We’re forever on the lookout at the Carbon Tax Center for new and outsized ways in which Americans are using energy. Too often, today’s novelty item is just a clever marketing campaign away from tomorrow’s sizeable carbon emitter. Witness high-definition televisions, or Jet Skis.

If history is a guide, efficiency standards to govern new devices’ fuel consumption won’t be promulgated until after they have proliferated — if ever. Carbon taxes, in contrast, could help rein in new products’ energy requirements from the git-go, i.e., in the design stage. Where a product has little redeeming social value, the price signals from a carbon tax might even keep it from gaining a toehold in the culture.

These thoughts came to mind when we read an article in The New York Times last week about suburbia’s latest must-have energy-guzzlers: home snowmaking machines.

“Since Nature can no longer keep to her early deadlines,” The Times reminded us in a veiled nod to climate change, dads from Darien to Denver “are taking matters into their own hands, and creating their own seasons, at least when it comes to winter.”

They’re doing it with snowmakers — machines named “Backyard Blizzard” and “Snow at Home” that feed on water and run on electricity, lots of it. According to the manufacturer, the Blizzard Sport model uses 2 kilowatts. The Times article gave a lower figure — which didn’t appear until the nineteenth paragraph and came with the curious note that “a clothes dryer guzzles more power.”

Of course, most clothes dryers aren’t left on for two days straight. That’s how long a snow-loving Greenwich, CT developer profiled in The Times story had been running his two snowmakers when the reporter dropped by.

Another two-machine man, owner of a boat repair business owner near Atlantic City, NJ, made this admission: “My neighbors are going to work at the casinos at 3 a.m. and I’m out there, too, messing with the guns. It’s really hard to turn the guns off.”

Hmm, what did Miles Davis tell Coltrane when the saxophonist said he sometimes didn’t know how to end a solo? “John, just take the horn out of your mouth.” In this case, given the large helpings of fossil fuels that go into powering snowmakers, a carbon tax might provide a strong incentive to users to turn them off, or to refrain from buying them in the first place.

We calculate that using two snowmakers — one evidently isn’t enough — twice a month, for two days straight, over four months of the year consumes around 3,000 kWh — enough to pump out 1,220 pounds of CO2, based on the national average mix of fuels used in making electricity. On that average, the $370/ton carbon tax that CTC proposes (after a 10-year phase-in) would add
$225 a year in operating costs.

Based on the high price-elasticities for many luxury goods, the tax might be expected to reduce sales of home snowmakers by around a third. That’s a nice hit, though admittedly it’s far from the 75% market shrinkage that is probably needed to strangle the snowmaker industry in its cradle. (Achieving that through a tax disincentive alone would require a carbon tax five times larger than the one CTC is seeking.)

Which suggests that by itself a carbon tax won’t determine the outcome every time. But it would nudge some of us away from making certain climate-damaging choices. And at least the polluter — whether it’s a giant factory or, as in this case, dear old snowmaker dad — would be made to pay.

Photo: el moose / Flickr

Times science blogger John Tierney beamed the spotlight on CTC big-time in his front-page blog today:

If you thought there was something missing in the energy section of the State of the Union Address, there’s a new Web site to fill in the gap.

President Bush last night dutifully mentioned the "serious challenge of global climate change" and reeled off ways to address it – burn less gasoline, subsidize other forms of energy. In the Democrats’ response, Sen. James Webb of Virginia dutifully talked of "affirmative solutions" and "a wave of entrepreneurial growth in the form of alternate energy programs." But neither he nor Mr. Bush went anywhere near economists’ favorite prescription for slowing global warming: a carbon tax.

The tax is taboo in Washington, but now there’s a place it dares speak its name: the Carbon Tax Center,
which opened this week with the aim of becoming "the village square for civic and political conversations about the why, who, and how of taxing CO2 emissions in the U.S. and, eventually, the world."

Tierney notes that taxing carbon is an uphill fight. Okay, carbon taxers, let’s start evening the odds. Post a comment on his blog and let the fur fly!

Last week’s New Yorker magazine carried a profile of energy-efficiency apostle (and, as it happens, my college classmate and longtime acquaintance) Amory Lovins by the magazine’s global-warming reporter Elizabeth Kolbert. "Mr. Green — Environmentalism’s most optimistic guru" is a fair, digestible (at just 8 pages) portrait of the Rocky Mountain Institute CEO who reconceptualized the energy debate in the 1970s and is still tirelessly pitching his message of synergistic, human-scale energy solutions to the world’s political, financial and industrial leaders.

Back in the day, I was a member of Amory’s worldwide web of energy analysts who fed him our cutting-edge research (mine concerned cost escalation in the building and operating of U.S. nuclear reactors) and benefited in turn from his incisive editing and brilliant framing of our work. Along the way, however, I grew skeptical of his faith that human ingenuity and care would catalyze the dreamed-of wholesale shift to energy efficiency and renewables. Advances in efficiency, and there were many, seemed scattershot and outweighed by humankind’s capacity to invent ever more uses of energy and our boundless appetites for using them.

The key difference in our outlook turned out to concern price. Amory, the physicist and optimist, considers high energy prices helpful but not necessary, whereas I, an economist and, dare I say, a realist, regard them as necessary though not sufficient. Thus, the Carbon Tax Center.

Toward the back of Kolbert’s article is this useful passage:

… the example Lovins likes to point to — the drop in oil use in the early nineteen-eighties — is, at best, equivocal. As Lovins notes in his book, what made people "pay attention" to oil consumption was the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the second, even more severe 1979 oil shock. Part of the drop was due to structural shifts in the economy away from oil-intensive activities. Part of it was fuel substitution by both individual consumers and industry, as homeowners and factories switched from oil to, for example, natural gas. The largest part of it was increased fuel efficiency in both automobiles and buildings, led by the creation of federal auto efficiency standards in 1975. And, finally, part of it was a change in consumer behavior as Americans bought smaller cars and turned down their thermostats. Thus what Lovins offers as a demonstration that federal regulation and new taxes are unnecessary could just as plausibly be seen as evidence of exactly the opposite.

My point — and CTC’s point — exactly.

And Thomas Friedman’s point too, perhaps. In his first New York Times column after Kolbert’s article appeared, Friedman wrote of the need to require "power utilities, factories and car owners … to pay the real and full cost to society of the carbon they put into the atmosphere." In case the point wasn’t clear, Friedman added: "… prices matter. They drive more and cleaner energy choices."

Although Friedman didn’t mention Lovins by name — he’s a big admirer of Amory, as am I — I’ll bet he wrote with the New Yorker profile in mind.