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Search Results for: I-732

To The Left-Green Opponents of I-732: How Does It Feel?

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The Friday-afternoon tweet from Greenwire nailed it: @Koch_Industries & @VanJones68 united in $$ battling Wash. state #carbontax measure.*

Though they could also have tweeted: Fossil-Fuel Right & Doctrinaire Left team up to battle Wash. state #carbontax measure.

Screenshot from Nov 4 tweet by E&ENews. Digitally available via @EENewsUpdates.

“Green jobs” champion Van Jones is flanked by fellow I-732 opponents Charles & David Koch in this Nov 4 tweet. Digitally available via @EENewsUpdates.

The occasion was the news that Koch Industries just poured $50,000 into the coffers of the No On 732 forces. As everyone knows who wasn’t slumbering through the past two decades, the Hard Right takeover of Congress and dozens of statehouses and legislatures owes much to Koch Industries’ prolific bankrolling of reactionary candidates and lobby groups. Brothers Charles and David Koch are billionaires many times over, thanks to Koch Industries’ empire of pipelines, refineries, mines and wells that for generations have spewed carbon pollution into the atmosphere for free.

The Koch brothers are no dummies. They know what fellow fossil fuel exec Robert E. Murray told Kirk Johnson and Coral Davenport of The New York Times the other day: Passing I-732 to enact a carbon tax in Washington state could ignite a trend that “would eliminate the use of all fossil fuels.”

We at the Carbon Tax Center know it too. Which is why we’ve pulled out all the stops to educate Americans from Washington and beyond on the merits of that state’s carbon tax referendum and its potential to kick open the doors to national carbon taxing.

What’s been hard to fathom is the drumbeat from so-called left greens like visionary climate hawk and political activist Van Jones in opposition to the Nov. 8 ballot measure.

In the past two weeks we’ve had to contend with bizarro posts like “Here’s Why a Carbon Tax Helps Fossil Fuel Companies, Not the Environment” (an op-ed in AlterNet by Food & Water Watch) and “Why Exxon Loves the Carbon Tax—and Voters Should Not” (the same group’s op-ed in the ironically named Yes! magazine).

It was just a matter of time before the Koch Bros. cut a check to stop I-732. Meanwhile, the Yes forces have no Exxon money; nor would they take any.

It was just a matter of time before the Koch Bros. cut a check to stop I-732. Meanwhile, the Yes forces have no Exxon money; nor would they take any.

We responded to both last week — before today’s filing by No On 732 revealed that the Koch brothers are helping finance the opposition. Needless to say, only an ideologue could believe that Exxon’s once-a-year opining for hypothetical carbon taxes counts for more than $50,000 in Koch Brothers money against an actual one. (Click here to see the Koch contribution in the No On 732 list.) And sure enough, there was a lot more ideology than reason on display in a press event yesterday in which leading left greens inveighed against I-732.

We were allowed to listen in, but not to speak or ask a question. No transcript or audio has been made available, but here’s a sample of what we jotted down from speakers’ remarks. (Remember, they were addressing a carbon tax that has been meticulously designed to make Washington state taxes less regressive, primarily by dedicating the lion’s share of revenues to slice a full percentage point off the WA sales tax.)

You’re doing climate policy on the backs of the poor. — Van Jones, CEO of Green for All

A “neutral” 732 is perpetuating a one-sided economy of wealth and privilege. This is not a time for more tax cuts for corporations. — Heather McGhee, President, Demos

We stand united to defeat 732. We agree that climate policy cannot be promoted on the backs of the poor. — Mary Kay Henry, president, Service Employees International Union

We’re working on an alternative proposal. There are difficult legal questions. We’re beefing up the struggle after the election. — Rich Stolz, Director, One America

The last quote was in response to a reporter’s question about the alternative to I-732 that the left greens in Washington have talked about for years but never actually written. (Spoiler alert: writing the kind of ballot measure the left greens purport to want is devilishly difficult, in large part because the various groups have competing as well as overlapping interests, which are hard to reconcile. A revenue-neutral measure like I-732 didn’t face that problem.)

The untethering of those quoted statements from the reality of I-732 — a measure meticulously designed around a sales tax cut so low- and middle-income families aren’t harmed — is distressing to me personally. I’m a long-time admirer of every one of the organizations whose leaders I’ve just quoted. As I’ve said many times in this space, I’m a green and I’m on the left. I want to be partnering with Van and Heather and Mary Kay and Rich, not fighting them.

But a carbon tax is too central to climate, and climate is too central to all of our common struggles, for me to sit by and let ideology get in the way of sensible, pragmatic advocacy.

If “friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” it should also be true that activists don’t let activists drive policy from rhetoric.

To Van Jones et al., how does it feel to be on the same side as Charles and David Koch? That’s the corner you’ve painted yourselves into.

*Author’s Note: E&E News tweet lightly edited for clarity.

 

 

 

Washington State’s I-732: A Climate Measure for the Society We Have

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Paul Goodman, a mid-century American apostle of transformational change, entitled a collection of his letters, “The society I live in is mine.” With apologies to Paul, whose unsparing but inspiring critiques of U.S. corporate government helped shape my generation of radical activists, I’m here to say that the Washington state carbon tax initiative, I-732, is the perfect climate measure for the society we have.

Calling out the old guard's "deafening silence" on the Washington state carbon tax.

Calling out the old guard’s “deafening silence” (or worse) on the Washington state carbon tax.

I thought of Goodman today as I read the remarkable “Open Letter from the Millennial Leaders of Carbon Washington and the Yes-on-732 Campaign” to the green establishment leaders who are silent or oppositional on the initiative. Paul was an unabashed champion of youth and an instinctive foe of the old guard, most notably in his best-known book, Growing Up Absurd.

I believe Goodman, renowned for speaking directly, would have relished the millennials’ plain-spoken courage in calling out their heroes’ “deafening silence” on I-732. Devoted to participatory democracy, he would have applauded the millennials’ insistence that the climate crisis “belongs to more than just a handful of non-profit gatekeepers to decide what should be politically realistic and what isn’t.”

I also think that Goodman, a champion of rigor, would have pounced on the insubstantial arguments made by I-732’s “green” opponents, corrected their errors, and alerted them to the absurdity of climate advocates opposing a carbon tax that has advanced to an actual ballot proposition.

Here’s one of those arguments. It’s the first of three bullet points in the message by Washington Conservation Voters telling their members and supporters to vote No:

[I-732] relies solely on economic signals to drive down emissions, which allows all polluters to pay to continue to pollute instead of reducing emissions. Without a carbon cap, we can’t ensure that we will achieve the pollution reductions that are required in state law, but are currently unenforced.

Everything in that paragraph is correct. And all of it is utterly beside the point.

Yes, Initiative 732 relies solely on economic signals to drive down emissions of carbon dioxide. That’s by design. Those signals — higher market prices of fossil fuels — are essential to solve or at least massively shrink the climate crisis. Without them, any climate policy, including the “investment” approach favored by WCV and other green groups opposing or abstaining on I-732, will fall woefully short.

Make no mistake, Carbon Washington, the upstart group that drafted Initiative 732 last year and obtained hundreds of thousands of qualifying signatures to put it on the Nov. 8 ballot, dearly wants society to invest in massive weatherization and solarization of buildings, remediation of polluted communities, better urban and suburban transit, and the like.

So do I. In fact, my other “day job,” aside from running the Carbon Tax Center, is mostly fighting for those very investments and policies in New York City, where I live and work.

