About us …
The Carbon Tax Center (“CTC”) was launched in January 2007 to give voice to Americans who believe that taxing emissions of carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas — is imperative to reduce global warming. Co-founders Charles Komanoff and Daniel Rosenblum bring to CTC a combined six decades of experience in economics, law, public policy and social change. CTC Washington representative James Handley is a chemical engineer and attorney who previously worked in the private sector and for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
To read the most recent issue of our newsletter, A Convenient Tax, please click here.
About our name
Considerable thought went into our choice of the name, Carbon Tax Center. Despite the obvious drawback — any bill packaged as a “tax” is flying into a stiff headwind — we felt it was more important to openly confront the tax issue. We also knew that given that we were proposing a tax, even a revenue-neutral one, others would be more than happy to stick us with the “T word” — and argue that we were duplicitous in trying to hide the fact.
Since our founding, we’ve received numerous notes from supporters urging us to change our name to de-emphasize the “tax” aspect and reframe carbon taxes as a a tax-shift or carbon-cutter or a refundable tax credit — anything but a “carbon tax. We value these notes, particularly the reminders to emphasize the revenue-neutral aspect of our carbon-tax advocacy.
We are also aware that FPL Group CEO Lewis Hay III refers to the carbon tax as a “fee” and that Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd called for a “corporate carbon tax” in his unsuccessful 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. (We’ve posted statements by both Hay and Dodd on our Supporters pages.) While we welcome and support their advocacy, we intend to continue to play it straight with the American people and keep the name Carbon Tax Center.
Nevertheless, we too are increasingly referring in our advocacy to a carbon fee. For one thing, climate scientist James Hansen, who is now (in 2010) easily the most visible advocate of a carbon tax approach, has had much success in branding a federal carbon tax with 100% return of revenues to households as “fee-and-dividend.” There’s also the fact that, anti-tax rhetoric aside, “fee” connotes a user charge more directly than does “tax.” As Get Energy Smart Now blogger Adam Siegel pointed out recently via e-mail, “Charging a fee for dumping pollution into the commons” may appeal more broadly than a “tax which implies taking something away from people.”
Lessons from “Traffic Tax”?
Several years back, as congestion pricing was being debated in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to charge a user fee for driving into the Manhattan Central Business District was commonly abbreviated to a “traffic tax.” (As in the headline for the May 29, 2007 lead article in the New York Sun, Spitzer Open to a Deal on Traffic Tax.)
Congestion pricing and carbon taxing emanate from the same overarching idea: that the most effective way to reduce a “negative externality” is to tax it. Of course, the mayor and his allies went to great lengths to frame the congestion charge as a fee, and he also pledged to dedicate the revenues to bus and subway improvements that would benefit lower-income New Yorkers, the vast majority of whom take mass transit into the CBD. None of that stopped opponents, and even some media supporters such as The Sun, from labeling the congestion charge as a tax. (Even the pro-congestion charge urbanist bible, Planetizen, did so; see New Yorkers Might Not Be Ready For Congestion Tax).
