Here we cross-post my article published in The Nation magazine this morning, under the headline, Progressives Need to Get Over Themselves and Support This GOP-Backed Carbon-Tax Plan. Except for a few extra links below, the two versions are the same.

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  — Charles

Carbon tax haters can relax. The proposal for a national carbon tax released on February 8 by high-level Republicans, including uber-GOP consigliere James Baker, isn’t going anywhere. Financially and ideologically, the American right is wedded to carbon fuels. Trumpism runs on and reeks of them. Predictably, not a single Republican in Congress, and no one in the White House, has uttered a single positive word about the new carbon tax plan.

Nevertheless, the proposal’s intended audience may not be Beltway Republicans, but rather those ordinary Americans, majorities in both parties, who say they want action on climate, and who therefore might yet figure in the political equation over climate policy. That group includes progressives. We should pay attention: Carbon taxes matter.

Our long-building climate crisis is already materializing as drowned coasts, punishing droughts, vanishing glaciers—and political upheaval. At its root is a century-old lie: market prices for gasoline and other fossil fuels that do not factor in the damage from burning them.

A clean energy revolution is at last underway, with wind power, solar electricity, and energy efficiency becoming not only cheaper by the day, but easier to deploy. Still, the clean energy transition will be slowed until prices of coal, oil, and gas reflect their true environmental costs. A carbon tax could do that, if designed properly.

How carbon taxes work is simple enough, at least in theory. Fuel use is infinitely varied and intricately woven into society in ways that regulations such as auto mileage standards can’t fully reach. Clear price signals, on the other hand, can be a nearly magic wand to help billions of invisible hands rapidly reduce and replace fossil fuels.

But with a carbon tax come difficult choices about the vast revenue it will generate. Carbon taxing had a test run at the ballot box last November in the state of Washington, and it ended badly.

On November 8, voters in the Evergreen State rejected by a nearly 3-to-2 margin what would have been the nation’s first statewide carbon tax. A win for “Initiative 732” would have given the United States a carbon tax beachhead, like Canada’s British Columbia, which has had a small but successful carbon tax since 2008.

Remarkably, the decisive factor in defeating I-732 may not have been money from big carbon or even popular aversion to higher taxes, since the initiative was tailored to keep Washingtonians’ tax burden unchanged. What doomed I-732 was a fissure within the climate movement, with centrist economists and other policy wonks in favor of the initiative and progressive greens opposed.

Stated briefly, climate activists in Washington split over opposing answers to two key questions: What are carbon taxes for, and who gets to design them?

Carbon taxes can cut emissions in two ways. As noted above, they raise the price of carbon fuels, thereby worsening their competitive position vis-à-vis cleaner fuels. In addition, the tax revenues raised by a carbon tax can be invested in clean energy infrastructure such as public transit and community solar.

The first path—the “price pull” of boosting market prices of carbon fuels—is what dazzles economists. The second route—the “revenue push” of investing in green infrastructure—appeals to many ordinary folks, especially on the left. Some progressives actively distrust policies that lean hard on price signals, partly for fear that workers in dirty industries will be penalized as investment migrates to cleaner alternatives.

For decades, reactionary forces in the US have been able to block seemingly every new public endeavor by labeling it tax-and-spend. The Washington state carbon tax proponents believed they had an antidote: don’t allow the government to spend the revenues from the carbon tax; rather, use those revenues to reduce other taxes. The political assumption seemed to be that going “revenue-neutral,” though it might frustrate the left—bye-bye public investment—could placate the right or at least capture the center. And so Carbon WA, as the advocates of I-732 called themselves, fashioned its ballot initiative around cuts to the state’s regressive sales tax.

Progressive greens recoiled. The Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy, a state umbrella group of environmental justice organizations and mainstream allies, blasted I-732 for starving green jobs and ignoring frontline communities. So did nationally prominent progressive leaders like Naomi Klein and Van Jones. The measure’s electoral chances, which were never good, could not withstand this split. On election day, as Hillary Clinton was besting Trump in Washington state by half-a-million votes, the carbon tax was rejected, 59 percent to 41 percent.

But progressives can’t just walk away from carbon taxes. Carbon taxes are the only policy tool that, by slashing demand in a rapid, predictable way, divests our economy from fossil fuels and enables governments, business and consumers to make investments in the transition to clean energy. Carbon taxes also have the best chance of catching fire globally.

