Why I’m Thinking About Alcohol Taxes
This is an excerpt from The Atlantic’s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today.The climate scientist Ken Caldeira recently tweeted a joke meant to charm carbon-tax advocates. “If we don’t want people to drink so much alcohol, rather than taxing alcohol, we can subsidize everything that is not alcohol,” he wrote. His point, if I may ruin the punch line, is that the United States’ approach to combatting climate change is kind of silly.