Carbon Tax Center

New Converts to Carbon Tax: Welcome Aboard, Now Start Rowing

09/1/2010 by Charles Komanoff

(Note: NYT DotEarth blogger Andy Revkin linked to this post today in a piece that has more from Bill Gates on carbon pricing. Click here. – C.K., Sept 2.)

Last week, Bill Gates. This week, Bjorn Lomborg. With the world’s #1 software magnate and the man whom the Guardian labeled “the world’s most high-profile climate change skeptic” both endorsing a carbon tax, is the tide of influential opinion on climate policy and carbon pricing turning?

Yes and no.

Bill Gates. Photo: Steve Jurvetson (flickr).

Let’s look at Lomborg first. The Danish policy analyst built a lucrative career lambasting climate-change advocates as scaremongers who would consign millions to early death by devoting resources to decarbonizing the world economy rather than fighting killer diseases like malaria. But in a new book to be published next month, the self-styled “skeptical environmentalist” reportedly will call global warming “one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront.” According to the Guardian, Lomborg will urge investing tens of billions of dollars a year to tackle climate change, with the funds to be raised through a carbon tax.

In somewhat overheated prose, the Guardian called Lomborg’s new-found resolve to combat global warming “an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.”

Gates, on the other hand, has long worried about climate change. But in an interview in Technology Review last week, he added a new wrinkle: criticism of cap-and-trade:

TR: [A]lmost everyone agrees that there needs to be a price on carbon–whether a Pigovian tax or a cap-and-trade system. Without a price, there’s going be very little incentive to do the kinds of research, or create the kinds of technologies, or build out the kind of infrastructure, that we need.

Gates: No, that’s not right. It’s ideal to have a carbon tax, not just a price on carbon, which is this fuzzy term that includes cap-and-trade.

TR: Well, ideally, you’d do a Pigovian tax –

Gates: No, not a Pigovian tax. A Pigovian tax is where you pay for the damage. Here, you’re not paying for the damage — you can’t pay for the damage. You’re using the tax to create a mode shift to a different form of energy generation.

TR: That sounds very rational, pragmatically feasible, and humane. It also sounds politically unlikely.

Gates: Which is more likely: a [hidden] carbon tax [Gates’ way of describing cap-and-trade] with all sorts of markets and options and uncertainties about prices, and traders in the middle, and confusion about who initially gets the most advantage? Or a regulatory thing that says you mark every coal plant in the country with when it has to be retired, and a 2 percent tax to fund the R&D so that utilities know they can buy a plant that’s emitting hardly any CO₂?

Gates’ disparagement of cap-and-trade is striking. But neither his 2% carbon tax nor Lomborg’s, which appears to resemble Gates’ in magnitude and function ─ funding energy R&D ─ is going to end the reign of fossil fuels in the foreseeable future.

Bjorn Lomborg. Photo: Emil Jupin (Lomborg.com).

The notion of an R&D solution is alluring. Who doesn’t want there to be global warming antidotes lurking in garages and labs, waiting for funding to unlock them? But it’s a chimera. Even with unlimited research funding, no technological breakthroughs can dislodge carbon-based fuels from dominion over the world’s energy economy. Fossil fuels’ energy density is too great, and their positional advantages of infrastructure and institutions too powerful.

Yes, subsidies can help push renewables past the “hump” in the S-curve to where scale economies can kick in and take a few bites out of the fossil fuel pie. But as New Republic blogger Brad Plumer pointed out recently, “Government subsidies just don’t pack the same punch as a market price on carbon pollution.” When a commodity or activity causes harm, the surest way to reduce it isn’t to subsidize a thousand and one alternatives but to directly discourage the thing by internalizing the cost of the harm into its price.

