As in 2016, Democrats appear poised to capture the White House and perhaps the Senate while retaining the House. Let’s explore what a Democratic presidency and Congress might mean for climate policy and carbon taxing.

Caveats first. We offered a similarly rosy prediction in 2016, a month before Election Day. In a post on Oct. 9, The Political Meltdown That Could Save the Climate, we said that the “Access Hollywood” tapes were leading “shell-shocked Republicans to abandon the Trump ship.” Little did we know that the Trump campaign was already detonating a wave of counterattacks that would culminate in FBI director James Comey’s catastrophic Oct. 28 letter to Congress dredging up Hillary Clinton’s emails. Nor did we imagine that most swing-state voters who disliked both candidates would pivot sharply from Clinton, or that her seemingly impregnable lead was partly an artifact of pollsters’ under-representation of Trump’s top demographic, non-college white voters.

Even more wild cards abound this time: possible election intimidation and interference, Covid-related voting reluctance, and of course Trump’s proven willingness to say and do almost anything to hold onto power. Plus, the election is still 16 weeks away — “an eternity in politics.” Nevertheless, Biden’s position today looks stronger than Clinton’s four years ago.

With Democrats rallying solidly around Biden, the trifecta of Covid, economic privation, and revulsion at white supremacy may be too much for the incumbent to overcome. At this writing (July 14), FivethirtyEight.com has Biden leading by at least 7 points in the three states that tipped the 2016 election to Trump. As for the Senate races, though polling is thinner, Democrats are being given the edge in a majority of the eleven most competitive races; they need only take five to gain the majority (four if Biden wins).

So let’s make the optimistic assumption that the party of climate denial, tax inequality and All Lives Matter is trounced this November. What’s in store for climate and carbon pricing?

Tackling Inequality and Climate Change

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt last week singled out the Democrats’ agenda’s “two defining features”:

The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave. The second is acting on climate change. (From It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?, July 10; emphases added)

Those two elements overlap with the three building blocks we articulated for climate progress in our Dec. 2019 post, A New Synthesis: Carbon Taxing, Wealth Taxing & A Green New Deal.

Leonhardt contends that while “[Joe] Biden may not seem like a history-altering figure, certainly like less of one than Barack Obama did. . . he could wind up presiding over a larger scale of political change than Mr. Obama did, for reasons largely independent of the two men themselves.” One reason is that unlike the start of Obama’s presidency, which coincided with the onrush of the 2008 financial meltdown, “today, by contrast, progressives have spent years working through the details of plans on climate change, high-end tax increases, antitrust policy and more.”

“There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” says economist Heather Boushey, who runs the progressive-leaning Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and whom Leonhardt quotes. “And there is a lot more runway,” she told him, contrasting the ten or so months Biden’s team will have had to lay out their plans with the mere two months available to Obama.

The other factor militating for potentially sweeping legislative change under Biden, in Leonhardt’s view, is the vast scope of disruption in the past two decades. This period includes “the biggest two economic crises since the Great Depression, the worst pandemic in more than a century and the election of two presidents unlike any before them — and diametrically unlike each other.” He could also have mentioned the breadth and militancy of the resurgent U.S. left, which has served notice that it has no intention of letting up or bargaining down during a Biden presidency — a perspective that suffuses another, more visionary essay that the Times published alongside Leonhardt’s, The Left Is Remaking Politics, by Ohio State University law professor Amna A. Akbar.

Standards-Investment-Justice: an emerging Democratic Party alignment on climate

In late May, Vox climate writer David Roberts published At last, a climate policy platform that can unite the left, a monster (6,000-word) post drawing on his decade covering U.S. energy and climate policy and politics.

Roberts posits, and offers as his post’s subhead, that “the factions of the Democratic coalition have come into alignment on climate change.” “For the first time in memory,” he writes, “there’s a broad alignment forming around a climate policy platform that is both ambitious enough to address the problem and politically potent enough to unite all the left’s various interest groups.”

Roberts quotes Maggie Thomas, former campaign aide to Jay Inslee and Elizabeth Warren, now with the climate mobilization group Evergreen Action: “All of those people who ran for president … had a much more expanded vision on climate by the end of their campaigns than when they started,” and then offers sections entitled Net-zero emissions by 2050 is the new baseline, Republicans aren’t going to help, and Carbon pricing has been dethroned (we’ll have more on that in a bit), before unveiling his synopsis of this emerging Democratic climate alignment:

• Standards: “[E]lectricity, cars, and buildings together … make up close to two-thirds of US emissions. The core of any aggressive 10-year mobilization on climate must be to target them, not sideways through a carbon price, but directly, through sector-specific performance standards and incentives, to drive out the carbon as quickly as possible.” Details vary among various (former) candidates’ platforms and advocacy groups’ programs, Roberts, notes, “but there is a strong common core: performance standards and incentives for the three biggest emitting sectors, aimed at making rapid, substantial progress on emissions in the next 10 years [with] the ultimate vision a carbon-free electricity sector powering an electrified, emission-free vehicle fleet and building stock.”
• Investment: The idea of “large-scale public investment,” says Roberts, “is not new, but something about the moment — the rising danger of climate change, the growing influence of Sanders-style democratic socialism, the pent-up public need after decades of austerity politics — made it resonate.” “The investment ideas cover a wide range, e.g., rural electrification, universal broadband, long-distance electricity transmission, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure [though public transit goes unmentioned here], but the focus in all of them is supporting green industries, manufacturing, and research, and, above all, creating jobs.”
• Justice — “for unions, fossil fuel workers, and front-line communities,” per Roberts’ summary. “Putting justice first,” which the emergent alignment does, “represents the most notable shift in green thinking and strategy over the past decade,” in Roberts’ estimation. And I believe he’s right. Whereas “climate justice” has been construed primarily as remediation and protection for marginalized constituencies that are predominantly Indigenous or communities of color, it is now extended and broadened to encompass workers in obsolescent fossil-fuel industries, the regions burdened by energy extraction and processing, and under-employed people.

Is “Standards-Investment-Justice” reconcilable with CTC’s “Taxing Carbon and Wealth for a Green New Deal”?