Either Carbon Washington or I could have written the first part of WCV’s second bullet:

To reduce carbon emissions quickly, we must not only decrease our use of fossil fuels, we must also rapidly increase our use of clean energy, including solar and wind power and the electrification of transportation. This is the only way for us to transition to a low-carbon economy and significantly decrease our use of fossil fuels.

Well, that transition is precisely what carbon taxes can spark. Raising the prices that businesses and households alike face for coal, oil and gas and for the goods and services manufactured from them will accelerate the society-wide switch to clean energy. Conversely, without those higher fossil fuel prices, solar and wind and electric vehicles and transit will forever be competing with one hand tied behind their backs. Sure, they’ll advance, but not nearly fast and widely enough to push out fossil fuels on the scale our climate requires.

I readily admit — and I’ll wager that Carbon WA will admit as well — that by itself the I-732 carbon tax won’t effectuate that transition either. The tax level specified in the initiative, essentially $25/ton of CO2 after two years, then rising 3.5% a year above general inflation, is too low for that. But that too is by design: the USA’s first statewide carbon tax can’t be super-steep, else industry and agriculture could be hampered vis-à-vis neighboring states, a prospect that would forestall approval by either voters or the legislature.

Rather, the Washington carbon tax is intended as proof of concept. Once a carbon tax has been established in one state, it can be adopted by others, creating a critical mass of political acceptance, demonstrating success in driving down emissions, and disarming the negative arguments on effectiveness, equity and overall feasibility that have stood in the way of a national tax on carbon emissions.

Moreover, as I argued recently, the emerging possibility of a “wave” election transforming the power dynamics in Congress creates a surprise bonus opportunity, in which winning a carbon tax next month in just one state could give tremendous momentum to carbon tax proposals at the federal level.

Even without a Democratic takeover of one or both houses of Congress, the national and global perspective completely moots the insular one inherent in WCV’s complaint that I-732 “can’t ensure that we will achieve the pollution reductions that are required in state law.” Whether or not the particular carbon tax on the Nov. 8 state ballot lets Washington meet those targets is dwarfed by the potential of the carbon tax template to go viral nationally and internationally.

But perhaps the most telltale confusion in that first WCV bullet point is the charge that I-732 “allows all polluters to pay to continue to pollute instead of reducing emissions.” As the saying goes, that’s a feature of carbon-taxing, or indeed any carbon pricing system, not a bug.

Here’s the thing, or two things: first, in our society, polluters get to choose to pollute; what I-732 does is to finally make polluters pay to do so; second, polluters’ choices — and whether we like it or not, “polluters” means all of us who press a gas pedal or turn on a switch as well as the corporate bosses atop the system that limits our agency to choose — are affected by prices.

Every day, in Washington state alone, millions of decisions are made, some almost microscopic (how fast to accelerate up that hill; whether to drive to the nearby mall or the distant one) and some momentous (Boeing’s design and material selections for future aircraft; how it powers its factories) that together determine energy demand and fuel choice and, thus, carbon emissions.

As much as we might wish otherwise, we as a society can’t take away the freedom to make those choices. We can constrain some choices through regulations such as CAFÉ and appliance standards and building codes and the like. We can expand choice through judicious planning. But regulations and planning by their nature can only address one facet of the many-sided carbon equation. A carbon tax, in contrast, operates on every side. (For more on this point, please download and read our 2014 comments to the Senate Finance Committee on energy subsidies vs. taxes.)

We could conjure Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” if the right wing hadn’t co-opted it to prop up its laissez-faire ideology. Let’s say instead that the tax on carbon pollution embodied by I-732 is neither an upending of our market system nor the “clever tinkering with market forces” alleged by an environmental-justice opponent, but an overdue and essential correction — a way to enable markets to finally tell the truth about what fossil-fuel burning is doing to our climate.

The final point to address here is Washington Conservation Voters’ objection to I-732’s allocation of the carbon tax revenues:

Unfortunately, [I-]732 devotes the revenue created by the initiative on tax cuts, instead of strategically reinvesting in clean energy to accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels and fund an equitable transition for workers and disadvantaged communities.

True again, but just a sliver of the whole truth. “Tax cuts” conjures giveaways to the wealthy, but I-732 is the opposite. It applies most of the carbon tax revenues to cutting the state sales tax, a regressive tax like no other that for decades has slammed Washington’s poorest households and communities. The percentage point cut in that tax, to 5.5% from the current 6.5%, allows the carbon tax to yield a net financial gain for most families in the bottom half.

Do the trustees of Washington Conservation Voters fully grasp the game-changing potential of I-732?

Do the trustees of Washington Conservation Voters fully grasp the game-changing potential of I-732?

Imagine if WCV had written the revenue-treatment provisions of I-732 to “reinvest [the carbon tax dollars] in clean energy” and “fund an equitable transition for workers and disadvantaged communities.” Without a doubt, the fossil fuel interests would have blasted the initiative for compounding the financial strains already faced by Washington low- and middle-income families . . . and they would have been right. Branded, correctly, as income-regressive, the carbon tax would have been consigned to a resounding defeat.

Making the carbon tax income-progressive, and not the shibboleth of “appealing to Republicans,” is the main reason Carbon Washington designed Initiative 732 to be revenue-neutral. But that decision has laid bare real fault lines in the environmental community, particularly on energy prices.

Green opponents of I-732 appear to believe that we — Washington, the United States, the world — can craft policies to quickly abandon carbon fuels without rapidly raising their market prices; or that the right energy-investment programs will offset the impacts of those price rises on vulnerable households and communities (a category that since the onset of the financial crisis has grown to encompass perhaps two-thirds of U.S. families).

Proponents believe, as I do, that rapidly raising the market prices of fossil fuels is essential, and that the only sure way to protect households and communities financially is to return the revenues in some progressive fashion. Nationally, that could be via the “dividend” approach propounded by Citizens Climate Lobby. That is probably not practicable for individual state carbon taxes, however, and I believe Carbon WA made the right call to swap out the revenue by cutting the sales tax.

In either case, the carbon reductions sacrificed by returning instead of investing revenue can be recouped by raising the carbon tax rate briskly year after year — a policy that can be enacted if and only if a clear majority of households are made better off or at least kept whole through revenue return.

In closing, let me affirm that I’m a man of the Left. Like Paul Goodman, whom I cited at the top, I’m suspicious of all powerful organizations, private or public. Nevertheless I firmly believe in the capacity of government to do good. If enough other citizens felt the same way, I might well be calling for the investment program that LCV says it wants. Heck, if a majority believed as I do, our country wouldn’t have one of the industrialized world’s most unequal distributions of income and wealth. Instead we would have a social system to support families that stood to lose more from rising fuel prices than they would gain from energy savings.

But we don’t live in that kind of society. We can fight for it, as I and many others in the climate movement do. But we can’t design climate policy for a society we don’t yet have. To turn away from the most potent climate policy instrument we have — one that is now, almost miraculously, being put before the voters of an entire state — would be sheer folly.

Click here for more on I-732, including links to the best and most recent press coverage.

Where We Are, Now that Biden’s Climate Change ‘Revolution’ Isn’t Coming

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A New York Times post this week, Biden’s Climate Change ‘Revolution’ Isn’t Coming, caught our attention with its trenchant look at climate policy’s low ebb in the wake of two crushing setbacks in just three weeks: the June 30 Supreme Court ruling blowing up EPA’s carbon-regulating authority under the Clean Air Act, and Joe Manchin’s coup de grace to the remnants of President Biden’s Build Back Better climate package.

Drawing on fellow Times writers, opinion editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell painted an unsparing portrait of U.S. — and global — climate stasis as dangerous heat was enveloping Britain, much of Europe and large swaths of the U.S. Here we reprint his post in full, with our commentary as counterpoint.

