[SGVLUG] help save the world, pwr off game consoles

[Christopher Smith]

On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 13:37 -0800, Dan Kegel wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Stan Slonkosky <stan.ke6zc at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> There are also other tools than requiring absolute
> >> compliance.   One could levy a tax for
> >> all consumer appliances that is proportional to
> >> the amount of power they use in excess of the
> >> Energy Star limits.  Or, more simply, proportional
> >> to the amount of power they consume, period.
> >> Industry would probably prefer the former :-)
> >
> > Why? People already pay for the power they use. That is incentive
> > enough for them to conserve.
> 
> Power is currently cheap because it doesn't factor
> in the cost of future pollution and global warming.
> Raising the price of power to accurately reflect that
> is hard, and would retroactively penalize people
> for inefficient devices they bought in the past.

Put me firmly in the Pigou Club on this one.

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/files/Smart Taxes.pdf

That retroactive portion has pretty straightforward solution: you delay
the implementation and graduate the tax increases. It would have the
same effect of encouraging people to purchase energy-efficient devices
but not necessarily drive them to buying *new* ones. Taxing energy
inefficient devices (and then there is the whole mess of how you decide
what "inefficient" is) also creates an unfortunate distortion in the
trade offs between "less energy to make" vs. "less energy to use". The
last thing we want to do is encourage consumption!

--Chris