While the Standards-Investment-Justice moniker is largely Roberts’ formulation, the idea it encapsulates has been in the air for a year or more and is now trending. It’s easy to see why. Performance standards are broadly accepted in the U.S., if not by Fox News mouthpieces then by an impressively broad spectrum from environmental groups to appliance manufacturers. (The standards rubric also includes state-level clean-electricity standards that many credit with priming the wind and solar power pumps for the past one or two decades.) Investment is newly resonant for the reasons Roberts notes, with credit also due Green New Deal proponents including the Sunrise Movement for their constant invocations of FDR’s presidency (minus the racist exclusions). Justice, a bedrock human ideal, here becomes a rubric to unite two factions that are vital yet have rarely been joined politically: the environmental justice left and the more traditional labor center.

“S-I-J” strikes us, then, as empowering and vital. But what about “P” for pricing — carbon pricing? Recall that Roberts dissed it, in the Carbon pricing has been dethroned section of his post. Here’s how he put it:

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

Roberts is right on several counts: Carbon pricing is no longer centered in climate policy. Raising prices is politically difficult. Cap and trade is toxic. And carbon taxing has lacked bipartisan support since the 2009 Tea Party insurrection (the occasional Republican mild pats-on-the-back for token carbon taxes don’t really count).

But his insinuation that carbon pricing in isolation can’t get us to net-zero emissions by 2050 is a straw man; no carbon pricing advocate of any stature has posed it as a stand-alone measure for a long time. More importantly, the absence of bipartisan support shouldn’t disqualify carbon taxes from consideration by a Democratic White House and Congress, should that be the outcome of the November elections. With Democratic majorities, and assuming the newly Democratic Senate abolishes the filibuster, a meaningful carbon tax, e.g., one that begins at $15 or $20 per ton of CO2 and rises annually by $15 to reach $100 per ton within seven years, ought to be able to get through Congress and reach the White House.

Biden’s $2 Trillion Climate Plan

Yesterday, the Biden campaign released its climate plan. The Biden Plan To Build A Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure And An Equitable Clean Energy Future would invest $2 trillion over the next four years to build new infrastructure, boost clean energy, and repair and remediate communities historically damaged ecologically and socially by fossil fuel extraction and burning.

The Biden plan appears to embed carbon reduction in a broader framework of economic recovery, infrastructure revival, racial equity, and jobs — apt framing in light of the Depression that has enveloped the U.S. in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s largely business-as-usual stance, as well as the awakening of many Americans to the ongoing damage from persistent structural racism.

Release of the plan followed on the heels of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force’s policy recommendations on climate change issued last week (July 9), which in turn hewed fairly closely to the June recommendations of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The select committee’s “majority” report (from the Democratic conference), Solving the Climate Crisis: The Congressional Action Plan for a Clean Energy Economy and a Healthy and Just America, “calls on Congress to build a clean energy economy that values workers, centers environmental justice, and is prepared to meet the challenges of the climate crisis.”

We’ve read the Biden Plan’s write-up of its seven key elements, shown above — U-C Santa Barbara poli sci professor and climate savant Leah Stokes has an excellent Twitter thread on it, by the way — and have seen nothing about, or even hinting at, carbon taxing or carbon pricing of any stripe. On the other hand, another part of the Biden Campaign’s climate page, Biden’s Year One Legislative Agenda on Climate Change, includes language suggesting support for pricing carbon emissions:

This enforcement mechanism [to achieve net-zero emissions no later than 2050] will be based on the principles that polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting and that our economy must achieve ambitious reductions in emissions economy-wide instead of having just a few sectors carry the burden of change. (emphasis added)

That said, sifting various iterations of the Biden campaign’s climate platform doesn’t feel particularly useful. Whatever climate legislation (and executive action) emerges from a Biden administration and Democratic Congress is likely to be determined more by the demands of the climate movement this year and next than by Biden campaign statement. The implication is that carbon tax advocates would do better educating fellow climate campaigners on the need for carbon taxing — and, of course, organizing for electoral change this summer and fall — than bemoaning the absence of carbon taxing from current climate discourse.

We give the last word to the Times’ David Leonhardt, whose July 10 column we drew on, above:

“If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.”

We’re grateful to Gavin Grindon, a lecturer in art history at the University of Sussex, U.K., for his trenchant analysis last week of Big Oil’s longtime strategic sponsorships of museums and other prestigious cultural media in Britain and the United States.

In a Memorial Day New York Times op-ed, This Exhibition Was Brought to You by Guns and Big Oil, Grindon made clear that “For big oil, big pharmaceutical companies and the arms industry, sponsorship of the arts is not charity; it is a strategic expenditure.”

“To conduct their business,” he explained, “companies must build a web of influence and operation through many of the institutions that are often clustered in cities, through which they become enmeshed in our lives. London, for example, is one of the main financial centers for the oil industry. Oil companies must extract from the city a combination of services, so that elsewhere they may continue to extract, refine, transport and sell oil.”

Grindon described how this “extraction of services” works:

This is a matter not only of buying financial services from private companies, but of creating legal, political and technological leverage; facilitating clearance from regulators; gaining support from government departments or legal permission for new projects. Cultural institutions are a key part of this infrastructure into which businesses must insinuate themselves to establish an air of social legitimacy and acceptability for practices that might otherwise risk coming into question. (emphasis added)

In Britain, Grindon noted, corporate cultural insinuation typically takes the form of branded museum sponsorships which “offer businesses the attention of influential audiences, access to senior government figures at special events and the opportunity to securely intertwine themselves with ideas of national history and culture.” Whereas in the United States, cultural insinuation is more commonly conducted “through a system of boards that reward individuals who make charitable donations to the museum with the culturally influential position of trustee.”

You can’t ask for a more richly embroidered depiction of how oil and other companies “cynically use art to build webs of influence and become further enmeshed in our lives,” as the subhead of Grindon’s op-ed put it. Yet the question remains: Just how much do these webs of influence actually keep modern industrial societies locked into oil and the other fossil fuels? And the corollary: How effective, really, is deligitimizing Big Carbon — kicking fossil fuel executives off museum boards, university boards, other corporate boards, etc., “shaming” them, for short — in resetting governmental policies that enforce carbon “lock-in” against energy efficiency, renewable energy and other carbon alternatives?

Someday, social science may have the answers. For now, we’re skeptical, Grindon’s evocative essay notwithstanding.

For one thing, Big Oil is already deeply enmeshed in our lives. Every trip in a petrol-fueled car, every delivery to our doorstep from a van or truck, every airplane journey manifests and reinforces our complicity with oil. The “shame” of causing climate change isn’t limited to the fossil fuel companies, notwithstanding headline-garnering reports proclaiming that “Just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global [carbon] emissions.”

