Majority support for a carbon tax spanned the political spectrum in the Yale-George Mason poll, with 51% of self-identified Republicans, 69% of independents and 77% of Democrats supporting a carbon tax with revenue returned as lower taxes.

The survey found 60% support for a $10/ton CO2 tax if revenue is returned by reducing income taxes. (The pollsters helpfully noted that $10/ton CO2 equates to around 10 cents per gallon of gasoline.) That support slipped to 49% if revenue is returned via annual checks to families, with each family receiving the same amount. The apparent preference for an income tax shift over a “dividend” runs counter to the view that voters are more likely to embrace direct checks than tax shifts. The survey did not poll on monthly checks, nor on the payroll tax shift approach backed by many economists and embodied in Rep. John Larson’s carbon tax bill.

In the poll, 70% of respondents rated global warming as a high priority for the President and Congress, suggesting that reality in the form of this year’s record-breaking 14 weather-related disasters in the U.S. may be affecting public opinion more than the constant drumbeat of industry-funded climate science denial.

Greater funding for research on renewable energy was supported by an overwhelming 78% of respondents, with greenhouse gas regulation supported by 63%, slightly less than the 65% support for a carbon tax. The survey also found that 70% of respondents oppose fossil fuel subsidies, including a whopping 80% opposition among independent voters.

The Carbon Tax Center has long urged polling organizations to query voters on revenue-neutral carbon taxes, in order to test opinions on carbon taxes apart from anti-government sentiments. The strong public support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax evidenced by this groundbreaking survey suggests we are on the right track.

Greenstone opened by noting how closely-linked energy consumption is to our well-being, but strongly cautioned about very serious un-priced side effects, especially from fossil fuels. Gayer recommended reforming government cost-benefit analysis to focus more on those un-priced externalities, especially since consumer benefits, he noted, are already efficiently priced into markets. Deutch advocated creation of a national energy technology research corporation to harness private sector investment free of a Department of Energy that “is mostly about bombs.” Aldy proposed a technology-neutral “National Clean Electricity Standard” to tax carbon-intense electricity generation and credit low- and zero-carbon electricity,  while providing federal revenue.

Greenstone asked the panel if their proposals wouldn’t be better replaced by a “grand bargain” to provide more of what we like: income, and less of what we dislike: carbon pollution. “[T]he giant prize standing in front of us is the realization that one could raise revenue instead of raising income taxes… through a carbon tax or some kind of carbon charge.” Aldy enthusiastically agreed, claiming “evidence of bipartisan support” and pointing out that he and Brookings economist Adele Morris proposed a carbon tax to the Obama deficit commission.

Deutch chimed in, “I couldn’t agree more with a proposal to do a comprehensive greenhouse gas tax. It depends, of course, on how it’s designed… and how you allocate the revenue. So if you put onto a tax proposal like you say a revenue proposal, then you have at least some chance of selling it.” Deutch urged return of some revenue to taxpayers as “walking around money.” “We’ve got to get the legislation passed,” he concluded.

Jeff Stahler, Columbus Dispatch, 2011

Times reporter Clifford Krauss expended three thousand words trying to say what Columbus (OH) Dispatch cartoonist Jeff Stahler conveyed in eight words and a drawing: that for four decades U.S. administrations have postured rather than acted to reduce petroleum consumption and oil imports.

Overlooked entirely was the principal reason U.S. imports remain around 50 percent of consumption: the failure to raise taxes on transportation fuels — gasoline, diesel and jet fuel — and instill incentives to move people and goods less frequently, less inefficiently, and for shorter distances.

Krauss ascribes the singular success in reducing imports — temporarily halving them from 1977 to 1982 — to “the efforts of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations.” Yet what made auto-efficiency and other fuel-saving standards politically viable while motivating millions of households and businesses to economize on oil was the rise in petroleum prices.

