“For years, the lobby of small gas station owners worried they would be crushed by big oil companies, which then owned most stations, and could afford to install the modern pumps and canopies self-service demanded. ‘They would have been 10 or 15 cents a gallon less than mine, so they would have buried me,’ said Sal Risalvato, who opened a station in Paramus [New Jersey] in the late 1970s.”
– Kate Zernike , “Drop That Gas Nozzle: New Jersey Is Full-Service Island, and Likes It,” New York Times, May 23, 2015, A1.
Saturday’s New York Times front-page article, Drop That Gas Nozzle: New Jersey Is Full-Service Island, and Likes It, brought the peculiar politics of New Jersey’s ban on self-service gasoline/diesel to a national audience. Fines for self-pumping start at $50 and grow to $500 for repeat offenders.…
Continue Reading“Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”
– Center for American Progress (and Climate Progress), two years ago.
Dear CAP: Get a life. Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but drive, bus, train, and fly to a better environment–your self-selected environment.
The automobile and the open road are environmentalism-on-wheels and freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. (And if it makes you happy CAP, those ‘huge profits’ of “Big Oil’ are absent.)
Yesterday’s post explained how market incentives can address environmental issues, including the believed-to-be negatives of climate change. Prices of inputs and outputs, utilizing resources even if they are subject to the tragedy of the commons, incorporate dynamic environmental changes. Markets, in other words, offer the potential for dynamic responses.
If climate change reduces the productivity of land for wheat production, for example, the price of land will be high relative to its productivity. This generates an incentive for wheat farmers to seek new places for wheat production where land prices are lower. Hence, the 2012 Bloomberg news headline, “Corn Belt Shifts North With Climate as Kansas Crop Dies.” Therefore even if the atmosphere as a GHG sink and GHG emissions themselves are not priced, prices correlated with the effects of climate change will induce adaptation.…
Continue Reading