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131 comments on Is There A Painless Way To Fill The Oil Supply Gap?
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131 comments on Is There A Painless Way To Fill The Oil Supply Gap?
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To the extent that pensioners experience an increase in the cost of living, their incomes are hedged by the increase in pensions eg Social Security, which are indexed to CPI. This would also be true of most others on state benefits, which are mostly indexed to CPI.
So the only gap is for those whom energy is an above-CPI weighting slice of their total expenditure.
These would not, by any means, be only (or mostly) pensioners. Pensioners drive less than the average, and on balance probably have smaller homes. They consume fewer goods and services with a high carbon content.
The UK government already gives a heating grant to poor pensioners and others in cold winters. It wouldn't be impossible for the US government to do the same. Similarly countries set minimum standards of housing insulation, and have loan programmes to support those who need to upgrade to meet them.
'tax' is one way to do this. Another is tradeable permits. We might grandfather existing polluters, giving them permits, or we might use the revenues from selling those permits to reduce other taxes.
The real question is how much does one value the welfare of future generations? If we don't feel we have an obligation to do something for those generations, then we could simply say global warming is a problem for them.
Since C02 lasts in the atmosphere for 100 years or more, I think this is a difficult argument to make, but we can make it.
Valuethinker,
You are mis-informed about pensioners, at least in the UK. As a group,
they encounter far higher inflation than the CPI weighted average. This is
because a higher proportion of their total income goes on food,
heating and local council taxes than the general population. These items
have been rising sharply, and are offset in the CPI by discressionary items
like electronic gizmos, which have negative inflation.
They also tend to live in older, poorly maintained, poorly insulated and
inefficiently heated houses, often larger than they need personally, because
they do not down-size after their family grow up. This is true of my
parents, even though they are well educated and not short of money. They
do not like change, or what they see as long term investment.
The Labour government had a 'fuel poverty' programme in 1997, and
was one of the few targets they looked likely to meet, due largely to hand-outs to the poor. The energy price rises of the last 3 years has largely
undone this good work, and we once again face the prospect of large numbers of old people dying of hyperthermia, (global warming not
withstanding) or heat exhaustion (courtesy of global warming).
Leaving these people to rigours of the open market for their heat is an
option, but it is not one I would vote for. They will be the 'demand
destruction' element, at least in the UK market.
If they have a larger house than they need, and they own it, then the problem is their housing equity is illiquid.
This is not a trivial point. Vancouver for example allows retired homeowners to charge their property taxes against their estate. *they* don't need to move, whilst they live.
Property is a major fraction of retired person's assets. We just haven't constructed easy ways of unlocking that.
Over to the RPI. I haven't seen any real figures, but I suspect the problem in the UK is limited to those who are relying primarily or wholly on the state for their pensions. The old drive less, or at least drive smaller cars.
(I agree the state of the UK housing stock is a national scandal-- but that can be fixed).
As to global warming killing old people, I have first hand evidence (next door neighbour). But very, very few people in the UK have residential air conditioning: it's not going to be carbon taxes which makes their situation worse.
Doing nothing about global warming will make their children and grandchildren's lives much worse, however.
The UK has the lowest replacement ratio (state pension to average wage) in the western world: thank you Margaret Thatcher and Peter Liddle for that fiscal sleight of hand. So the problem of old age poverty in the UK is about *that* rather than the price of any one commodity per se.
You will note the Daily Mail, in all its vitriol, doesn't mention that point.
The problem is not so large that it cannot be fixed. Nor is it rational, nor economically efficient, to fail to do something about carbon emissions because one group in society will suffer disproportionately.
The increase in energy costs, a 'tax' due to market forces, which has happened to date, is larger than the proposed carbon taxes.
Oh, they own a UK house but somehow they are still poor and claim that they can't afford their heating bills? My heart bleeds for them.
Not.
Most people reading this thread probably have no idea just how expensive UK house prices have become and just how much UK houses have gone up in value over the past twenty years. If they get out of the oversized house which they no longer need and move into something more appropriate they should have at least a hundred thousand dollars in profit which they can then use to pay their heating bills with.
Sadly, there are far too many people who would rather whine about how old and poor they are and how they need handouts from the government to stay warm in winter.
The people I feel sorry for are the young families who need the space and are wondering how they can afford the payments on an enormous mortgage. Payments which will certainly be far greater than their heating bills.
The sooner that we understand that dealing with global warming is going to require modest sacrifices from everybody the sooner we will be able to make some progress on the issue.