The carbon tax James Baker brought to the Trump White House on February 8 on behalf of the new Climate Leadership Council has a lot in common with I-732: the Council’s proposal is also avowedly revenue-neutral. But rather than lowering an existing tax, it relies on a so-called tax-and-dividend model: as the state of Alaska does with oil revenues, revenues from the Council’s national carbon tax would be returned equally to all American households in quarterly “dividends” digitally deposited in Social Security accounts. The tax would start at $40 per ton of carbon dioxide.

Earmarking all of the revenue to these dividends creates the political will to raise the tax every year, since the dividends rise in tandem with the tax rate. Ramping up the tax by $5 a year would shrink the use of carbon fuels so drastically that, by my calculations, US carbon emissions in 2030 would be 40 percent less than they were in 2005 (a standard baseline year).

Yet this progress comes with a catch. The Council would phase out much of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority over greenhouse gases and would outright repeal President Obama’s Clean Power Plan to cut emissions from electricity generation. It would also immunize fossil fuel companies from lawsuits for damages done by their products—lawsuits such as those bound to arise from the revelations that ExxonMobil and other companies knew for decades about the climate damages their products cause, and lied about it.

But government policy revolves around trade-offs, and on balance the Council’s carbon tax is worth supporting. After all, well over 80 percent of the Clean Power Plan’s targeted reductions for 2030 were already achieved by the end of 2016. Thus trading away the Clean Power Plan for a tax that could scour fossil fuels from the entire economy is like swapping an aging ballplayer for the next superstar.

Of course, not everyone will see it that way, particularly traditional green groups that helped write the laws and regulations that cleaned up the nation’s air and water. Some will regard the Council’s trade as a ploy to undo the EPA’s authority to protect not just climate—where it may be largely ineffectual anyway—but public health.

With Republicans tightly lashed to climate denial, the value of Baker’s carbon tax proposal may be less as a gateway to legislation and more as a spur for progressives and other citizens to take a clear look at carbon pricing.

Will progressives trust the verdict of economists that a revenue-neutral carbon tax can drive the energy transition so long as the tax level is high enough? Or do we support carbon taxes only if the revenues are invested in the clean energy transition? If so, how do we craft a spending program that reconciles the claims of competing interests? And what is our blueprint for building political power to enact such a carbon tax, when “tax” remains a dirty word in national politics?

Clear majorities of Americans want climate action. Remarkably, some polls have even found that majorities of Americans support carbon taxes like the Climate Leadership Council’s proposal. With the Democrats’ national defeats last November, the failure of climate activists to unite on the Washington state referendum is looking like an unforced error of cruel proportions. We can’t afford to repeat that mistake at the national level.

February 8, 2017, 9:30 a.m. • For Immediate Release

The Carbon Tax Center voiced strong support this morning for a proposal by the Climate Leadership Council to enact a comprehensive nationwide carbon tax starting at $40 per ton of carbon dioxide and rising over time.

The Council is scheduled to release its proposal, “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” at the National Press Club this morning, Wednesday, Feb. 8, at 9:30 a.m.

A $40 per ton tax on carbon pollution starting in 2018 and rising thereafter by $5 per ton each year would, by 2030, reduce annual U.S. CO2 emissions from levels in 2005 (a common baseline year) by an estimated 2.3 billion metric tons, a 40 percent reduction.

Alternatively, measured against a moving “business as usual” trajectory with no national carbon price, the 2030 reductions would be 1.4 billion metric tons a year, or nearly 30 percent of unpriced emissions projected for that year.

(The Council’s proposal envisions that “A sensible carbon tax might begin at $40 a ton and increase steadily over time.” We chose $5/ton as a politically palatable annual rate of increase, and modeled such a tax using our carbon tax model.)

“The robust carbon tax proposed by the Climate Leadership Council would vault the U.S. from the middle to the head of the global pack in reducing heat-trapping, climate-damaging emissions,” said Carbon Tax Center director Charles Komanoff. “It would also provide a template for other nations to follow, creating a real possibility of keeping the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Centigrade or less,” Komanoff said.

Using CTC’s model, Komanoff calculated that the future emissions reduction rate with the Council’s carbon tax would surpass by 50 percent the actual reduction rate since 2005, “a major achievement,” he said, “given that the past reductions were largely enabled by eliminating much coal-burning – the lowest-hanging fruit in eliminating carbon.”

