The D.C. Carbon Tax Comedy of Errors

Washington City Paper's February 8 article discussing the ongoing carbon tax initiative in the District of Columbia—A Carbon Tax Is Popular, But District Lawmakers Can’t Decide How To Implement It—reads like a comedy of errors. A change to public policy as significant as a tax on energy requires precision and clarity, but the proposals being tossed around D.C. are instead half-baked and imprecise. What the discussion lacks is a clear delineation of how the sundry proposed government actions would achieve the desired ends. And more fundamentally, the discussion fails to identify precisely what those desired ends are. The panoply of misrepresentations and inchoate arguments, though specific to D.C. in its details, is representative of the underwhelming case being made for a carbon tax in a number of states across the country as well as at the federal level. Carbon tax advocates, as aptly described by the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass in his essay “The Carbon-Tax Shell Game,” have no one ironclad argument in favor of their proposals and instead resort to new lines of reasoning each time a justification is challenged. The Washington City Paper article illustrates just this point. Among the justifications presented by local activists and politicians for enacting a carbon tax in D.C. are that it would reduce childhood asthma, that it would help the environment, and that it would spur investment in carbon-free energy technologies—all, of course, in the context of maintaining Mayor Muriel Bowser’s pledge of fidelity to the United Nations’ Paris climate agreement intended to slow global warming.

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