Charles Komanoff

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

For Long-Term NY Transit Funding, Look to a State Carbon Tax

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The New York City public affairs site Gotham Gazette today published my essay, For Long-Term MTA Funding, Look to a State Carbon Tax. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and to bring it directly to the Carbon Tax Center’s readership.

 — C.K., May 4, 2023

That huge sigh of relief from New York City mass transit advocates last weekend was for the state budget handshake to tack more than a billion additional dollars a year onto a key MTA funding stream, the Payroll Mobility Tax. According to both my calculations and an announcement from Gov. Kathy Hochul, the agreed-to 75% rise in the tax rate on employee salaries paid by businesses in the five boroughs will add $1.1 billion to the PMT’s ongoing annual $1.8 billion take.

(The numbers prorate imperfectly because the rise in the tax rate, to 60/100 of one percent, applies only in the city; the rate in the seven suburban MTA counties remains 34/100 of one percent.)

The upward bump in the PMT is part of the package to avert a fare hike and service cuts that would have jolted the entire metro region. Raising the same $1.1 billion via the subway farebox, for example, would have required a whopping 35% jump in fares, a calamity that would have triggered enough new car, cab, and Uber trips to slow vehicles in Manhattan by 5% and boosted city and regional carbon emissions by nearly 400,000 tons of CO2 a year — enough to negate the climate benefit of 90 new large wind turbines, according to my modeling. And these figures don’t include lost jobs and commerce from worsened transportation. Reducing service to save the same amount would have produced similar bad outcomes.

Score a big win, then, for transit and New York. But the new revenue comes with a downside: taxes on payrolls discourage hiring and compound our area’s anti-business aura. Moreover, this revenue infusion will almost certainly be not the last but the first in a series the MTA will require throughout the decade to limit future fare hikes and improve service even as ridership continues to lag pre-pandemic volumes. Counting on raising the PMT next time, and the time after that, will be a fool’s errand. There has to be a better way.

I believe there is: enact a modest statewide carbon tax and dedicate a third to a half of the revenue to shoring up public transportation budgets around the state, though principally in New York City.

Reappraising Carbon Taxes

On January 1, Washington state launched its carbon-pricing program, the nation’s second all-sectors carbon charge, with a starting price around $20 per ton of CO2, though most of the emission allowances fetched even higher prices in the first carbon auction, in March. I estimate that the same $20 price applied to all fossil fuels burned in New York State could generate revenues of $3 billion a year (see table).

Dedicating a third of those proceeds to the MTA would add a billion dollars to the authority’s annual revenue. Other slices of the revenue could cure deficits at smaller transit systems around the state.

Even with these allocations, roughly half of the new $3 billion in annual carbon revenues would remain available for a range of purposes from home weatherization to rebates offsetting higher fuel costs for lower-income rural New Yorkers.

Of course, no new tax is ever welcomed with open arms. In recent years, moreover, carbon taxing has lost political standing with left and right alike. Right-wingers, in thrall to fossil fuels, denigrate the very idea of climate concern. Opinions on carbon pricing on the left, while far more nuanced, tend toward an “eat your peas” quality, seeing the promised revenues but not the powerful tides unleashed by the increased fuel prices.

Could a state carbon tax have a chance in New York this time around? I believe so, if only because MTA deficits are untenable and a statewide carbon tax looks like the least-bad long-term antidote.

Consider:

  1. New York wouldn’t be the first state to price all carbon emissions. California has done so for a decade, and, as noted, Washington just followed suit.
  2. Two-thirds of the $3 billion in carbon tax revenue could go to other, non-MTA uses across the state.
  3. Nearly half of the revenues would come from charges on fossil (natural) gas, the very fuel that climate activists are targeting in order to electrify heating and cooking while also shrinking climate-damaging methane leaks from pipelines, wells, and buildings.
  4. Carbon taxing’s regressive bias (it takes more dollars from the rich but more proportionally from the poor) would be blunted by its helping keep a lid on transit fares.
  5. The affluent suburban counties that will be on the hook for the carbon tax caught a big break by their exemption from the increase in the Payroll Mobility Tax. Moreover, some pro-climate suburbanites might even support a climate-helping carbon tax.
  6. Upstate households will be cushioned from the tax by the region’s preponderance of low-carbon electricity from nuclear, hydro, and wind power.
  7. Aid to transit could be packaged as an urban corrective to suburban- and rural-facing Inflation Reduction Act federal subsidies for solar panels, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. (Notably, the IRA does not fund urban-friendly mass transit and e-bikes.)
  8. Left-leaning climate-justice advocates who shy away from carbon pricing might warm to a policy that cuts emissions by attracting car trips to buses, trains, and subways.

This panoply of advantages points to diverse potential sources of support for a transit-benefitting state carbon tax:

  • NYC transit and “livable streets” advocates;
  • Economic-justice advocates who recognize affordable transit’s value in combating poverty;
  • Climate campaigners who see carbon pricing as a complement to other carbon-cutting policies;
  • Suburbanites concerned that future hikes in the Payroll Mobility Tax will come for them;
  • “Electrify-everything” proponents working to eliminate fossil gas from residences and other buildings;
  • Developers of low-carbon electricity — not just solar and wind providers but proponents of retaining the state’s four upstate reactors and building new ones;
  • Energy-efficiency engineers, contractors, and workforces;
  • Labor unions whose members fabricate, erect, and maintain the spectrum of green energy projects that a carbon tax will help make more abundant by making fossil sources costlier.

Competing Claimants?

Electricity producers in New York already pay a carbon fee under the multi-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) cap-and-trade program. In addition, Governor Hochul and the statewide climate coalition New York Renews have advanced competing carbon pricing concepts, both of them, somewhat confusingly, dubbed cap-and-invest. Hence, an MTA-focused carbon tax, which would employ a carbon-based charge on fossil fuels extracted or imported into New York State rather than a carbon cap enforced through sales of emission permits, wouldn’t arrive on a blank slate.

RGGI currently charges electricity producers around $14 for each ton of CO2 their generators emit. This levy is generating $365 million of statewide revenues a year, paid as surcharges on power bills, which goes to support investments in energy-efficiency and renewable electricity. While in theory the RGGI charge could be netted against the new carbon tax, the relative ease and importance of decarbonizing electricity production make it preferable to retain it and add the carbon price on top.

Cap-and-invest presents a trickier set of issues, partly because neither the governor’s prospective program included in the new budget nor NY Renews’ more elaborate plan has been fully fleshed out. In addition, the latter is the fruit of years of deliberation and consensus-building among the coalition’s hundreds of participant grassroots groups, who now constitute a formidable host.

