The Big Miss

Monday 10 June 2024

Congestion pricing is increasingly popular around the world but in the United States its first steps may have just been crushed, by the governor of New York. With less than 30 days to go before a fee-for-use program was set to come into effect in lower Manhattan, Governor Hochul has placed a “pause” on the scheme’s implementation. This appears to be a way around the conventional legal structure which grants the right to make laws to legislatures, and the duty of executives to apply them. While a legal battle is likely to ensue, Hochul can probably burn up months in the gray area created by her decision. It’s unclear why, however, the governor has taken this course of action, or how it can possibly help her politically. The loudest voices in opposition to the program have largely come from neighboring residents of New Jersey and Connecticut, while passionate support is broad and deep among the millions who live in New York City.

The loss of nerve in the face of America’s first road-charging scheme is, however, another reminder of the crucial difference between stated and revealed preferences when it comes to taking action on emissions. The Democratic populations of the big, blue states like California, Illinois, and New York are overwhelmingly in favor of decarbonization policies. In this way, they are distinct from rural state populations that are either disinterested or hostile to such policies. But blue state populations find it much easier to state these preferences than to actually undertake them. As New York City’s scheme was about to get underway, Hochul—rightly or wrongly—must have decided she will get blowback after the program gets underway. In other words, even in New York City, Hochul faces what other blue state governors face, which is why congestion charging is not even on the table in all of America’s big blue cities like Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle.

There is also a potential knock-on effect that the New York decision may unleash. If it is already politically risky to even mention or propose congestion charging in the rest of the United States, the New York case may bring a kind of iron curtain down on the entire idea. And it’s important to note that many American cities have been “studying the idea” of road-charging for decades while taking no action whatsoever. So, it’s encouraging that the state and city of New York did in fact take the step, but it’s equally amazing the executive of the state has decided to bring the high drama of its disabling upon herself, and her administration.

As we know, transportation is now the top emitting sector in the United States so anyone who claims to be serious about fighting emissions must not just admit to the problem, but must do something about it. And what we find again and again is that the majority of Democratic voting populations across the United States are not serious about fighting emissions at all. Instead, they prefer to think they are. This is the inconvenient truth that many left-leaning writers who cover climate change would prefer to ignore. It’s so much easier to finger the open hostility to climate policy among the right than to admit that this huge deadweight from the left is also structural to our inability to make progress. And, the outlook is very dim. The only policy left standing in the US to reduce transport emissions is the adoption of electric vehicles. That single-bullet solution is deeply-flawed, of course, because of the length of time it takes to turn the fleet over. If your only solution is to electrify, then you are choosing to delay transportation sector emissions declines into next decade.

There are many tragedies here. A big one: the US has the power to finally kick oil consumption off a 20 year oscillating plateau (a great example of how long the condition of peak can endure, without any meaningful decline). Were the US to introduce such schemes across many cities, we would finally see petroleum use decline. That would send a shockwave through the oil market (already under pressure from overcapacity) and would shift the timeline of the oil age as the world’s number one oil consumer embarked on a new era. Well, it’s a nice thought, regardless.