Assume, moreover, that the boards of the Guggenheim, the Met, the Moma, the Whitney and the New Museum, to name five museums targeted by “protests over their links to issues like the oil and arms trade, gentrification and colonialism,” according to Grindon, were 100 percent free of fossil fuel executives. How exactly would that slow the rate of carbon emissions today, next month, a decade or now?

Yes, the legal, political and technological leverage that helps clear the paths to new oil fields and new markets, along with the regulatory clearance, governmental support and permissions, and other realms that Grindon lacked space to mention such as university R&D — would all become incrementally harder to obtain and hence more expensive to acquire. That in turn could make petroleum fuels somewhat more expensive to produce, thus hiking their prices and reducing demand. But in our estimation, these slightly higher hurdles wouldn’t materially change the infrastructural inertia and broad acquiescence that keep oil and coal and gas firmly in the saddle.

Sure, we’re all for ostracizing fossil fuel executives and others who lobby elected officials, strong-arm regulators, intimidate landowners and in some cases instigate lethal violence against protectors of nature, all to extract more petrol whose combustion products add to climate wreckage. But at what point, if ever, does this ostracism penetrate to Joe Sixpack in the showroom choosing between the F-150 that delivers 22 miles to the gallon and the F-350 that gets just 15? Or to the councilmember of a transit-rich city or suburb being pressured by NIMBY’s to reject upzoning and thus force local schoolteachers and sanitation workers to move to the auto-dependent exurban fringe? Or her counterpart in rural America or England who next week must cast the deciding vote on a wind or solar farm whose production would help phase out the gas-fired power plant three townships over?

We’ll say it again. In our view, the level of carbon emissions today and in the future is determined far more by structures of settlement, commerce and identity than by the decisions of a few hundred oil executive and business tycoons — whom we regard in any event as largely interchangeable, so long as demand renders their functions essential and profitable. And those structures, while seemingly unshakable, can be weakened and brought down with the help of carbon taxes.

Breaking Big Carbon requires huge mobilization along interconnected fronts of political action, public investment, culture change and carbon taxing. Exposing and stopping the oil industry’s cynical use of people’s longing for artistic experience is good work, and we support those doing it. But it’s not a substitute for the hard slog of politics, investment and carbon pricing. Let’s keep on with them.

 

 

 

[NB: A longer version of this post was published on March 13, 2020 in Counterpunch.]

Prologue

Good lord, how do you schedule the spring ticket traps at the same time as you tell people to bike to work https://t.co/DCAIZDvnDc

— Good Idea Dave (@DaveCoIon) March 10, 2020

The tweets above, from a bicycle commuter and a local journalist, are New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in a nutshell. Even as he was encouraging coronavirus-concerned commuters to cycle to work, he not only failed to carve out special lanes on streets and bridges, he also stood by while NYPD conducted its customary cyclist-summonsing traps as if nothing had changed.

Ditto on the climate crisis. For two years running de Blasio has made a show of divesting from and suing fossil fuel companies, winning him the allegiance of the climate vanguard. Yet throughout his mayoralty he has doggedly rejected mounting pleas to “break car culture” in the very place where his authority matters. His administration consistently gives drivers a free pass to contribute to rising global temperatures even as their driving repeatedly puts other New Yorkers at risk.

I have a foot in both the climate camp and New York’s “livable-streets” camp. I’ve fought fossil fuel use for almost half a century and currently head the militant pro-climate Carbon Tax Center. Locally, I’ve been an architect of congestion pricing, a bicycling activist and a direct-action campaigner for pedestrians’ rights. The juxtaposition of de Blasio’s climate calls-to-arms with his pro-driving policies is head-spinning.

Is it worth calling out a lame-duck mayor’s complicity in car culture? Yes. New York retains an outsize influence on urban policy and culture. Actions here to de-emphasize automobiles could reverberate globally and help shrink burgeoning transportation emissions. Moreover, de Blasio recently returned to the national stage, stumping for Bernie Sanders. Before his self-proclaimed myth as climate mayor goes national, we should scrutinize his record.

De Blasio is M.I.A. on breaking car culture

Public interest in transit and traffic in New York City blossomed over the past decade. Ideas and activism abound. De Blasio remains oblivious.

Take congestion pricing. For years the mayor’s answer to proposals to toll drivers entering Manhattan was ginned-up sob stories about having to pay $12 to drive to $500 doctor visits. He got on board only after his hand was forced by the governor.

Or “Fair Fares,” the progressive brainchild of having city government pick up half of the cost of poor families’ Metrocards. De Blasio brushed it off until City Council activists attained a veto-proof majority. When it passed, City Hall slow-rolled the implementation.

Busways? Transit buses have hemorrhaged ridership for years, largely because mounting car and truck traffic has brought them nearly to a standstill. After de Blasio agreed to let transportation officials pilot car restrictions on one crosstown route, speeds and usage shot up. Yet the mayor hasn’t committed to replicating it elsewhere.

The story repeats on almost every transportation front. The mayor stood by as Uber and other ride-hailing services muscled into the Manhattan taxi franchise, bankrupting thousands of cab drivers, worsening traffic and undermining mass transit. He let free-parking pleaders delay bicycle lanes even as biking fatalities hit a 20-year high. And de Blasio’s signature “Vision Zero” traffic-safety initiative is undermined daily by his denial of NYPD’s entrenched pro-driver bias. Police issued more summonses to bicycle riders than truck drivers last year. Unsurprisingly, pedestrian fatalities, many under the wheels of trucks, are on the rise.

The twin threads running through this account are passivity and fatalism. In de Blasio’s New York, everyone is a driver and every car and truck trip is sacrosanct.

Confronting Big Oil has delivered little

The mayor’s bold words on climate haven’t yielded much. On divestment, it took city officials two years simply to select advisers “to evaluate options and recommend actions.” The city’s lawsuit seeking to hold oil and gas companies liable for climate change harms was dismissed in federal district court, for pre-emption.

But a municipal climate strategy built on attacking Big Oil has a graver defect: Neither divestment nor litigation materially alters the systems of demand and supply that generate the carbon emissions that are wrecking the climate.

To be sure, divestment campaigns and demands to hold fossil fuel companies liable are contributing mightily to movement-building and elevating climate change politically. Because of these campaigns, climate advocacy has been surging, which promises big policy dividends down the road.

But it’s also true that even if fossil fuel stocks are dumped from city pension portfolios, every drop of drivers’ demand for fossil fuel will still be met at the gas pump.