Biden’s Climate Change ‘Revolution’ Isn’t Coming.

Introduction

When President Biden took office, one of the first things he did was make a pledge: The United States, he vowed, would finally “meet the urgent demands of the climate crisis” through “a clean energy revolution.” That revolution was to be set in motion by a $2 trillion plan for putting the country on a path to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. (It now stands at 2.2 degrees.)

But after more than a year of negotiations, compromises, deal-making and belt-tightening, that plan appeared to collapse last week when Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia and a key swing vote in Congress, announced that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs.

What does the collapse of Biden’s agenda mean for the domestic and global politics of climate action moving forward? Here’s what people are saying.

Biden’s Plan, Though Not Revolutionary, Was Bold.

Introduction

Even a fully intact Biden plan would have fallen short of its goals. Nevertheless, its scope and reach would have far surpassed any climate program by any major nation. Build Back Better’s carbon reductions and climate benefits would have been numerically substantial and would also have triggered parallel policies in other countries.

(Chart is from CTC Sept 2021 post, Without a Carbon Tax, Don’t Count on a 50% Emissions Cut.)

1. The climate deal that wasn’t

As my colleagues have reported, experts generally agree that there are two ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the speed and scale required. The first is making fossil fuels more expensive by ensuring that their environmental costs — global warming, for one, but also the staggering harms of air pollution — are reflected in their price. While widely championed by economists, carbon taxes have proved politically unpopular: A carbon tax by ballot referendum in Washington State has failed twice.

Biden hoped to take the other approach: reducing emissions by driving down the cost and improving the efficiency of low-carbon energy sources, like wind, solar and nuclear power. Initially, the centerpiece of his plan was a clean energy standard, which would have legally required utilities to draw 80 percent of their electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035. But when Manchin — who made millions from his family coal business and took more campaign money from the oil and gas industry than any other senator — pulled his support from that scheme in October, Democrats pivoted to a $300 billion package of tax credits to encourage the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Now, both avenues to decarbonizing the country have been all but closed off. Even before Biden’s plan was whittled down, there was some debate about whether it was sufficient to meet his ambitions. But now that the president’s most powerful tools for reducing emissions have been confiscated by Congress (and the Supreme Court, which last month limited the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate power plant emissions), “We are not going to meet our targets, period,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Santa Barbara, California, who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation.

Manchin’s reason for scuttling the negotiations, according to his spokeswoman, was his desire to “avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire.” But in The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer argues that, in addition to being “extraordinarily bleak for the climate,” Manchin’s reversal will actually worsen inflation: By reducing long-term demand for oil, Biden’s plan would probably have lowered gas prices, and an earlier version of the package would have led to hundreds of dollars in annual energy cost savings for the average U.S. household by 2030, according to an independent analysis from researchers at Princeton.

“America’s climate negligence endures,” Meyer writes. “That is not just due to Senator Manchin’s negligence, of course. It is also the collective responsibility of the Republican Party, whose 50 senators are even more resolutely against investing in clean energy than he is.”

1. The long shadow of Washington state’s failed carbon tax referendum

Bokat-Lindell could have said, about carbon taxes, that they are widely championed by economists and others who judge robust carbon taxing as uniquely capable of delivering big emission cuts quickly. Still, his characterization of carbon taxes as politically unpopular was fair.

He was also on solid ground in pointing to the failed Washington State carbon tax referendum. Perhaps even more than Donald Trump’s concurrent electoral win over Hillary Clinton, the 2016 defeat of Initiative 732 put a hurt on U.S. carbon tax organizing and advocacy. After all, if a carbon tax couldn’t garner an electoral majority in a certified blue state — one with a strong outdoors-nature ethic to boot — it was likely to be a tough sell almost anywhere else.

During the run-up to that vote we published a raft of posts calling out progressive icons like Naomi Klein, Van Jones and Mary Kay Henry for willfully distorting I-732 — labelling as a tax cut for the wealthy its swap of the carbon revenues to cut regressive sales taxes, for example. Their high-profile drive-by opposition also encouraged environmental justice groups to view I-732’s revenue-neutral design as a ploy to block green investments in disadvantaged communities rather than a design to offset lower-income households’ higher fuel expenses. Mainstream environmental groups mostly stayed on the sidelines, as did climate champion Bill McKibben. Their neutrality contributed to the 59-to-41 electoral wipeout which poisoned the well for a Green New Deal-style reboot effort in 2018.

Fast-forwarding to 2021-2022, it’s also fair to ask why climate activists trained virtually all of their fire on Joe Manchin, perhaps not grasping that his personal and political indebtedness to fossil fuels — duly noted by Bokat-Lindell — placed him beyond their reach. As The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, 50 Republicans blocked Biden’s climate package no less than Manchin. Protests in their home states might have moved the legislative needle or at least thrown down a marker to preserve Democrats’ control of Congress in the coming midterms.

2. A domestic defeat with global consequences

Because the United States has spewed more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, it plays a uniquely prominent role in global climate politics. (It’s worth noting that on an annual basis, China is now the world’s largest emitter, having surpassed the United States in 2006, though America’s per capita emissions still far exceed China’s.)

Given the United States’ historical “climate debt,” many lower-income countries have made their climate commitments contingent on those of the United States and other rich countries. Especially after Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement, many world leaders were hopeful that Biden would arrive at the Glasgow climate talks last year having secured some legislative achievement as a mark of political seriousness. That, of course, did not happen.

Now, the United States’ international climate credibility is even more damaged, which will in turn impede global decarbonization efforts, The Times’s Somini Sengupta writes. “Manchin’s rejection and the recent Supreme Court ruling dealt a heavy blow to U.S. climate credibility,” Li Shuo, the Beijing-based senior policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, told her. It underlines what many people abroad already know, Li said: that “the biggest historical emitter can hardly fulfill its climate promises.”

The U.S. climate envoy, John Kerry, is expected to attend the next round of climate talks, in November in Egypt, but will once again have little to show for it. The United States “will find it very hard to lead the world if we can’t even take the first steps here at home,” said Nat Keohane, the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental group. “The honeymoon is over.”

2. Goodbye to the myth of U.S. global leadership on climate

We noted upfront that in addition to their sheer numerical weight, Build Back Better’s carbon reductions would have triggered parallel policies in other countries. Bokat-Lindell articulates this well, with framing that, appropriately, prioritizes U.S. climate stewardship as “necessary” rather than merely “sufficient.”

What would translate almost automatically from the domestic sphere to the global is U.S. federal-level carbon taxing. The simplicity of a national carbon price alone makes it child’s play to replicate it in any other country — in marked contrast to the welter of tax credits, rules and line items embodying Biden’s climate plan that would be devilishly hard if not downright impossible to copy elsewhere. Moreover, the logical companion piece to a national carbon tax — a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — would powerfully incentivize non-carbon-taxing countries to enact their own in order to capture for themselves carbon tax levies that otherwise would be collected by their carbon-taxing trading partners.

That said, the various stories and authorities cited in the Times column have it exactly right. The heavy weight of America’s outsize cumulative carbon emissions, combined with what now must be seen as chronic federal government inaction — aptly summarized by Greenpeace as (“the biggest historical emitter can hardly fulfill its climate promises”) — expose the U.S. as climate laggard rather than leader.

Unfortunately, that fact didn’t keep U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who once supported carbon pricing via cap-and-trade (see this 2009 op-ed in the New York Times), from uttering this arrant nonsense this week: “I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change.”