At this writing, NY Renews envisions applying $10 billion in carbon revenues over several years in no less than 73 individual spending buckets grouped in four uber-categories: Climate Jobs and Infrastructure includes elements like aiding electric bus manufacture ($100 million) and offshore wind power supply chains ($300 million). Energy Affordability earmarks $1 billion to wipe out utility customer debt and $2 billion to support building electrification. Community & Worker Transition Assistance devotes $600 million to the “just transition” from jobs in carbon fuels to positions in renewable energy. And Community Directed Climate Solutions sets aside $2 billion to unspecified projects in historically underserved and overburdened urban neighborhoods and rural areas.

The NY Renews plan should be seen, then, as a holistic roadmap to make over not just how energy is supplied in the state but how it is consumed and governed. Billion-dollar-a-year allocations to the MTA aren’t the kind of investment its members have envisioned. Nevertheless, exploratory calculations suggest that the carbon payoff from service improvements paid for by a state carbon tax would be impressive.

As an illustration, I have calculated that an average 20% speed-up in subway trips achieved by running more trains at higher speeds would save straphangers and drivers each around 100 million hours a year (the latter from car trips switching to trains) while reducing car and truck emissions by 900,000 tons a year. Even more CO2 would be eliminated because of New York City’s improved competitive advantages vis-a-vis less “inherently green” suburbs and exurbs.

To be sure, so striking a gain in subway performance would almost certainly carry a price tag well over a billion dollars a year. Still, the prospective benefits underscore both the carbon-cutting potential of infusing new funds into subway service and the need to score competing claims for their climate value.

Broader Considerations and Next Steps

Over time, the carbon tax’s revenue base will shrink as its price incentives kick in and other carbon-cutting policies also gather steam. The resulting loss in tax revenues could be counteracted by periodically raising the per-ton tax rate. New York City could supplement the tax through revenue-generating street-management measures such as curbside pricing and other forms of road pricing.

Earlier this year, Community Services Society CEO (and MTA board member) David R. Jones and Riders Alliance executive director Betsy Plum proposed expanding New York City’s Fair Fares program to allow an additional 772,000 lower-income New Yorkers to qualify for half-fare transit passes. The cost, which they put at $142 million a year, should be a candidate for the carbon spending package.

This discussion has centered on the carbon tax’s creation of a new funding pot to maintain and improve transit affordability and performance. But taxing carbon emissions stands to benefit society in two other major ways. It will diminish financial incentives propping up carbon fuels and also support societal paradigms promoting care over harm.

A carbon tax is more than just a pay-for, in other words. Simply making it more expensive to buy and burn carbon fuels discourages fossil fuel use in a multiplicity of ways. Moreover, the very act of pricing carbon emissions can spur “externality taxing” in other realms, from congestion pricing to taxing the sugar content of soft drinks. Making New York the third U.S. state with broad-based carbon pricing will also add momentum to long-sought federal carbon emissions pricing.

Shoring up MTA finances, while reason enough to enact a state carbon tax, isn’t the lone consideration. The crisis of transit funding should be seen as a catalyst to pricing fossil fuels more closely to their true societal costs — a vital goal in its own right.

The next MTA funding crisis-as-opportunity will be upon us soon. The Legislature should move swiftly to study the benefits of taxing carbon emissions as a way to hold the line — and more — on transit fares and service, well in time for next winter’s budget negotiations. Transit and climate advocates and their counterparts in the Hochul administration should consider integrating a transit-focused carbon tax into their agendas.

Taking $3 billion a year for any public purpose, no matter how noble, is no small matter. The time to start selling a transit-supporting state carbon tax is now.

Fossil fuel companies are producing something that society has been eagerly gobbling up. We have to drastically reduce demand.”

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John Holdren, chief science advisor to Pres. Obama (2009-2017), in New York Times, Many Young Voters Bitter Over Biden’s Support of Willow Oil Drilling, April 25. The article, by climate reporter Lisa Friedman, added that Holdren “opposed the Willow project. But he believes that driving down the demand for oil and gas — as the Biden administration is trying to do by expanding clean energy and encouraging electric vehicles — is more effective than blocking drilling. If everyone is driving electric cars, there’s less need for gasoline, the theory goes.”

A Bitcoin Mining Exposé Strengthens the Case for a Carbon Tax

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The Nation magazine this morning published my essay, A Bitcoin Mining Exposé Strengthens the Case for a Carbon Tax. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and add tables and graphics.

 — C.K., April 20, 2023

Clean electricity, the backbone of the Biden administration’s strategy for slashing carbon emissions, is becoming daunting to expand.

US wind farms, which last year generated more electricity than all hydropower and solar panels in the 50 states combined, often face years of contention. The entire mid-Atlantic offshore region, an area brimming with wind potential, could be proscribed by Pentagon fretting over interferences with aircraft deployment, Bloomberg News disclosed this week.

But if red tape for green power is a bother, why not get the benefits with none of the fuss? Send commando teams to the 34 large-scale Bitcoin mining sites in the United States that were identified in a New York Times front-page exposé this month. In synchrony, have them sever the facilities’ power cables, which combined demand some 3,900 megawatts of electricity—nearly as much as 3 million households combined.

In a flash, legions of electricity-gulping, combination-seeking computers in Texas, New York, and 13 other states would cease whirring. Like a power surge but in reverse, the fossil-fuel generators energizing so-called cryptocurrency mining—literally, trillions of combination-seeking calculations every second—would dial down. The corresponding drop in carbon emissions would be the same as if thousands of new industrial-size wind turbines could be instantly erected and connected to grids, supplanting electricity now furnished by burning coal and methane gas.

Data adapted from NY Times April 9, 2023 story. Link in text above. FF% is estimated percent of *incremental* power demand supplied from coal or methane gas.

Fanciful? Consider the numbers. The Times helpfully enumerated each Bitcoin mine’s fossil-fueled draw on state and regional power grids along with the associated carbon emissions. It took only a few further steps for me to translate those emissions into generic megawatts of clean power that would defray them. Using today’s customary 300-foot-tall, 3.6-megawatt wind machines as my standard, I calculated a staggering 3,700 turbines.

There you have it: The US Bitcoin industry is single-handedly neutering the entire climate benefit from nearly 10 percent of US wind energy. That’s more electricity than is generated with wind in any single state, save Texas and Iowa.

This raises two uncomfortable questions for the climate movement: Why isn’t it rallying against Bitcoin mines and other parasitic users of carbon fuels? And why isn’t it taking the obvious step of calling for a tax on carbon emissions to reduce those usages while simultaneously extracting revenues from them?

Second question first. Generating the electricity consumed by those 34 Bitcoin mines causes 16.4 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, according to the Times. If the United States had a $100 per ton carbon tax—the current price of carbon emission permits in the European Union’s cap-and-trade system—the carbon levies at the mine mouth and wellhead would be extracting $1.5 billion a year from the fossil fuel companies that power the Bitcoin operations, and depositing it into the Treasury.

To be sure, that money would only fund a mere 2.4 hours of federal spending a year—barely a single baseball game’s worth, under the new hurry-up-and-pitch rules. On the other hand, the tax moneys are twice what Fox News will pay Dominion Voting Systems under the settlement reached this week. And they’re recurring.

