4 ms·

Gasoline is not cheap, you are just not paying the full cost of it. There are a slew of negative externalities that other people ultimately pay.

Aloha 10y ago
What costs are we not paying that others are? I'm aware the US has some low fuel taxes, but what else am I missing there?
- eropple 10y ago
  In addition to low taxes, the petroleum industry in the United States is perhaps the most heavily subsidized industry (on both a state and federal level) in the country. (Top three, for sure.) At the same time, neither the petroleum industry nor the people driving gas-burners are asked to account for the pollution caused by said gas-burning. The unpaid-for externalities related to cars and gas-powered transit cannot be blurfed away by insisting that the New York Times "hates" cars. (And that's not getting into the economic questions about the places that are made livable because of the profusion of cars--he namedrops places like Tennessee and Idaho and blah blah blah, but the overwhelming majority of those places are money sinks rather than money sources. As a happy liberal, I'm not against subsidizing economically inefficient lifestyles to some degree--but when they're built inescapably on farting out greenhouse gases at a high rate, I think there's a reason to have a discussion about the policies that encourage them.) It is a many-faceted problem, but the facets being most steadily ignored are the ones that make the pro-car argument pretty weak.
  - Aloha 10y ago
    Most of those oil companies are huge multi-nationals, wouldn't that (admittedly evil) subsidy benefit the whole world? Roughly 30-40% (depending on which source of numbers you look at) of greenhouse gas emissions are from base load power generation - which is something we can mitigate far more easily than the transportation sector. I believe strongly in building more walkable cities, but I don't want to hang the whole of the greenhouse gas problem on the car.
    - ageofwant 10y ago
      How would subsidizing multi-nationals benefit the whole world ? Corporate welfare benefits the corporation and that's it. If you wanted "the world" to benefit then help the world. I've always found the argument that helping corporations ultimately benefits some other nebulous beneficiary somewhat vacuous. I believe cargo ships followed by airplanes are the biggest net emitters in the transport sector. Office building are the biggest consumers of non-industrial base-load. So pushing fat broadband pipes to the home could potentially reduce the need for both office buildings and daily commutes. Yes, city density should vastly increase. I would like to see the vast sprawling urban deathscape replaced by massive tower cities surrounded by mostly native parklands, interconnected by underground trains and fat broadband pipes. Should you need to leave your comfy digs you ride the elevator or the train.
- omegaworks 10y ago
  Air and water in my neighborhood are more polluted[0][1] thanks to byproducts of the petroleum storage and refining industries finding amenable (read: desperate and politically and economically disempowered) conditions here. This is the cost I pay that you aren't paying. 0. https://www.epa.gov/petroleum-coke-chicago https://www.epa.gov/petroleum-coke-chicago 1. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/toxic-tour-of-northwest-indiana/Content?oid=3189482 http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/toxic-tour-of-northwest... The native people of Standing Rock are fighting to prevent contamination of their water supply, a risk that was unpalatable to the people of Bismarck. The predominantly white city was able to force the rerouting of the Dakota Access Pipeline. [2] They are fighting to not be forced to pay the cost that you aren't paying. 2. http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/5840804e180000fb12310e4b.png http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/5... Not only is the oil industry tax-subsidized, they are also granted use of eminent domain-seized lands and have their interests protected by militarized police forces from across the country. [3] 3. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/standing-rock-police-militarized-emergency-management-assistance-compact-north-dakota http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/standing-rock... There are costs measured not in dollars, but in blood and misery.
  - Aloha 10y ago
    I spent my formative years in the Los Angeles Area - please don't presume I didn't pay for it - I did. I'm very aware of the solution and byproducts of refining - while its much cleaner than it ever was - its still not clean.