3. Where the politics of climate action go from here

The Biden administration will have to rely on its less powerful arsenal of executive actions to make progress on its decarbonization efforts, however short of its initial targets. As The Times’s Coral Davenport explains, the White House could use its regulatory authority to increase vehicle emissions standards, potentially catalyzing the transition to electric vehicles; to compel electric utilities to slightly lower their greenhouse emissions without falling afoul of the Supreme Court; and to plug leaks of methane — an extremely potent greenhouse gas — from oil and gas wells. Biden may also use his pulpit to push for action at the state level, where climate policy has assumed new importance in the absence of federal leadership. “States are really critical to helping the country as a whole achieve our climate goals,” Kyle Clark-Sutton of the clean-energy think tank RMI told The Times. “They have a real opportunity to lead. They have been leading.” Both California and New York, for example, have committed to reaching net-zero emissions by no later than 2050.

As far as national electoral politics are concerned, The Times’s David Leonhardt argues, the fact that a single Democratic politician was able to derail Biden’s climate agenda should prompt Democrats to redouble their efforts to increase their Senate majority, particularly by winning over more voters in red and purple states. “It is clear that many blue-collar voters don’t feel at home in the Democratic Party — and that their alienation is a major impediment to the U.S. doing more to slow climate change,” he writes.

It is also possible that the government’s sclerosis could spur interest in less conventional and extra-electoral avenues to addressing climate change, among them nuclear power (the promise and drawbacks of which have been explored in this newsletter; the “degrowth” movement; speculative technological fixes such as solar geoengineering; and mass movements of civil and uncivil disobedience, as the ecologist Andreas Malm called for in his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

As the Colorado River reservoirs dry up, as the death toll from the record-setting heat waves and wildfires scorching Europe rises, and as more than a billion people in South Asia recover from a season of heat extreme enough to test the upper limits of human survivability, “this moment feels interminable,” Meyer of The Atlantic writes. “But what is unsustainable cannot be sustained. If one man can block the industrial development of what is, for now, the world’s hegemon, then its hegemony must be very frail indeed.”

But then, climate change seems to remain a relatively minor concern among the U.S. electorate: Just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named it as the most important issue facing the country; even among voters under 30, that figure was 3 percent.

That is just one poll. But it would perhaps be premature to rule out another direction the politics of climate change might take, one that could prove familiar to those who have witnessed how the American public has processed other cumulative traumas, like the drug overdose crisis or gun violence or the pandemic: a resigned acceptance of mass suffering, punctuated by moments of shock that serve only as reminders of how the unimaginable became normal.

3. The impasse at the abyss

Bokat-Lindell packed many leads and ideas into his closing section. We’ve touched on a lot of them in the past year.

Our high points:

A. The “arsenal” of potential executive actions is terribly meager vis-a-vis the task at hand. Stronger CAFE standards, for example, are badly undermined by light trucks’ takeover of the automotive fleet, and are assumed in most climate emission scenarios anyway.

B. States-as-climate-loci is also overblown. A full two dozen are solidly red, i.e., fossil fuel dominated. Even in blue states, policy is circumscribed by federal authority and bureaucracy; the holdup of New York’s congestion pricing program by federal highway officials is one case in point. Moreover, visions of 2050 net-zero or 2035 grid decarbonization by California and New York are almost certainly way out in front of actual commitments and have been made needlessly more difficult by nuclear power plant shutdowns.

C. Securing a true Democratic Senate majority and retaining the House this November are indeed vital.

D. Like Andreas Malm, we believe that direct action in defense of climate and earth needs to come to the fore, as we proposed in two posts last summer inspired by Malm’s book: Christopher Ketcham’s essay, Let’s Blow Up Luxury Carbon, and my own “Rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.” Both are worth your attention.

E. The low primacy of the climate crisis among voters is both real and arguably not fatal. The U.S. is beset by so many crises that even so committed a climate scientist as Peter Gleick declared this week his greater alarm over incipient fascism.

A greater cause than insufficient ardor of the U.S. failure to enact “revolutionary” or even strong, incremental climate policies is an unproportionate and cumbersome political system that puts up multiple roadblocks to systemic change.

Alas, that isn’t poised to change. More and more, it looks like achieving genuine climate action will require passionate and creative direct action. Targets abound: helicopter commuting, crypto “mining,” obstructionists of wind farms or dense housing or congestion pricing, to name a few. Successful actions will be those that harness broad-based and truly intersectional campaigns attacking not just emissions but privilege and wealth.

We have an idea or two up our sleeve. Perhaps you do as well. We wish you luck. We still insist that carbon taxing is revolutionary — how can tackling a fundament of fossil fuel dominance be otherwise?

Green Fragility: Alternatives to California’s Pro-Car Giveaway

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Of the myriad motorist giveaways now being rushed into place around the U.S., none sting like California’s. I share Darrell Owens’ tweeted dismay, not just because California is so reliably blue but because Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed car-cash payments point to a troubling fragility in the state’s clean-energy leadership.

The specifics of the so-called relief plan are still being worked on. But the basic shape is expected to hew to the contours posted by Newsom’s office this past week and shown further below: $9 billion in payments to households of $400 per registered car (limit of 2 per family) and just $2 billion to make transit cheaper.

While a per-vehicle stipend isn’t quite as environmentally  loathsome as the gas and diesel tax “holidays” already rolled out in Georgia and Maryland and being readied elsewhere (NPR has a useful digest), California’s nearly 50-year record at the forefront of cleaner energy might have suggested other, greener approaches.

I know that record well. Not long ago, I did a study comparing California’s rate of decarbonizing its economy to the rest of the country’s. I found that from the mid-1970s to 2016, California drove down its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic activity nearly 20 percent faster than the other 49 states. Had those states matched California’s pace, I calculated, the country would now, each year, be eliminating 1,200 megatonnes of CO2, an amount equivalent to the carbon emissions from our entire fleet of passenger cars.

Those findings became the basis of a 2019 report for the Natural Resources Defense Council, California Stars: Lighting the Way to a Clean Energy Future. My NRDC co-authors and I credited a host of actors: Gov. Jerry Brown (1974-82, 2010-18), for imbuing an energy-efficiency ethic throughout the machinery of state government; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003-10), who lent “Terminator” cred and financial support to solar power; and, above all, the thousands of resourceful and devoted state employees who developed and oversaw a kaleidoscope of performance standards that embedded energy efficiency into appliances, equipment and buildings.

Alas, California’s energy record also had an un-stellar part: automobiles. “Passenger vehicles continue to be a weak point,” we noted dryly in “California Stars,” as the state’s consumption of motor fuels grew faster than the rest of the country’s during 1975-2016 (albeit a tad more slowly per unit of GDP). We listed many factors but omitted the most fundamental: California’s vaunted green ethos didn’t include recognition of, and resistance to, car-dependent transportation.

Consider that the day before yesterday, in New York, a coalition of transit, environmental and economic-justice organizations declared their opposition to a possible statewide gas tax holiday “because it does little to help those New Yorkers most hurt by rising prices, takes revenue away from needed road and transit investments and completely contradicts New York’s climate goals.” The groups, who have long worked in concert for safe streets, congestion pricing and better transit, pointed to rising prices for energy (electricity and heating fuels, not just gasoline), food and housing and called for targeted state aid to lower-income households.

Read it and weep: Gavin Newsom’s proposed give-away to California car-owners.

