Charles Komanoff – Page 3

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

Exxon’s $59 Billion Spike Through Divestment’s Heart

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The impossibility of throttling Big Oil through fossil fuel divestment campaigns was laid bare last week when ExxonMobil announced it was acquiring Pioneer Natural Resources, the #1 driller in the #1 producing U.S. oilfield, the Permian Basin.

Chart from macrotrends.net shows ExxonMobil’s market capitalization (stock price x shares outstanding) last week near an all-time high.

In a transaction priced at $59.5 billion, Pioneer shareholders will receive slightly more than 2.3 shares of ExxonMobil stock for each Pioneer share. No banks are involved, no debt, no third parties; and, most noteworthy, no cash. Pioneer’s management evidently holds Exxon’s current and future financial strength in such high regard that it was willing to sign on to an all-stock deal.

Had it been necessary, though, Exxon could have bankrolled the entire acquisition using cash generated by its sales of petroleum products to U.S. and world motorists, truckers, air travelers and shippers. Last year alone, Exxon generated more than enough cash flow, $76.8 billion, to buy Pioneer outright. Its market capitalization stands at $450 billion, triple the lows during the 2020 pandemic year and higher than the $400 billion in 2012, when climate author-activist Bill McKibben kicked off the divestment movement with his Rolling Stone manifesto, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.

Photos by Johnny Silvercloud (L, 2015) and Herb Keeney (R, 2016). Thousands of similar images and hundreds of divestments haven’t crimped the coffers of Exxon and its oil brethren.

McKibben was admirably candid about wanting to “make clear who the real [climate] enemy is”: the fossil-fuel industry, led and epitomized by the oil-and-gas giant ExxonMobil. The eleven intervening years have cemented Exxon’s standing as Big Oil incarnate. Not only is Exxon the industry’s most technologically proficient and politically connected member, it’s the one that for decades sowed disinformation about climate change even as its own scientists advised management to fortify the company’s drilling platforms against rising seas.

Unsurprisingly, “Exxon Knew” ranks high among contemporary climate-protest slogans. And the company certainly merits every ounce of opprobrium directed at it. Divestment was a righteous idea, but it has proven futile.

Wake-Up Call

The Pioneer acquisition should be a wake-up call. If the wave of divestments over the past decade by universities, philanthropies and pension funds had genuinely dented oil industry prospects, Exxon’s stock wouldn’t have had the cachet to lure Pioneer into an all-stock purchase. Nor would Exxon have been able to pull off a Plan B of forking over $60 billion in cash. The ease of the acquisition puts the lie to divestment’s starve-and-shame paradigm intended to dry up dollars and discredit industry brands.

Permian Basin map from ExxonMobil Oct 11 news release.

Pressuring institutions to divest from fossil fuels never made much sense as a pro-climate strategy. Targeting any one oil company was never going to be able to restrain carbon emissions. No single company supplies more than a small slice of the world’s petroleum.

Indeed, as Bloomberg News reported last week, even with Pioneer, Exxon will account for only 15 percent of Permian Basin extraction and a far smaller share of world oil production — three or four percent, according to my calculations. At that modest scale, a hole in any one company’s finances would simply make room for others.

Divestment’s futility actually went deeper, though. In the oil business, access to capital markets matters hardly at all. Most of the time the industry is flush with cash. Just about everything it does — exploration, extraction, pipelining, refining, selling — is self-financing, paid for by the ceaseless ka-ching from sales of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, bunker fuel and other petroleum products, not to mention natural (methane) gas, which in 2022 provided nearly three-fourths as much primary energy worldwide as petrol, according to BP’s 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy (covering 2022).

To be fair, divestment campaigning did appear to penetrate Exxon’s inner sanctum in 2021, when the activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 succeeded in electing three directors to ExxonMobil’s 13-person board. “Exxon’s Board Defeat Signals the Rise of Social-Good Activists,” trumpeted the New York Times headline reporting the surprise incursion. Yet the ideological impact, if there was one, was short-lived. All three insurgent members backed the Pioneer acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

WSJ Oct 14 headline canonizing Exxon CEO Woods for his $60B Permian Basin play.

Indeed, in the Journal story, Charles Penner, architect of the Engine No. 1 campaign, says the Pioneer deal “shows Exxon had heard some of the campaign’s critiques and changed its approach to focus on returns instead of costly megaprojects more dependent on long-term demand.” Oof. The story has nothing from Engine No. 1 on Exxon’s present or future complicity in climate-damaging emissions generated from its products. And nothing in its detailed portrait of CEO Darren Woods suggests that worries about divestment ever cost him a moment’s sleep.