From a carbon standpoint, divestment, litigation and general saber-rattling against Big Oil are essentially performative acts. Payoffs will take decades to appear. Yet de Blasio holds the reins over a multiplicity of policies that determine how much New Yorkers drive and, thus, how much gasoline they burn. He simply chooses not to wield them.

Why is “breaking car culture” anathema to de Blasio?

What accounts for de Blasio’s disinterest in reducing automobile use in New York City? For one thing, he appears genuinely terrified of yoking the NYPD to any action that might appear anti-car or anti-driver. But the roots of the mayor’s reticence lie deeper: De Blasio lives inside a windshield world.

Questioned not long ago about possibly converting “free” parking on residential streets to metered parking, de Blasio said:

“If we’re going to tell people they can’t park on their street, no, that does not ring true to me. If you go so far as telling people they can’t park on their street, no, I’m not there.”

Yet the idea put to the mayor wasn’t to ban street parking but to charge for it — which could make parking easier for most by inducing a fraction of residents to stop storing cars on the street.

The same reflexive identification with a traditional conception of driving underlies de Blasio’s gut-level resistance to nearly every proposal to alter the city’s streetscapes so New Yorkers can safely and easily get around without a car.

As one City Hall reporter put it, “De Blasio is a driver. He’s also a very affluent man who views himself as an average middle class guy. So he genuinely believes ‘Oh this [congestion pricing] is going to hurt lots of regular Joes’ without examining any data behind that belief.”

Yet congestion pricing alone will cut New York City’s CO2 pollution by nearly a million metric tons a year, an amount nearly triple the drop in New York’s car and truck emissions from 2005 to 2017 (which came about only because federal mileage standards — pre-Trump — made new cars less inefficient).

And those million tons are just congestion pricing’s down payment for climate. As I wrote two years ago, when the mayor was still badmouthing the idea:

Congestion charging’s true climate payoff is in the households, jobs, and activities that will locate or remain in the city, rather than fleeing to the new exurban ring or the Sunbelt, which have carbon footprints many times larger than New York’s.

Is climate posturing de Blasio’s way to avoid reckoning with NYC’s car culture?

Notably absent from the livable-streets movement are most self-described climate activists — groups like Bill McKibben’s 350.org or Food and Water Watch. This prompts the question: are plaudits from climate leaders letting the mayor deflect efforts to downscale the primacy of cars and make the streets not just safer but more sustainable?

Make no mistake: the climate vanguard’s embrace of the mayor is powerful. Just last month, McKibben posted on Twitter:

Remarkable: in his State of the City address, @NYCMayor Bill de Blasio just said NYC will never again approve new fossil fuel infrastructure. That is, the fossil fuel age is now officially in its twilight in the world's financial and diplomatic capital

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 6, 2020

Emphasis added: The fossil-fuel age is now officially in its twilight in the world’s financial and diplomatic capital.

New Yorkers by the thousands have organized for years to win better subways, safe bicycling and vital public spaces — both for their own sakes and because they enable a city with fewer cars. While McKibben talks airily about stopping new fossil fuel infrastructure, we confront that infrastructure’s present manifestation daily in our city’s hellscape of cars and trucks.

Livable-streets advocates are counting down the 22 months left in de Blasio’s second and final term. We’re weary of his inane climate pronouncements and his cluelessness about what being a climate mayor really means. We yearn to be free of the spectacle of a mayor pontificating about Greta Thunberg while refusing to use mass transit.

But mostly we long for, and are resolved to elect, a mayor who at long last understands that breaking car culture lies at the heart of urban climate action.

The International Monetary Fund is endeavoring to put carbon taxing front-row center in climate policy with a new report, How to Mitigate Climate Change. (Link to IMF blog post about the report, here; link to report executive summary, here; link to entire 30-p. report, here.)

“Carbon taxes levied on the supply of fossil fuels in proportion to their carbon content are the most powerful and efficient . . . of the various mitigation strategies to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions,” says the report, “because they allow firms and households to find the lowest-cost ways of reducing energy use and shifting toward cleaner alternatives.”

Nothing new there. What’s noteworthy in the report released today by IMF are three things:

First, the report quantifies emission reductions for three different levels of carbon taxes: $25/ton, $50/ton and $75/ton. The results, shown at left, reveal both carbon taxing’s power and its limits. The projected reductions from the $75/ton tax are substantial, surpassing 40 percent of emissions for the world’s #1 and #3 current emitters, China and India. Yet those reductions are vis-a-vis 2030 emissions, not current levels. Moreover, they fall far short of the needed contractions for meeting the nominal IPCC target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade, as the graph below demonstrates.

Second, the report eschews the disastrous conflation of the principal carbon externalities (climate damage and air pollution) as subsidies — a misguided framing that marred the otherwise exemplary (and pro-carbon tax) 2014 IMF report, Getting Energy Prices Right. That language furthered the false narrative that governments need not tax fossil fuels to slash CO2, since they would only need to zero out their fossil fuel subsidies; in fact, the “subsidies” were largely the failure to tax in the first place.

Last, and perhaps most intriguing, the report takes the bold step — bold for an establishment icon like IMF — of casting France’s Gilets Jaunes (yellow vest) movement not as know-nothings protesting a piddling rise in the price of diesel, but as a rising up against the privilege to pollute enjoyed by the rich:

In France, the rapid ramping up of a similar [to Sweden’s] carbon tax was suspended in 2018 at $50 a ton, following public backlash against the perceived unfairness of the tax, which was introduced at the same time as broader tax reductions seen as benefiting the wealthy. (IMF at pp 13-14)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s often said that a carbon tax is first and foremost a tax on coal. I’ve probably said it myself, and David Roberts wrote as much the other day in his useful post for Vox, The 5 most important questions about carbon taxes, answered, pointing out that “A carbon tax hits coal first, hardest, and, at least early on, almost exclusively.”

Coal is first up in carbon taxing’s crosshairs for two reasons: its energy value comes almost exclusively from oxidizing carbon, whereas oil and gas burning also derives considerable heat from oxidizing hydrogen into harmless water vapor; and in the U.S. coal is used almost exclusively to generate electricity, a commodity that many other sources can make as well.

But oil would hardly be immune. A U.S. carbon tax — not a token, Exxon-style one but a robust fee on fossil fuels’ carbon content that ramped up steadily — would, before long, put a sizable dent in petroleum use. Ditto, natural gas, as the carbon tax level rises still higher.