Ironically, Barack Obama appeared to grasp this during his run for the presidency. In a February 2008 interview with the San Antonio Express he enthused over the idea of a carbon tax:

Q. Have you considered … taxing emerging energy forms, for example, say a penny per kilowatt hour on wind energy?

A. Well, that’s clean energy, and we want to drive down the cost of that, not raise it. We need to give them subsidies so they can start developing that. What we ought to tax is dirty energy, like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas. (emphasis added)

How big a carbon tax is needed? A lot more than 2%. Raising electricity prices by 2%, if that’s what Gates envisions, would reduce electricity usage by an estimated 1.4% over the long run. Assuming, as modeling at the Carbon Tax Center suggests (xls), that fuel substitution (gas and nuclear for coal, wind and solar for gas, etc.) contributes roughly two units of carbon reduction for each unit gained from demand destruction, the total impact of the Gates tax on carbon emissions from the electricity sector would be just 4-5%. Since other sectors are less price-elastic, the average economy-wide reduction would be even less, probably just a few percent.

Contrast this with the bill introduced by Rep. John Larson (America’s Energy Security Trust Fund Act of 2009, H.R. 1337), which has a first-year carbon tax of $15 per ton of CO2 increasing steadily and predictably at $10-$15/ton each year, that would cut (xls) U.S. carbon emissions by approximately 30% by 2020, or an order of magnitude more than Gates-Lomborg carbon taxes. And Larson would return the vast bulk of carbon revenues to workers’ paychecks while setting aside a fund for the sort of clean energy R&D that Gates and Lomborg espouse.

Why the 10-fold difference in impact? A large carbon tax like Rep. Larson’s would create profound incentives: on the demand side to use less energy (via billions of decisions at household and social levels), and on the supply side to shift fuels and power to low- and zero-carbon sources (via thousands of decisions by entrepreneurs, utilities and energy companies). A mere 2% carbon tax, even one with revenues allocated to R&D, would not.

In his Technololgy Review interview, Gates at least coupled his carbon tax with a notion of ordering utilities to shut down CO2-intensive plants at such and such a time:

And then you just take all the carbon-emitting plants, you look at their lifetime, and you say on a certain date this one has to be shut down, and when a new one is put in place, it has to be low-CO₂-emitting.

But how this would come to pass in the absence of price signals and corrections justifying it financially is, to be charitable, unclear.

Both Gates and Lomborg deserve plaudits for their disavowals: of cap-and-trade by Gates, of climate-change denialism by Lomborg; and for embracing the idea of a carbon tax. They now need to see the next light: to have the necessary impact, a carbon tax can start modestly but must keep rising predictably. Fortunately, we have the example of British Columbia to show that an upward-trending carbon tax of the needed size can be politically popular if the revenue is returned to the public.

Arising from the Senate’s Ashes?

07/22/2010 by Charles Komanoff

And now, ve may begin?

Readers of a certain age, and a certain literary bent, will recognize the words of Alexander Portnoy’s psychiatrist, spoken at the close of Philip Roth’s transgressive 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint.

After lo these many years, they popped into my head today as I read that Senate Democrats had finally thrown in the towel on an energy bill that would have included a partial cap-and-trade provision for limiting carbon emissions from power plants. The bill, written by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, was touted by Washington insiders and some major environmental groups as this year’s last hope for federal climate legislation. Yet it would have relied on carbon offsets and other dodges to postpone the day of reckoning with true, visible carbon emissions pricing — the cornerstone of meaningful climate policy.

Instead, reported the New York Times, Senate Democrats will pursue a limited bill aimed at increasing oversight of oil drilling and tightening energy efficiency standards — with no direct assault on climate-destabilizing CO2. (For a later Times story amplifying the first, click here.)

Yes, now, we may begin — “we” being Americans who care about climate, sustainability, and Earth — to unite around a climate approach that is effective, equitable and transparent enough to win the support of our fellow citizens and a Congressional majority.