But it would not be extinguished. That’s where the climate movement comes in.

Had the tax been in place a decade ago, as I and others urged, the extra expense might have stopped some cyber-currency ventures from the git-go. But if it were put into place today, a robust carbon tax could at least impel Bitcoin miners to economize on electricity, charge more for transactions, or actually contract with greener power providers rather than merely pretending to, as the Times found.

Although no one can pinpoint precisely how a carbon tax would shrink Bitcoin mining’s carbon footprint, let alone any single sector’s, abundant empirical evidence suggests that total US carbon emissions would be around a third less with a triple-digit national carbon tax than without. Bitcoin would not be exempt.

The movement has targeted banks and pipelines for more than a decade, with not much to show in the way of lesser carbon emissions. Why isn’t it disrupting Bitcoin mining and other bloodsucking machines—helicopters, private jets, yachts, super-sized SUVs—that feed on fossil fuels and are predominantly playthings of plutocrats? Why isn’t it going all out to stop highway expansions and eliminate restrictive zoning that lock in energy waste for generations?

Yes, climate activists stopped Keystone XL. They won a ban on fracking in New York. They’re fighting to drive oil drilling out of Los Angeles. Valiant, heroic work. But these and other keep-it-in-the-ground victories are creating little climate benefit. Why? Because the same underlying demand, largely unaffected by those protests, is met by supplies from elsewhere.

The bank protests seem even less focused. Conoco doesn’t need financing from JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo to drill in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The only “bank” it requires is the collective fuel tanks of America’s 280 million motor vehicles, plus aircraft, off-road vehicles, and pleasure boats.

Marching on Citibank does send a message, and activating seniors who might otherwise sit at home posting about their grandkids is soul-stirring. But if divestment and bank-shaming were going to slow the assault on climate, we would have seen bigger results by now.

“If the world wants to limit warming,” Norwegian energy researcher Espen Erlingsen told the Times this month, “it will have to limit demand for oil and gas because [the] industry can deliver this kind of volume for many more decades.”

Amen. The climate movement’s strategy isn’t working. Trying to bottle up supply instead of throttling demand is whack-a-mole without end, chasing after but never stopping capitalism’s dynamism from erupting in crypto mining and 1,001 other climate-destroying products and technologies.

By itself, a carbon tax won’t cure that. But it would at least start to steer innovation and cultural norms away from endless new climate horrors.

Addendum: My concluding sentence — perhaps too subtle a literary reference — is elucidated in Brian A. Oard’s delightful Mindful Pleasures website. Please note that the ultimatum was uttered not by Sabbath but by his lover, Drenka. — C.K.

If the world wants to limit warming, it will have to limit demand for oil and gas because [the oil] industry can deliver this kind of volume for many more decades.”

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Espen Erlingsen, a partner at the research firm Rystad Energy, in “Even as Nations Push Renewables, Oil and Gas Projects Come Roaring Back,” New York Times, April 6. (Headline in digital edition: It’s Not Just Willow: Oil and Gas Projects Are Back in a Big Way)

Climate Sound and Fury, Signifying What, Exactly?

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(This post was amended on March 31 to include rebuttals of our criticism of the Montana climate-change lawsuit from two distinguished participants.)

Climate agitation was much in the news last week. The Guardian reported on a forthcoming Harvard Environmental Law Review paper suggesting that fossil fuel companies could be held liable for homicide from deaths caused by climate change. A New York Times front-page story previewed a courtroom trial to determine if Montana policies promoting fossil fuels violate that state’s constitutional protections of a healthful environment. And in dozens of cities, activists assembled by noted climate author-organizer Bill McKibben tore up their Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America credit cards to spotlight the big banks’ financing of $1 trillion in fossil fuel projects over the past five years.

In other climate news, however, suburban legislators are contesting a bold initiative from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to compel New York City and surrounding counties to expand housing supply. New York City’s public transit provider is scrounging for revenues to shore up declining subway and bus farebox receipts stemming from the triple-whammy of residual Covid worries, violent-crime fears, and working-from-home. Around the country, meanwhile, just about all of the gargantuan road-widening projects listed in U.S. PIRG’s most recent Highway Boondoggles report are proceeding apace.

“States’ rights” have become “local control.” L: Wallace for President rally, 1972, courtesy Google Images. R: Ryan Lowry for the NY Times, accompanying March 22, 2023 opinion essay, “NIMBYs Threaten a Plan to Build More Suburban Housing,” by Times editorial writer Mara Gay. Photo was captioned, “Legislators protested Gov. Kathy Hochul’s housing plan in Albany on Monday.” Faces and demographics in the two photos, taken more than half-a-century apart, are hard to distinguish.

Yes, we’re juxtaposing.

The three just-noted happenings threaten to lock in place profligate fossil fuel consumption and associated carbon emissions. Highway widenings engender more driving (“induced demand,” it’s called). Fare hikes and service cuts to transit in NYC and elsewhere will do the same. And bottling up housing supply, as New York’s suburbs and my own borough of Manhattan, along with affluent cities and towns all over the U.S. have been doing for decades, guarantees urban stasis and its evil twin of exurban sprawl, with its accoutrements of carbon-spewing SUV’s, manses and subdivisions — not to mention segregation.

Litigating for Climate

These carbon accelerants might be more bearable if the climate agitation mentioned at the top had genuine prospects for cutting emissions. Do they? Not likely.

Indicting, much less convicting, officers of fossil fuel companies for killing people via their emissions-induced climate change is the definition of quixotic — to my untutored eye, anyway. In court, Big Oil will simply point to the tens of billions of lives uplifted by the fruits of their fuels. And they won’t be spouting nonsense. The raising up of most of humankind out of subsistence, and the resulting cradle-to-grave lengthening of human lifespans, could not have happened without the carbon-fueled Industrial Revolution. Set against those numbers, the millions — if that — of lives provably lost because of climate change will appear as a mere rounding error.

To be sure, the still-rising use of fossil fuels globally has now burst past the point of positive net benefits, especially with the advent, at last, of scalable non-carbon ways to power civilization. But actually effectuating the transition seems a matter for politics, with or without judicial support.

And even if some clarion guilty verdict were rendered in some court, what would be the remedy? Would the fossil fuel industry be made to dismantle itself? What about the billions of motorists, manufacturers and other consumers and producers who would clamor for more. Sorry, there’s no bypassing the messy work of using pricing, regulation and innovation to get off fossil fuels.

I’m almost as skeptical re the Montana litigation — notwithstanding the earnestness of the young plaintiffs, including two brothers who not only are the sons of firearms-industry apostate Ryan Busse but who were motivated to join the lawsuit by the climatological deterioration of their beautiful corner of northwest Montana.

