Less is more . . .

Or less

Suppose you are economic czar. Your country is vexed by one sector that chronically produces more than the market can absorb. Producers in that sector are always on the verge of bankruptcy. You are a free-marketer at heart. Your instinct is to let the weakest producers go out of business. This will correct the overproduction and leave the remaining producers in the sector healthy.

But there’s a catch. The producers are politically influential beyond their numbers. They don't want to go out of business. 

What do you do?

If it's the 1930s and you’re Franklin Roosevelt, and the troublesome sector is agriculture, you persuade Congress to pay farmers to produce less. The farmers stay in business, partly through the support payments and partly through higher prices resulting from the lower production.

As a bonus, the farmers like you and vote for you and your party for decades. And during those decades, Americans get used to the strange idea of paying people not to do something.

Now suppose it's today, and you're president, and the problem is carbon emissions. How do you reduce them? Most straightforwardly, by getting people to do less of the activities that produce carbon. But people are attached to those activities. They like to drive cars and fly in planes and do all the other stuff that spews carbon into the atmosphere.

How do you get them to cut back? You’ve tried lecturing them. But they laugh at you the way Americans laughed at Jimmy Carter when he suggested turning down the thermostat during the winter and putting on a sweater.

Maybe you should pay them. You learn that this has already been done indirectly in the form of subsidies for things like the purchase of electric vehicles and the installation of solar panels.

But what if you expanded the idea? And what if you modeled your program on FDR’s farm scheme, paying people for carbon they don't produce?

If the subsidy for an EV was $5,000, and the EV cut your carbon emissions for transport by half, maybe the payment for forgoing a car altogether (in favor of a bike, say) should be $10,000.

That would be just the start. Would-be tourists could be paid for staying home. Vegans could be paid for not eating meat. (Here the offending gas is methane, but the same principle applies.) In general, consumers could be paid for consuming less of any number of things that generate carbon.

There are some obvious problems. First, who's going to pay for all this? Here the answer is the same as in the case of the farmers: taxpayers. Taxpayers resisted the farm payment scheme but eventually learned to live with it. To the objection that the cost would be greater than for the farm payments, the answer is that so would the benefits, as they would apply to the whole population.

But wouldn't the program be hard to administer? What if I wasn't really planning on taking a vacation but simply said I was, to claim my offset payment? Who would know?

True, that's a sticker. But solutions were devised in the farm program, based on acreage taken out of production, or previous years’ production.

Okay, I'm going to stop here. The scheme won't ever work. It will never even be tried. The farm scheme passed political muster because there were comparatively few farmers. Everybody is a consumer. 

Even so, the underlying principle might be worth keeping in mind. Climate reformers lament that people don't cut their carbon emissions voluntarily. Well, pay them to cut their emissions. They don't even have to be convinced that climate change is real. They'll simply do it for the money. But still it gets done. 

A version of this is employed in countries that use carbon taxes. Doing less of the activity that produces carbon yields a lower tax, which arithmetically is the equivalent of a payment. Some developing countries assert that if they are going to accept a slower pace of development in order to reduce carbon emissions, they will have to be paid for it.

There is a deeper problem. Reducing car sales puts people out of work. Curtailing tourism hammers the hospitality industry. Veggie burgers eat into the profits of ranchers. When the Olympics were in Beijing in 2008, the government of China solved the city's air pollution problem overnight, by closing all the factories and banning all cars for the duration of the games. We could solve the carbon problem today by drastically reorienting our economy and way of living. But that would create other problems that might turn out to be greater.

 Carbon emissions fifty years ago were half what they are today. We could cut today's emissions in half by returning to the economies that existed back then. But that's a luxury only the rich could even consider. For most of the world it's not a viable option.

We grew ourselves into this mess. We're going to have to grow ourselves out of it.

Even so, if you want to ride a bike to save the planet, go ahead. You won’t save the whole planet, but every bit helps.