I’m referring of course to the idea advanced by climatologist Jim Hansen as fee-and-dividend and by the Carbon Tax Center as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, by which fossil fuel extractors and importers pay the U.S. Treasury fees pegged to the carbon content of the coal, oil and gas they take from the ground or bring into U.S. ports, and the Treasury distributes the revenues to all Americans via equal monthly dividends (“green checks”), or by tax-shifting from regressive taxes such as payroll taxes.

The Senate’s antipathy to even the partial cap-and-trade proposed by Sen. Kerry will doubtless be spun as indicating that for the foreseeable future the well for climate legislation has been poisoned. The Carbon Tax Center says that the opposite may be true: with cap-and-trade out of the way at last, the political well can begin to be de-toxified so that the effective, equitable and transparent carbon fee-and-dividend can be seriously considered.

For this to happen, however, the Big Green groups like EDF and NRDC that for years have dominated climate discourse among environmentalists, and that convinced Congressional Democrats and the White House that the only way to “put a price on carbon” in America was via carbon cap-and-trade, will have to abandon that approach and allow others, and themselves, to try a fresh start.

It will be said that cap-and-trade failed because Fox News and other climate deniers branded it as “cap-and-tax” and, therefore, a carbon tax (or fee) cannot possibly succeed. And it is true that carbon cap-and-trade was looked to, years ago, as a way to build on the success of acid rain cap-and-trade, win over Republican free-marketers, and put a price on carbon without having to parade the dreaded t-a-x word before the public.

In the event, though, carbon cap-and-trade did none of these things.

Instead, Big Green’s pursuit of carbon cap-and-trade tethered the climate movement to complex financial instruments and branded us as servants of Wall Street elites. It opened the legislative floodgates to off-the-charts Beltway deal-making that rightly repulsed the public. Perhaps most importantly, the co-optation of climate advocacy by the cap-and-traders robbed us of the high moral ground we might have shared with abolitionists, suffragists, labor agitators and civil rights workers — true American heroes who fought to liberate our society of oppression and injustice.

If you’re in the climate movement, you recognize that fossil fuels’ assault on Earth’s climate is an ultimate form of oppression and injustice: of rich against poor, of the profligate against the frugal, of the present against the future. Ending this assault will require concerted action on many fronts; and it starts by internalizing the climate-damage costs of coal, oil and gas into their prices, so that the free ride for fossil fuels is ended and all of the alternatives, from energy efficiency, renewable energy and low-carbon fuels to conservation-based behavior and mindfulness toward energy consumption, may compete fairly and effectively.

Political action to accomplish this must be done in bright sunlight, not in Beltway shadows.

Cap-and-trade, let us hope, is dead. And now, we may begin!

Photo: Flickr / generica.

Nat’l Academy of Sciences Tells Citizen-Lobbyists: First Priority is Economy-Wide Carbon Price

06/23/2010 by James Handley

On Monday, Dr. Laurie Geller, director of the National Academy of Sciences’ new blue-ribbon climate change report, briefed the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s National Conference, kicking off CCL’s Washington lobby week.  Part I of NAS’s report stresses the strong evidence and broad scientific consensus that Earth’s surface is warming due to human-caused fossil fuel burning. NAS recommends further research on managing impacts on ecosystems, food production, public health and climate policy.

Part II, “Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change” calls for immediate, urgent action; its top recommendation is to “Adopt an economy-wide carbon pricing system.”  It also urges additional clean energy R&D, research into how behavior and technology interact and incentives for low greenhouse gas energy technologies.  Part III, on adaptation, suggests responses to the inevitable consequences of climate change already in motion.  Recommendations include: “develop hot weather early warning systems” as Philadelphia has done, and “Alaska: Retreat from the Coast” beginning the process of relocation from areas where thawing and erosion are rendering present settlements untenable.

Lester Brown, whose book “Plan B 4.0” is an inspiring blueprint for a sustainable, low-carbon future, also addressed the CCL conference. Brown reminded listeners that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sparked President Roosevelt to call on industrialists to convert automobile and steel manufacturing into wartime production, leading to victory in WWII. Brown sketched a similarly broad transformation away from fossil fuels and toward efficiency and renewables that is now urgently needed to avert climate disaster — a far more profound threat to our security than Japanese invasion was in 1942. Brown stressed that a gradually and predictably-rising carbon tax is a key policy needed to drive the energy transformation required for climate stability essential to human civilization.