What To Do?

There are so many climate campaigns needing and deserving of the energies now squandered pursuing fossil-fuel divestment. I suggested a few of them in The Climate Movement In Its Own Way, my April 2022 article in The Nation (reposted here at CTC). Here’s a top-10 list (in no particular order):

  1. Policy campaigns to curb motor vehicle size and weight
  2. Organizing to expedite up-zoning in cities and suburbs and otherwise promote housing density
  3. Advancing walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented communities
  4. Restricting and overcoming NIMBY power to block wind farms and solar arrays
  5. Supporting the operability of existing, well-functioning nuclear power plants
  6. Advancing congestion pricing and other road-pricing / traffic-pricing proposals (valuable for themselves and as templates for broad carbon-emission pricing)
  7. Taxing extreme wealth, to both attack luxury emissions and promote social solidarity needed to tackle carbon consumption
  8. Shrinking the local, state and national reach of the world’s sole major climate-denying political party (whose dysfunction is currently in especially plain sight, as NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie trenchantly documented this week)
  9. Reducing animal agriculture through both culture and policy change
  10. Advancing or at least keeping alive the idea of robust carbon pricing at the state and especially national level

Note that all of the above measures, except perhaps #8, attack carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions from the demand side, insulating them from the all-too-real whack-a-mole syndrome that undermines most supply-side climate campaigns due to global substitutability by which increased drilling “there” offsets halts to drilling “here.”

Missing from the list: abetting the electrification of cars, trucks, cooking, heating and industry. Why not? For one thing, “electrify everything” has no shortage of NGO advocates like Rewiring America, and, thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, it enjoys generous federal subsidies. For another, decarbonization of U.S. grids is far from complete and, in many states and regions, painfully slow.

Graphic and data curated by Isuru Seneviratne, Nuclear NY, Oct 2023.

Here in New York City, CTC’s home territory, fossil fuel burning today generates more than 90 percent of all electricity (see graphic from Nuclear NY), down from 70 percent since the 2020-2021 closure of the downstate grid’s only large-scale non-carbon generator, the Indian Point nuclear plant.

As a result, rarely if ever is the incremental electricity that my grid calls on to recharge EV’s or energize electric heat pumps generated from a non-carbon source. The same is true at present in much of the United States. Electrification, an essential long-term program, is not yet a carbon-eliminating panacea .

Want to hurt Exxon AND fight climate change? Work to bring robust carbon pricing back into the national policy conversation. A meaningful carbon price — one that quickly ramps up to triple digits per ton of CO2 — will crimp the oil business, the coal business and the fossil-gas business, harming the fossil fuel industry’s shareholder value and political power, while effectuating steady and significant reductions in combustion. And, when considering the to-do list above, keep in mind that robust carbon pricing (#10) enhances all of the others.

Addendum: Two days after posting, we learned that Chevron is acquiring oil giant Hess Corp. in another all-stock deal, this one valued at $53 billion.

NYC Climate March: Unsettling but Inspiring

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Sunday’s March to End Fossil Fuels in midtown Manhattan was big, loud and vibrant. The organizers put the tally at 75,000. While that may have been over-generous, the march was far and away the largest U.S. climate assemblage in some time.

It was also an occasion to ponder the goals and tactics of the climate movement.

The customary signs and chants denouncing Big Oil and its funder banks were out in force. What felt new, and unsettling, was the vitriol directed at President Biden. Last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its promise to hasten the transition from fossil fuels by accelerating wind and solar and electrification, might as well have been an hallucination.

This photo by Sarah Blesener ran above the fold in the New York Times’ print edition the next day. The paper’s online caption caught the focus of the march: “Protest organizers used Sunday’s event to send a message to President Biden as he begins his push for re-election: Do more if you want our votes.”

Ganging Up On Joe

The signs and chants castigating the president flowed like a river. Biden: Declare a climate emergency … Cancel Willow … I didn’t vote for fires and floods.

Yikes. Whatever happened to the Inflation Reduction Act’s nearly half-a-trillion dollars worth of tax credits and other subsidies paying down the cost of renewable electricity from solar and wind farms while also cutting consumer costs to purchase electric vehicles, electric heat pumps, and home and commercial electric battery storage?

