American Highways and the Climate Crisis

Keywords: highways, carbon tax, infrastructure
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

For more than a century, state highway departments played the dominant role in the development of the American highway system, a vast network of four million miles of roads retrofitted for motor vehicles. They achieved this, as I have argued elsewhere, because of their capacity to organize across the many divides of the American federal system (Johnson 2021). For most of that century they also controlled a potent revenue source: the excise tax on gasoline. That revenue source, however, faltered sharply in the 1970s after producing nations jacked up the price of oil. It began to falter again in the early 2000s from a combination of increased fuel efficiency and a slowdown in the growth of motor vehicle use. Though Congress has routinely filled the gap with general funds, there are clear signs that bi-partisan accord on the issue is wearing thin. Progressives held the Infrastructure bill of 2021 hostage for four months in an effort to pass a companion bill. Conservatives are already gearing up for a re-debate when current authorizations run out in 2027. What policy makers have not yet fully grasped, I argue, is the fact that the gas tax is currently the nation's only direct tax on fossil fuels. As the paper explains in more detail, redefining and redeploying that revenue source as a carbon tax could enable these still powerful agencies not just to re-secure their fiscal base but launch a sustained transition of the American economy as a whole away from fossil fuels.