If similar noises are being made in Los Angeles or San Francisco, they aren’t yet audible in New York. Nor do we know what California’s iconically green ex-governors would have done in the face of $5 or $6 gasoline. (The state’s anti-smog rules and carbon cap-and-trade program lead to unusually pricey motor fuels.) I’d like to believe they would have used the gas-price “crisis” as an opportunity to speak inconvenient truths about driving, fossil fuels and climate stewardship. Perhaps Brown would have harkened back to his seventies self and encouraged Californians to voluntarily curtail the share of their driving that is particularly mindless and unnecessary. Schwarzenegger, who earlier this month made an extraordinarily empathic antiwar video appeal to Vladimir Putin’s subjects (“I love the Russian people. That is why I have to tell you the truth.”), might have connected less driving and fuel conservation to patriotism and manliness.

While Newsom lacks those predecessor’s strong personal stamps, he doesn’t lack for imaginative staff. Think of the good the state could do for economic justice and climate protection with the $9 billion he’s handing car-owners.

The most obvious scheme is to apply that money to reduce the state sales tax, a stunningly regressive tax. California’s 7.25% state sales tax brings in around $45 billion annually, according to Tax Foundation figures ($42.7 billion in FY 2020, the most recent figure available), suggesting that $9 billion worth of lower sales taxes would enable the state to cut the rate by one-fifth, to a little under 6%. That change would give relief to every Californian, and disproportionately to poor and working families, without rewarding automobile use and dependence. And it would align nicely with The Economist’s insistence yesterday that “Governments should support household incomes instead … of cutting fuel taxes.”

(Sales tax swaps aren’t exactly novel in environmental discourse. Washington state’s I-732 initiative would have used revenue from a $20/ton carbon tax to cut the state sales tax — the nation’s steepest — by one percent; it was defeated, in 2016, when some climate hawks derided it as, somehow, pro-corporate. Two decades earlier, I published an op-ed calling for a nickel-a-mile charge on driving in Long Island, NY, with the proceeds paying for a 3 percent cut in Nassau and Suffolk Counties’ sales tax.)

M.I.T. Dept of Urban Studies alum Joan Walsh is a board director of AC Transit in Oakland, CA.

In a different vein, folks in the bicycling circles I inhabit are touting free e-bikes rather than car-based giveaways as a means to cushion the pain of high gas prices while helping spur people away from automobiles. The same $9 billion would allow Sacramento to issue e-bike rebates of $300 each to of the roughly 30 million Californians of bicycling age (say, 10 to 80). Making the rebates tradeable would bend to two realities: not everyone can or will use a bike — even one with electric assist — and supplies are constrained. The latter factor suggests that the rebates should remain valid for several years.

Doubtless, there are other productive ways California could distribute $9 billion in economic relief. What makes the planned automobile giveaway so dispiriting is that for half-a-century the state has done so much in green energy and electricity, outside of the transportation sector, that is pro-climate, pro-consumer and innovative. Gov. Newsom’s rush to invest $9 billion in a one-shot that pulls in the opposite direction is damaging in itself and also indicative of the fragility of California’s supposed green ethos.

Progressives and Carbon Pricing

U.S. progressive activists have turned away from carbon pricing. Some are opposed, some are indifferent but few, it seems, vocally support carbon taxing or other ways to price carbon emissions.

To be sure, we have no data tracking left-progressives’ attitudes toward pursuing carbon taxes as part of a climate policy agenda. Still, it’s safe to say that support for carbon taxes by prominent progressive-identifying leaders and organizations is far less common today than it was early on in Barack Obama’s presidency, when a Democratic carbon cap-and-trade bill passed the House but failed in the Senate.

A case in point is Are We Entering a New Political Era?, a May 31, 2021 New Yorker magazine profile of the insurgent group Justice Democrats who were reported to be “reshaping the Democratic Party by giving moderates an unignorable reason to guard their left flank.” The article plumbed the politics of the climate crisis and the Green New Deal without once mentioning carbon taxing — a clear sign that the idea of pricing carbon emissions has fallen off progressives’ political map.

Bernie Sanders’ unabashed support for carbon taxing in his 2016 campaign has little resonance in today’s left.

(Curiously, the article mischaracterized Bernie Sanders’ 2016 climate plan as relying on “tax cuts and other market-based incentives.” Sanders’ climate platform actually centered on an aggressive carbon tax, not tax cuts, and we don’t recall his ever characterizing carbon taxing as market-based — a label we consider shallow and reductionist.)

Here, after a quick look back at the watershed 2016 carbon tax referendum in Washington state, we assess political progressives’ stances toward carbon pricing during the Biden presidency. This page can be viewed as a companion to our Carbon Pricing and Environmental Justice page.

We say “stances” (plural) because there’s a range of views on carbon pricing among political progressives. Still, mirroring changing currents among environmental justice advocates, politically active left-progressives in recent years have distanced themselves from carbon tax advocacy. Considering the U.S. right wing’s descent into near-monolithic climate denialism (summarized on our Conservatives page), the antipathy to carbon pricing on the left is helping to relegate full-throated support for pricing carbon emissions to an ever-narrowing political center.

The divisive 2016 battle over Washington state’s carbon tax referendum

The 2016 referendum to enact a carbon tax in Washington state was a political watershed for carbon pricing. Bypassing a coalition of environmental-justice advocates and other progressives, the bipartisan group Carbon Washington placed a revenue-neutral carbon tax on the ballot. Initiative-732 would have levied a statewide $20 per ton carbon emissions fee. Rather than investing in low-carbon infrastructure and frontline communities, the proceeds would have been applied to cutting the state sales tax, the nation’s highest, by a percentage point — a move intended to shield lower- and middle-income households from the financial burden of higher fuel prices from the carbon tax.

Progressive heavyweights Mary Kay Henry, Naomi Klein and Van Jones slammed Washington state’s 2016 carbon tax initiative. Criticisms of carbon taxing from the left have only intensified since.

The statewide coalition of progressives objected not only to this “revenue-neutral” form of carbon taxing but also to having their slower, consensus-building methodology trampled by upstarts aiming to touch off a nationwide prairie fire of state carbon taxes leading to a national carbon price. Progressive-identifying state organizations, augmented by prominent national figures like Service Employees International Union chief Mary Kay Henry, media darling Van Jones, and globe-trotting author Naomi Klein, lined up against the measure while most environmental groups remained neutral. I-732 lost resoundingly, and since then the divide in the climate ranks between carbon tax acolytes and left-leaning forces has only deepened. (The story is recounted on our page, Washington’s 2016 carbon-tax defeat.)

Ten reasons progressives have soured on carbon pricing

The schism over Washington’s I-732 didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Skepticism about carbon pricing — and pricing mechanisms generally — has long been present among people who lean progressive. We’ve collected and summarized ten reasons (they’re numbered for later reference):

  1. Sympathy for the idea that carbon pricing commodifies the natural world and demeans humans’ right to a safe environment and climate.
  2. The belief that pricing carbon emissions lets the affluent buy their way out of pollution regulations intended to protect vulnerable populations as well as the larger environment.
  3. Suspicion that carbon pricing is a quintessential neoliberal policy, and thus a handmaiden to austerity policies that elevate private enterprise and well-being above public governance.
  4. The oil industry’s ostensible support, which some regard as a badge of dishonor or Trojan Horse, or both.
  5. A preference for taxing billionaires’ and multimillionaires’ wealth rather than for broadly based carbon taxes that ensnare poor people as well as rich.
  6. Disdain for “market-oriented” measures as ploys to gain support from Republican voters and legislators.
  7. Belief that energy use is essential down to the last drop, which would make pricing mechanisms punitive rather than curative.
  8. Skepticism of the idea — a tenet of economics — that prices are a powerful determinant of human behaviors and choices.
  9. A preference for “carrots,” i.e., subsidies that lower sticker prices of alternatives to fossil fuels, versus the “stick” of making fossil fuels cost more.
  10. The conviction that society must be remade from the ground up through expansive public investment rather than through more diffuse programs with a top-down appearance.

