Charge Companies for Releasing Carbon Dioxide
I have a friend, call him Rick, who runs an ice skating arena that has an outsize parking lot. The lot is rarely used to its full capacity, even when business is popping.
The arena is across the street from a big grocery store. A few weeks ago, the big grocery store hired a paving contractor to resurface the store’s parking lot.
The pavers needed a staging area for their trucks and paving supplies. It wouldn’t do to use the store’s parking lot, since that would squeeze out paying customers.
The contractor’s crew chief spotted the ice arena’s big parking lot across the street. Light bulb flashed overhead. "Why look", he told his crew. "That empty lot would be perfect. Park the trucks and pile our stuff over there."
So they did. And Rick was not happy about it, or about the mess he had to sweep up afterward.
Rick told me the story at a chamber of commerce picnic. "Did you send a bill?", I asked. "Sure did", Rick said, "for $1,500."
He was within his rights to ask for the money. It doesn’t matter that the arena’s parking lot is mostly empty most of the time. It doesn’t matter that the pavers didn’t have a practical alternative. And it doesn’t matter that they meant no harm.
When a business uses someone else’s property for its own purposes, it ought to pay the owner. Especially when permission was not secured ahead of time.
Which is why industries ought to pay for disposing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and why the revenues ought to come back to you and me.
The sky is mine. And it’s yours too. Those who use the sky to dispose of their refuse ought to pay for the privilege. It doesn’t matter whether the payments come from auctioning emissions allowances or levying a carbon tax. Either way, it’s a user fee.
As Ronald Reagan said in 1988, “Many laws protecting environmental quality have promoted liberty by securing property against the destructive trespass of pollution.”
Back to the ice arena. The $1,500 bill that Rick sent was reasonable. Had he sent them a bill for $15,000, that would have been unreasonable. Rick wasn’t interested in gouging the paving company, only in receiving fair compensation for use of his property, the resulting wear and tear, and his time sweeping up after them.
Fairness is why carbon disposal fees ought to bear a reasonable relationship to the risks of loading our atmosphere with gases that could harmfully perturb the global climate and with the costs of mitigating the problem. Charge nothing more and nothing less.
One more trip back to the ice arena. The following didn’t happen, but suppose it did. The paving contractor sends Rick a check for $1,500, and the city demands most of the payout. We have better uses for this money than the ice arena does, the city fathers say. The budget’s tight, folks like our programs, and we sure don’t want to have to lay off cops, do we?
As the Beatles song “Tax Man” goes, “Be thankful I don’t take it all.”
Whether the city has better uses for the money than Rick does is irrelevant. The payment is for use of his property, not to fill another tanker car on the government gravy train.
That’s why carbon disposal fees ought to go back to the people who own the sky. You and me. Not the tax man.