I identify with Lander and Badge Busse. Melting snow in nearby Glacier National Park helped trigger my ecological awakening, but in an opposite fashion from theirs. On a long-ago day in July, driving on the park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road with my grade-school pal, I parked our tiny Renault auto to fetch water dripping from roadside snowbanks. We filled our canteens and started walked uphill toward the source. An hour later, we were a thousand vertical feet above the roadway and following real-life mountain goats under an impossibly blue sky. Bookending our hike into the Grand Canyon a week earlier, that day became my gateway into love of wildness, defense of clean air, and a career in environmental policy analysis and activism.

Most of Glacier’s glaciers are now diminished if not gone, making the lawsuit, Held v. State of Montana, painful as well as valiant. Yet even if the brothers and their co-litigants win their case, what exactly is the remedy? The Montana Supreme Court possesses no magic button whose pressing can end the burning of fossil fuels. Stop drilling or mining in Montana, and producers will up their output from Wyoming. Stop it in all 50 states, and the same suppliers will boost production overseas. Sure, impeding fuel extraction will incrementally drive up fuel prices and take a bite out of demand, but that’s just a sideways blow at best. The solution, as CTC has argued since our founding in 2007, lies in throttling demand for carbon, not stoppering supply.

Montana litigation supporters weigh in

Shortly after this post went up, CTC received this brief rebuttal from a long-time supporter of the Montana suit and the larger Our Children’s Trust campaign to enshrine a legal right to a safe climate:

The Montana climate suit seeks to build case law affirming a right to a stable, livable climate. I liken it to the long-term legal struggle to secure equal treatment under the law for women and people of color.  For example, the legal battle to desegregate schools was a long one built on case law. I agree that any individual state has limited ability to impose a price on emissions, but the Juliana vs. U.S. suit does. It seeks a science-based reduction in emissions sufficient to maintain a stable, livable climate, and proposes a carbon tax as the single most effective policy to achieve that goal.  Likely the courts will only impose emission reductions. Politicians will then be tasked with submitting a plan that is affordable and effective. The Montana and other suits build case law affirming the damage caused by fossil fuel emissions and a right to a livable climate. Courts act more on evidence and less on short-term political pressure.

We also received this note from noted environmental attorney and climate-law expert Michael Gerrard, who directs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and was featured in the New York Times story noted at the top of this post:

I think we need to attack both the demand side and the supply side. No one action will affect the supply on a macro scale, but cumulatively many could. Montana is one of the nation’s largest fossil fuel suppliers, and if the courts shut down some of that, it would be a good thing. The judge, at least, is taking the case seriously. Whether or not the Montana Supreme Court upholds a decision for the plaintiffs, the case will cast a harsh light on the fossil fuel companies. Most of these campaigns are largely aimed at delegitimizing the fossil fuel companies and reducing their political clout. That is having some effect in blue states, where quite a few strong climate laws are being enacted over the opposition of the fossil companies. And keep in mind that each new coal mine, each new gas-fueled power plant,  and so forth, creates a constituency for its long-term preservation; that needs to be resisted.

CTC collage from two separate photographs on Third Act website, snipped on March 30, 2023.

Banks and Climate

We come now to last week’s bank protest that Bill McKibben organized with his new “Community of Americans,” Third Act.

As much as I admire Bill’s unflagging zeal and his Third Act cohorts’ earnest willingness to put themselves out there, I strongly question targeting banks as a cause of fossil fuel exploitation and a locus for climate activism.

How will bank reformation impact the use of cars, trucks and planes in the U.S. or elsewhere — use that requires purchases of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel that in turn provide both the financial wherewithal and the political muscle to drill, extract, refine and transport petroleum products whose combustion releases the carbon dioxide that is wrecking our climate?

Should not Third Act and indeed the entire climate movement be organizing and demonstrating for demand-cutting policies and developments such as mixed-use and dense housing, functional-or-better public transportation, bikeable and walkable streets, fuel-economy standards without “light truck” loopholes, and the like? Wouldn’t their energies accomplish more, both short- and long-term, if they were to swarm Albany and other state capitals to demand upzoning, no more highway widenings, and permitting reform to circumvent anachronistic regulations hindering wind farms and solar homes?

In response, Bill would probably say “We need to remind people of the connection between cash and carbon. Literally, somebody who has $125,000 in those banks [Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America] is producing more [carbon] because it’s being lent out to pipelines and frack wells than all the cooking, flying, heating, driving, cooling that the average American does in a year. Five thousand dollars in [those banks] produces more carbon than flying back and forth across the country.”

How do I know? Because that’s exactly what he said on Democracy Now on the morning of the protests (quoted segment begins around 37:45). Try as I might, I can’t follow the logic.

Coda

Notice I haven’t mentioned carbon pricing, except tangentially. Here at CTC we’re laying low on carbon taxing for the time being. U.S. politics still aren’t ready, what with climate-averse Republicans occupying half of Congress, and Democrats wary of the difficult politics. We focus on what’s possible in the here-and-now.

Last year it was the praiseworthy (if imperfect) Biden-Schumer Inflation Reduction Act. This year we’re continuing to do what we can to bring congestion pricing for New York City into being. We’re also quietly nurturing a promising new avenue to advance a New York State carbon price. Please stay tuned!

Alaska oil push shows Biden lacking courage of his climate-policy convictions.

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President Biden’s decision this week to greenlight ConocoPhillips’ $6 billion Willow oil-and-gas drilling venture on Alaska’s North Slope is being cast as a climate disaster first, an ecological disaster second.

That’s backwards, not to mention incomplete. As we explain below, climate damage may be the least consequential aspect of Biden’s decision. More dire is the ecological impact, which will be felt both in Alaska and on America’s roads. But first and foremost, the president’s action is a political debacle.

Biden’s naked, unnecessary expansion of U.S. petroleum extraction into the country’s largest tract of undisturbed public land cuts the legs out from his singular legislative accomplishment so far: the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The IRA’s most public-facing part is its intricate array of consumer subsidies and manufacturing incentives to hasten replacement of America’s two hundred and eighty million petrol-burning cars and trucks with electric vehicles. The Carbon Tax Center came out swinging for this initiative, notwithstanding its tacit endorsement of EV giantism and cold shoulder of small, urban-appropriate electrics such as bicycles, scooters and neighborhood electric vehicles.

With his Willow go-ahead, Biden has put the IRA’s proud optics behind a dark curtain. Why direct tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to ramp up electric vehicles, possibly turbocharging U.S. deficits and inflation, if EV’s aren’t going to bring down the curtain on U.S. oil consumption?

Our view is that the “climate bomb” isn’t any one oil project or even all of them, it’s the SUVs, pickups and oversized roads that make the oil business so profitable. Photo credits: L, Kendra Brock / @kendrarayee via Pinterest. R, Riley Rogerson accompanying her Jan. 10, 2023 Anchorage Daily News story, “Protesters rally at White House calling administration to block Willow oil project in Alaska.”