A vigorous U.S. carbon tax would squeeze every owner of oil wells, petroleum infrastructure and hydrocarbon reserves: shareholders of Exxon, Shell, BP et al.; the Koch Brothers; and, most of all, Saudi Arabia’s national petroleum and natural gas company, Aramco — the world’s #1 oil extractor and largest holder of oil reserves.

The list of ways that a carbon tax would lessen oil use is nearly limitless. Driving, costing more, would  begin to shrink. Fuel-efficient cars that stretch each gallon — higher-mpg vehicles and electrics — would gain market share. Freight movement by truck would start to be switched to rail and water, while supply chains became more local. Air travel would get pricier even as new aircraft engines were designed for greater fuel efficiency. In millions of economic decisions, proximity would be favored over distance and sprawl. Transit, cycling and higher-density development would gain.

These changes wouldn’t happen everywhere or immediately, of course, but they would gather strength as the carbon tax ramped up and society’s defaults got reset. And while we can’t micro-model every behavioral and structural change from carbon taxes (there are literally billions), the rich academic literature of price-elasticity makes it possible to rough-estimate the aggregate impacts of raising the prices of petroleum products for households and businesses.

In our modeling at the Carbon Tax Center, we estimate that a U.S. carbon tax that started modestly at $15 per ton of CO2 but increased each year thereafter by $10 per ton would, by its tenth year, shrink U.S. oil usage by 3.3 million barrels a day, cutting usage by one-fifth.

That shrinkage amounts to more than 3 percent of current world oil consumption. A drop of that magnitude — even ignoring that many other countries would follow suit — would deliver a powerful one-two punch to Saudi pockets: lesser sales and a lower price.

With less money to throw around Washington and the Middle East, the corruptive power of the Saudi regime would begin to diminish. Its wherewithal to bomb Yemen back to the Stone Age, silence dissident journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, punish Canada simply for expressing “grave concern” about arrests of activists in Saudi Arabia, and so on — and immunize itself by spreading cash around U.S. universities, think tanks, artistic institutions — would be diminished as well.

All of which makes another reminder that the benefits of taxing fossil fuels according to their carbon content go beyond even helping arrest climate damage. Human rights activists — indeed, everyone who wishes to see justice done for the brutal murder of Mr. Khashoggi — should join the movement to tax carbon emissions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The biennial “Scalise Resolution” condemning carbon taxing is up for a vote in the House this week, according to a report on The Hill news site.

The text of H.Con.Res.119 — “Expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy” — may be viewed here. It says, inter alia, that “a carbon tax will fall hardest on the poor, the elderly, and those on fixed incomes,” and that “a carbon tax would reduce America’s global competitiveness.”

The first assertion ignores the possibility of carbon-dividend proposals that would benefit most low-income households by returning more carbon revenues in monthly payouts than they would take away in higher fuel prices. The second ignores the need of U.S. industry to heed the accelerating transformation of global energy markets to low- and no-carbon tech like wind turbines, solar cells and efficient vehicles and appliances.

The resolutions’s other thirteen “whereas’s” are equally vapid, and in fact the Scalise Resolution is just the Republican Party trying to use carbon taxing to beat up Democrats. Nevertheless, the upcoming vote can be seen as a crucial test not just for the Climate Solutions Caucus but for the very idea of a Republican-backed or -assisted carbon tax.

The caucus now has 43 House Republican members. By joining, each took a pledge to “explore policy options that address the impacts, causes, and challenges of our changing climate,” according to the page devoted to the caucus on the Web site of its sponsoring organization, Citizens’ Climate Lobby. It also has 43 Democratic members, per its “Noah’s Ark” approach to climate bipartisanship. We single out Republicans because in 2016, when a similar resolution passed by 237-163, not a single Republican voted No. Sixteen abstained, while six Democrats joined the 231 Republicans to vote in favor.

In the past, House G.O.P. members and their apologists have cited “primary anxiety” — fear of being ousted in a party primary by even harder-right insurgents — as reason to toe their party’s denialist line on virtually anything bearing on climate. But this year’s primaries are now in the rear-view mirror. Any Republican member’s vote against the Scalise Resolution this week would appear to carry no political cost until at least 2020. And by then, climate denial could have become untenable in most House districts, even red ones.

Even less peril awaits the ten Republican caucus members whose current term in Congress is their last. Nine have announced their retirement: Bud Shuster (PA), Charlie Dent (PA), Darrell Issa (CA), Dave Reichert (WA), David Trott (MI), Ed Royce (CA), Ilenaa Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Lynn Jenkins (KS), Ryan Costello (PA). A tenth, Mark Sanford (SC) lost his primary last month.

Just a single vote opposing Scalise would end the carbon-tax embargo by which no sitting Republican congressmember or senator has ever endorsed carbon pricing, even just in principle, since 2010. It could signal, in some small way, that at some not-far-off time, a critical mass of Republicans might vote for a carbon tax. Which in turn could validate organizing for revenue-neutral carbon taxing like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s fee-and-dividend proposal.

CCL is rallying its membership to defeat the Scalise Resolution. But my sources say that CCL leadership aren’t focusing their organizing to target Republican caucus-members. That might have been understandable two years ago, when the caucus was in its infancy. But it’s now midway through its third year. It’s fair to demand that Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus to stand up and oppose the Scalise Resolution. If they won’t, why should anyone believe that any Republican will ever stand for a carbon price?

Prominent climate journalists including David Roberts and Kate Aronoff have dismissed the caucus as greenwash for denialists. It may be too much to ask all 43 of its G.O.P. members to form a No bloc on Scalise. But the ten who are retiring at year’s end could take a stand, and perhaps pull in a few Republican holdovers.

As we suggested last month, that could provide political validation for carbon fee-and-dividend and its close cousin, the Climate Leadership Council’s carbon dividends plan. We at CTC aren’t holding our breath. But we’d love to be proven wrong.

July 19 addendum: Four G.O.P. caucus members — Ros-Lehtinen, Fitzpatrick, Love and Curbelo, whose carbon-tax bill is expected to drop next week — voted against the resolution today, as Inside Climate News reported. Two non-caucus Republicans joined them, for a total of six.

If you’re not shaken by Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Climate Agreement yesterday at the White House, you’ve wandered into the wrong Web site.

Those “individual nationally-determined commitments” whose sum is, or was, the Paris agreement may be woefully insufficient to stop climate ruin; yet reaching the agreement was an enormous step forward, marking the time the world began moving in concert, if haltingly, toward capping, reducing and eliminating climate-destroying emissions.