CTC also endorsed the political “swap” in the Council’s proposal to rescind the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. “The important work of the Clean Power Plan was largely completed anyway,” said Komanoff, pointing out that well over 80 percent of the plan’s targeted reduction in electricity-sector emissions for 2030 had already been achieved by the end of 2016. “The proposed carbon tax is the logical and necessary next step,” he said, “instilling incentives throughout the U.S. economy to replace fossil fuels with clean energy.”

CTC further endorsed the Council’s proposal to “dividend” the carbon tax revenues to U.S. households on a quarterly basis. “We’ve studied ‘fee-and-dividend’ for years, and can vouch that it’s the most equitable, least bureaucratic and least corruptible way to distribute the hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue from a carbon tax, while also generating jobs,” Komanoff said.

Komanoff sounded a cautionary note about the dogged resistance of Congressional Republicans to climate action, but added that the Council’s proposal hits all the right marks for a business-friendly, small-government climate policy. “Republicans looking for a way out of their denialist, obstructionist stance on climate have been handed a lifeline,” he said. “Their children and grandchildren are counting on them.”

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About CTC: Since 2007, the Carbon Tax Center has stood at the front lines of the struggle for a sustainable climate and a habitable Earth. Our mission: to generate support to enact a transparent and equitable U.S. carbon pollution tax as quickly as possible — one that rises briskly enough to catalyze virtual elimination of U.S. fossil fuel use within several decades and provides a template and impetus for other nations to follow suit.

Think global, act local. I had that seventies slogan in mind last Sunday morning, at home in lower Manhattan. The pro-immigration rally in Battery Park was a few hours away, the sun was shining, and I walked around the corner to meet up with Erik Torkells, editor of the neighborhood blog, Tribeca Citizen.

Erik had a bag-snagger — a telescoping grappling hook for pulling plastic bags off tree limbs. Like many New Yorkers, he can’t abide the bags and other gossamer debris stuck, like tumors, to our half-a-million street trees. The contraption cost 400 bucks, and when he drew it from its canvas bag I could see why: it had four extenders, a fancy clamp or two, and a fearsome business-end worthy of a stevedore.

Bag snagging, I quickly learned, is serious business. Time-consuming, too. Over the next hour-and-a-half, and even with a big assist from my pal Rachel, who was passing by and gamely joined our little crew, Erik and I could only untangle a few dozen derelict bags from as many trees. And sad to say, we snapped a few spindly tree limbs in the process. (After we posted this, Erik put up a detailed account, Adventures in Bag Snagging; it’s obsessively terrific.)

If only there were a way to keep the bags out of the trees in the first place!

There is, of course, and that’s the main reason I went bag-snagging on Sunday, and why I’ve posted this piece as a Carbon Tax Center blog.

Beginning in February, a NYC local law enacted last spring — Local Law 63 of 2016 — will attach a nickel fee to carryout bags dispensed at supermarkets, grocery and convenience stores, and pharmacies. Shoppers who bring their own bags with them are of course exempt from the charge. Similar fees in dozens of U.S. cities, including San Jose, CA and Washington, DC, have curbed distribution of store bags by over two-thirds, reducing bag litter in gutters, streams and, yes, trees, and saving municipalities millions in trash collection and disposal.

Here in New York, however, implementation of the law was suspended to allow time for, er, more arguing. And now a last-ditch effort to pre-empt the law threatens to undo it before it can get started.

The connection to carbon taxing isn’t so much the petroleum waste from single-use bags, as the principle of charging a fee to encourage efficiency and conservation. To opponents, the fee smacks of punishment. To supporters, it’s a simple prod to finally do what our counterparts in Europe have been doing without grumbling for a century: keep a string or cloth bag with you to stick the groceries in.

In a way, the bag fee fight is the carbon tax struggle stripped to its essence: both policies internalize some of the cost of the harm in its price to incentivize less use. If anything, the bag fee is even more of a no-brainer. There’s no demonstrable burden on the poor. (The NYC law exempts food-stamp users.) There are no shut coal-mines to fret over, no analog to the low-wage worker forced to drive hours each day between two jobs. “You say you use twenty bags a week? Fine, bring your own!”

Sadly, that logic hasn’t worked on a handful of legislators. Perhaps they can’t make the imaginative leap to picture the simple but permanent behavior change. Or maybe they look upon the bag fee as an affront. Either way, the anti-fee forces might actually carry the day. Their repeal bill has cleared the NY State Senate, and now only the Assembly and the Governor stand in the way.