Yes, the combustion-to-electricity transition can’t happen overnight. But Willow makes the transition look depressingly distant. Indeed, by pumping up the supply of the fossil fuels the IRA professes to replace, Biden is casting shade on the underlying paradigm to electrify not only vehicles but “everything,” including heating, cooking and industry.

By our calculations, the drop in oil consumption from the IRA’s EV incentives will outweigh the oil supplied from Willow 6-fold. That finding highlights either how big a deal the IRA is or the relatively smallness of the oil venture. But the public is unlikely to see it that way. Rather than viewing Biden’s legislation as transformative, they’ll regard it as banal — helpful, but incomplete without a big assist from business-as-usual fossil fuels.

The “climate bomb” fallacy

CTC has long looked askance at climate campaigns targeting “fossil fuel infrastructure.” We view oil and other fossil supply as the tail, with the carbon dog being the demand that creates both the impetus and the financing to pull fossil fuels from the ground, process them and deliver them to vehicles, engines and furnaces. Stop this well or that pipeline, we contend, and another will be developed to supply the fuels that customers demand.

Yes, this view is oversimplified, but not by much. It is true that each new supply increment pushes down prices somewhat, which then pumps up demand; or, equivalently, bottling up particular supply projects raises industry costs, hence prices, which depresses demand. But these processes are largely indirect and not nearly “one-for-one.” The larger truth, we believe, is that demand finds a way to create supply.

Stop Willow, in other words, and the Permian Basin or the Persian Gulf or emerging oil frontiers like Uganda will serve up replacement supply.

In our telling, then, the only way to stop carbon combustion and climate chaos is to destroy demand. That points straight to carbon taxing, since it directly depresses consumer demand for energy, period, while also engendering conversion of energy supply to low- or zero-carbon sources, particularly in the more fungible electricity sector. Carbon taxes also “play well” with other policy instruments, reinforcing efficiency and regulatory standards.

Accordingly, the true “carbon bomb” isn’t Biden’s Willow signoff nearly as much as America’s 280 million combustion vehicles along with jetliners, helicopters, jet skis and so forth and — to go deeper — the development patterns and acculturation that valorize them. For its part, Willow won’t actually “bomb” Earth’s climate since without it, the same amount of extraction will be done elsewhere (if a tad less fuel-intensively in non-Arctic, non-wild environs).

Alaska’s wild ecosystems and heritage, including Indigenous livelihoods, will arguably be bigger losers than climate, then. Another loser will be our nation’s streets and roads and those who use them, since each opening of the petroleum spigot enables and normalizes the ongoing shift to ultra-large vehicles — both combustion and electric. As urban researcher-scholar David Zipper has shown, the supersizing of the U.S. vehicle fleet is the #1 reason that U.S. road deaths, especially but not exclusively of people riding bicycles and walking, have shot up in recent years even as virtually all other developed nations enjoy steady declines in per-capita traffic fatalities.

IRA vs. Willow: No Contest

The depressing irony about Biden’s approval of the Willow project is that the oil supply it will unlock, an estimated 180,000 barrels a day of crude, according to AP, isn’t particularly large, in oil terms. Notwithstanding the “massive” tag applied in much of the media, ConocoPhillips’ projected output amounts to only 1 percent of 2021 U.S. consumption of 19.8 million barrels of petroleum products per day.

What’s more, Willow’s increment to U.S. supplies will only be one-sixth as much as the need for petroleum that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will obviate by accelerating the uptake of electric passenger vehicles vis-a-vis the baseline pace, i.e., more gradually rising EV sales and use without the incentives in the IRA.

This finding is shown graphically at right. To derive it, we relied on projections in a January, 2023 white paper, Analyzing the Impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on Electric Vehicle Uptake in the United States, prepared jointly by two respected think tanks, International Council on Clean Transportation and Energy Innovation.

The calculation was straightforward. Table 3 of the report shows the ICCT/EI projections of future U.S. electric vehicle shares — not of sales but of registered vehicles in use — under baseline assumptions (no IRA) and four scenarios reflecting different extents of consumer uptake of EV’s. We used the “deltas” (differences) from the base case during the seven years of greatest policy impact, 2026-2032 — they average 19 percent — to compute the gasoline that would be burned nationwide if there were no IRA and the IRA-boosted electric vehicle-miles were instead driven in combustion vehicles.

We assumed 200 million passenger cars averaging 25 mpg and each traveling 12,000 miles per year in 2026, with the number of vehicles rising by 2 million a year and fuel economy inching upward by 0.5 mpg per year, but with no change in per-vehicle miles driven. The amounts of avoided gasoline are easily calculated.

Several simplifying assumptions were involved:

  1. We assumed no offsetting petroleum consumed in generating electricity, due to oil’s minuscule share (less than one percent) of national electricity generation.
  2. Though ICCT/EI’s deltas don’t apply to states that adhere to California’s more-aggressive zero-emission vehicle rules, we extrapolated them to the entire country.
  3. We ignored the IRA’s accelerating effect on electric truck sales and use — almost certainly understating the legislation’s petroleum savings more than our overstatement in bullet #2.
  4. We implicitly treated crude oil supply with gasoline demand, a minor simplification that we suspect doesn’t tilt our comparison much one way or the other.

Tongue-tied on the campaign trail?

From R. Crumb’s, “Despair” Comics, 1969.

We don’t mean to be cruel, but until this week we pictured President Biden campaigning for re-election and touting the Inflation Reduction Act’s manifold achievements: Without a single Republican vote, we passed a law freeing us from manipulated, volatile oil prices and corporate despoiling of our climate and our Earth. And the law is creating millions of good-paying jobs for Americans, especially in areas ravaged and ruined by fossil-fuel development.

That’s still true. But with Willow, the purity of the message is gone, taking much of the power with it.

We allow the fossil fuel industry, economists, politicians, celebrities, random people on the internet, the youths that are leading the climate movement — everyone has a stake and a right to comment on these climate policies except, it seems, those of us who have subject-matter expertise in the area. That seems like an odd policy and I take issue with it.”

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Earth scientist Rose Z. Abramoff, interviewed on “Democracy Now” about being fired from her research job at the federal Oak Ridge National Laboratory for her public-facing climate protests, Jan 19, 2023 (quote begins at 54-minute mark).

 

 

U.S. auto fuel-economy is flatlining. Here’s why that’s not news.

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It should have been big news: A report this month from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admitted that the fuel economy of new light-duty vehicles sold in the U.S. last year was no better than the year before. The mix of cars, SUV’s and pickups sold in 2021 averaged the same crummy 25.4 miles per gallon as in 2020.

Screenshot from ACEEE Dec. 12 press release. Link is in text.

Flatlining new-vehicle mpg is bad news. It portends more climate damage, worsened pollution and strained household budgets, along with geopolitical turmoil, fattened oil company earnings and brawnier petro-states. It’s also a betrayal of long-standing promises by Democratic presidents, EPA administrators and environmental groups that, together, they would make auto companies achieve ever higher mileages, like 54.5 mpg in 2025, as the Obama administration pledged a decade ago. (See White House 2012 press release, below.)