A transcript of Trump’s Rose Garden remarks is here, for anyone who cares to look. Rather than prate on, I’ve chosen to link to the four most penetrating pieces about this calamitous misstep that I’ve seen. Here are brief samples from each:

1. Mike Grunwald, in Politico, Why Trump actually pulled out of Paris

It wasn’t because of the climate, or to help American business. He needed to troll the world — and this was his best shot so far.

Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: it was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal.

The real triumph of Paris wasn’t America’s promises; it was the serious commitments from China, India and other developing nations that had previously insisted on their right to burn unlimited carbon until their economies caught up to the developed world.

2. Paul Krugman, in The New York Times, Trump Gratuitously Rejects the Paris Climate Accord

As Donald Trump does his best to destroy the world’s hopes of reining in climate change, let’s be clear about one thing: This has nothing to do with serving America’s national interest. This isn’t about nationalism; mainly, it’s about sheer spite.

Pay any attention to modern right-wing discourse and you find deep hostility to any notion that some problems require collective action beyond shooting people and blowing things up.

Beyond this, much of today’s right seems driven above all by animus toward liberals rather than specific issues. If liberals are for it, they’re against it. If liberals hate it, it’s good. Add to this the anti-intellectualism of the G.O.P. base, for whom scientific consensus on an issue is a minus, not a plus, with extra bonus points for undermining anything associated with President Barack Obama.

3. 350.org founder Bill McKibben, also in The Times, Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision

It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.

But it’s not just science that [Trump is] blowing up. The Paris accord was a high achievement of the diplomatic art, a process much messier than science, and inevitably involving compromise and unseemly concession. Still, after decades of work, the world’s negotiators managed to bring along virtually every nation: the Saudis and the low-lying Marshall Islanders, the Chinese and the Indians. One hundred and ninety-five nations negotiated the Paris accord, including the United States.

The changes [committed to at Paris], and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world’s governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.

4. David Roberts in Vox, Trump’s Paris climate decision shows the threat rising tribalism poses to the planet

The hallmark of tribalism (a term I prefer to “nationalism,” as it gets at the deeper roots) is that it views the world in zero-sum terms — if one tribe benefits, it is at another tribe’s expense. As has been much remarked (see my post on Trump’s mindset), this describes Trump to a tee. He views all interactions, both personal and international, in terms of dominance and submission.

Tribalism has also entirely subsumed the US conservative movement. The intellectual core has all but rotted; what remains are older, rural and suburban white men and their wives, angry that their tribe is being demoted from its hegemonic position. At a barely beneath-the-surface level, Trumpism is about restoring old hierarchies: the powerful over the powerless, whites over minorities, men over women.

A zero-sum perspective is inherently hostile to collective agreements and treaties. It can only see such agreements as attempts by the weak to bind and restrain the strong (a theme that popped up again and again in Trump’s announcement on Paris). Trump was inclined to see things that way already, no matter what he was told.

That is the backdrop to Trump’s decision. It’s not that Paris particularly constrained him — it didn’t constrain him at all, actually — but the very notion of committing to collective action bothered him (and Steve Bannon). From his perspective, the US has tons of fossil fuels, and that gives the US power. Voluntarily reducing dependence on fossil fuels threatens US dominance.

Trump doesn’t just want that dominance — he wants to signal it, to shove it in other countries’ faces. Staying in the agreement, even if it was substantively meaningless, didn’t send the right signal.

McKibben ended his piece with this:

And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn’t take climate change seriously, but also because he didn’t take civilization seriously.

Maybe it was the McKibben passage I put in bold that led me to call out my own mayor, NYC’s Bill de Blasio, for his transportation hypocrisy, on a radio call-in this morning. (Watch this space next week, for details.) A small step, to be sure, but I intend to take another tomorrow, and the day after, as I know you will as well.

Note: This post was updated in mid-May to reflect three additional signatories.

Republicans hold 241 seats in the U.S. House, a 47-vote margin over the Democrats’ 194. Earlier this week, 17 [now 20] of the GOP members issued a resolution “expressing the commitment of the House of Representatives to conservative environmental stewardship.”

The resolution doesn’t call for a carbon tax or any specific climate action; it doesn’t even mention “climate change,” though it does refer to “a changing climate.” In fact, the resolution is word-for-word identical to one issued eighteen months ago, in September 2015, also by 17 House Republicans, a group that included 10 of the signatories of the new resolution. (The other seven signers from 2015 are out of office — five declined to run, and two lost their seats to Democrats last November; none were “primaried” out. Of the seven new signers, four were newly elected to the House in 2016.)

Nevertheless, the resolution stands as a positive if halting step in the possible emergence of a critical mass of Republican officeholders to endorse and eventually vote for a carbon tax to combat climate change.

The resolution was by and for House Republicans only, a not unreasonable way to strike a small flame that would not be overshadowed by solid Democratic support for climate action. The 17 [now 20] signers hail almost evenly from Trump states and Clinton states, with four [now six] from New York, three each from Pennsylvania and Florida, and the other seven [now eight] from seven [now eight] other states. Only one represents a heartland state — Don Bacon, who just won election to the House from Nebraska — though two [now three] others are from the mountain West: Mark Amodei of Nevada and Mia Love of Utah [and also Mike Coffman of Colorado]. (See map.)

The resolution kicks off with this “whereas”:

[I]t is a conservative principle to protect, conserve, and be good stewards of our environment, responsibly plan for all market factors, and base our policy decisions in science and quantifiable facts on the ground. (emphases added)

Mild stuff since the time of Teddy Roosevelt — or the dawning of The Enlightenment — but relatively bold in the current era of Republican denial of science and dismissal of considerations that might interfere with short-term profit.

It goes on for eight more whereases, culminating (or petering out) with this resolution:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives commits to working constructively, using our tradition of American ingenuity, innovation, and exceptionalism, to create and support economically viable, and broadly supported private and public solutions to study and address the causes and effects of measured changes to our global and regional climates, including mitigation efforts and efforts to balance human activities that have been found to have an impact.

Weak tea, to be sure, but the point isn’t the resolution’s text but its existence. A small flag planted in an otherwise barren landscape.

And barren it is, on the GOP side. The Gallup Organization this week released new poll data indicating that amidst an upsurge in Democrats and self-declared Independents who “worry a great deal about global warming,” the share of Republican worriers is stalled below 20 percent (see graph at left). That’s less than the rate a dozen years ago, before the Koch Brothers launched their insidious campaign to cloak denialism in pseudo-scientific respectability and ensure that GOP office-holders shield fossil fuel interests from regulation.