  - graycat 10y ago
    I read the story about NW Indiana, South Chicago, and Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes were long a dumping ground for whatever, and for decades now there have been efforts to quit the dumping and clean up the place. A lot of progress has been made: E.g., some people I know who live on Lake Erie and do a lot of boating say that the lake used to be just filthy, put scum on boats, etc., but now is much cleaner. Yes, apparently for some reason it was common to dump PCBs in rivers. Then the mud at the bottoms of the rivers got the PCBs; even when the dumping stopped, the PCBs kept leaching out and causing trouble, say, for wildlife and using the river for drinking water. This was the story in the Hudson River. IIRC, the clean up effort has been extensive and somewhat successful but very expensive and long lasting. The story about NW Indiana and South Chicago has residential homes in the shadows of oil refineries, electric generating plants, steel mills, etc. Those homes should have been bought out long ago. Apparently now we know how to make such industrial plants clean enough, and maybe we are. On the externalities, it appears that mostly the pollution is left over from the past, decades ago, clean up efforts have been going on for decades, and maybe now new industries have to be clean enough. In this case, the pollution externalities are from the past, not the present. For CO2 and global warming, I responded to that in another post on this OP -- net, I'm not concerned. For the "subsidies", so far I have yet to see a clear, credible description of those. But apparently it is common for a plant, essentially anything that can generate employment, to get various subsidies, tax breaks, help with worker training, etc. E.g., it was just announced that Toshiba and SolarCity will be taking over some old factories in Buffalo, NY and building solar panels or whatever. Well, NYS and Cuomo gave them some financial help. Apparently such financial help is common -- the local communities and the states want the jobs and associated tax revenue from the employees, the increased economic activity, etc. and regard the financial help as worthwhile. I suspect that if the businesses are successful, NYS will get the money back plus a lot more. IIRC, the regulations now on coal fired electric generating plants are so severe that really can't start a new plant and, for an old one, about have to shut it down. As I explained above in this thread, I'm not at all concerned about the CO2 from burning coal, but other stuff that might come out the smoke stack should be of concern -- radioactivity (right, from coal, really much more than is coming from nuke plants), heavy metals (mercury?), sulfur (causing acid rain?), maybe some concerns over some oxides of nitrogen, black smoke from carbon soot, etc.? But my understanding is that long ago there were good cleanup techniques and efforts for such stuff from burning coal -- stack gas scrubbers or some such. It looks like now Obama, his EPA, etc. are using CO2 as an excuse to go after coal in an effort just to shut down coal; to me, that is foolish. We need to use coal, if only for making steel. If we can generate cheap electric power from coal safely without harmful pollution, then to me we should. Apparently Buffett believes that the US will continue to burn coal to generate electric power because recently he bought Burlington Northern Railroad which carries a lot of coal to electric power plants. But, I'd like to see lots more electric power from nuclear fission -- uranium, plutonium, thorium, whatever -- and nuclear fusion when and if we can make that work. I'm sorry about what happened over the past 100+ years to many of the major US rivers -- Mississippi, Ohio, Hudson, Calumet, Cuyahoga (right, the one that had a spill that actually caught fire) -- along with Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, maybe San Francisco bay, maybe Long Island Sound, etc. Easily, our most dense central cities won't like lots of private cars. Okay. Easily our rural and suburban areas and smaller cities will like lots of private cars and will buy more of them as soon as they have the money -- one car for Dad to commute to the office; one car for Mom to move the kids, laundry, groceries, take the family to the beach, etc.; one car for Junior as he turns 18 or so; another car for Sis, etc. If Junior has a 10 year old used car, okay, but he'd have a new Corvette if he could afford it. Outside of the dense cities, people need/like cars. Yes, we need to clean up the messes of the past, and I suspect that in total a lot of money is being spent to do that and significant progress is being made. But I also suspect that now we can burn gasoline in cars, burn coal and natural gas, etc. safely and cleanly enough. With the cleanup done from pollution from 50+ years ago, we will be able to can catch and eat fish and shell fish in the Great Lakes, the major rivers, the major bays, offshore in the salt water, etc. and, IMHO, we should. Net, I'm not seeing why private cars that burn gasoline and provide personal and family transportation outside the dense central cities are a bad idea. And, for the OP, I can't believe that there will be fewer cars; instead, outside of the dense central cities, people will buy more cars as soon as they have the money. For self-driving cars, I see no hope for a long time.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  All of your future generations, in perpetuity. Whatever their opportunity costs of cleanup and climate change - you're not paying for it.

