Politico on Edwards

It's good to get attention! It's less good when that attention is, you know, anything other than totally laudatory, but I'll take it. Ben Smith responds to my post on the Gail Collins op-ed. It's... other than totally laudatory:

This seems to totally miss the point of the tangerine moment, and of Collins' column. It's one thing to talk about sacrifice; it's another thing to tell ordinary people that when they elect you, gas, fruit and imported goods cost more, to name specific sacrifices.

This isn't to single out Edwards; none of the leading candidates has exactly been going around pledging to make consumer goods more expensive. They talk occasionally about switching to fluorescent light bulbs, but they don't cast that as a sacrifice, more as a win-win. And you see why they avoid it. Calls for real sacrifice are met by jokes about Jimmy Carter's sweaters.

Edwards laid out a plan today to pay for his expanded spending on health care and other initiatives, which he lays out in detail on his site. The plan will call from sacrifice for many of the people who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and for people who pay the Capital Gains Tax -- disproportionately, but not entirely, the rich. Maybe you can cast that as a sort of national sacrifice. But you see Collins' point.

When Collins asked Edwards specifically about the Tangerines, his answer was, at first, that he'd have to think about it. Well, ok, maybe that's not exactly overwhelming forthrightness in the Jimmy Carter/sweater sense of the word. But then again, this issue--the impact of climate change legislation--is extremely tricky.

When you're talking about a major federal program like cap and trade that will include all sorts of incentives, aide, regulations--CAFE and otherwise--it's really, really difficult to disentangle what its microeconomic impact of the actual legislation is from other drivers and also to know what would have happened in the plans absence. You can implement climate change legislation and the price of tangerines might well up or you can not implement climate change legislation, and  instead burn through tons of ever more expensive oil and... the result is exactly the same. Or, by massively ratcheting up CAFE standards, perhaps fuel prices become less of a concern but the cost of transporting tangerines across the land gets shifted to auto companies who will be forced to modify their fleets.

You can say then that they're the ones that get stuck with the cost, but then you can also consider the possibility that without increased CAFE standards the auto companies are, as gas gets more and more expensive, in mortal danger. So it's complicated, right? And the best you can say is that--as Al Gore has said many times--the economy will see both benefits and hard knocks as the result of climate change legislation, and that those pros and cons are difficult to predict. Edwards basically says this, too.

The fact is Edwards has been much more clear than any candidate I can ever remember that the things the country needs and the programs that will benefit the needy actually cost money. He's made it clear to those who make over $200,000 a year, and to the coal industry. I sincerely doubt they'll be shoving a bunch of money at his campaign, and I also doubt that their unions will throw their support his way. And unions constitute some of his biggest supporters. What he could say, I guess, is that with his plan, some people will be penalized for driving big cars, but that much is almost definitional.

Really, though, the best way forward for anybody who doesn't want to suffer big lifestyle changes, or be otherwise deeply impacted by climate legislation, is in pushing their Congressmen and Senators and home town businesses to not just prepare, but embrace any coming regulations, and prepare for them. With enough preparation, we'll lose much, much less than we will if we stall and play gotcha games with the people who are the most serious about this. Maybe we'll even be able to partake guiltlessly in the bucolic excesses of modern American life in perpetuity. Even eating tangerines in the south.