The intent of the IRA’s myriad and synergistic incentives isn’t just to grow the U.S. green manufacturing base with good-paying green jobs. It’s to displace fossil-fuel use by retiring petrol-fueled engines and furnaces and simultaneously “greening the grid” by speeding the rate at which wind and solar power usurp electricity generation from coal and methane gas.

As the IRA was snaking through Congress last August, energy analysts were scoping the potential carbon and methane reductions from those displacements, along with estimates of increased emissions from new federal oil and gas leasing that Biden committed to expedite to win the tie-breaking Yes vote from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. One leading think tank, Energy Innovation, concluded that “The bill’s clean energy measures will yield 24 times more emissions reductions than its fossil fuel provisions will increase emissions.” (The firm subsequently raised its 24-to-1 emissions ratio to 28-to-1.)

Seven months later, Biden held up his end of the deal, issuing a permit okaying ConocoPhillips’ $6 billion Willow oil-and-gas drilling venture on Alaska’s North Slope — and threw away the climate good will due him from the IRA. Never mind that the additional carbon emissions from the Biden-Willow “hydrocarbon bomb” will only negate a fraction of the emission reductions from his legislation’s clean electricity and end-use electrification, as I pointed out back in March. Even more poignantly, those additional emissions are more properly estimated to be close to zero. Why? Because what actually burns the carbon fuels and puts the CO2 into the atmosphere is fossil fuel consumption, not supply. If Biden had rejected Willow, the same supply would have been called forth from Nigeria, or Kuwait or some other oil region or state to fill U.S. cars, planes and trucks.

In other words, Willow or any new U.S. drilling activity is nearly irrelevant from a climate standpoint because, as we wrote then, “demand finds a way to create supply,” rather than the reverse.

As we marched, I asked a smattering of anti-Biden sign-holders if the president merited praise for the green energy unleashed by his IRA, rather than criticism for okaying Willow or the other contentious project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia. The typical response was No, we’re in a climate emergency. Any new fossil-fuel infrastructure is too much.

To be sure, trade-offs are hard to wrestle with even in calm moments, much less among a big crowd on the move. But the blank stares about the IRA and occasional flashes of venom against Biden were disquieting, nonetheless. The Times‘ headline for its print report on the march was all too accurate: “Fingers Pointed at President, Protesters Demand End to Fossil Fuels.” Left unsaid is whether protesting Biden climate bombs will seed electoral bombs in 2024, placing our democracy as well as climate in irredeemable peril.

Who’s Really Funding Fossil Fuels?

If the anti-Biden sentiment was novel, the anti-big banks rhetoric was old hat. Blaming the climate crisis on Big Oil and demanding that universities, pension funds and the like “divest” by dumping fossil fuel securities from their holdings, has been a staple of climate organizing for nearly a dozen years, as I decried a year-and-a-half ago, in Exxon doesn’t care if you divest. Neither does climate:

When the writer and climate activist Bill McKibben kicked off the [divestment] campaign in a July 2012 Rolling Stone article, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, the rationale was three-fold: (1) dry up capital and make it harder for the fossil fuel industry to create new mines, wells, pipelines and terminals; (2) weaken the industry’s social and political standing so it couldn’t easily block pro-climate policy; and (3) by hanging a “Dump Me” sign around Big Oil, amp up climate organizing. Not for nothing did McKibben subtitle his Rolling Stone article, “Make clear who the real enemy is.” It was Exxon and its brethren.

A climate marcher with Third Act helpfully displayed the biggest U.S. banks’ fossil-fuel financing over the past seven years.

That path has proven to be a dead-end, I concluded in my post. One piece of evidence was a simple graph showing that Exxon-Mobil’s share price had outperformed the stock market as a whole since the onset of the Covid pandemic. More evidence, if any were needed, was available in the wonderfully wonky signboard at left that was borne by one of yesterday’s marchers, a vibrant senior citizen affiliated with the McKibben-inspired Third Act.

The amounts that the four banks — Chase, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — have funneled into fossil fuels since the start of 2016 sum to an impressive-seeming $1.27 trillion ($1,270,000,000,000). Yet over the same period, consumption of petroleum products by U.S. families and businesses earned the oil companies a revenue haul nearly three-and-a-half times as great: an estimated $4.29 trillion ($4,290,000,000,000).

