It’s another example of accounting being stretched to fit a know evil into monetary terms. It’s one of the moral evils of fracking, like the racial result that comes from running the pipelines through Indian and Black territories.

It is also evil to cause people, children, old folks and healthy adults to be sick. How do you put a price on that?

It is being done to maximize return to a nameless list of investors, when we all know it is destroying resources needed for the future, too. It isn’t being minimized to get civilization through while better methods are being worked out: solar, wind and eventually fusion. It involves lots of casual lying about both necessity and cost.

It’s like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but on a worldwide scale.

First, there are health costs in the drilling and fracking areas that don’t come under the category of air pollution and so are presumably not included.

Second, the tax does not solve any problem, unless it somehow protects people over a scattered large area from the effects of air pollution, and somehow reduces the effects of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. That’s not where the tax money would go–states would put it in their general fund. If the benefits go to one group of people and the costs go to another, that is the definition of environmental injustice.

Third, it’s rather meaningless to assign a dollar value to lost life. If you were one of the casualties, would you be okay with dying young as long as the people burning the gas paid more for it? This tax would not be a “tax the bads” sort, because if assessed on the drillers, who are economically precarious as it is, it would drive them out of business. But it would not be assessed on them — the people in the benefiting category, those with jobs, fat salaries, or dividend checks. It would be assessed on the buyers and might slow down that buying, but the cost of gas is so low right now that it might not matter that much–unless there was cheaper gas that could compete (and thus obviate the virtue of the tax).

Fourth, nothing is said here about the schemes to sell the liquids to a (proposed) petrochemical corridor along the Ohio with a whole raft of new pollution concerns. Or would that be taxed too? If so, how much help would that be for the marine animal thousands of miles away, dying from plastic in its gut or wrapped around its head or flippers?

No, we don’t need a tax. We need legislation to assist in a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, both for energy and for the myriad things plastic is now used for, especially the single-use plastic. The notion that problems can all be solved with economic policies, as the magical Free Market solves all problems, is not science-based, it’s an ideological misconception.

Mary Wildfire, Roane County, WV