These objections were always lurking. Nevertheless, in the past most progressives were willing to swallow them in the interest of gaining climate progress through eliminating fossil fuels’ artificial price advantage over efficiency and renewables. That changed with the 2016 Washington state schism, the rising opposition to carbon pricing by environmental advocates of color, and the sense of siege that settled in among progressives after the election of Trump — a cataclysm that appeared to require more fundamental responses than merely “tinkering with prices.”

In some ways, the changed mood comes down to the incongruity of seemingly politically-neutral calls to price carbon alongside the progressive mantra that “another world is possible.” Not many peoples’ idea of utopia includes triple-digit carbon taxes. (Though it’s also true that utopia doesn’t go well with a broken climate.)

Rebuttals

To carbon-tax proponents, all ten concerns are rebuttable:

  1. Better to commodify nature than leave it prey to ever-greater assault by failing to exact a price for damaging it.
  2. Similarly, making the affluent pay to pollute is preferable to letting them keep polluting for free.
  3. Rather than being a detriment, carbon pricing’s ostensible neutrality makes it a perfect complement — administratively as well as politically — to progressives’ desired regulations, standards and investments.
  4. Exxon and BP’s occasional professions of support for token carbon taxes are an obvious feint to advocates’ pushes for “robust” (triple-digit) carbon tax levels and should be treated as such.
  5. Nothing precludes taxing billionaires and also taxing carbon emissions; that’s CTC’s preferred policy suite, in fact, as noted here and here.
  6. Unlike cap-and-trade programs that entail markets in emission permits, carbon taxes are not “market mechanisms” — a canard that should be retired.
  7. Changing energy usage overnight can be difficult, even sacrificial; but over the longer time frames that matter for climate, energy use is surprisingly elastic (fuller discussion here).
  8. Prices influence the vast majority of the billions of short- and long-term daily decisions that collectively determine usage levels of fossil fuels and, hence, carbon emissions.
  9. Raising prices of “bads” reduces their use considerably more than does lowering the prices of the multitude of possible alternatives. (See CTC’s 2014 congressional testimony quantifying the longer reach of carbon taxes vis-a-vis subsidies for low-carbon fuels and technologies: pdf.)
  10. As noted in #3, carbon taxing is perfectly compatible with public investment and community participation; if it helps, think of carbon taxes as a tailwind to everything we want.

Admittedly, rejoinders don’t assuage the aversion to carbon pricing — even “pure” carbon taxing, untainted by offsets or other carve-outs — felt by most vocal progressives. To some on the left, carbon pricing presents as a piecemeal, reductionist, soulless approach that fails today’s “intersectional” moment. It’s not that pricing carbon won’t cut emissions (though we suspect that most progressives don’t fully grasp its reach — see points 7 and 8), but that, for many progressives, carbon pricing feels desiccated, dated and inadequate to the demand that everything wrong in the world be confronted at once.

Critiques of carbon pricing from a Spring, 2021 podcast about it

The Pricing Nature podcast gave voice to several prominent progressive climate activists in a May, 2021 episode, Carbon Pricing Hits a Brick Wall on the Left. We’ve tagged these excerpts from the podcast’s Substack page with our bullet points they match with:

Keya Chatterjee (then-executive director, US Climate Action Network): There’s simply a philosophical opposition —particularly in many indigenous cultures — there’s a philosophical opposition to the idea that you can give money to pollute. You can give money and continue to do something wrong as long as you pay to do that thing. (Reasons #1 & #2)

Michael Méndez (assistant professor, U-C Irvine): Initially, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, a majority of California environmental justice groups were advocating for carbon pricing. While it’s still a market-based solution or a neoliberal solution, it more closely aligned to their goals of having more stringent reductions in polluting facilities near the communities that they were living in. Over the time that evolution has changed a little and environmental justice groups have grown and have more influence in state legislatures and city halls, and to some extent at the federal government, where they’re advocating against all types of market-based mechanisms or neoliberal solutions. (#3, #6)

Keya Chatterjee, David Roberts and Michael Méndez aired their concerns about carbon pricing on a “Pricing Nature” podcast.

What’s striking about those statements is their abstract quality. Philosophical opposition . . .  market-based mechanisms . . . neoliberal solutions. Nothing about whether and how fast carbon taxes might actually cut carbon emissions, reduce co-pollutant emissions in fenceline communities, and make poor and working-class families better off financially.

Keya Chatterjee: We have massive income inequality in this country. We have massive racial injustice. We have a huge wealth gap between black and white people in this country, a massive wealth gap. There is nothing that we should be doing that puts any additional burden on people who have less. It should be quite the opposite. If we need to pay to deal with the climate crisis, that money should come from the people who created the climate crisis, the polluters. If we need more money, it can come from a wealth tax. (#5, #7)

David Roberts (author of the Volts newsletter): I think they [Green New Deal proponents] realized there just aren’t enough environmentalists to do something this big. Like we’re talking about remaking the entire economy. We’re talking about revolutionizing the entire direction of the world, you know? And that’s not something that the “environmental movement” has the juice to do. If we want to do that, we have to build a coalition. We have to bring everybody together. (#4, #8, #9, #10)

Unacknowledged in Chatterjee’s quotes in the Substack page is that with the right carbon tax, such as Citizens Climate Lobby’s fee-and-dividend, the dividend puts more money back in most poor and working households’ pockets than the fee takes away through costlier fossil fuels. She’s right, of course, about systemic economic inequality and massive wealth gaps — a matter so central to our dysfunctional politics and society that our site has an entire page about it. And as we’ve written repeatedly, as in this 2019 post, A New Synthesis: Carbon Taxing, Wealth Taxing & A Green New Deal, we’re in complete synch with her in wanting wealth taxes to pay for the Green New Deal.

Chatterjee almost certainly is conversant with the various carbon dividend proposals. Could it be that, like some other progressives, she believes in her heart that carbon tax revenues should be spent on carbon-reduction programs (rehabbing leaky houses, boosting public transportation, and so forth) and thus opposes distributing the revenues as dividends to households? Perhaps she lacks conviction that making coal, oil and gas cost more will actually move the needle on decarbonization?

We suspect it’s the latter. For evidence there’s Chatterjee’s phrase, “If we need to pay to deal with the climate crisis,” suggesting that, like many progressive activists, she views carbon taxes only as pay-for’s to finance green infrastructure and overlooks their other dimension: inducing across-the-board changes in behavior and investment.

Then there’s climate-politics commentator David Roberts, contending that the imperative of constructing a big-tent climate movement overrides the potential payoffs from carbon taxes — a thesis he trenchantly articulated in his May 2020 Vox post, At last, a climate policy platform that can unite the left.

“For the first time in memory,” Roberts wrote then, “there’s a broad alignment forming around a climate policy platform that is both ambitious enough to address the [climate] problem and politically potent enough to unite all the left’s various interest groups.” The platform, which Roberts and others dubbed S-I-J (Standards-Investment-Justice), pointedly omitted carbon pricing:

Carbon pricing — long treated as the sine qua non of serious climate policy — is no longer at the center of these discussions, or even particularly privileged in them. For one thing, there’s the political economy: Raising prices is unpopular, and raising prices enough, fast enough, to hit the 2050 target will be an almost insuperable political challenge. Cap and trade is still in the reputational toilet. Carbon taxes never saw the bipartisan support their backers always promised. The politics of carbon pricing just don’t seem to be going anywhere. (emphasis added)

There, at last, is an objection to carbon pricing that registers. Indeed, we share enough of it to have declared, three months into the Biden administration, that we did not want the president or Congressional Democrats to seek carbon tax legislation at least until after the 2022 midterms, on grounds that it can’t pass until the Democrats have more than paper-thin majorities. We also expressed strong support for the climate provisions of the Biden-Schumer Inflation Reduction Act, even though they embody the diametrically opposite approach from carbon pricing: making clean energy cheap rather than making dirty energy more expensive.