Why fight for the fee when a megalomaniacal demagogue in the White House is persecuting immigrants, refugees and Muslims and preparing to blow up the Paris climate accord? That one’s simple. The battles aren’t either-or, they’re both-and. We can progress on multiple fronts. Later that Sunday, my wife and I rallied with over 10,000 other New Yorkers in Battery Park, against the new administration.

Earlier this month, the New York Times asked Jennie Romer, the activist founder of Plastic Bag Laws, to comment on the rollback effort in Albany. “It seemed to be a very simple incremental policy to make real environmental change,” she told the Times. “And it has turned out to be an incredibly difficult fight.”

Yes, even seemingly incremental progress can be hard as hell. Still, we don’t stop.

If you’re a New York State resident, click here to find your Assemblymember’s contact info.

Bag-snagging photos by Erik Torkells.

Did you march on Saturday? Well over 3 million people did in 500 cities across the U.S., according to the meticulous list compiled by Professors Jeremy Pressman ( U-Conn.) and Erica Chenoweth (University of Denver). A quarter of a million in Chicago. Two hundred thousand in Denver. Twenty thousand in Houston. As many as 750,000 in Los Angeles. Fifteen to twenty thousand in Nashville, and an equal amount in tiny Montpelier, VT. Four hundred thousand in my New York City. Plus another quarter of a million in dozens of countries from Morocco to Mexico.

The resistance to what one observer has labeled “a thin-skinned authoritarian whose only real constituent is himself, and whose intentions, to the extent we can discern them, are to destroy a lot of the things that make this country (truly) great,” has begun with what may have been the largest nationwide explosion of protest in American history.

And, to borrow from our 16th president, “it is altogether fitting and proper” that this new wave of protest was conceived, organized and stamped by women. At the risk of over-generalizing, women incline more than men toward co-operation, mutuality, and inclusivity — attributes that are central to society and survival but are anathema to No. 45.

To quote from the Women’s March Web site:

We stand together in solidarity with our partners and children for the protection of our rights, our safety, our health, and our families – recognizing that our vibrant and diverse communities are the strength of our country… This march is the first step towards unifying our communities, grounded in new relationships, to create change from the grassroots level up… We work peacefully while recognizing there is no true peace without justice and equity for all.

Like most protests, the Women’s Marches had three purposes: for the country and world, including the media, to send a message; for the marchers, to fortify commitment; and for the marchers as well, to instill the belief that we are not alone and that together we can make a difference. From what I saw and felt in New York, and likewise my wife and son in DC and our other son in St. Paul, MN, the women’s marches succeeded brilliantly on all counts.

For once, the multiplicity of causes distilled in tens of thousands of homemade signs didn’t dilute the point — it was the point. Tolerance, diversity and difference — the essence of society and nature alike — are now under attack in America as perhaps never before. And of course science, fact and truth. While it was good to see the occasional “Time to Price Carbon” sign, it was appropriate that climate was just one of hundreds of concerns expressed at the rallies.

(And of course the People’s Climate Mobilization — what 350.org is calling “the launch pad for a larger, nationwide movement to fight fossil fuels at the local level” — is just 14 weeks away, on April 29. Click here to participate and organize.)

If the marchers’ joy and solidarity were stirring counterpoint to the brutalism of the swearing-in of the new regime, I experienced a similarly stark contrast on Inauguration Day. My wife engineered the near-miracle of procuring three tickets to the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and with our son we spent the afternoon there, sheltered from the events unfolding around us in real time.

We spent most of our time in two of the history galleries: Slavery and Freedom 1400-1877, and Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968. This isn’t the venue, nor am I the vehicle, for a full account of the richness of the experience. (For that, I suggest Holland Cotter’s review, The Smithsonian African American Museum Is Here At Last: And It Uplifts and Upsets, and Wesley Morris’s essay, Visiting the African-American Museum: Waiting, Reading, Thinking, Connecting, Feeling, both in the New York Times.)

What I can report is how my immersion at the “Blacksonian” on Friday deepened my understanding of the mercantile nature of slavery. Panels reporting the ship names, flag, voyage dates, and number of slaves who were boarded in Africa and survived the Middle Passage to the Americas drove home with brutal force not just slavery’s vast scope but the web of contractual and monetary arrangements that undergirded it. “Money money money money money” I whispered to my wife as we gazed at these impassive testaments to greed and suffering. Slavery made white America rich.

