The discussion around the oil industry’s proposal for a linked carbon fee has raised some interesting questions about altering consumer behavior. Will a rise in the retail price of gasoline lead Americans to drive less or consume less fuel overall?
Empirical evidence from 1980 to 1990 found that a 1 percent increase in the price of gas is estimated to reduce gas demand by 0.3 to 0.35 percent in the short run and 0.6 to 0.8 percent in the long run. More recent research estimates the short run effect of gas prices on the demand for gasoline is much smaller: about -0.06 percent at the end of the 1990s and between -0.03 and -0.08 during 2001 and 2006.
Several critical points should be made. In terms of behavioral change, gasoline price changes have a larger impact on aggregate fuel consumption than on traffic levels. For example, a study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a traffic volume elasticity of -0.035 with respect to the price of gasoline. This result may point towards higher fuel efficiency of cars on the road and not towards reduction in driving, measured by vehicle miles traveled (VMT).
Chronic City
By Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, 432 pp., $27.95)
My heart sank when I read the opening line of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel. “I first met Perkus Tooth in an office,” it reads. Oh no, I thought, not that again. Is he really going to drag us through the kind of genre exercise a cutesy name like “Perkus Tooth” connotes? Lethem’s career was not supposed to be going like this. After banging out four sciencefiction novels in as many years, he had graduated, with Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, to a more mature realism. Genre elements still clung like packing chips to both works--detective fiction in Motherless Brooklyn, the last remnants of sci-fi, or so it seemed, in Fortress--but so stunning was the latter despite its flaws, so dense its every phrase with feeling and implication, that there seemed to be no going back. After successively closer approximations, the introverted boy from Boerum Hill, who flung himself into prodigies of pop-cultural absorption after the death of his strong-willed hippie mother a short while after his fourteenth birthday, had come home to his subject. Family dynamics and adolescent friendships; comic books and rock and roll; the word on the street, the throb of the city, the wounded edge where black meets white. Brooklyn sang, and Lethem vibrated like a reed. You Don’t Love Me Yet, a facile rom-com set amidst the L.A. hipoisie, was a beach vacation we could have done without, but Chronic City promised a return to New York and, at more than four hundred pages, a resumption of high ambition.
Sometime after the release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, environmentalism crossed from political movement to cultural moment. Fortune 500 companies pledged to go carbon neutral. Seemingly every magazine in the country, including Sports Illustrated, released a special green issue. Paris dimmed the lights on the Eiffel Tower. Solar investments became hot, even for oil companies. Evangelical ministers preached the gospel of "creation care." Even archconservative Newt Gingrich published a book demanding action on global warming.
Yesterday, Rick Perlstein wrote a post in which he contrasted the way America greeted Ahmadinejad this week with the way we greeted Nikita Khrushchev in 1959.
Looking up at the towering, massive, early twentieth-century skyscraper that is the Municipal Building, I saw the names of my beloved city carved in Roman letters in a continuous line in blocks of stone: NEW AMSTERDAM MDCXXVI / MANAHATTA / NEW YORK MDCLXIV. Manahatta--what a beautiful name, I thought, so much more lyrical than New Amsterdam or New York or our present-day Manhattan, a name so lyrical that Whitman had written a lovely ode to it:
I'm trying to remember what I thought about Antarctica before I came here. For the most part, I didn't think about it at all. It is just plain remote. From the other side of the world, in Christchurch, New Zealand, it is another eight hours due south by plane to the main U.S. base, McMurdo, and then another three hours from there to the South Pole.