We differ from Roberts, however, in hoping that larger Congressional margins will embolden Biden to push for a carbon tax if and when Democrats have firm control of Congress . As much as we admire Roberts’ perspicacity, we’re not sure he has ever tuned in fully to carbon taxers’ key argument: pricing carbon emissions will go a long way to curtailing and eliminating fossil fuels, while not pricing them almost certainly consigns climate efforts to falling short. We also note the circularity implicit in Roberts’ last sentence excerpted above: since carbon pricing isn’t going anywhere, let’s set it aside, which ensures it won’t go anywhere.

Like Roberts and other progressives, we believe another world is possible, but we also believe carbon pricing is a key to building it.

CTC’s Carbon-Tax Strategy

Following, from mid-2021, was our rough schema for the remainder of 2021 and all of 2022:

  1. Biden and Congressional Democrats enact uncontroversial wind, solar and electric vehicle incentives and programs as part of an infrastructure package.
  2. By establishing and showcasing alternatives to fossil fuels, these measures soften opposition to carbon pricing somewhat.
  3. Along with vehicle and appliance efficiency standards, these initiatives cut carbon emissions, albeit not massively (due to both lead times and the fact that neither renewables nor standards attack fossil fuel use holistically).
  4. The stubbornness of U.S. carbon emissions increases belief in the necessity of carbon pricing to achieve deep cuts.
  5. The Biden administration aggressively addresses disparate pollution incidence and other environmental injustices through such initiatives as its proposed $20 billion plan to reconnect predominantly Black neighborhoods severed by highways in mid-20th Century “slum clearance,” winning greater trust among EJ advocates.
  6. Biden and Congressional Democrats raise taxes on wealthy businesses and households, mollifying progressives and making inroads into Republicans’ “populist” base.
  7. These and other popular and successful programs enable Congressional Democrats to expand their majorities in the Nov. 2022 midterms.

“That’s a tough needle to thread,” we wrote then, adding that “we believe it’s achievable and can lay the groundwork for enacting a meaningful carbon tax in 2023-2024.”

Conversely, though conditions can always change, right now we don’t see other paths to the kind of robust carbon pricing that can slash U.S. emissions and establish a template for concerted global climate action.

Australia’s Brief, Shining Carbon Tax

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I was there to catch a man
I thought I had him by the hand
I only had him by the glove
The War on Drugs, I Was There, 2011

Australia, engulfed in flames, choking in smoke, a billion animals perished, once had a powerful climate solution by the hand: a carbon tax. The nationwide tax on fossil fuels was in effect for just two years, but what an impact it had, helping the country cut its carbon emissions while economic activity climbed unimpeded. During the carbon tax’s middle year, 2013, Australia’s CO2 to GDP ratio had its sharpest drop ever (see graph below).

Lake Conjola in New South Wales on the last day of 2019. Photo by Matthew Abbott, courtesy NY Times.

Australia stands apart, then, not just in the magnitude of its climate-charged horror but in deploying a climate-change antidote, only to lose it to a right-wing, coal-financed backlash. Not even Trump’s dismantling of the Obama pro-climate Clean Power Plan and auto-mileage standards, unsettling as it has been, stands out as cruelly as Australia’s renunciation of its carbon tax.

Unwanted child, stepchild, bastard child … Australia’s carbon tax was all of that. It took effect on July 1, 2012, the keystone of a deal between the Labor Party headed by incoming prime minister Julia Gillard and the pro-carbon tax Green Party, whose votes Labor needed to attain a majority.

As Australian journalist Julia Baird noted in a 2014 NY Times op-ed, Gillard’s earlier pledge to not tax carbon emissions and her “perceived lack of conviction in the policy itself” damaged the tax’s credibility and her own viability. The subsequent electoral victory of a “Liberal” (read: right-wing) government committed to repealing the tax led to its rescission on July 17, 2014.

Yet the tax appears to have performed brilliantly. With just two years of data, we can’t draw sweeping conclusions. Nevertheless, we have these ineluctable facts about the 24 months in which Australia taxed carbon emissions from all major sources except petrol-fueled transport:

  • CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels in Australia fell 2.4 percent in 2013 and 1.1 percent in 2014 — the two steepest year-on-year declines since 1990, when modern record-keeping began.
  • Emissions in 2014 were 14 million metric tons less than in 2012. The decline was powered by a 19 million metric ton drop in the electricity sector, which is highly carbon-intensive and thus the most responsive to carbon pricing. (Increases in mining and manufacturing emissions somewhat offset that downturn.)
  • Economic activity was unaffected by the carbon tax, as indicated by the minimal difference between the 3.01% average annual rise in GDP for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014 vs. the 3.07% average rise for the remainder of the 1990-2017 period for which we had data.

As each day brings new stories of suffering from the terrifying temperatures (including a continent-wide average 107.4ᵒF on Dec. 18) supercharged by climate change, we can only speculate what might have turned out differently if the country hadn’t abolished its carbon tax in 2014.

Calculations by author, from data posted by Australian Greenhouse Emissions Information System, Department of the Environment and Energy. CO2 figures include all sectors except Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing. GDP data are from World Bank and in constant US dollars.

For one thing, the 18 million metric ton rise in nationwide emissions since 2014 (to 2017, the last year for which the government has issued data) might have been averted if the carbon price signal had stayed in place. Emissions might even have shrunk if the tax had risen from its roughly $20 per ton level — and if the national government had embarked on a New Deal-style project to harvest the country’s vast solar and wind resources.

Even more, Australia’s action might have rippled through the world. The example of a proudly macho and avowedly hedonistic society explicitly pricing its carbon emissions could have turned heads, particularly in the United States, with its many cultural resemblances to Down Under. The fantasy of a land that produced Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee serving as a global role model for carbon taxing and reduction is delicious, though alas, no more than that.

Had Australia continued taxing carbon, British Columbia, the other English-speaking jurisdiction with an explicit carbon tax, wouldn’t have been dismissible as a unicorn. Carbon tax campaigners in, say, Washington state, whose voters considered but rejected a carbon tax in 2016, would have had more than one drum to pound.

Stark difference in CO2 emissions between three years in which Australia’s carbon tax was in effect and rest of 1991-2017.

It could be said, of course, that Australia’s rescission of its carbon tax is merely one of a number of missed opportunities around the world to tackle climate change by transparently pricing carbon emissions. In an alternative U.S., influential left-greens like Van Jones, Naomi Klein and Food & Water Watch might have backed that Washington carbon tax referendum — or, at least, not lent their voices to the opposition. Earlier, at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009, U.S. “big green” groups could have thrown their weight behind straight-up carbon taxing rather than try to muscle the convoluted, Wall Street-friendly Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill through Congress.

But Australia’s fateful choice is harder to bear. A country of 26 million people didn’t merely pass up a potential opening six years ago; it turned its back on an actual, promising beginning by bringing to power a confirmed climate denier, Tony Abbott, who axed the tax in 2014 and just a month ago, as his country was becoming a cauldron, complained to an Israeli radio audience that the world was “in the grip of a climate cult.”