[I calculated that figure from the average 19.9 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other petroleum products  kerosene and so forth consumed per day over the same seven years, 2016-2022. (See Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, Table 3.5 Petroleum Products Supplied by Type.) Factoring in (1) there are 42 gallons of petrol per barrel, (2) the seven years total 2,555 days (365 x 7), and 3) an average retail price per gallon sold of $2.00 — a conservative markdown from the actual $2.82 average retail price of gasoline over that period — yields $4.29 trillion.]

Who’s really funding fossil fuels? American households, businesses and institutions, locked into grotesque consumption levels that U.S. climate activists studiously ignore.

To be sure, my dollar comparison has apples-and-oranges elements. Only some of the $4 trillion or more in petrol sales is available for investment in exploration and other petroleum infrastructure. And other banks beyond the Big Four also fund oil investment. On the other hand, U.S. consumption of methane gas and coal fossil fuels now exceeds consumption of petroleum on a Btu basis by 20 percent, suggesting that total fossil fuel revenues over the past six years was probably in the vicinity of $8 billion rather than the $4.3 billion from petroleum products alone.

My point is that bank financing is a much weaker linchpin for creating new fossil fuel infrastructure than most climate activists suppose. What really makes fossil supply possible is the lock-in of consumption of fossil fuels themselves, in billions of routine purchases that, day in and day out, fork over many more dollars to the fossil fuel industry than do the banks.

(Owens was responding to a Cameron Murray, PhD, who was decrying the idea of asking Americans to take some responsibility for their personal carbon footprint.)

Or, as Darrell Owens, an analyst with CA YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), the pro-housing group that has spearheaded the recent revolution of expansionary zoning in California, put it recently on Twitter, “Oil drilling [and such] isn’t for fun, it’s in service of carbon intensive demand that can be stopped.” Stopped how? By undoing automobile dependence, incentivizing smaller vehicles, densifying suburbia, introducing congestion and road pricing, and of course, federal-level carbon taxing, as I detailed last year for The Nation magazine (The Climate Movement In Its Own Way).

Uprooting the Source: Carbon Consumption

Happily, some at Sunday’s march saw past Biden and the banks and critiqued the structures of consumption that enforce dependence on fossil fuels, whether directly at the gas pump or the furnace or stove, or indirectly in purchases of products whose manufacture and transportation entail massive quantities of fuel, or in inefficient or indulgent use of electricity, most of which is still made by burning coal or methane gas.

These included stalwarts from Citizens Climate Lobby, including an enthusiastic contingent from Pittsburgh as well as folks from across the Northeast; and individuals whose handcrafted signs called out U.S. car culture not only for its gasoline profligacy but for its stifling of human life and health.

Some marchers saw beyond Biden and bankers to demand enduring solutions: carbon fee-and-dividend and liberation from automobiles.

“Tax Pollution, Pay People” packs so much into four words, I said to the sign-holder, a CCL member from Pittsburgh,  who told me his name, which I failed to write down. When I told him mine, he nearly jumped out of his shoes and shouted it to his fellow CCL’ers as if I was Greta Thunberg and Steelers legend Franco Harris rolled into one.

I started to apologize for CTC’s relative quiescence over the past year or two and to explain that I’ve been consumed with helping get NYC’s congestion pricing plan across the goal line. He stopped me short, thanking me for CTC’s work and insisting that, together, we’ll win a nationwide price on carbon before it’s too late.

So there’s my take. Singling out Biden for attack felt excessive and worrisome, since any falloff in enthusiasm will crimp the chances of small-d democratic, climate-aware outcomes in the elections next year. Similarly, more than a decade’s worth of targeting Big Oil and the banks doesn’t appear to have moved the needle for effective climate policy. Going after “luxury carbon,” as Extinction Rebellion did in a small but resonant climate action last week that I helped organize, feels to me like a more empowering path, one that might capture both the populist moment and climate urgency in a single stroke.

But notwithstanding the mis-directions, it was uplifting to be amidst tens of thousands with a like mind: A better world is possible. A better world is necessary. I want a fossil-free president. Amen to that!

In many parts of the world, including some of the most densely forested, trees are not perfect allies for tree-huggers anymore, and forests no longer reliable climate partners. What was once the embodiment of environmental values now seems increasingly to be fighting for the other side. In some places, fighting harder each year.”

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NY Times climate correspondent David Wallace-Wells, in Forests Are No Longer Our Climate Friends, Sept. 6.