Obama Likens BP Spill to 9/11 But Still Misses Main Message

06/14/2010 by Charles Komanoff

In an Oval Office interview last Friday with Politico columnist Roger Simon, President Obama likened the Gulf oil disaster’s impact on the national psyche to that of 9/11:

In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come.

Unfortunately, judging from the portions of the interview published by Politico over the weekend, we shouldn’t expect this reshaping to include a carbon fee or similar tax on dirty energy.

Obama did stress the environmental costs:

I have no idea what new energy sources are going to be available, what technologies might drive down the price of renewable energies. What we can predict is that the availability of fossil fuel is going to be diminishing; that it’s going to get more expensive to recover; that there are going to be environmental costs that our children, … our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren are going to have to bear.

Yet there was nothing in the Politico interview to match the seeming commitment to legislating a carbon emissions price that the President made in his June 2 energy speech in Pittsburgh, as reported in the New York Times:

If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction — if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs — we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.  The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.

Needless to say, it’s a long shot that renewable technologies will ever be able to undercut fossil fuels in price unless at least some of those environmental and security costs are factored into coal and oil prices, as the Christian Science Monitor noted in an editorial published the same day that Politico interviewed the President.

Gov’t Panel Estimates Cost of C02 pollution: $21/t and rising

06/3/2010 by James Handley

An inter-agency panel estimated this week that each additional (metric) tonne of CO2 emitted into Earth’s atmosphere inflicts at least $21 in damage to agricultural productivity, human health, property damage from flooding, and the value of ecosystem services lost due to climate change.  (According to EPA,  the U.S. emitted 5.6 billion tons of CO2 in 2008.)  The panel, representing the consensus of 12 federal agencies, provided its climate damage analysis for use in cost/benefit calculations assessing major federal actions, including regulatory changes.

The panel applied “conservative” assumptions: a relatively high (3%) discount rate which tends to downplay the present value of future damage, they excluded large categories of costs such as military intervention or humanitarian assistance to failed states, and gave only minimal consideration to potential catastrophic climate tipping points.  Even with those assumptions holding damage figures down, their mid-range assessment supports a $21/t initial CO2 price rising by 2050 to $45 in low-risk scenarios and to $136 in their high-risk scenario.   The analysis can be seen as a low-end “benchmark” that will only go up as we learn more about (and can better quantify) climate damage.   And it clearly underlines the need for a carbon tax of at least $21/t and rising, to reflect more of the true cost of CO2 pollution and create economy-wide incentives to minimize climate damage.

NYT Columnist Bob Herbert: After Gulf Disaster, “We Need A Carbon Tax”

06/1/2010 by Charles Komanoff

It’s hard not to turn one’s head from the carnage the Deepwater Horizon oil is wreaking in the Gulf of Mexico.

The loss of human life, the loss of human livelihood, the enormous ecological destruction and loss of ecosystem services, are heartbreaking. The helplessness of British Petroleum and the oil industry to stanch the ongoing eruption of crude from beneath the ocean’s depths is maddening. And the complicity of the oil-besotted U.S. Government is revolting.

NYT columnist Bob Herbert

A beacon of light in this Hades-like darkness has been New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Last Friday, Herbert used a shockingly naive remark by the President to spotlight the centrality of unfettered corporate power to the Gulf crisis:

“Where I was wrong,” said President Obama at his press conference on Thursday, “was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.”

With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to worst-case scenarios.

These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.

“An Unnatural Disaster,” May 28.

Today, Herbert honed in on solutions, and, finally, embraced a federal carbon tax.