As we made our way through the Freedom floor, we saw the promises of emancipation yanked away by the KKK, lynchings and Jim Crow. But the exhibits also told of W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and of course the Civil Rights Movement. The story of freedom in America is the story of struggle.

Campaigners for justice have always battled tall odds. I wrote on Nov. 10 that “fighting for a livable planet and a humane society is what I’ve done my whole life. I’m not stopping now, and I know neither are you.” The massive rejection of Trump and the calls for resistance that sounded through the land on Saturday demonstrate without doubt that we’re a movement of millions.

Photographs by the author.

The Republican Convention is over. And it’s fair to wonder if the dream of a bipartisan carbon tax is over as well.

It’s not just the viciously hard-right emotions and ideologies so prominently on view in Cleveland. While those are disturbing enough, they could perhaps be written off as convention fever. But we can’t ignore the persistent absence of palpable climate concern in virtually the entire Republican Party.

Consider A Cure for Trumpism, the high-minded essay by two leading “reform conservatives” that led the New York Times’ Sunday Review section on the eve of the convention. Stretching over 2,000 words, this blueprint for a revitalized Republican Party, by Times columnist Ross Douthat and National Review editor Reihan Salam, never mentioned climate change or global warming.

There’s also the strange case of Jay Faison, the plutocrat whose ClearPath Action Fund, the Times informed us in June, “will spend at least $2 million on digital media campaigns to defend [Republican] Senate incumbents running in two of the tightest races in the country, Rob Portman in Ohio and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.” That’s in “recognition of the senators’ support for clean energy,” Faison told the Times. “ClearPath is also spending several hundred thousand dollars on digital advertising campaigns to support Representatives Carlos Curbelo of Florida and Tom Reed and Elise Stefanik of New York, all Republicans running for re-election in similarly tight races,” the Times noted.

Since Faison routinely lambasts the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan as too regulatory, you would think he backs invisible-hand approaches like taxing carbon. Not so, according to this account in the Daily Caller:

North Carolina philanthropist Jay Faison has come out against taxing carbon dioxide emissions as a conservative solution to both fighting global warming and promoting cleaner sources of energy.

“We don’t need more subsidies and top-down regulation,” Faison told reporters [on March 8] at the National Press Club. “[M]aking traditional energy sources, like coal and natural gas, more expensive is not the way to power innovation in green energy.” (emphasis added)

That’s a zinger, all right — correcting the massive market failure that is unpriced climate pollution means more “top-down regulation.”

So what climate solutions does the GOP’s great green hope support, if not a carbon tax or other price mechanism? Here’s the Daily Caller again:

Faison argued [that] more needs to be done to get rid of burdensome regulations on hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants.

There you have it. Precious few Republicans are willing to publicly support carbon taxing, even in revenue-neutral form. Either climate pales beside real issues like immigration, family-friendly tax reform and foreign policy (Douthat & Salam), or we can cure it, somehow, without resorting to carbon taxes (Faison).

What about the Republican rank-and-file? Evan Lehmann of ClimateWire was at the GOP convention and he spoke about climate with some 51 GOP delegates. Here’s how he distilled their responses:

A Texas delegate tilted his hat back when asked about climate change and said, “Ew.” A delegate from Florida lamented his party’s inaction on warming. And one from Wyoming claims it’s a conspiracy to hide the government’s involvement in the spread of a damaging beetle.

The bad, the good, and the ugly, you might say. (That beetle infestation, by the way, which is devastating lodgepole pines throughout the Rockies, is itself largely a result of climate change.) Not exactly the stuff of a party steeling itself for taxing carbon emissions  — or taking any concerted action on climate.

We could also cite the failure of even a single House Republican to vote against the Scalise Amendment denouncing a carbon tax. And that was in June, after any of them might have had to fear a primary challenge for veering from party orthodoxy.

Their rationale could be Koch Brothers money, or resentment of scientific elites, or, as writer Rebecca Solnit has suggested, an “ideology of isolation” that militates against grasping the interconnectedness at the heart of ecological thinking. Another factor, hinted at by former GOP House member Nan Hayworth in an interview with the Guardian this week, is that Republicans, having ceded the climate issue to Democrats, are now loath to be identified with it:

My former colleagues understand the importance of protecting the environment, but one of the problems is the political opposition from environmental groups and the left is so extreme in some cases, even when they try to move towards environmental points of view they get no credit for it politically.

