What environmental reasons justify sacrifice?

I can only think of four fundamental environmental rationales off hand.  Email or leave a comment if you think of more.  

1. Global warming 
1. This really just duplicates the following reasons, but is potentially so important that it deserves its own category.
2. Reduce resource extraction to preserve nonrenewables for future generations? 
3. Reduce toxic pollution (poisons by ingestion or breathing)? 
4. Wellbeing of other species?

People like tax expenditures much better than explicit expenditures

The Monkey Cage:

We presented survey respondents with a description of a federal housing program, after which they were asked to rate their approval of the program on a seven-point scale.  About half of respondents received a description of the real-life Home Mortgage Interest Deduction:
“We’re going to ask you your opinion on a government program intended to help Americans afford to own homes. Under this program, individuals who take out a mortgage to buy a home are eligible to deduct the monthly mortgage interest from their taxable income, thereby reducing their tax burden. The total savings for individuals under this program are estimated to be $94 billion for fiscal year 2011.”
The other half of the respondents were shown a description that differed in two respects: first, the words “eligible to deduct the monthly mortgage interest from their taxable income, thereby reducing their tax burden” were replaced with “eligible for a grant from the federal government to help them afford the monthly payment;” second, the words “The total savings for individuals under this program…” are replaced with “The total government expenditures to individuals under this program…” We believe these contrasts in language were reasonable given the way these types of programs are often framed by elites. 
The effect of this manipulation of delivery mechanism is displayed in this bar graph, which displays the percentage of respondents in each treatment group who expressed at least some approval of the program.  The effect is considerable, as support drops by about 24% when the program is described as a grant.

The effect of this manipulation was especially pronounced for conservatives.  Conservatives appear to be just as willing as liberals to support a government program, provided that it is delivered through the tax code, but less willing to support this program when described as a “grant.”

Why the preference?  The authors hypothesize that it is partly due to "a lack of understanding about ... tax expenditures"  or " perhaps it’s about the beneficiaries; Americans may look more generously upon “taxpayers” than they do upon other potential recipients of policy benefits."

Age Dependent Taxation

Horizontal or vertical equity?  Matthew Weinzierl:

age-dependent taxes... the idea of making the tax rate contingent upon the age of the tax payer. ...the administratively simple reform of age dependence can make the tax system substantially more efficient and more equitable...:

• Age-dependent marginal tax rates are tailored to the distribution of income at each age. To see why, note that a 25-year-old earning $100,000 is higher in his or her age-specific income distribution than is a 45-year-old earning $100,000. Furthermore, these two workers are likely to have a different lifetime earnings path. We therefore ought to tax them differently.
• Age-dependent average tax rates can help individuals transfer earnings across the lifecycle when private borrowing and saving is restricted.
• Age dependence yields a large welfare gain by reducing distortions (lower marginal tax rates) and by making possible more redistribution.

See working paper (PDF)

When Privitization INCREASES Expenses!

Good Magazine highlights a new POGO study which finds that government outsourcing often increases costs rather than decreasing them. 

A new study by the Project On Government Oversight revealed that contractors earn 1.83 times more than public employees, and more than twice the compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.
While the federal workforce has remained steady at about 2 million people since 1999, the contractor workforce increased from 4.4 million to 7.6 million in 2005, costing approximately $320 billion a year. In 33 of 35 occupational classifications, paying government employees would be cheaper than hiring a contractor.
POGO points to two main reasons for the huge waste. One is the steady drumbeat of small- and anti-government rhetoric from the right, which has resulted in the creation of a “shadow government” in which contractors perform services once handled by public employees at far greater cost—which, ironically enough, increases the size of the federal budget.
The second reason is that the government is ill-prepared to negotiate market-rate fees because it does not manage data about payments and processing or maintain clear standards about occupational specialties and justifying outsourcing. There’s also the issue of no-bid contracts and other shady paths for companies to find lucrative arrangements working for the government.

Intellectual Property

 Yglesias:

I think the right way to think about striking this balance is in terms of the capital-intensity of what you’re talking about. If you’re talking about a very capital-intensive field, then you won’t have any new products unless there are large financial incentives to innovate. But if you’re talking about a field with low needs for capital inputs, then creating the large incentives is less important and strong IP rights are mostly acting as an obstacle to innovation. The rise of digital technology has made it much cheaper than it was before to produce and distribute most kinds of media. The correct policy response is to adopt somewhat weaker intellectual property rights. Instead, we’ve moved in the opposite direction to shore up firms threatened by potentially disruptive technological change. It’s a mistake.

 I don't think "capital-intensity" is the right term.  It is large size of investment that requires large financial incentives.  In most areas the cost of innovation has declined, but I'm not sure it has declined in drugs.  The cost of drug discovery may be down, but the cost of drug development and testing has suffered from Baumol's cost disease as well it should.  50 years ago, Americans were less concerned about the potential harms from drugs than we are today.  Heck, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment only ended in 1972 which shows how little regard the medical establishment had for the safety of human experimental subjects at that time.  That led to major medical experimentation regulation. 

Cost Benefit of Coal

Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus have a new paper in the American Economic Review that does CBA on coal and finds enormous externalities even without any global warming added into the mix.  This should be famous and shape public debate, but it is not. 

Externalities of Coal

Brad Johnson:

A new economic analysis of the costs of pollution to the United States finds that coal power is harming the economy. In the American Economic Review article “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy,” economists Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus model the physical and economic consequences of emissions of six major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, fine particulate matter, and coarse particulate matter) from the country’s 10,000 pollution sources. They estimate the “gross external damages” (GED) from the sickness and death caused by the pollution, and compare that to the value added to the economy:

Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. . .
Coal plants are responsible for more than one-fourth of GED [gross external damages] from the entire US economy. The damages attributed to this industry are larger than the combined GED due to the three next most polluting industries: crop production, $15 billion/year, livestock production, $15 billion/year, and construction of roadways and bridges, $13 billion/ year.

“Five industries stand out as large air polluters,” the authors write, “coal-fired power plants, crop production, truck transportation, livestock production, and highway-street-bridge construction.”
When the authors add in highly conservative estimates of the cost of carbon dioxide pollution, they find that “the damages caused by oil- and coal-fired power plants are between 30 and 40 percent higher.” With an estimated social cost of carbon — a damage estimate of global warming pollution — of $65 (far less than other estimates), the GED for coal-fired generators is $0.21/kW.
In other words, instead of being “cheap” and “affordable,” coal is actually the costliest fuel for electricity.
“The findings show that, contrary to current political mythology, coal is underregulated,” Legal Planet’s Dan Farber comments. “On average, the harm produced by burning the coal is over twice as high as the market price of the electricity. In other words, some of the electricity production would flunk a cost-benefit analysis. This means that we’re either not using enough pollution controls or we’re just overusing coal as a fuel.”