What happened?

Don’t just blame the Trump administration’s four-year mpg slow-walk and roll-back. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy was forthright in its Dec. 12 press release: EPA Finds No Progress in Vehicle Efficiency as Automakers Sell More Big Models (emphasis added).

“The [auto] manufacturers are canceling out all the efficiency progress as they sell more large vehicles,” said ACEEE senior transportation researcher, Avi Mersky. “And it’s completely allowed under the federal rules.”

CBS News usefully chimed in:

The EPA said in a statement that all vehicle types are at record low carbon dioxide emissions, but “the market shift away from cars and toward sport utility vehicles and pickups has offset some of the fleetwide benefits.” (emphasis added)

In the 2021 model year, cars and station wagons, the most efficient vehicles, fell to 26% of U.S. new vehicle production, well below the 50% market share as recently as 2013, the EPA said. SUVs were a record 45% of new vehicle sales for the 2021 model year, while pickup trucks hit 16%.

2012 press release copied from National Archives. Poignantly, it promised that the nearly doubled auto efficiency would bring consumer savings as large as $1 per gallon cheaper gasoline.

Let that sink in: in just eight years, the U.S. market share of new sedans and station wagons fell practically in half, to 26 percent from 50 percent. (And no, CBS, that shift didn’t just offset some of the mpg benefits, it offset all of them, though credit the network for covering the story at all.)

The Hill did well, with EPA report: Vehicle fuel efficiency flat in 2021. Otherwise, there wasn’t much coverage. Sure, Christmas was coming, and there were year-end stories to report. Still, it’s striking that such a big failure in a sector that now produces nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions merited so little attention. (See our CO2 pie chart, further below.)

The silence of the greens

Robustly rising automotive fuel economy was, for decades, a cornerstone of mainstream environmental advocacy. So-called CAFE standards (the acronym denotes Corporate Average Fuel Economy) would, before long, turn most of America’s 200 million passenger vehicles into fuel-sippers, relieving pressure to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and other sacrosanct natural areas, enabling some oil refineries to close, and cutting air and carbon emissions. Just make sure EPA kept ratcheting up the mpg standards, and all would be well.

Things turned out differently, of course. Not only did U.S. miles driven resume rising after a relative caesura from the mid-aughts to the mid-teens, but the fleet mpg average barely budged, due to “the market shift away from cars and toward SUV’s and pickups” noted by CBS News. Compounding the shift, long-standing CAFE loopholes grant bigger vehicles looser mileage targets.

Autos now (2021) account for 24% of U.S. CO2. Note that other transportation emissions (trucks, planes) are recorded separately.

Most of the big U.S. green groups just watched the shift unfold, essentially throwing in the towel. Either they didn’t grasp its extent or they viewed it as unstoppable. Maybe they felt constrained by their members’ and donors’ preference for the roomier and supposedly outdoors-friendly sport utilities. Who knows? But they basically gave up on improving actual vehicle fuel-economy, and the impact has been stark.

Even as the U.S. electricity sector has seen a substantial decline in carbon emissions, an estimated 36 percent drop from 2005 to 2021, the drop for automobiles has been only one-seventh as much — a measly 5 percent. The vastly improved mpg performance that was going to swamp growth in driving simply didn’t materialize.

What did eventuate from the big bulk-up of U.S. passenger vehicles has been a far greater menace to pedestrians, cyclists and users of smaller vehicles. Due to their greater mass and taller profile, those super-sized sport ute’s and pickups are tougher to maneuver and control, are harder to see around, are often driven with a greater sense of entitlement, and cause more damage when they hit someone.

Automotive researcher-journalist David Zipper tied things up recently for Bloomberg News, in a post trenchantly titled, “US Traffic Safety Is Getting Worse, While Other Countries Improve,”:

Uniquely, the US has seen larger SUVs and pickup trucks dominate its domestic car market. While the profitability of this trend has delighted automakers, the weight and height of these vehicles places other road users in greater danger. Research has linked the ascent of SUVs to the surge in US pedestrian deaths.

Possible futures for U.S. passenger vehicles

In his Bloomberg post, Zipper also noted that in other countries, “higher gasoline taxes (as well as weight-based fees adopted by countries like France) have slowed adoption” of large vehicles. (Doubtless there’s also a reinforcing cultural factor, or “path dependence,” that frowns on supersized vehicles and demurs from designing infrastructure around them, which discourages their use and thus helps keep the higher taxes on bigger vehicles politically defensible.)

Higher gasoline taxes are a form of carbon tax, of course. Indeed, resistance to increasing taxes on gasoline has always been a central sticking point to enacting carbon taxes — ironically so, given that those who cry the loudest tend to be big-car owners whose choice of vehicle effectively has them taxing themselves by locking them into purchasing more gallons.

Nevertheless, another locus of opposition to taxing gasoline to reduce its use has been — surprise! — the same green groups that habitually put all their chips on CAFE standards and other regulatory mechanisms. Sometimes these groups have even badmouthed the idea that gasoline use is somewhat price-elastic, mistaking short-term inflexibility for long-term (a confusion I pointed to in my 2015 post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes — scroll down to “Argument #3”).

The supposed impossibility of reducing the use of gasoline by raising its price has been part and parcel of Big Green’s attachment to mpg standards — despite the fact that mileage reg’s do nothing to reduce driving and its vast negative consequences: not just traffic congestion but also poor health (sedentary living, car crashes, noise) and general unaffordability (car loan costs, upkeep expenses, costlier housing due to cars’ consuming urban and suburban land).

This does not bode well for enacting weight or weight-distance charges on the increasingly electric fleet of U.S. passenger vehicles. Yet weight-based fees might be our best bet for reining in the size and weight of EV’s and, thus, serving four vital societal objectives: (i) ensuring that shortages of lithium or other minerals critical to electric-vehicle batteries don’t hold back electrification of transportation; (ii) curbing the amount of electricity that must be generated to drive the EV fleet; (iii) easing the stresses that larger vehicles impose on urban and suburban form; and (iv) reducing traffic carnage, especially to pedestrians, cyclists and users of small vehicles.

With the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which we at Carbon Tax Center strongly supported from the git-go (our extensive, ongoing write-up of the IRA is here), the Biden Administration has put in place an array of mutually reinforcing, intelligently crafted subsidies and incentives to electrify U.S. passenger travel. Climate and transportation advocates alike should now work to craft and enact incentives to steer vehicle electrification toward smaller, lighter, less-dangerous and city-friendlier forms of individual and family transportation. The choice between carbon taxes or weight-based charges or hybrids of the two is less important than getting strong incentives in place widely and soon.

