Carbon tax in the U.S.?

Elizabeth Kolber, in the current New Yorker, [subscription required] reminds us that global warming is a very large problem of externalities, that is, costs of private actions imposed on the general public.  People using fossil fuels -- car owners and utilities burning coal and gas -- discharge CO2 into the atmosphere, add to the greenhouse effect, which heats up the planet, which ends up creating the havoc of storms like Hurricane Sandy.  The idea behind a tax on these fuels is to require users to pay for some of the environmental costs they help create with their CO2 emissions.  A carbon tax would have other benefits.  She cites a Congressional Budget Office report stating that a “relatively modest” tax on gasoline and other fossil fuels could cut the federal deficit in half.  How could this not be politically attractive?
 
So how attractive is the idea?  Kolbert reports considerable support from both liberal and conservative economists and quite a number of corporations, including ExxonMobil.  Unfortunately, the Obama administration, so far at least, isn’t at all attracted to the idea.  Maybe, after “fiscal cliff” issue have been resolved, the President could turn his attention to climate change, an issue he has repeatedly said has a high priority. 

Sadly, though, even after the current tax and budget issues have been resolved, House Republicans promise a new confrontation over the debt ceiling.  And this sort of action is likely to continue at least through the 2014 congressional elections.  In a sense, the carbon tax is another example of how House Republicans are stalemating efforts to deal with obvious public problems.  In this case they’re not doing it directly; yet, by opposing virtually every significant legislative proposal, they raise the political costs for the Administration, thereby limiting the range of what can be proposed to just a handful of critical issues.