However and whenever the well gets capped, what we really need is leadership that calls on the American public to begin coping in a serious and sustained way with an energy crisis that we’ve been warned about for decades. If the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history is not enough to bring about a reversal of our epic foolishness on the energy front, then nothing will.

The first thing we can do is conserve more. That’s the low-hanging fruit in any clean-energy strategy.

It’s fast, cheap and easy. It’s something that all Americans, young and old, can be asked to participate in immediately. In that sense, it’s a way of combating the pervasive feelings of helplessness that have become so demoralizing and so destructive to our long-term interests…

We also need a carbon tax. The current crisis is the perfect opportunity for our political leaders to explain to the public why this is so important and what benefits would come from it.

“Our Epic Foolishness,” June 1, emphasis added.

Herbert thus joins fellow Times columnists David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman as carbon tax advocates. Friedman, who from time to time has trimmed his carbon-tax sails in favor of cap-and-trade, last Sunday returned to the fold, with first daughter Malia Obama as his foil:

Kids get it. They ask: Why would we want to stay dependent on an energy source that could destroy so many birds, fish, beaches and ecosystems before the next generation has a chance to enjoy them? Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?

“Malia for President,” May 30, emphasis added.

The heartbreaking Gulf disaster would have at least a small silver lining if it moves a national carbon tax toward center stage in the debate over energy and climate policy.

Postscript: A booklet I published after 9/11, Ending The Oil Age, outlining specific steps, including a phased-in hike in the federal gas tax, that could have reduced U.S. petroleum consumption by 10% within six months as a down payment on sustained actions to end U.S. oil dependence, may again be relevant in the wake of the Gulf disaster. Click here to download (pdf).

Kerry-Lieberman “climate” bill is worse than nothing

05/14/2010 by James Handley

“Is this the Climate Treaty You Came For?” George Monbiot asked hundreds of activists at the Copenhagen Klimaforum last December. Monbiot, a prolific reporter for The Guardian (U.K.) on climate, and author of Heat, offered this reply: “The UN isn’t even asking the right questions yet.” Green energy is still trying to “out-subsidize” dirty energy. “The Kyoto agreement isn’t curbing demand for fossil fuels.”

Alberta Tar Sands Mine

As one example, Monbiot pointed to tar sands mining wrecking boreal forests in Canada, a nation ostensibly “capped” by Kyoto. Monbiot agreed that unlike subsidies and “caps,” a revenue-neutral carbon tax would effectively curb demand while creating broad incentives for efficiency and increased supply of low-carbon energy.

Yesterday, the climate advocacy group 1 Sky held a conference call with Sierra Club’s climate and energy lobbyist David Hamilton. David pondered an updated version of Monbiot’s query: “Is the cap in the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act worth the cost” in terms of subsidies for dirty energy and huge compromises including more offshore drilling. Hamilton called this a “cosmically difficult question.”

Not for me. Here’s why:

First and foremost, in dollars, Kerry-Lieberman is overwhelmingly a dirty energy subsidy bill with crumbs tossed to “green” energy. More money (loan guarantee, tax breaks, insurance subsidies) for nukes, “clean coal,” oil companies, and highways. As documented by Earth Track and Taxpayers For Common Sense, K-L’s “buy everyone off” approach means inducing more demand for energy, which in turn means driving drilling anywhere and everywhere, blowing up more Appalachian mountaintops, and maintaining and extending America’s military presence around the world:  An addict’s frenzy for yet another “fix” of cheap fossil fuels.

For the utility sector, K-L relies on a “cap” with trading and offsets, ceding to traders (i.e. Wall St.) the authority to set carbon prices. In the transportation fuel sector, K-L at least uses a more direct approach of selling allowances at a price established by the utility permit auctions, thus limiting somewhat the problems from trading. (Oil companies don’t like volatility, either.) Yet nowhere does the bill set the clear, briskly-rising price on CO2 pollution essential to create incentives for efficiency and low-carbon energy development across the economy.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (5/1/10)

K-L gives offshore drilling the green light. While K-L purports to let states “veto” drilling in previously-protected waters up to 75 miles off their coasts, it offers them a whopping 37.5% share of revenues generated by offshore oil and gas activity — no strings attached. How many cash-strapped states will resist cries to “drill, baby, drill” in coastal and marine areas already under stress from pollution, over fishing, ocean acidification and warming? And this virtual “bribe” to drill will run afoul of long-standing domestic and international maritime law holding that coastal waters (and revenue from leasing) belong to the entire nation, not just the adjacent state.