Why This Week’s Other Breakthrough May Pay Off Faster Than Fusion

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While the world is abuzz with the news that a fusion laboratory in California recently generated more energy than the reaction consumed, a different breakthrough in Europe may portend bigger, faster progress on carbon emissions and climate: European national governments and the European Parliament have reached an agreement to tax imported goods and materials based on the carbon dioxide emitted in making them.

The levies will initially apply to imports of iron and steel, cement, aluminium, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity, according to Euractiv, the Brussels-based pan-European news site specializing in EU matters, which also reported that the mechanism “will mirror the EU’s own domestic carbon price.”

That price — the price of emissions allowances traded on the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) — on Dec. 1 was 85 euros per metric ton, equivalent to around $91 per metric ton, or nearly $83 per short (U.S.) ton, a far higher price than the starting levies embodied in most U.S. carbon tax proposals. If “mirrors” means “duplicates,” imports from non-carbon-taxing countries may soon face steep charges indeed.

English translation: For the climate, as Europeans, we are constantly taking action. The European Union today adopted a carbon border tax. Our requirement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will thus apply to the products we import. We are going forward!

With the agreement, which caps more than a year of negotiations, the European Union is poised to “insert climate-change regulation for the first time into the rules of global trade,” the Wall Street Journal noted. Pascal Canfin, chair of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, was even more emphatic, telling the New York Times that “We are putting carbon and climate at the heart of trade.”

The Journal added that “The plan, known as the carbon border adjustment mechanism, would be the world’s first tax on the carbon content of imported goods.”

CBAM could become a breakthrough

What could make the EU agreement a climate breakthrough is the tantalizing possibility that carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs) may compel the United States, China and other major emitters to finally enact national carbon taxes or equivalent carbon-pricing mechanisms.

The initial step in this scenario, which the Journal says “the EU is expected to adopt in the coming weeks as part of a sweeping package of legislation [to] step up the bloc’s efforts to limit global warming,” is to tax imports of key industrial commodities like steel, aluminum and cement to the extent that the carbon intensity of their manufacture exceeds EU averages. Exporters then have two ways to avert the trade tax. They can cut down on the carbon emitted to produce their product. Or the country in which they produced it can tax carbon emissions to the same level as the EU’s carbon price.

The climate wins either way. The first way directly cuts emissions in the industrial sectors covered by the tax. The second cuts emissions indirectly, but far more broadly, via the carbon tax’s economy-wide incentives that steer all energy supply and demand away from fossil fuels by making the market prices for coal, oil and gas reflect at least some of their climate damage.

The announcement from Europe follows by less than a week the Biden administration’s transmission to the EU of a proposal suggesting “creation of an international consortium that would promote trade in metals produced with less carbon emissions, while imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and elsewhere,” according to the New York Times.

While the Biden proposal is merely a “concept paper” and is being kept under wraps, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which drafted it, has at least given it a name — the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum. The Times story called it “the first concrete look at a new type of trade arrangement that the Biden administration views as a cornerstone of its approach to trade policy … one [that] would wield the power of American and European markets to try to bolster domestic industries in a way that also mitigated climate change.”

The trade concept paper appears to embody the principles underlying the Clean Competition Act (S. 4355) introduced in June by U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), perhaps Congress’s most indefatigable climate hawk, to tax both domestic and foreign manufacturers of steel, aluminum, cement and other industrial commodities to the extent that the carbon intensity of their manufacture exceeds U.S. averages.

(A July post here by CTC contributor Mike Aucott, A Novel Way to Price Industrial Carbon Emissions?,” has terrific details on how CBAMs would look from a U.S. perspective, and includes a link to a comprehensive  report by the Climate Leadership Council on the relative carbon advantage of U.S. industry compared to Russia, China and the authoritarian petro-states. In a similar vein is a September report from Resources for the Future that compiles carbon emission intensities of both domestic and foreign producers for 39 industrial sectors.)

As for nuclear fusion …

National Ignition Facility, seen from above. Its huge scale is indicated by three helmeted workers near foreground. Photo courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Ignition Facility & Photon Science.

We’re thrilled that on Dec. 5, the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA achieved an historic first in efforts to harness nuclear fusion, when their laser-driven fusion device, in a brief (100 trillionths of a second) burst, achieved “positive net energy” by generating a flow of neutrons carrying 3 megajoules of energy, exceeding by almost 50 percent the 2.05 megajoules the lasers consumed in the process, as New York Times science correspondent Kenneth Chang reported yesterday.

That’s terrific news for science and, maybe someday, human prosperity and global sustainability. It’s been a long time coming.

We’ve been reading, and dreaming, about the wonders of fusion power — seemingly low and short-lived radioactivity, impossibility of runaway reactions or meltdowns, abundant resource base (deuterium and tritium in seawater), and of course carbon-free — since the 1960s.

But for almost as long, we’ve been mindful of the dauntingly high hurdles that nuclear fusion must clear to ever operate on a commercial, global scale. As climate activist and author Bill McKibben usefully pointed out this week, “producing [the Livermore Lab] reaction required one of the largest lasers in the world.” Not only that, “the reaction creates neutrons that can destroy the very equipment required to produce it” through chronic embrittlement.

Amplifying those concerns, Arthur Turrell, deputy director for research and economics at the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) Data Science Campus, and author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet, reminded listeners on the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday that for the Livermore Lab breakthrough to lead to the advent of commercial, global-scale electricity, it must be miniaturized and also made modular and scalable.

Perhaps this can happen someday, with enough time, money and commitment. But the march to that point will be measured not in years but in many — multiple — decades.

Consider that a quarter-century elapsed from the first sustained fission chain reaction at the University of Chicago, in 1942, to New Year’s Day 1968, when the first non-prototype nuclear power plants in the United States, Connecticut Yankee and San Onofre 1 (around 500 megawatts each), achieved commercial operation. And harnessing nuclear fission was a far simpler task than achieving breakeven with nuclear fusion, judging by the multiple order-of-magnitude scale differences between Enrico Fermi’s fission team — which operated in a confined space beneath the college football stadium! — and the enormous National Ignition Facility shown in the photograph.

Clearly, it would be folly to ease up on the multiple, synergistic programs to move the U.S. and the rest of the world off of fossil fuels, including implementing the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and progressing with carbon pricing. As Stephen Sondheim’s mythical, murderous barber Sweeney Todd pronounced, in a somewhat different context: The work waits!

“Our action brought them back to earth.”

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The Intercept today published Christopher Ketcham’s and my essay, The Shutdown of “Luxury Emissions” Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments by Carbon Tax Center subscribers and readers. Let us know what you think.

    — C.K., December 13, 2022

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. The world must also rein in consumption.

By Christopher Ketcham & Charles Komanoff ▪ Photos and captions are copied from The Intercept.

SEVEN HUNDRED SELF-DESCRIBED “climate rebels” breached the chain-link fence surrounding Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s third-busiest hub for international passenger traffic, on November 5. With bolt cutters they opened holes in the fence and poured in, some of them on bicycles, and raced across the tarmac. Others laid ladders against the 9-foot-high fence and topped it on foot.