Note that our Polls page has more on the Gallup findings along with new and more encouraging data showing growing support for carbon taxes, from the National Survey on Energy and Environment (NSEE) from the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College.

The graph makes clear that many Republican office-holders — unlike the distinguished party elders who last month unveiled the Climate Leadership Council‘s right-of-center, revenue-neutral fee-and-dividend proposal — are skating on thin (melting?) ice. Yet despite, or perhaps on account of, the “lite” nature of their climate resolution, they deserve our support. Here’s what you can do:

• If you live in one of the 17 [now 20] districts represented in the map above, write to your Congressmember expressing appreciation and support for participating in the March 14 resolution.
• If you live in one of the other 224 [now 221] other districts represented by Republicans, write your Representative and urge/insist s/he sign on.
• If you live in any of the 194 districts represented by Democrats, let your representative know about the resolution and urge her/him to reach across the aisle to support the 17 [now 20] signers — particularly those from their state.

As you write your representative, you may want to consult FiveThirtyEight’s listing of your district’s Trump-vs.-Clinton vote from last November. It shows 21 districts where Clinton outpolled Trump but with a Republican member who hasn’t signed the resolution; they may be more amenable to suasion than other GOP representatives.

At least as important, join and support Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which since 2009 has been organizing to create political will for carbon taxes and which played a major role in both the 2015 and 2017 resolutions. A new CCL Web page on the Republican Climate Resolution makes it easy to take the first two steps outlined above.

The carbon tax proposal that the Climate Leadership Council unveiled last month upends orthodoxies on both sides of the political divide. It is revenue-neutral, which goes against the desires of many on the Left to invest carbon tax revenues in a “just transition” to clean energy. It distributes those revenues as “dividends” to U.S. families, an income-progressive outcome that frustrates those on the Right who might accept a carbon tax as a way to pay for reducing the corporate income tax, at least in theory.

We at CTC heartily endorsed the council’s proposal in a blog post hours after its release. So did a dozen leading newspapers, including the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Financial Times and Barron’s, some of which were likely impressed that the CLC rollout was led by GOP icons James Baker and George Shultz, both of whom held multiple cabinet posts in earlier Republican administrations. But that wasn’t good enough for the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page sometimes reads as if written by the Koch Brothers-financed, climate change-denying Americans for Prosperity. Its Feb. 25 editorial attacking the CLC proposal, The Carbon Tax Chimera, didn’t so much rebut the proposal as excoriate it.

Messrs. Shultz and Baker responded in a letter in the Journal last Friday, We Thought We Would Hit Your Sweet Spot. Their letter isn’t aimed at the Journal’s editors, who are tethered to hard-right climate denialism, but to the paper’s remaining readers who recognize that catastrophic climate change poses risks to their bottom line (and themselves) and are looking for a policy response they can support. In the same spirit, we present this point-by-point rejoinder to the Journal’s editorial by Dr. Peter Joseph, group leader of the Marin County, CA chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby. Dr. Joseph is an outspoken advocate for the fee-and-dividend approach to carbon taxing which forms the heart of the CLC proposal.

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1. WSJ: The climate may change but one thing that never does is the use of climate change as a political wedge against Republicans.

Dr. Joseph: Following Sen. John McCain’s 2008 campaign acknowledgment of climate change, it was Republicans who turned climate change into a wedge issue by conflating scientific uncertainty — a necessary and ever-present part of scientific inquiry — with the well-established scientific consensus about global warming. The Journal seems not to appreciate that the Shultz-Baker plan, tailored to appeal to fiscal conservatives, can serve as Republicans’ escape ladder from this untenable position once they let go of the “I am not a scientist” trope and decide to join every other major political party – including conservative — in the Western democracies and get serious about this threat.

2. Also never changing is the call from some Republicans to neutralize the issue by handing more economic power to the federal government through a tax on carbon.

Revenue neutrality with 100 percent of the revenues returned to U.S. families as carbon dividends actually deprives the federal government of more economic power by channeling all the money back to citizens and reserving decision-making power to households, companies and markets.

3. The risk is that Donald Trump takes up the idea, which would hurt the economy with little benefit to the environment.

A fully refunded carbon tax will cut emissions with greater efficiency and less economic drag than regulations. It also produces greater environmental benefits and promotes business stability. The Climate Leadership Council estimates that by 2025 its plan will reduce CO2 emissions reductions by 28% below the 2005 baseline, meeting America’s Paris commitment. The Carbon Tax Center, modeling a more robust rise in the tax level after the initial $40/ton, estimates that the council’s plan would, by 2030, reduce our annual CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by 40 percent.

4. Such a tax might be worth considering if traded for radically lower taxes on capital or income, or is [sic] narrowly targeted like a gasoline tax.

Some economists recommend tax swaps, with Republican-leaning economists preferring cuts to the corporate income tax and Democratic-leaning ones favoring cutting the payroll tax. But politics point strongly to the dividend approach. The tax code is so complex, and Treasury Department bookkeeping so labyrinthine, that it’s extremely difficult to pull off a tax swap that’s immune to suspicions that the government is “stealing” the money. Accountability is crucial. Plus, the carbon tax has to rise each year, since it can’t start at the high levels that are required without seeming punitive. This requires the public to trust that the tax revenues will actually come back to them. A dividend like the council’s can win their trust, since the dividend checks rise in concert with the tax level.

5. But in the real world the Shultz-Baker tax is likely to be one more levy on the private economy.

Reinjecting billions directly back into the Main Street economy will act as a stimulant, not a drag. When families, particularly at the lower end, receive money regularly, they spend it. Sectors other than the hydrocarbon industry will benefit, and the predictable glide path toward the low-carbon economy will allow industry to adapt.

6. Even if a grand tax swap were politically possible, a future Congress might jack up rates or find ways to reinstate regulations.

The carbon tax signal should escalate predictably, and as long as the public receives the funds they won’t be inclined to revolt, since a clear majority will be made better off. As for wealthier households, many will hardly notice that their dividend checks don’t cover their carbon tax bite. Provided the tax levels are robust rather than token, Congress will have no incentive to “jack up rates” later on. Remember, Washington keeps none of the money.

7. Another problem is the “dividend.” A carbon tax would be regressive, as the poor spend more of their income on gasoline and household energy.