The notion of a carbon tax received its token mention, as did the existence of something called climate change. Otherwise, the article was one dreary cheer for dirty energy including shale gas (a winner, “presuming that the oil and gas industry can answer growing environmental concerns surrounding their hydraulic fracturing practices”), synthetic oil from tar sands (speciously, “if the United States does not import that oil, China will”), and even nukes (astoundingly, “In the aftermath of the Japanese disaster, nuclear power will need to be put on safer footing and expanded.”).

You can’t make this stuff up.

Yesterday, Federal District Judge Dee Benson instructed the jury not to consider Tim’s defense that he acted out of “necessity” in the face of the global climate emergency. Invoking Gandhi’s maxim to “Be the change you want to see in the world,” Tim explained in an interview with Good Magazine:

“[T]he change that most of us wish to see is a carbon tax, but our leaders aren’t doing that for us, so Gandhi’s call is then for us to be the carbon tax… [t]o cost the fossil fuel industry money in any way that we can… [g]etting in their way, slowing them down, shutting them down. Doing whatever we can to be that tax. It forces our leaders to make a choice—to either be more explicit in their war on the young generation, or to get serious about stopping climate change.”

The Carbon Tax Center expresses profound thanks to Tim for putting his liberty on the line for “Generation Hot” and for calling out the policy change that’s urgently necessary: a carbon tax that makes the prices of fossil fuels reflect at least some of the damage their use costs nature, communities and humanity.

That’s former Fed Vice-chair and Princeton Econ. professor Alan Blinder’s message in “The Carbon Tax Miracle Cure,” broadcast today from the pulpit of free-market orthodoxy, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:

[A] carbon tax… should be enacted now [but] set at zero for 2011 and 2012. After that, it would ramp up gradually… What’s critical is that we lock in higher future costs of carbon today.

Once America’s entrepreneurs and corporate executives see lucrative opportunities from carbon-saving devices and technologies, they will start investing right away—and in ways that make the most economic sense… I can hardly wait to witness the outpouring of ideas it would unleash. The next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are waiting in the wings to make themselves rich by helping the environment.  Jobs follow investment, and we need jobs now.

Blinder recommends using carbon tax revenue to reduce the deficit and underscores the advantages of a carbon tax over other deficit reduction strategies:

[E]very realistic observer knows that closing our humongous federal budget deficit will require a mix of higher taxes and lower spending as shares of GDP. Forget about value-added taxes and other new levies you may have heard about. A CO2 tax trumps them all… reducing our trade deficit, making our economy more efficient, ameliorating global warming, and showing the world that American capitalism has not lost its edge.

Now that “hiding the price” behind cap-and-trade has crashed politically, Prof. Blinder is urging Congress to try the opposite: show the price—two years ahead of time—and let the expectation of a rising price on CO2 pollution do its job-creation and climate work. As for the politics, Blinder drags out the familiar Churchill quote: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.” It’s a cliché, all right, but it might just apply.

The fascinating and heartbreaking narrative can be read as an indictment of the Senate and the power of the fossil fuel industries. The scene of Sen. Kerry seeking a deal with natural gas baron T. Boone Pickens — who in 2004 “swiftboated” Kerry out of a possible presidential victory — is particularly pathetic. But there’s an ironic nugget missing from the story.

In February, at a meeting with Sen. Kerry, climate scientist Dr. James Hansen urged the Massachusetts Democrat to quit “hiding the CO2 price” under cap-trade-offset “gimmicks.” Instead, Hansen insisted, Kerry should propose a direct fee on CO2 pollution, assuring fairness and popular support by returning revenue via equal monthly “green checks” to every citizen. Kerry insisted, “I know what can pass the Senate.” As the New Yorker article’s title suggests, the Senator knew no such thing … and the result was tragic.

The tale of climate legislation isn’t over, though; people do learn from experience. Can we move beyond the mirages of cap-trade-offset to a transparent “carbon fee and green check” or “carbon fee with payroll tax cut”? With atmospheric CO2 at 388 ppm and rising, there’s no time to lose.

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.

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.

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.

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.