New York Times congestion-pricing table-setter bodes well for carbon taxing

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The New York Times yesterday published my op-ed, There’s Only One Way to Fix New York’s Traffic Gridlock, co-written with Columbia University climate economist Gernot Wagner.

Our essay is a meticulous and extensive (1,300 words) brief for making drivers feel the pocketbook costs of their vehicles’ traffic-jam causation, via the policy measure known as congestion pricing. In our telling, not only is this policy guaranteed to generate immense benefits for New Yorkers; as the title suggests, we declare it to be the only way to “free … drivers from the traffic snarls that pollute the air and crush the soul.”

From the Times’ home page, June 8, 2023.

The essay was nearly a month in the making and the product of extensive argument-shaping and fact-checking by the Times’ op-ed staff, bespeaking the paper’s commitment to presenting congestion pricing in a positive light. Its appearance broke the mold of the paper’s hesitant past coverage in two important respects:

1. It explicitly rests on the “comprehensive spreadsheet model” of New York traffic and transit I began developing in 2007 (coincidentally, the year I launched the Carbon Tax Center).

2. It let Gernot and me voice the inconvenient assertion that the regional transit agency charged with designing and administering congestion pricing — the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — “through a few fateful, faulty assumptions, underestimated drivers’ propensity to switch trips from cars to other transit options.” These flubs have tied congestion pricing advocates in knots, forcing us to rebut objections of environmental justice impacts that don’t stand careful scrutiny, although they understandably resonate with communities that historically have borne hugely disproportionate damages from highways, energy facilities and other polluting infrastructure.

It’s only a modest stretch to view the Times’ twin breaks with tradition as the Grey Lady’s version of Andrew Cuomo’s bombshell announcement in August 2017 that “congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come” — itself a rupture that set in motion passage of the state statute authorizing congestion pricing in March 2019.

They suggest that the Times may be lying in wait for the right political winds to let advocates of carbon pricing make a parallel case with respect to climate. Not that a carbon tax is “the only way to fix America’s carbon crisis” but, rather, that it’s a complementary policy tool to last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, and an essential one to ensure that green energy actually replaces rather than merely supplements use of fossil fuels.

For the benefit of non-subscribers blocked by the Times’ paywall, and also to enable comments as well as add a few graphics, we present Gernot’s and my op-ed in full.

— C.K., June 9, 2023

The plan to charge drivers to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street, which last month moved closer to federal approval, will deliver two notable gifts to New York and the region when it begins, perhaps as soon as next April.

The first is that congestion pricing will cut traffic not just within the so-called charging zone but on the hundreds of streets and highways that cars use to go to and from that zone. This reduction of almost two million miles traveled in the region each day will free many drivers from the traffic snarls that pollute the air and crush the soul.

Using a detailed benefit-cost analysis that assumes a pricing structure of $15 at peak times, $10 as traffic begins to thicken and $5 at off-peak times, we calculate that the value of those projected time savings to drivers and truckers amounts to nearly $3 billion a year, with time saved in the boroughs and counties surrounding Manhattan exceeding those on the island.

These estimates are based on a comprehensive spreadsheet model of the region’s traffic, developed by one of us (Mr. Komanoff). State officials used that model to write the statute authorizing congestion pricing, which the New York State Legislature passed in 2019.

The other gift will be the $1 billion a year in congestion pricing revenue that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use to secure $15 billion in bonds to pay for improvements to mass transit in the city. Those upgrades will reduce waiting times and onboard delays — and the precious time subway passengers lose as a result.

Either outcome would be a godsend. The combination has the potential to be transformational for New Yorkers.

Our op-ed rests on the benefits and costs summarized in the chart.

Why, then, do many people seem anxious about, if not downright opposed to, congestion pricing? Entitlement plays a part: Why should we suddenly be forced to pay for something that had been free? Another reason surely is disbelief. Many people don’t believe that the revenues — the $1 billion a year from drivers — will actually improve mass transit services. The M.T.A. is a money pit, people say.

They may have a point. But the subway, bus and commuter rail services that the M.T.A. operates are also a marvel and a necessity. After the pandemic lockdowns, the system still delivers 2.5 times as many people a day into the Manhattan core as cars and trucks do, though that is down from four times as many before Covid struck. Still, the M.T.A. must build and manage far more effectively. The same political will that got congestion pricing written into law must be marshaled to eliminate layers of consultants, to bring work rules into the 21st century and to make design-build contracting, in which the project designer and the contractor work together under one contract from the beginning, the rule.