K-L continues the pretense that coal can be made “clean” through thermodynamically-challenged “carbon capture and sequestration” by throwing an additional $2 billion/yr on top of the $2.4 billion in the 2009 stimulus package. CCS is a speculative technology that (if viable at all) will require burning at least 30% more coal per unit of net output to power the process of “capture” and “sequestration” of CO2 and building an additional facility roughly equal in size and cost to every coal-fired power plant. Plus, a huge new network of pipelines. Then there’s the problem of finding the underground capacity for permanently storing a few billion tons more CO2 every year… from now on.

K-L’s vaunted “cap” is a joke. A “cap” that adds 2 billion tons of offsets on top of an economy that generated 5.4 billion tons of CO2 last year means that even if the cap tightens a few percent each year, polluters will be able to buy (cheap) offsets instead of making reductions for the next two decades. By design (K-L calls it “cost containment”), CO2 prices will be set in the offset market, not by supply constraints of the “cap.” Charles K. Ebinger, Director of the Energy Security Initiative at the – Brookings Institution critiqued the bill forcefully:

“If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S., let’s do it. Otherwise we simply are exporting capital and jobs [via offsets]. The [K-L] bill’s price on carbon is unlikely to be high enough to generate any real movement away from fossil fuels. Furthermore, the provisions… for trading in carbon are too complex and as written could allow gaming of the system. Energy security and climate change are issues of the most urgent national significance. We should not pretend that we can do it on the cheap with no pain, at no cost, and with no sacrifice for the greater national good.”

In short, as climate scientist Jim Hansen articulated on Earth Day, we will not address climate and energy security without raising the price of cheap, dirty energy. And if we’re serious about a meaningful and effective price, we must return revenue to U.S. workers and families.

Senator Kerry has been boasting about returning revenue, apparently in response to Senator Cantwell’s “CLEAR” bill that proposes returning 75% of revenue to citizens. But K-L’s revenue return has barely budged from that in the Waxman-Markey bill. K-L would return about half of revenue generated by allowance auctions in the utility sector (about 40% of CO2 emissions) through local distribution companies. In states with aggressive public utility commissions, consumers would see some reduction in the fixed charges on electric bills. But in poorly regulated states, which include many in the South, revenue return will be a big windfall for utilities. And since a majority of electricity usage is commercial or industrial, that leaves only a minority of the returned revenue for households. Bottom line: K-L returns only a small fraction of CLEAR’s 75% revenue return.

Still, the Big Green groups and their allies in the US Climate Action Partnership insist that K-L is “better than nothing.” And “we have to do something about climate now.” In exchange for an energy-giveaway bill masquerading as a climate bill, they’re in effect lobbying for dirty energy subsidies and for undercutting much of EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases — an authority that these same groups once vigorously defended, and which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court.

Though K-L would leave intact EPA’s recently-finalized CAFE (automobile efficiency) standards, it would limit the Agency’s authority to mandate technology to cut CO2 emissions from stationary sources (e.g., coal power plants) and would confiscate EPA’s biggest Clean Air Act hammer, the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned EPA to “cap” CO2 emissions using NAAQS under which states would develop and enforce plans to reduce GHG emissions. Some analysts suggest that states’ existing Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives (RGGIs) could be adapted and approved by EPA under NAAQS.

