prices on goods or behavior that cause environmental damage. What, if anything, should we do about that?
First, many of those conflicts can be resolved or mitigated in the tax system, protecting those whose income makes change hard while letting rising prices push us to better solutions. It’s important to let higher prices drive us away from bad climate choices whether in fuel or groceries. But we can use the tax system to distribute and share the burden. What we can’t do is let demand for lower prices drive us to global disaster.
Problems, like rising prices, that are almost entirely financial can be straightforwardly handled with tax breaks for those who would be injured, without eliminating the incentive of rising prices to shift toward more environmentally friendly behavior.
Some problems are more difficult. Forcing people to move to find decent new homes or jobs is not a trivial problem. It creates problems for all of us. Instability in our communities and personal relationships tears apart our support groups, networks, business partners, clients, customers and other relationships. And it tears apart the personal ties that keep us behaving at our best. It puts us in a sea of people we don’t know and often don’t trust. Moving is hard. We’ve seen many marriages torn apart because one partner settled into a new work community and the other was left at sea.
So we have a dual problem. We must not give up on meeting the challenge of global warming. But we shouldn’t simply flip the bird at those who lose out because of the changing economy. So, what can we do where changes in the tax system are insufficient?
We can try to provide or stimulate good new jobs that contribute to a better environment as the Biden Administration has been trying to do. We can try to encourage putting those jobs near where the now defunct ones were. And government can and has located facilities where people need jobs.
My final point is about environmental justice: all of us have the right to expect everyone to share in the costs of dealing with global warming, whether they move, stay or change other behaviors. What we cannot do is just stand pat. None of us should expect to be immune from sharing the cost – from taxes to relocation or rebuilding.
If we are going to help people stay in or move back into areas prone to environmental disaster, the rest of us have a right to insist that rebuilt areas contribute to improvements in the climate, not make things worse.
We can improve the transportation system to help people get to jobs, but we have a right to insist on doing it in ways that reduce global warming.
We’re all in this together.
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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