Nor does O’Toole take into account the many ways that transit makes possible a greener lifestyle by facilitating dense urban development that requires fewer and shorter trips overall. For a full critique see here.

I often criticize government approaches to environmental problems, but mainly because I think they’re too often compromised by other interests. Our extremely wasteful ethanol subsidies are just one example.

That said, I’m quite open to a tax on carbon emissions applied at the source of power generation. CO2 is a classic externality. If the problem is big enough, it certainly makes sense to tax it early in the supply chain and then let the market figure out the most efficient ways to cut back on emissions. So a role for government, sure, but in a way that takes advantage of economic discovery.

I’d also like to see better pricing for energy related goods. For example, more toll roads, variable electric pricing, and rewarding small-scale producers of renewable energy who put excess power into the grid. There are lots of market approaches whose use could be expanded.

I ask that not in a spirit of challenge but of honest inquiry. I visited that A Better Earth site of yours once or twice, and all I found was criticism of government-based approaches to environmentalism. I was hoping that someone would be proposing some market based solutions. I’d be willing to listen to that. And maybe I wasn’t searching that hard, but all I found were critiques explaining how government approaches won’t work….but offering no alternative.

Which, as I said, just leads me to despair.

Unless you somehow contend that fuel efficiency is going to reach such levels that we aren’t going to wreck the planet, I find this post hideously depressing.