They had to move quickly before military police, tasked with securing the airport, saw what was happening. The rebels targeted 13 private jets parked or preparing for takeoff, at least two belonging to NetJets, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary that bills itself as the world’s largest jet company and sells fractional ownership shares in private business jets.

They swarmed each of the jets in groups of 20 or 30 or more and sat down before the looming machines, there to stay for the next six-and-a-half hours, unmoving, until at last police waded in and started hauling the rebels to jail. Some of the 413 arrests were violent. “There was fear and rage, for the state of the world and for my own future,” said one of those arrested.

Another 800 people gathered for a march and sit-in at the airport’s main plaza, and at least 30 activists blocked the road that serves as the supply route to Schiphol. Every single private jet at Schiphol ended up grounded that day, not merely the 13 that were surrounded.

“The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,” Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us. “Our action brought them back to earth. We wanted to show the extremeness and injustice related to this manner of transport.”

In other words: a perfectly tailored climate action. Not a highway sit-down ensnaring hapless motorists and keeping cars running, and emitting, longer. Not sit-ins at banks that broker investments in fossil fuels but don’t directly cause their combustion. And certainly not spattering soup on museum art, with its unsettling aura of sullying humanity’s heritage in order to save it.

No, the Schiphol action went for climate change’s jugular: self-indulgent carbon-spewing. It did so balletically, in the democratic and fuel-efficient motion of humans racing on foot or whirling about on bicycles. And ecologically: In the words of one participant, “We made sure that any planes could still land, because the last thing we wanted was for them to be unnecessarily flying for any longer than they already were.”

It was an action that bared the gluttony and entitlement of fossil fuel usage. “Keep it in the ground” protesters confine their blockades to energy supply infrastructure and studiously ignore the demand half of the equation. This has been a shortcoming of the climate movement for too long, as it passes up one opportunity after another to rouse millions against the class that, even more than the corporations of Big Carbon, perpetuates the climate crisis: the world’s wealthy.

Limits of Green Energy

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. Replacing fossil fuels with a planetary buildout of wind turbines and solar panels, while simultaneously making and plugging in a billion new electric furnaces and vehicles, looks straightforward in a spreadsheet. In truth, though, ramping up green energy alone won’t cut fossil fuel use quickly enough to meet the Paris warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Supplanting the world’s combustion-based energy infrastructure with an all-electric model will be too lumbering, too roundabout, and too full of its own drawbacks to fully bend the emissions curve in the brief time left.

The world must also rein in consumption. For reasons both symbolic and practical, the climate movement must strike not just at pipelines and mines, but also at obscene wealth.

The justification is unarguable. Large personal fortunes feed carbon consumption and make a mockery of programs to curb it. As well, the surplus wealth of the superrich is probably the lone source of capital that can finance the worldwide uptake of greener energy and also pay for adaptation where it’s most critical.

At the nexus of consumption and wealth sits luxury carbon. Which is why the Schiphol action was so strategic.

Consider that the world’s richest 10 percent account for 50 percent of fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions. Consider that climate reparations, for which the Global South won acknowledgment but little more at last month’s COP27 climate talks, can’t be funded at scale by tweaking wealthy countries’ hidebound taxation-as-usual. Consider that carbon emissions pricing, an indispensable policy tool for shrinking fossil fuel demand, can’t be made politically palatable in the U.S. — even with worthy “dividend” schemes — so long as middle- and working-class families must witness the superrich lording and polluting at will.

Prodigal Aviation

As the Schiphol rebels surely know, luxury carbon, like all manufactured desire, is a contagion, oozing inexorably from the sanctums of the few to become desires of the many. Few Americans, and even fewer Europeans, flew in airplanes in 1950. These days, half of U.S. residents fly each year, averaging half a dozen flights each, according to the industry’s annual “Air Travelers in America” reports. As commercial aviation grew safer and more affordable, feeding the increase, business and pleasure travel became normalized.

Today, “general” aviation — private jets, business jets, air tourism — is undergoing a similar liftoff as well-heeled flyers seek refuge, and a status boost, from the indignities of commercial service. And nowhere is private jetting’s carbon waste as blatant as it is in Europe, with its extensive rail network. Per passenger, private air travel is five to 14 times more carbon-polluting than commercial flights, and 50 times more than high-speed rail, according to the European NGO Transport & Environment.

In the Netherlands, 8 percent of the population takes 40 percent of flights. Worldwide, the difference is even more stark: One percent of the population is responsible for 50 percent of pollution due to aviation, making air travel a textbook example of how pollution by the rich leads to consequences and injustices for those who have not caused the climate crisis.

Naysayers will note that the tactic of occupying and disrupting airports has been tried before, as in the case of the Plane Stupid campaign of the 2000s and 2010s. Radicals in the climate movement such as Andreas Malm, who advocates property destruction of fossil infrastructure, point out that Plane Stupid was ineffective in bending the arc of emissions.

“What the Schiphol people needed to do is destroy the airplanes on the tarmac and then destroy the airplane manufacturers,” said an ecosaboteur named Stephen McRae, an acquaintance of one of the authors, who recently completed a six-year prison sentence for industrial sabotage. Although he no longer participates in such criminal acts of destruction, he has a point. The planes grounded on November 5 are already back in the air. That doesn’t diminish the value of what the Schiphol rebels did, however. Actions that disrupt carbon comfort without violence or hardship are morale-building, the material from which more actions and eventually mass movements are made.

Ripple Effect

A few days after the Schiphol revolt, climate activists under the banner of Scientists Rebellion disrupted operations at private airports in four U.S. states and a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times roundup.

While the Times attributed the rising militancy of scientists to “the increasing clarity of the science,” it was more likely propelled by the impulses that motivated protesters in the Netherlands: rage at a future “thrown away for the profits of a few,” in the words of one Schiphol rebel, and the palpable need “to stand there and know we actually were grounding private jets and … actively stopping this manner of pollution,” per another.

Along with their clarity in targeting the true fountainhead of climate disorder — sybaritic carbon profligacy — what stands out most about the Schiphol action is its organizational breadth and cohesion. On top of the 700 occupying the tarmac and the 800 marching and sitting-in at the main plaza were those “working throughout the day, and in the days and weeks beforehand, in a range of supporting roles,” as one organizer reported, describing legal and media teams, an arrestee support team, and a team of caterers. “The diversity of roles worked to our advantage: There are as many ways to engage with activism as there are people, everyone has their own way of contributing.”

Social solidarity on this scale helped buffer the cruelty of airport police who in some cases “ripped people from their groups and held [them] in painful positions even though they were cooperating,” reported one first-time protester who joined the action as a medic. “What started as a nervous morning ended with a fulfilling and accomplishing situation,” he said. “We did this.”