People are also unconvinced that congestion pricing will, in fact, cut congestion. Urban gridlock has come to appear immutable in the United States, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Manhattan core, where travel speeds were averaging a maddening 7 miles per hour before the pandemic. Why should congestion pricing succeed where a century of other remedies — like widening roads to only then narrow them again — has failed?

This question is even more salient after the M.T.A.’s environmental study of congestion pricing, released last summer, which concluded that Manhattan traffic will diminish only because trips that now pass through the city’s center would divert around the island, possibly adding traffic and air pollution to parts of the Bronx, Staten Island, Nassau County on Long Island and Bergen County in New Jersey.

We believe that the M.T.A., through a few fateful, faulty assumptions, underestimated drivers’ propensity to switch trips from cars to other transit options. We don’t say this idly — our estimation is based on decades of studying traffic in and around Manhattan and on basic economic principles.

How much traffic will diminish will depend on the toll design selected by the civic leaders who make up the city-state Traffic Mobility Review Board. They’ll be aiming for the same sweet spot that London, Stockholm and Singapore have attained through their successful congestion pricing programs: 15 to 20 percent fewer car trips into the zone, a cut big enough to reduce the many negatives traffic brings and enough to reap the targeted $1 billion a year in revenues to improve the subways, buses and commuter rail systems. (New Jersey Transit rail and bus and PATH would not share in these revenues.)

The congestion charges have not been set. But the M.T.A.’s model and ours agree that if exemptions are kept to a minimum, it could be as little as $15 for a rush-hour trip into Midtown and $5 to $10 during off-peak hours for E-ZPass holders. (In  London, drivers pay 15 pounds during the day, or nearly $19.)

The benefits of congestion pricing — faster, less stressful travel above and below ground and safer, healthier streets and communities — don’t negate the distress of drivers who understandably don’t want to pay where they now drive free, but they assuredly eclipse it.

In addition to the nearly $3 billion worth of saved time for drivers, we estimate that the myriad other benefits add up to an additional $2.5 billion. Those benefits include fewer crashes, better health from cleaner air and more walking and biking, and time saved for transit riders, thanks to improvements enabled by the congestion pricing revenue. Subtracting the $1 billion drivers will pay to enter the congestion zone, the result will be over $4 billion in annual net benefits, or almost $12 million each day.

Moreover, only a small slice of area residents habitually drive into the Manhattan core. Very few are among the working poor, as the Community Service Society of New York, one of the nation’s oldest antipoverty organizations, found when it endorsed congestion pricing in 2019 and again last year. Many drivers, too, may come to feel less of a sting from paying the toll once they actually experience the less-snarled roads.

Schroon River in New York’s Adirondack region on May 12, photographed moments before Gernot called to suggest we pitch an op-ed pegged to the week-earlier removal of a key hold-up to congestion pricing. Our first draft began there.

Last month, the Federal Highway Administration tentatively approved an M.T.A. report that identified how to alleviate possible harm to disadvantaged communities. Now the public has until Monday to review it.

To opponents of the plan, we say:

The M.T.A. is responding to public concerns. To hasten federal approval, the agency has committed to toll discounts for frequent low-income drivers into the zone and also to encourage pollution reductions such as electrifying diesel-powered refrigeration trucks at the Hunts Point Market in the South Bronx and expanding New York City’s clean trucks voucher program to help pay to electrify diesel trucks elsewhere. These commitments followed public feedback on earlier versions of the plan.

Every car is causing congestion. Stalled highways and jammed streets aren’t just the fault of Uber or U.P.S. or bike lanes or public plazas. Everyone driving to or in New York’s central business district (except in the wee hours) adds to congestion. We estimate that right now, a single round trip by car from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn to Radio City Music Hall in Midtown during most of the day causes $100 to $200 worth of additional delay for everyone else. That makes a prospective $15 or even a $20 peak congestion toll a downright bargain in comparison.

Congestion pricing is the only durable antidote to persistent traffic congestion. The Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate William Vickrey demonstrated 60 years ago that there’s no way out of gridlock without making drivers pay for taking up limited street space. Otherwise, there will always be more car owners wanting to use the available space than there is space to accommodate them.
Drivers all over the city and well beyond stand to gain from this plan. Yes, it will be painful to pay for something that has been free. But it is even more painful to spend hours idling in traffic, knowing that a better path beckons.

Charles Komanoff is a transportation analyst in New York. Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School.