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the extraction of fossil fuels, interfering into the market to lower their
cost, creating as we so often do a kind of warped socialism, stretching
out a helping hand to the staggeringly wealthy. The first thing we need
to do, then, is to eliminate these subsidies entirely. But that step in itself
would simply restore the market to its own equilibrium and would fail to
address the problem at its core.
A greenhouse gas untax cuts through this impasse. Ordinarily, the low
cost of fossil fuels makes them the default source of energy; as long as
these sources remain cheap, the market will forever reinforce our current
fossil-fuel habits. By raising the price of sources of energy that contrib-
ute to climate change, an untax modifies this dynamic entirely. Because
it incorporates the collective good into the pricing mechanism, it enables
us to bring about a massive shift in our practices simply by following the
laws of the market. Once fossil fuels become more expensive than renew-
able alternatives, we'll all have the incentive to power our industries, heat
our homes, and fuel our cars with sustainable sources of energy.
The result will be an explosion of technological innovations to create a
new energy economy. When this untax raises the cost of agricultural and
forestry practices that produce greenhouse gases, it will also drive wide-
spread innovations in managing the land. No doubt public investment in
technology research will also be needed. But rather than transforming
public behavior exclusively through law or regulation, this measure uses
the market to counteract the harm it previously reinforced. Furthermore,
if it truly is an untax, rather than a tax—if the federal government dis-
tributes all of the proceeds equally among the nation's taxpayers—then it
innovates in a further way: it makes protecting the future into collective
property, giving each taxpayer a stake in social change. The more citizens
get atached to their share of the money, the more they will identify their
self-interest with the good of the whole. 86
This proposal thus represents an important innovation in the
American understanding of the market. On one level, the untax appar-
ently accepts without question the market's dominion over the Earth,
creating that strange beast, the notion of profit-driven ecological change.
But in fact, by using the terms of the market, this solution subordinates
the market's workings to a common goal. It suggests that even if the mar-
ket is a set of mechanisms that usually create cheapness and efficiency,
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