It seems today that more and more conservatives are weighing in on the global warming debate and finding that the forum for ideas has been especially crowded by a general political consensus. What conservative all tend to agree on is that the free market, counter-intuitively, can be one of the best means of tackling environmental problems. For all of the talk about giving businesses and consumers “incentives” to change their consumption and production patterns, most of today’s consensus proposals are swamped in bureaucratic regulation and barely get to the heart of market behavior. There are, indeed, better alternatives for real conservatives to contemplate.
The first free-market solution to global warming is to stop funding “alternative fuels,” and start importing them. The present fad is ethanol. It is common knowledge that ethanol, when blended with gasoline, produces some significant greenhouse gas reductions. It’s very fuel efficient because it’s made from biomass. The only problem is that American ethanol is made from corn, which is not a very good source. Corn ethanol actually requires more energy from other sources to produce than it conserves when burned.
The ideal solution is to rely on foreign markets. Brazil and various Central American countries produce a lot of ethanol’s optimal source-sugar. Sugar ethanol is eight times more fuel efficient than corn, and would actually conserve a lot of net energy, both for the consumer as a whole if released onto the free market as an automobile fuel, and for the environment. It’s also much cheaper than corn ethanol, and so the final product would actually stand a chance against oil financially, especially with today’s rising gas prices. The one thing stopping this solution are the huge tariffs imposed on imported sugar and imported sugar ethanol, tariffs that have been lobbied for by the domestic sugar industry and corn farmers to protect their industries.
Incidentally, most of the subsidies for ethanol go simply to these large industries. If the United States lifts these tariffs, it’s very possible that we could actually have a real fuel alternative coming into the market en masse. After all, Brazil was able to successfully impose a top-down model of fuel transformation from oil to sugar ethanol hybrids in the 1970s. All the United States has to do is allow consumers, who want to save money and avoid trips to the gas pump, to buy this cheaper fuel alternative at its real price.
A second alternative to the environmental consensus is to stop rewarding businesses and start taxing individuals. It’s fairly simple economics that if you have an industry in which consumers are consuming too much of a “bad” product-in this case, oil-government can increase taxes on it. For all the talk about rising gasoline prices, most North American consumers haven’t changed their fuel-guzzling ways. What government can do is increase the gas taxes already in place so that consumers will eventually realize that they need to consume less simply because they can’t afford to continue their present behavior. This might seem like a harsh measure, but if government were to implement the gas tax in tandem with sugar ethanol imports, consumers could find relief in a much cheaper alternative.
Both these initiatives contribute to real independence from oil-a good thing even if it weren’t environmentally sound-in favour of fuel-efficient alternatives that will help the Western world cushion the yet-unknown long-term effects of global warming. For conservatives, and everyone else, these alternatives represent a refreshing new way of thinking about our environmental problems, without all the annoying bureaucratic regulations.
