Originally published on Forbes.com.
The Peoples Climate March made for quite a weekend. Saturday evening I was at a rooftop party, where somebody from the Union of Concerned Scientists was chiding me about the amount of climate change denial on forbes.com. Who knew? Once again my influence is vastly overrated. Sleeping on an air mattress in my son’s dorm was a real throwback experience.
Then it was up early this morning for the opening ceremonies which were run by indigenous people. I learned that sitting there in the south end of Central Park, I was in Lenape country. Apparently, they always checks with the original owners before hosting a ceremony. There was a lot of facing in the four cardinal directions and they were on the ball enough to know that uptown is not exactly north (look at a map sometime).
Unlike religious ceremonies I was familiar with as a little kid, there was a lot of participation by women. On the other hand, on the familiar side, there was incense, people talking in languages most of the crowd did not understand and some genuflecting. Actually everybody else was doing full kneeling, but I stuck with genuflecting, to avoid having trouble getting up again.
It was actually pretty inspiring.
My travelling companions who are serious journalists abandoned me, so I had to find a group to march with. I managed to disorient myself pretty effectively, but then saw somebody with an appropriate t-shirt, who looked like he knew where he was going.
Fred Loeb of Next Step Living said that I would be welcome to join his company’s group. Fred had driven from Sictuate Mass to Westchester County, taken a train to Grand Central and then walked uptown to where we happened to meet. If that 20 city blocks to a mile rule is true, he had already hiked nearly two miles and it took us a bit more to find his group at Central Park West and 78th street.
Fred’s company helps consumers realize energy savings both through conservation measures and alternatives such as heat pumps and solar. Part of the way they do it is by helping them navigate the various subsidies including tax credits. As the guys started talking about the travails of selling the systems to homeowners I could not help but think of the movie Tin Men.
Of course this inevitably invoked an even darker movie about sales.
Just behind us was a large sign saying that capitalism had failed the planet. What was really ironic was that I was hanging with folks from a highly entrepreneurial company who are thinking that their type of capitalism might save the planet.
I spoke with the Geoff Chapin, the founder of CEO on Next Step. What Geoff thinks would really make things happen is a carbon tax.
The tax would be applied at the point of extraction or as the fuel is shipped into the country. It could be applied either to reduce other taxes or create a per capita rebate to help people to deal with the added cost of, well, just about everything. Probably the item that has the most emotional impact on a lot of us is the effect on the price of gassing up the car. According to Geoff a carbon tax that would provide a $1,600 per capita rebate would add twenty cents to a gallon of gas. OK. Here’s the deal. I don’t have the capacity to really check that out, so I’m not going to attempt it.
I do, however, think that even if, maybe especially if, you have strong free market views, the principle is sound. The free market does not work well when there are externalities – costs imposed on people who are not part of the deal. A carbon tax would force the externalities to be internalized and reflected in the price of goods and services based on the carbon effect of the various transactions as they percolate through the economy. If you believe that the burning of fossil fuels is doing bad things to the climate, the carbon tax is probably the best free market solution.
Well, that’s what you get when a tax geek goes to what might have been the largest climate march in history. I have to confess that I didn’t actually march. After standing around for nearly an hour and a half, I finally bailed. Speaking to people afterwards, apparently they started moving about an hour or so after I left. So those large counts you have been hearing may have been a little short.