Cap-and-trade simply cannot achieve emissions reductions large enough to avoid climate catastrophe. The price signal is too murky to trigger the needed shifts to clean energy, and the revenue return is too meager to cover the needed price rises. Nor can it lead to an international price on CO2 pollution supported by trade agreements. Big Green’s insistence that “we have to pass Kerry-Lieberman or we won’t have any climate program” is specious, therefore, insofar as K-L itself is no more a climate program than was any other energy-giveaway bill in recent decades. We still need a carbon fee that returns all or nearly all revenues to citizens to gain and keep broad bipartisan and public support. Passing K-L will only make this difficult task harder by entrenching traders, offset purveyors and recipients of the bill’s dirty energy subsidies.

K-L presents no “cosmic difficulty” for me. Let’s book a grand, New Orleans-style funeral for cap/trade/offset where concerned citizens gather, take stock and start working for a People’s Climate Bill – a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Photos: flickr– Google/SkyTruth, NASA Goddard

Plan B: After KGL / Cap-Trade-Offset

04/26/2010 by James Handley

Earth Day weekend’s headlines set the stage: “Sen. Graham Walks Away from Climate and Energy Bill” and “Climate consensus collapses in Senate.”

Speaking at the Earth Day rally, Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica called for everyone to “use less stuff,” looked to a future beyond fossil fuels and urged Congress to “get serious” about climate.  In turn, Dr. Hansen pointed to our “false economy of cheap fossil fuels” and proposed a “People’s Climate Stewardship Act” — a steadily-rising carbon fee with revenue returned to Americans.  Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) spoke immediately following Dr. Hansen. Afterwards, Dr. Hansen and I congratulated Van Hollen for his “dividend” proposal to return carbon revenue to Americans.  Van Hollen thanked Dr. Hansen and agreed: a price on carbon is essential; a fee with revenue return is the “cleanest” way. He said, “I will work with you” and encouraged us to continue educating the public and pressing for bipartisan support.

Here’s Dr. Hansen’s report: Earth Day on the Mall.

Scientist James Hansen Proposes “People’s Climate Stewardship Act”: A Simple Carbon Fee with Revenue Returned to Americans

04/25/2010 by James Handley

“Our grandchildren will blame us if we destroy the remarkable planet that we inherited,” warned renowned climate scientist James Hansen today at the 40th anniversary celebration of Earth Day on the National Mall in Washington, DC.  Dr. Hansen, awaiting the imminent birth of a grandchild (his 4th), is keenly aware of the threat that potential human-made climate chaos poses to her generation and all who will follow.

We live in a “false economy” of cheap fossil fuels whose prices don’t reflect their true costs to society, the environment and future generations.  “As long as coal is so cheap that low-carbon energy can’t compete, we will not make the transition to a clean-energy future,” Dr. Hansen said.

Dr. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, spoke on this policy-related topic today as a private citizen.  He called on the public and lawmakers to reject the “smoke and mirrors” of energy bills now before Congress, which rely on “cap-and-trade” and “offsets.”  “We need a bill designed for the public, not for big banks and fossil-fuel companies,” Dr. Hansen said.

His proposal calls for a “simple, honest” carbon fee, collected from fossil-fuel companies upon the first sale at the mine, wellhead or port of entry.

The money collected via this fee would be distributed to the public as a monthly “dividend” or “green check.”  Distributing all of the revenue equitably to households will ensure that families can afford the energy they need during the transition to a clean energy future, and it should help win public support for a rising carbon fee.

Dr. Hansen’s proposal was produced after months of discussion with religious leaders, the Carbon Tax Center, Citizens Climate Lobby and the Price Carbon Campaign.  It incorporates key elements of bills proposed by Congressmen John Larson (D-Conn) and Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), whom Dr. Hansen calls on to join forces for the benefit of American people in building an effective, bipartisan “Climate Stewardship Act.”