Really? Republicans would get no political credit for backing effective climate action? With head-spinners like that, it’s hard to disagree with the suggestion last week by veteran Times columnist Tom Friedman that “the best thing that could happen to America [is] that Donald Trump is not just defeated, but is crushed at the polls.”

Friedman was envisioning a “sweeping victory” in which the Democrats not only keep the White House but retake Congress, giving them “a chance to put in place a revenue-neutral carbon tax” without needing a single GOP vote. Whether November goes that way is anybody’s guess, but today’s Republican Party is so tied up in anti-climate knots that it’s hard to see a bipartisan path to the only policy that can drive down emissions fast and far.

Following is the text of my op-ed in today’s New York Daily News. — C.K.

Donald Trump calls global warming a hoax. In a speech on energy last week, he said “75% of our rules and regulations are bad for us.” Lambasting President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, he promised to “save the coal industry,” one of America’s single biggest polluters.

Trump, of course, also says he wants clean air — “beautiful, clean air.” And why wouldn’t he? Clean air has been very good to his businesses.

Not just good, but essential — the secret sauce, you could say, in Trump’s real estate empire. So secret that even he is probably clueless that clean air helped him amass the riches that have placed him one winning campaign from the White House.

The true extent of Trump’s wealth may be murky, but one thing is clear: His financial fortune has been bound up with New York City’s. If not for the city’s revival since the “Drop Dead” 1970s, Trump’s vaunted deals would have been less profitable, his name less marketable and the worldwide branding of his hotels, casinos and golf courses an impossibility.

You may not know it, but New York’s resurgence owes much to its healthier air. The reduction in violent crime has mattered most, of course, along with the striving energy of a million or more immigrants. Improved mass transit and public schools also rank high.

But no one should discount the part played by cleaner air. Over the past half-century, pollution levels in New York City have plummeted, making the air safer to breathe and lending sparkle to the cityscape. Lung bombs from diesel buses have virtually vanished, along with the old meme that breathing here is tantamount to inhaling two packs of cigarettes a day. This striking if unheralded improvement has helped attract and keep young families, startups and empty nesters.

The change in the air is now built into real estate values. Every New York developer and builder has been a big beneficiary, Trump included.

Yet the main agents of that change are anathema to him: scientists, environmentalists and government regulators.

In the mid-20th century, meticulous scientists documented the damages from polluted air, and grass-roots campaigners demanded action. Getting and enforcing regulations took decades, but the changes were impressive, and perhaps nowhere more than in New York City: tailpipe control devices, sulfur reductions in fuel and filters on smokestacks and furnaces. Later came systemic changes like investing in mass transit instead of highways and replacing incineration with recycling.

All were fought as too costly to job-creating businesses. In the end, though, the city didn’t just survive, it thrived. Fortunes were lost in polluting minerals like coal and lead but new ones were made in urban real estate.

The prime environmental challenge today is global warming, which Trump derides as a moneymaking hoax. He should know better.

First, rising seas pose an existential threat to Trump’s New York and Florida holdings. Even beautiful sea walls likely won’t save Manhattan and Miami, and in any event it won’t be Mexico paying for them.

Second, the evidence-based paradigm that catalyzed action on air pollution in the 1950s and 1960s is the very one Trump now ridicules for requiring action on climate change.

Still, Trump is half-right on one point: Global warming, while hardly a hoax, can be a moneymaker. New fortunes will be there for the taking in the solar and wind industries, especially if the next administration makes the fossil fuel industry pay for climate pollution with carbon fees.

The businessman who trumpets his acumen in exploiting the U.S. tax code won’t want to miss out on this big new opportunity if his presidential bid falls short.

Garish “Trump Solar” signs all across America wouldn’t be eyesores but a signal that Trump’s interests have finally aligned with the planet’s — and ours.

Komanoff, an economist, directs the Carbon Tax Center.

“Climate change just keeps getting scarier,” Paul Krugman rightly pointed out in his biweekly New York Times column yesterday. But fear not, he instructs. A “renewable-energy revolution” is brewing in America — one that won’t require threading a carbon tax through the climate-denying GOP Congressional majority.

This “remarkable technological progress in renewable energy,” which Krugman partly credits to Obama administration stimulus and tax breaks that helped wind and solar scale up and drive down costs, has “put the cost of renewable energy into a range where it’s competitive with fossil fuels.” The U.S. will soon be “leading the world” down the low-carbon path, promises Krugman, so long as the presidency, and Obama’s Clean Power Plan, stay out of Republican clutches.