Aloha 10y ago

What costs are we not paying that others are? I'm aware the US has some low fuel taxes, but what else am I missing there?

eropple 10y ago
In addition to low taxes, the petroleum industry in the United States is perhaps the most heavily subsidized industry (on both a state and federal level) in the country. (Top three, for sure.) At the same time, neither the petroleum industry nor the people driving gas-burners are asked to account for the pollution caused by said gas-burning. The unpaid-for externalities related to cars and gas-powered transit cannot be blurfed away by insisting that the New York Times "hates" cars. (And that's not getting into the economic questions about the places that are made livable because of the profusion of cars--he namedrops places like Tennessee and Idaho and blah blah blah, but the overwhelming majority of those places are money sinks rather than money sources. As a happy liberal, I'm not against subsidizing economically inefficient lifestyles to some degree--but when they're built inescapably on farting out greenhouse gases at a high rate, I think there's a reason to have a discussion about the policies that encourage them.) It is a many-faceted problem, but the facets being most steadily ignored are the ones that make the pro-car argument pretty weak.
- Aloha 10y ago
  Most of those oil companies are huge multi-nationals, wouldn't that (admittedly evil) subsidy benefit the whole world? Roughly 30-40% (depending on which source of numbers you look at) of greenhouse gas emissions are from base load power generation - which is something we can mitigate far more easily than the transportation sector. I believe strongly in building more walkable cities, but I don't want to hang the whole of the greenhouse gas problem on the car.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    How would subsidizing multi-nationals benefit the whole world ? Corporate welfare benefits the corporation and that's it. If you wanted "the world" to benefit then help the world. I've always found the argument that helping corporations ultimately benefits some other nebulous beneficiary somewhat vacuous. I believe cargo ships followed by airplanes are the biggest net emitters in the transport sector. Office building are the biggest consumers of non-industrial base-load. So pushing fat broadband pipes to the home could potentially reduce the need for both office buildings and daily commutes. Yes, city density should vastly increase. I would like to see the vast sprawling urban deathscape replaced by massive tower cities surrounded by mostly native parklands, interconnected by underground trains and fat broadband pipes. Should you need to leave your comfy digs you ride the elevator or the train.
omegaworks 10y ago
Air and water in my neighborhood are more polluted[0][1] thanks to byproducts of the petroleum storage and refining industries finding amenable (read: desperate and politically and economically disempowered) conditions here. This is the cost I pay that you aren't paying. 0. https://www.epa.gov/petroleum-coke-chicago https://www.epa.gov/petroleum-coke-chicago 1. http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/toxic-tour-of-northwest-indiana/Content?oid=3189482 http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/toxic-tour-of-northwest... The native people of Standing Rock are fighting to prevent contamination of their water supply, a risk that was unpalatable to the people of Bismarck. The predominantly white city was able to force the rerouting of the Dakota Access Pipeline. [2] They are fighting to not be forced to pay the cost that you aren't paying. 2. http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/5840804e180000fb12310e4b.png http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/5... Not only is the oil industry tax-subsidized, they are also granted use of eminent domain-seized lands and have their interests protected by militarized police forces from across the country. [3] 3. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/standing-rock-police-militarized-emergency-management-assistance-compact-north-dakota http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/standing-rock... There are costs measured not in dollars, but in blood and misery.
- Aloha 10y ago
  I spent my formative years in the Los Angeles Area - please don't presume I didn't pay for it - I did. I'm very aware of the solution and byproducts of refining - while its much cleaner than it ever was - its still not clean.