Photo: Columbia University

Join the Earth Day Climate “Revival” This Sunday

04/20/2010 by Charles Komanoff

There are good reasons, ranging from corporate sponsorship to vapidity, to have been cynical about recent Earth Day observances. But there are even more compelling reasons — the imminence of the climate crisis and the recent gain in denialists’ political standing — to put cynicism aside and come to Washington this Sunday for what organizers hope will be the “largest climate rally ever.”

Earth Day’s original national coordinator Denis Hayes and the Earth Day Network are aiming for a 40^th anniversary revival of the “spirit of 1970” that catapulted environmentalism into public consciousness, launching a decade of environmental reforms, winning landmark legislation, and birthing the modern environmental movement.

The list of speakers is impressive for its heft and diversity. They include:

• Climate scientist James Hansen
• Filmmaker James Cameron (Avatar; Titanic) and author Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale; The Blind Assassin)
• Business executives from Siemens and Phillips, and union leaders from the AFL-CIO and the SEIU
• Rainbow Coalition leader Jesse Jackson and NAACP V-P for advocacy Hilary Shelton
• Evangelical creation-care advocate Rev. Richard Cizik
• Climate-policy blogger Joe Romm

Plus a stellar roster of musicians including Bob Weir, Mavis Staples, Willy Colon, Booker T, and Sting

And the program’s diversity includes sharp differences over climate policy. Hansen in recent years has moved beyond climate science to climate politics, becoming the most visible (and perhaps most aggressive) U.S. advocate of fee-and-dividend — a federal carbon tax whose revenues would entirely be returned, per capita, to the American people. For his advocacy and his criticism of carbon cap-and-trade, Hansen has been censured by Romm, the climate blogger for the Center for American Progress, which is closely linked to cap-and-trade advocates in the Democratic Party and the mainstream environmental movement.

On Sunday, these differences can and should be put aside. As Romm did in his blog on the rally, we defer to Denis Hayes’ post on Grist:

Humanity must swiftly abandon dirty energy sources and switch to safe, clean, decentralized, renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal. The world, led by America, must abandon the appallingly inefficient way it uses energy and swiftly embrace the most efficient new housing, transport, and industrial processes that exist. We Americans must slash our politically risky and economically catastrophic dependence on the oil wealth of nations that don’t like us very much.

A necessary—though not sufficient—common denominator is to establish a price on carbon that reflects the costs of climate disruption, blowing the tops off mountains, and acidifying the world’s oceans. We must place a firm cap with no loopholes on the amount of carbon fuels we consume each year and ratchet that cap down at a prescribed rate every year in the future until we hit something very close to zero. Only a federal law can accomplish this goal.

If this were easy, we would have begun a quarter century ago. The junk science, climate-denying interest groups are rich, powerful, and ruthless. But sooner or later they will lose. Sooner is better

They will lose for the same reason that IBM and Control Data lost to Microsoft, Apple and Dell. They will lose for the same reason that Ma Bell—the most powerful monopoly in the world—lost to cellular upstarts and Internet-telephony. They lost because their thinking was anchored in the past instead of envisioning the future

The junk science, climate-disruption-denying interest groups will lose because 19th century answers won’t solve 21st century problems.

At some point, this climate-disrupting madness has to start to stop. Come to the Mall between the Capitol Building and the White House on Sunday, April 25. Bring your spouse, your parents, your kids, your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers, your congregation, your bowling league. Vote with your bodies on April 25th at the largest climate rally ever.

While we at the Carbon Tax Center differ with Denis’s emphasis on a cap — we’re convinced that only a carbon tax or fee can give U.S. entrepreneurs, investors and families the clear price signal they need to move to clean technologies, fuels and lifestyles — we salute Denis’s 40 years of advocacy (some of which is on fine display in the documentary Earth Days that PBS is airing this week).

We also salute the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who more than any other individual conceived Earth Day (originally as a national day of teach-ins on the environmental crisis) and whose staff hired Denis Hayes to co-ordinate it.

Let’s come to the Mall this Sunday and make our voices heard for climate sanity and the central policy measure that can take us there: a federal, revenue-neutral carbon tax.