Leaving aside the fact that the global renewables revolution already has a leader (hint: it’s Europe’s largest economy), there are many reasons to question Krugman’s implicit suggestion that the U.S. and the world can banish carbon fuels fast enough to avert catastrophic climate change without a serious carbon tax in the policy mix. Here are a few:

Demand matters (not just supply) — A renewables-only revolution leaves intact the demand side of the carbon equation. Yet human appetites for energy have proven so boundless that, absent robust prices on carbon emissions, energy demand will invariably outrun the output of even optimized solar and wind power systems — at least during the 50-year time horizon in which our climate fate will be decided.

There’s a new climate villain: cheap oil — With gasoline again going for two bucks a gallon, driving is up and fuel economy is down. Even the Obama administration’s vaunted CAFE standards can’t hold back such powerful price signals. Last year’s bump in U.S. cars’ and trucks’ emissions — the CO2 equivalent of nine good-size coal-fired power plants — will be just the beginning, unless we raise fuel taxes.

Scaling up wind and solar isn’t child’s play — To underscore the first point, take a look at the 100%-renewables plan drawn up for New York State (where both Krugman and I happen to live) by a crack team of physicists and engineers from Stanford. Their zero-carbon and zero-nuclear plan requires 17,000 giant offshore and land-based wind turbines to power just half of the state’s transportation, heating, industry and electricity. (The other half of the energy would come from masses of rooftop solar cells, solar PV and thermal plants, plus existing hydro dams.) Cutting that very tall order down to manageable size cries out for a carbon tax.

Tax breaks cost money — Fiscal-scolding isn’t our thing, but someone must pay for Krugman’s touted solar investment tax credits and wind production tax credits — not to mention ethanol mandates. Moreover, energy subsidies are notoriously hard to dislodge (notwithstanding Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory in yesterday’s Iowa Republican caucuses despite his attacks on ethanol subsidies). And it isn’t necessarily the wealthy who foot the bill, as we showed two years ago in our paper comparing carbon taxes with clean-energy subsidies.

We get that Krugman, an implacable foe of Republican know-nothingism since at least the 2000 elections, thinks it’s essential to keep a Democrat in the White House this November. We also appreciate his “tipping point” argument that “Once renewable energy becomes an obvious success and, yes, a powerful interest group, anti-environmentalism will start to lose its political grip.” And we don’t necessarily insist that every climate commentary begin and end with carbon taxes.

But Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics, surely knows that in the race to eliminate fossil fuels, raising their prices will go much further than making renewables cheap. We hope his columns will again make this clear, soon.

“Happy solar voters.” That was the picture caption for the smiling solar-powered family that led David Roberts’ post yesterday, “How inefficient climate policies can build support for efficient ones.”

Roberts, who blogged on energy and climate politics for Grist before moving over to Vox this year, counsels carbon-tax advocates to put “Green Industrial Policy” first. That way, solar and wind assemblers and installers and their happy consumers can develop into constituencies strong enough to prevail over the influence and inertia that will otherwise throttle carbon taxes.

Roberts’ post is of a piece with his long-standing disdain for carbon tax campaigners, and he lectures us here as well, insisting we “get over [our] obsession with carbon pricing.” But it also builds on a new article in Science (subscription required) by researchers at U-C Berkeley who surveyed worldwide progress, or lack thereof, in adopting carbon taxes or cap-and-trade permit schemes. “Of the 54 countries and subnational entities that adopted a carbon pricing scheme by 2013,” they report, “nearly two-thirds installed a Feed-in Tariff or Renewable Portfolio Standard before setting up the pricing scheme.”

That’s good to know, if a bit skeletal. The fact that FIT’s or RPS’s preceded the pricing measures doesn’t prove they had to, though they surely helped lay the foundations. Moreover, if advocates and policymakers chose to start with clean-energy subsidies, it might have been because they hoped positive incentives would be enough to move quickly from carbon fuels.

The more pertinent question, though, is whether the U.S. is now at the political take-off point where carbon-pricing can make it into policy. Wind turbines will account for 5 percent of U.S. electricity this year (and more than 15% in seven states last year), and solar-photovoltaic power is growing like gangbusters, thanks largely to Green Industrial Policy galore: state Renewable Portfolio Standards and federal production tax credits (for wind) and accelerated depreciation (for solar). Are the “demonstration” effect and jobs base from renewables strong enough to make the “winning coalition for climate policy” (that’s the Science article title) the U-C Berkeley authors are calling for?