When summer ebbs and the fires and smoke recede, Australians should consider how and why they disarmed themselves in the fight to stop climate change; and then make a new start by reinstating a policy that, in the brief time granted, appears to have worked wonders.

For more on Australia’s carbon tax history, click here (the Australia section of CTC’s “Where Carbon is Taxed” page).

What killed Washington state’s latest carbon-tax try?

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Washington state’s second shot at a carbon tax referendum, I-1631, went down to defeat on Tuesday. The 13-point margin was smaller than the 19-point loss for the 2016 carbon tax referendum, but not much.

That initiative, I-732, was mounted by a ragtag group of carbon tax acolytes from across the political spectrum, led by charismatic but, to some, polarizing economist Yoram Bauman. I-1631, in contrast, enjoyed active support from elements of organized labor as well as the state’s popular governor, Jay Inslee, whose effort earlier this year to push his own carbon tax bill through the legislature fell one or two votes short. I-1631 was also backed by climate-justice organizations and other “left greens” who two years ago opposed I-732, claiming it was insufficiently inclusive and progressive.

Screenshot from The New York Times, Nov. 10.

What happened? How come the supposedly broader base of support for this year’s initiative didn’t translate into a close contest, if not a win?

Of course, fossil-fuel money played a role. The latest figures we saw had the anti’s spending $25 million, much of it from British Petroleum, which operates a large oil refinery at Cherry Point in the state’s northwest corner. But the pro forces weren’t completely outgunned, with $12.5 million raised from the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and The Nature Conservancy.

Those figures don’t include the campaign’s final two weeks, when another wave of Big Oil money almost certainly washed ashore. But it feels simplistic to pin I-1631’s poor outcome entirely on the spending gap.

We don’t yet have a good feel for what happened. But maybe assigning the lion’s share of the carbon revenues to unspecified programs to help deliver clean energy and power savings to low-income households, communities of color and indigenous peoples, as I-1631 would have done, was less appealing to voters than to the constituencies who wrote that language into the initiative.

Maybe some voters figured out that, good intentions aside, I-1631’s revenue allocation might not have sheltered them from the higher energy prices resulting from the carbon tax. After all, the weatherization, better transit and community solar that the revenues were intended to pay for, while eminently worthwhile policies in other contexts, wouldn’t necessarily have offset farmers’ and long-distance commuters’ higher gasoline and diesel costs.

And maybe, just maybe, if  leading left greens hadn’t savaged I-732 in 2016 and slandered its sales-tax cuts — which were expressly designed to offset the carbon tax burden on poor and middle-class households — as “tax cuts for corporations” (Heather McGhee, president, Demos) and a burden “on the backs of the poor” (Mary Kay Henry, president, Service Employees International Union), that referendum might have had a fighting chance.

(And let’s not forget Left Green shero Naomi Klein, who slammed I-732 at the last minute with gems like, “[If I-732] is approved by voters, it would be a disastrous precedent that could set back the climate justice movement for a decade  — time that we simply can’t afford to lose.”)

Note Klein’s reference to the “climate justice movement” rather than the “climate movement.” Any analysis of the fate of I-1631 needs to look back at the internecine warfare two years ago over I-732 that pitted one against the other.

Meanwhile, economist Tyler Cowen has a thoughtful piece in Bloomberg, The Carbon Tax Is Dead, Long Live the Carbon Tax, with the intriguing sub-head: Maybe its failure on the ballot in Washington state will inspire economists to come up with better arguments. Here’s his gist:

I don’t view the unpopularity of the carbon tax as merely reflecting the influence of special interests. The American people apparently feel that government ought to be able to solve this problem without imposing a new tax burden on them. For all the talk about disillusionment and cynicism in American politics, this view represents a strange kind of optimism. If this issue really is so important, some voters must be thinking, surely you politicians can find a way to solve it without making us pay for everything. Don’t we give you enough money already? There is something admirable about this attitude, even if it doesn’t apply best to this particular case. (emphasis added)

Other reading: David Roberts’ post-election quickie, Fossil fuel money crushed clean energy ballot initiatives across the country, lacks his usual nuance, but is worth reading nonetheless. For local content, there’s this anodyne statement from Carbon Washington, who organized I-732 and campaigned strongly for I-1631, Despite I-1631 vote, Washingtonians still demand action on climate.

Check back here in the next few days. We put this post up quickly and may add to it.

The Seattle Times Misfires on I-1631

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Washington state’s largest newspaper is urging a No vote on I-1631, the carbon tax initiative on the state’s Nov. 6 ballot.

The Seattle Times editorial raises a few sound objections. But the paper falls into the same trap that ensnared some I-1631 proponents who fought a predecessor carbon tax initiative, I-732, two years ago: missing the forest for the trees.

Despite its flaws, it’s critical that Washington voters pass the initiative.

The Times editorial drills into I-1631’s prime weak spot — accountability:

It [I-1631] would collect more than $1 billion yearly. An un-elected board appointed by the governor would propose how to spend it. The initiative requires seats for powerful entities, such as labor and tribes, promising them large cuts.

The Legislature has the final say on appropriations. But the carbon board is structured to be a political juggernaut. Legislators might have difficulty mustering political will to change course.

Graphic courtesy of Sightline Institute.

Yes, taxpayer dollars ideally should be appropriated by the legislators those taxpayers elected rather than by an unaccountable panel of interest group representatives. (If you don’t see the problem there, imagine a board chosen by a conservative Republican governor.)

And granted, the initiative specifies that most of the carbon revenues must be dedicated to “clean air and clean energy investments.” But the language leaves plenty of room for projects that might have little or no impact on the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The Times also expresses dismay that the measure will — gasp! — raise prices of fossil-fuel energy, as if that weren’t the whole point. It’s a bit like complaining that cigarette taxes will raise costs for smokers.

Most of the revenue from the defeated 2016 carbon tax initiative, I-732, would have gone to cut the state’s regressive sales tax, easing the cost burden on households and businesses. I-1631 dedicates some funds to bringing cleaner energy to low-income households. But some Washingtonians with high energy bills relative to their incomes — especially low-income and rural residents — will nevertheless face higher costs. Proponents counter this concern in part by noting that some funds will flow to and benefit rural areas, as this Sightline Institute report argues.

Notwithstanding its drawbacks, passing I-1631 is critical. If the U.S. is ever to price carbon in a serious way, some state will have to go first, and that first measure probably won’t be perfect. Some of the groups promoting I-1631 today got that wrong two years ago when they opposed I-732 because they didn’t like how the revenue was used. Now the Seattle Times is repeating that mistake.

We need to start taxing carbon, — even the apolitical IPCC said so earlier this month — and arguably the best thing to do with the revenue is whatever will get the most votes for taxing carbon. I-732 wasn’t it. I-1631 might be.

A recent poll by the reputable firm Elway Research found 50% of voters supporting and only 36% opposing the initiative this time. Still, Elway’s survey size, just 400 voters, was thin, and polling on public questions is notoriously tricky. Moreover, there’s a $26 million oil-money war-chest working to turn the vote around in the final days. Anything can happen.

The good news is that this time the pro-initiative forces are also well-funded, with almost $14 million banked, including $1 million from Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Gates posted a powerful endorsement of I-1631 on LinkedIn earlier this month. He gets what the Seattle Times doesn’t:

If 1631 passes, it will create the first [carbon] fee in the United States. Going first is never easy, but Washington has a history of pioneering new ideas. And because of all the benefits — shoring up nuclear and hydropower, enhancing the state’s role as a leader in innovation, and most of all accelerating progress on climate-change solutions — I believe it will be worth it.