If the price elasticity of oil is low, then people will cut back only modestly if the price goes up. Ryan Avent argues that (a) even a modest cut is better than nothing, and (b) higher oil prices are also a good way to spur development of alternative energy technologies. Jim Manzi isn't impressed:

Now to evaluate Avent’s argument that taxing fossil fuels is a good way to induce new technology, consider an analogy. Suppose that there is a chemotherapy drug that increases five-year survival rate for a specialized type of cancer from 10 percent to 60 percent, but with horrible side-effects. Some scientists in a couple of university labs have had some promising results with basic compounds that might or might not ultimately be precursors to a new drug that could get better increases in survival rates, and without many of the awful side effects. If you believed that improving treatment for this disease should be a major public priority, would your preferred approach be to add a large tax to chemotherapy? This is, in effect, what Avent is proposing as way to encourage the development of alternative energy technologies. I’d fund NIH research into the new alternative drug.

I don't think this analogy holds water. In the case of the drug, you have something that, even though it's imperfect, is better than nothing. In the absence of alternatives, most of us would prefer to make the bad drug as widely available as possible even if it does have horrible side effects. After all, those side effects affect only the patient, and we all assume that she can make her own decision about whether they're worth it.

That's not true when it comes to energy policy. At least, it's not true for anyone who accepts the science of global warming. For us, fossil fuel use is something that we'd like to see cut back as a positive good all by itself. This is, to restate the obvious, because the side effects of fossil fuels don't affect only the person driving his car to work. They affect everyone.

Now, it's true that carbon taxes have only a modest effect on fossil fuel use. If the IMF's estimates are correct, this is partly because even the long-term elasticity of oil is fairly low, and partly because when we cut back on oil in rich countries it immediately gets snarfed up by developing economies eager for growth. But this is why no serious environmentalist thinks of carbon taxes as anything other than one piece of a broader plan to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions — sort of like providing a tail wind for everything else that you're doing. And I think that's the best way of thinking about it. You want to fund research into alternative energy sources? Me too! But that means you need funding, and what better way to fund energy research than with a carbon tax? It not only provides the money you'll need anyway, but also helps push public demand in the direction of the very alternatives you're subsidizing.

Given that we're quite obviously going to need new taxes in the future, I have a hard time seeing the downside of a carbon tax. I mean, what would you rather tax instead? Labor? Capital? Consumption? No matter what your political preferences are, surely taxing carbon is a better bet than any of those three?

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The anti-gay dead-enders in California continue to argue that it's unpossible for a gay judge to rule objectively in a case about gay marriage:

Attorneys for ProtectMarriage, the group that sponsored the 2008 ballot initiative, said in a legal motion that Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who retired from the San Francisco-based district court earlier this year, had a duty to disclose his relationship and step down before deciding whether a ban on same-sex marriage violated the federal Constitution.

"Judge Walker's ten-year-long same-sex relationship creates the unavoidable impression that he was not the impartial judge the law requires," said Andy Pugno, a lawyer for ProtectMarriage. "He was obligated to either recuse himself or provide full disclosure of this relationship at the outset of the case. These circumstances demand setting aside his decision."

Roger that. Clearly the only possible unbiased ruling in this case would have been handed down by a straight judge upholding the sanctity of straight marriage. Because everyone knows that straight judges can keep their personal feelings in check but gay judges can't.

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For years, opponents of abortion rights have complained to local, state, and federal law enforcement that Theodore "Ted" Shulman, a radical abortion-rights activist, was harrassing and threatening them. Nothing ever came of it until late February, when the anti-abortion rights blogosphere lit up with rumors that Shulman had finally been arrested.

"This is a huge relief to us that Ted Shulman is behind bars where he belongs," Cheryl Sullenger, a senior policy advisor for Operation Rescue, the controversial Kansas-based anti-abortion group, said in a post on the group's blog. But Politics Daily's David Gibson, the only reporter to cover the story back in February, could not confirm any charges against Shulman, and could not reach the FBI for comment. (Sullenger claimed the indictment had been filed under seal.) Now Mother Jones can confirm that Shulman, the 49-year-old son of famed feminist author and activist Alix Kates Shulman, faces a six-count federal indictment for allegedly threatening two unnamed anti-abortion activists. The charges, which each carry a maximum five-year-sentence, could land Shulman in prison for decades if he's convicted on all counts. Shulman pleaded not guilty.

Neither the FBI agent nor the assistant US attorney handling the case responded to requests for comment. A call and email to Shulman's lawyer went unreturned. It's not unheard of for extreme anti-abortion activists to face legal consequences when they cross the line. But Shulman is by far the most prominent alleged harrasser of abortion foes, and one of the first—perhaps the first—to be prosecuted under federal laws that forbid threatening others across state lines. He seemed to see himself as a kind of pioneer—according to Gibson, he liked to refer to himself as the "first pro-choice terrorist."

[Read more]

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Ben Wallace-Wells has a nice profile of Paul Krugman in New York magazine this month, and it's worth a read. For some reason, though, it prompted me to reread my interview of Krugman from back in 2003. Here's a snippet of our conversation that picks up at a point where we were talking about long-term economic woes and the Republican desire to slash entitlement programs:

I don't think politically you can cut those programs.

Train wreck is a way overused metaphor, but we're headed for some kind of collision, and there are three things that can happen. Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply cut Medicare and Social Security, because that's where the money is; or the U.S. just tootles along until we actually have a financial crisis where the marginal buyer of U.S. treasury bills, which is actually the Reserve Bank of China, says, we don't trust these guys anymore — and we turn into Argentina. All three of those are clearly impossible, and yet one of them has to happen, so, your choice. Which one?

Well, how about your choice? What's your best guess?

I think financial crisis, and then how it falls out is 50-50, either New New Deal or back to McKinley, and I think it's anybody's guess which one of those it is....I don't see any noncatastrophic solution to this, I don't see an incremental stepwise resolution. I think something drastic is really going to happen.

....What happens if [] foreign countries stop buying U.S. bonds? Is this a real concern, or a tinfoil hat kind of thing?

Oh, I don't think China is going to do it to pressure us. You can just barely conceive of a situation where they're mad at us because we're keeping them from invading Taiwan or something, but more likely they just start to wonder if this is really a good place to be putting their money.

So what happens is a plunge in the dollar when they decide to stop buying and start cashing in, and a spike in U.S. interest rates. But you might also get in a situation where the interest rates the government has to pay to roll over its debt become so high that you get an accelerating problem, which is what happened in Argentina. What happened was that suddenly no one would buy Argentine debt unless they paid a twenty something percent interest rate, and everybody says, but if they have to roll over their debt at a twenty percent interest rate, there's no way they can pay that back. So the whole thing grinds to a halt and the cash flow just dries up.

....If you were king of the economy, what's the Krugman plan?

A phased elimination of all the Bush tax cuts, plus some additional taxes. I'd probably look first at some way to make the corporate profits tax actually effective again — the nominal rate is 35% but the effective rate is only 15% or so. Look at some cuts, maybe you start to talk about retirement age, and possibly some means testing of Medicare, and that's enough to bring the budget under control.

Obviously the financial crisis of 2008 has intervened since then, but I wonder how much of this still represents Krugman's current thinking?

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