- graycat 10y ago
  I read the story about NW Indiana, South Chicago, and Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes were long a dumping ground for whatever, and for decades now there have been efforts to quit the dumping and clean up the place. A lot of progress has been made: E.g., some people I know who live on Lake Erie and do a lot of boating say that the lake used to be just filthy, put scum on boats, etc., but now is much cleaner. Yes, apparently for some reason it was common to dump PCBs in rivers. Then the mud at the bottoms of the rivers got the PCBs; even when the dumping stopped, the PCBs kept leaching out and causing trouble, say, for wildlife and using the river for drinking water. This was the story in the Hudson River. IIRC, the clean up effort has been extensive and somewhat successful but very expensive and long lasting. The story about NW Indiana and South Chicago has residential homes in the shadows of oil refineries, electric generating plants, steel mills, etc. Those homes should have been bought out long ago. Apparently now we know how to make such industrial plants clean enough, and maybe we are. On the externalities, it appears that mostly the pollution is left over from the past, decades ago, clean up efforts have been going on for decades, and maybe now new industries have to be clean enough. In this case, the pollution externalities are from the past, not the present. For CO2 and global warming, I responded to that in another post on this OP -- net, I'm not concerned. For the "subsidies", so far I have yet to see a clear, credible description of those. But apparently it is common for a plant, essentially anything that can generate employment, to get various subsidies, tax breaks, help with worker training, etc. E.g., it was just announced that Toshiba and SolarCity will be taking over some old factories in Buffalo, NY and building solar panels or whatever. Well, NYS and Cuomo gave them some financial help. Apparently such financial help is common -- the local communities and the states want the jobs and associated tax revenue from the employees, the increased economic activity, etc. and regard the financial help as worthwhile. I suspect that if the businesses are successful, NYS will get the money back plus a lot more. IIRC, the regulations now on coal fired electric generating plants are so severe that really can't start a new plant and, for an old one, about have to shut it down. As I explained above in this thread, I'm not at all concerned about the CO2 from burning coal, but other stuff that might come out the smoke stack should be of concern -- radioactivity (right, from coal, really much more than is coming from nuke plants), heavy metals (mercury?), sulfur (causing acid rain?), maybe some concerns over some oxides of nitrogen, black smoke from carbon soot, etc.? But my understanding is that long ago there were good cleanup techniques and efforts for such stuff from burning coal -- stack gas scrubbers or some such. It looks like now Obama, his EPA, etc. are using CO2 as an excuse to go after coal in an effort just to shut down coal; to me, that is foolish. We need to use coal, if only for making steel. If we can generate cheap electric power from coal safely without harmful pollution, then to me we should. Apparently Buffett believes that the US will continue to burn coal to generate electric power because recently he bought Burlington Northern Railroad which carries a lot of coal to electric power plants. But, I'd like to see lots more electric power from nuclear fission -- uranium, plutonium, thorium, whatever -- and nuclear fusion when and if we can make that work. I'm sorry about what happened over the past 100+ years to many of the major US rivers -- Mississippi, Ohio, Hudson, Calumet, Cuyahoga (right, the one that had a spill that actually caught fire) -- along with Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, maybe San Francisco bay, maybe Long Island Sound, etc. Easily, our most dense central cities won't like lots of private cars. Okay. Easily our rural and suburban areas and smaller cities will like lots of private cars and will buy more of them as soon as they have the money -- one car for Dad to commute to the office; one car for Mom to move the kids, laundry, groceries, take the family to the beach, etc.; one car for Junior as he turns 18 or so; another car for Sis, etc. If Junior has a 10 year old used car, okay, but he'd have a new Corvette if he could afford it. Outside of the dense cities, people need/like cars. Yes, we need to clean up the messes of the past, and I suspect that in total a lot of money is being spent to do that and significant progress is being made. But I also suspect that now we can burn gasoline in cars, burn coal and natural gas, etc. safely and cleanly enough. With the cleanup done from pollution from 50+ years ago, we will be able to can catch and eat fish and shell fish in the Great Lakes, the major rivers, the major bays, offshore in the salt water, etc. and, IMHO, we should. Net, I'm not seeing why private cars that burn gasoline and provide personal and family transportation outside the dense central cities are a bad idea. And, for the OP, I can't believe that there will be fewer cars; instead, outside of the dense central cities, people will buy more cars as soon as they have the money. For self-driving cars, I see no hope for a long time.
antisthenes 10y ago
All of your future generations, in perpetuity. Whatever their opportunity costs of cleanup and climate change - you're not paying for it.