Full dividend return converts a regressive policy into a progressive one. The key is the dividend: since wealthier people have larger-than-average carbon footprints (they buy more stuff, live in bigger houses, fly more, etc.), they’ll pay in, while most middle-income and virtually all low-income families will take out. Models show that close to two-thirds of the population comes out ahead with full revenue return via dividends rebate. Citizens will retain the freedom to lower their consumption and use the spread between their carbon dividend check and carbon footprint costs as an incentive to reduce personal emissions and make some money, if they choose, without being required to do so by the government.

8. The plan purports to solve this in part by promising to return the tax to the American public. But the purpose of taxes is to fund government services, not shuffle money from one payer to another. No doubt politicians would take a cut to funnel into renewable energy or some other vote-buying program.

Taxes fund programs, agencies and services that make America great. But a fully refunded “tax” such as the council’s isn’t really a tax if the government doesn’t keep the money. It’s a fee, not intended to generate operating revenue but to correct a market failure. True, politicians might find it difficult to let huge sums slip through their fingers. As then-ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson quipped in a 2009 speech advocating a revenue-neutral carbon tax, “I know that’s hard for a politician to say.” He suggested the tax be called “a refundable greenhouse gas emissions fee.” The U.S. government will return the funds unmolested as required by law.

9. The rebates would also become a new de facto entitlement with an uncertain funding future.

The dividends will rise initially, then level off and eventually — and predictably — decline as the rising fee does its job of lowering carbon intensity. (That decline is another argument against using the carbon revenue for tax swaps or government programs, as the eventual budget shortfalls would require a future Congress to raise taxes.) At the same time, energy from wind and sunlight, whose fuel is free, combined with efficiencies and innovative processes and products, will stabilize or decrease the costs of goods and services. What matters to citizens is their overall household budgets. There will also be savings in healthcare costs as the air gets cleaner, and presumably military expenditures as we wean off unstable sources of foreign oil.

10. Meanwhile, the energy import fee looks like an appeal to Mr. Trump’s protectionist impulses…The idea is an attempt to export U.S. climate and tax policy with the threat of tariffs, which other countries may resent.

The Journal would do well to look more broadly at the council’s border carbon tariff. It’s an incentive to other countries, a tool to ensure a level playing field for U.S. manufacturers, and an act of leadership by the world’s most vibrant economy. A sustainable climate and a habitable earth require controlling global emissions. Without a global carbon price, too many nations will be unable to fulfill the reduction targets they promised in Paris, which are all voluntary. The global economy is the only enforcement mechanism there is. From a practical political standpoint, without a border carbon tariff no carbon charge will ever get through Congress if it disadvantages U.S. exporters.

11. The tax rate would also be influenced by international climate models that have overestimated the increase in global temperature for nearly two decades.

Must the WSJ editorial page continue to cling to this wearisome canard, in the face of year after year of record-setting temperatures? As for alleged IPCC “overestimates,” presumably referring to the alleged “pause” in surface temperature increases, that spurious claim has been thoroughly debunked. The excess retained heat energy has been going into the oceans, where it’s accelerating the disintegration of the polar ice shelves — dams restraining the great land ice sheets —threatening much higher sea level rise than previously predicted and threatening to inundate vast stretches of our nation’s and the world’s coastal areas.

12. A carbon tax is always pitched as “insurance” against climate change, but no one thinks it will change the trajectory of temperatures.

That might apply to an anemic price signal. It hardly applies to a carbon tax that starts at $40 per ton of CO2 and rises from there. The data indicate that most known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground to prevent catastrophic warming. Only a robust price signal can enable markets to resist the disastrous allure of trillions of dollars worth of carbon products. A rising fee on carbon emissions is the most powerful lever we have to phase out fossil fuels as fast as practicable.

13. A 2016 paper from the Cato Institute makes the point that insurance policies hedge risks that are well-known, unlike climate change, whose risks are highly uncertain.

The Cato Institute, known for its climate denial, is hardly a source of sound advice. The scientific consensus tells us that the chances that climate change will wreak catastrophic damage on property, let alone ecosystems and civil society, are far greater than the probability that, say, one’s home will be destroyed by fire. Yet every homeowner has fire insurance.

14. Fossil fuels make up about 80% of U.S. energy; solar, wind and hydropower are more expensive and lack the scale to be a viable substitute.

Fossil fuels rose to dominance through political arrangements that externalized the true costs of dumping their combustion products into the atmosphere and oceans. One can argue that these costs were unknown until now. Today to not know is to deny reality. The carbon tax internalizes those costs, rectifying a massive market failure. Yet even without that tax, solar and wind are rapidly gaining market share and grid parity, and there are no limits to the eventual scope of their deployment. A carbon tax will accelerate this transition.

15. Congress has never shown the self-restraint to collect an estimated $1 trillion in taxes and return it to the public. Any Republican who supported a carbon tax can expect no help from Democrats, who won’t restrain the Environmental Protection Agency.

As Secretary Tillerson observed, it is tough for a politician to utter the words “revenue neutral.” The public will have to demand it, and the business community, understanding that climate disasters are terrible for business, must lobby for it. Elected officials will then follow. The Shultz-Baker plan calls for suspending most EPA authority over CO2, an olive branch to anti-regulation interests. Evidence that Democrats and their environmental allies might be willing to relinquish control over the carbon tax revenue stream can be found in the resolution that California’s Democratic-controlled legislature passed last August calling on Congress to enact a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend proposal similar to the Shultz-Baker plan.

16. You won’t read this elsewhere, but what’s driven the recent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions is fracking for natural gas, which might never have happened had a carbon tax been in place.

While it’s undeniable that fracked gas contributed to overall reductions bydisplacing dirtier coal, a recent report by the Carbon Tax Center established that since 2005 the combination of electricity savings from efficiencies and increased wind and solar have played a greater part in reducing carbon emissions tha the replacement of coal by gas. Moreover, efficiency, wind and sunlight — unlike fracking — generate zero emissions of methane, which is also a potent greenhouse gas.

17. Human ingenuity and prosperity are the best insurance against climate change.

Perhaps. But even human ingenuity is hard pressed to overcome broken markets that fail to price carbon emissions’ damages. As Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw pointed out in the CLC press conference rolling out the carbon dividend plan (@32 min), a carbon tax is as close to a silver bullet as there is, precisely because it engages the enormous power of money and markets, with minimal risk, in a nonpartisan way. The WSJ should support it.

Dr. Joseph may be reached at pjmd1@me.com. He asked us to note that the views expressed here are Dr. Joseph’s and not necessarily those of Citizens’ Climate Lobby or Citizens’ Climate Education. — editor.