Gar, I know someone that works for one of the big banks selling those card type programs to government... he'll love your idea, it's very profitable for them.

As to the price not being a huge incentive. I agree elasticity is about   50%. So price incentives by themselves don't work well, since you have to have a price increase about twice the size the cost of the saving - meaning regulations and public works provide the same savings less expensively.

The reasons you still have to have price increases is industry. In buildings, and transportation you have really clear metrics to measure the success of rule based regulation. Consumption per square foot, or per person in buildings. Consumption per passenger mile or ton mile in transportation.  But think of the variety of processes used in industry, the variety of products produced, and the variety of intermediate inputs. While there are a few processes common to all industries (boilers, motors, pumps and such) where regulation or subsidy might be effective, you need a carbon price to drive industrial efficiency. And once you have a carbon price in one sector, you need it across the board or enforcement becomes a nightmare.

Reasons other reasons you will want a carbon price:

1. While regulations and public investment can encourage efficiency and renewables, conservation (things like driving less as opposed to buying more efficient cars)  only respond to higher prices.

2. Having price signals as reinforcement will lower enforcement costs for regulation, and reduce the need for micromanagement.

3. Elasticity is not a fixed number. It responds to circumstances. In the presence of a robust public works program and strong regulations, you may get better responses to price signals.

2) maybe regulation will be reduced, but that still could be a big burden on the lower 80% -- I'd still rather take the money from the rich and powerful.

The way I'm trying to cut this gordian knot is to step back and ask, "How do we give people alternatives to various carbon-intensive technologies so that we don't have to price them out of using them".  

1)Large scale public investment funded by cuts in the military budget

2)Regulations so that we don't have to fund every frickin thing publicly and so that we have some standards for the success of our public investments.

3)Price signals to encourage industrial efficiency, because we can't measure it easily enough for public investment or rule based regulation, and (since we have to have them anyway) to reinforce progress elsewhere. The revenue from a carbon price should be rebated back to the public to avoid it being regressive.

That is in fact a policy at the expense of the rich and power. It is also a policy that, by using all three tools available for change, encourages the maximum rate of progress.

You haven't considered that any means of controlling energy and fossil fuels should be (4) regulated by regulating the companies, refiners, importers, and Big Oil - as opposed to taxing the people.  Several studies have noted that previous regulation of Big Oil dropped the amount of capital for new exploration and new rigs.  It was considered bad back then but might appeal to you these days as an effective way to reduce fossil fuel mining and extraction.  

Unfortunately that tactic also has issues, since (5) many Big Oil and Dirty Coal companies are investing in clean power of some kind, even if it involves hanging out at the government trough.  

So it's complicated machinery but I don't see how or why one should slap a tax on the consumers, especially in a recession when we're giving away free money.  /sam

Onward through the fog

6 kwh in a plugin car= one gallon of gas in a regular gas guzzler, in terms of miles.  So give the plugin hybrid driver 5 cents per kwh in subsidy.  That is equivalent to a subsidy of 30 cents for every gallon of gas saved by the plugin hybrid.

Take the 30 cents per gallon away from big oil company subsidies, that they no longer need due to soaring gas prices and profits.

They will pass that price on to consumers, calling it a tax.  After all the gas in the country suddenly rises by the same amount, right after the subsidy cuts are enacted, lower the boom.  With massive anti-trust enforcement on the multinational oil mob.

Use the 2 by 4 at the end of the process, instead of the start.  Oily billionaires like the Sauds and Bushes will get it right between the eyes.  Poor billionaires.

The best cushioning for the poor would be a rise in minimum wage, green jobs, and a tax rebate for all the local sales taxes they pay and hidden sales tax passed on by mega business.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

But with the reality that we have started paying, over the last 3 years, an additional $1.00-per-gallon -- with most of the profits being sent to fine, upstanding countries like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iran, UAE, and Russia -- the media seem pretty sanguine, and our economy (until now) seemed to muddle along just fine.

The irony continues to amuse me.  Namely: taxing ourselves in order to plow that money back into sensible, long-term improvements of our infrastructure is unacceptable, a non-starter.  But (effectively) taxing ourselves in order to plow our money into the economies of foreign despots -- that's OK.

"We may hit peak oil in the course of the next three, four or five years, in which case $100 oil will look somewhat quaint,'' Alfa Bank's Moscow-based Head of Research Ronald Smith said in an interview with Bloomberg television

And if Alaka politicians are any guide, the oil and gas industry trump global warming (and the survival of the polar bear) every time.

Better in my view to design a combined global warming/oil depletion initiative through the United Nations. Ration oil to cap the cost, (otherwise more and more of U.S. GDP will be exiting the country). Reduce the allowances 3-5% by country according to the global depletion rate each year. Give everyone an ATM card and enable them to trade carbon.

When oil is $200 and $300 a barrel, adding a carbon tax or enacting cap-n-trade will be politically difficult, to say the least. And with supplies being as tight as they are, we are all vulnerable to oil shortages. We need plans in place so everyone can get food and warmth, as well as getting to work.

2. Structural change. The political economy of the future will require radical reorganisation in its use of space and distance; it will develop the "proximity principle", which requires goods and services to be produced close to where they are needed; it will move towards localisation. Examples: local food production; local generation and distribution of energy; localities enriched economically, socially and culturally to the point where they can provide most of their needs from local resources.
The transport-dependent systems of today will become obsolete, as our society evolves and reorganises itself for a more rational use of land.page 24

This is interesting to me, because it actually gets back to transit and walkable communities; butg it also means that there may be a more social aspect to this than a teqs or any other market-based scheme, in other words, people will have to work collectively to rework the structure that the teqs people are talking about(and by the way, David Fleming has always seemed to me to be very worth listening to).

Now, as to questions: apparently the energy units would be embodied in goods and services consumers use: so the price would rise for these, which to me is similar to a tax, and falls more heavily on the poor.  The second thing that occurs to me is that, if equitably distributed throughout the world, it would involve a huge redistribution of wealth to poor, carbon-nonintensive countries; which might not be a bad thing, but it has to be dealt with.  And finally, is this similar to athanasiou's ecoequity idea?