Let’s hope so. Without a robust carbon tax, zillions of electrons in millions of backyard PV arrays are going to be consumed in-house instead of helping the grid back out fossil-fuel electricity. Without a carbon tax, gas-guzzlers and long commutes will keep “extreme” fossil fuels in business, along with their emissions. Granted, a carbon tax isn’t visually arresting like backyard panels. But the innovation and system changes it will catalyze will be at least as instrumental in getting us off carbon.

Photo: Shutterstock, via Vox.

Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia University’s prestigious Earth Institute, recently weighed in on the carbon-tax debate in the Huffington Post. The results are breathtaking – and not in a good way.

Cohen’s June 8 screed, “A Carbon Tax Is Not Feasible or Practical,” was a riposte to a New York Times editorial two days earlier endorsing a carbon tax as “one of the best policies available” to address global warming. The Times is wrong, says Cohen, as he proceeds to lay out a multi-count indictment. Among his anti-CT arguments are the following:

1. Carbon taxes are politically infeasible: Given the system’s deep hostility to tax hikes, “the space between the carbon tax as a policy idea and the reality of American politics is too vast to overcome. For better or worse, here in America we are in a period of tax policy paralysis that is unlikely to be surmounted anytime soon.”

2. Carbon taxes are unfair: They “cause people on the lower end of the economic ladder to pay a higher portion of their income on energy,” while corrective measures aimed at redistributing the costs “are far from simple to implement, might stigmatize recipients, and would become easy and obvious political targets.”

3. Contrary to The Times, carbon taxes are unequal to the problem of climate change because they would founder on the shoals of international politics: “China and India would need to go along, and given the urgency of their energy and development needs, it is difficult to imagine that they would agree to such a measure.”

4. Carbon taxes are anti-urban: “I sometimes think the push for a carbon tax comes out of an early 20th century environmentalist mindset that scolds people for consumption and living in evil, immoral cities.”

5. Finally, carbon taxes are unnecessary since tax breaks can be just as easily used to encourage alternative energy development: “Why waste time and effort on an infeasible policy that will never happen? Why not devote time and effort to building a real partnership between the public and private sector to create a sustainable economy?”

Careful readers will notice that the first two items are variations on a theme, which is to say the futility of relying on the U.S. political system to pass a well-crafted carbon-tax plan that discourages fossil fuels without burdening workers and the poor. The same can be said for number three, which is about the inability of a beggar-thy-neighbor international system to institute significant reform. Whether the fault lies with Washington, Beijing, or New Delhi, Cohen argues, the point remains that politicians of all nationalities are too selfish and shortsighted to deal intelligently with a carbon tax, so it’s best to forget the whole thing.

Charges four and five are different, so let’s tackle those first. [Read more…]

(Daniel Lazare is a writer living in New York City; his books include The Frozen Republic, The Velvet Coup, and America’s Undeclared War.)

Naomi Klein is not exactly bubbling over with enthusiasm about a carbon tax, and since she has emerged as a leading voice on climate change, it’s worth exploring why. She barely mentions the topic in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, her magnum opus on global warming, and was oddly dismissive in a recent interview with Grist. “I don’t think a carbon tax is a silver bullet,” she said, “but I think a progressively designed carbon tax is part of a slate of policies that we need to make this transition … [to] rapid renewables.” But then she went on to disparage the analysis that is at the core of the carbon-tax argument:

You know, I’ve been making these arguments around economics, but there is nothing more powerful than a values-based argument. We’re not going to win this as bean counters. We can’t beat the bean counters at their own game. We’re going to win this because this is an issue of values, human rights, right and wrong. We just have this brief period where we also have to have some nice stats that we can wield, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what actually moves people’s hearts are the arguments based on the value of life.

So on one hand we have economics, the stuff of “bean counters” and other bloodless sorts, while on the other we have values and morality. A carbon tax would be beneficial, but since we will never beat the economic analysts on their own turf, there’s no point even trying. Instead, we should concentrate on things that stir the soul, such as human rights.

Or so Klein maintains. But there’s something off-putting about such arguments. The distinction between economic analysis and morality, for instance, smacks of anti-intellectualism. Not only are head and heart separate and distinct in Klein’s world, but there’s no question as to which is on top. But her view of a carbon tax is also incorrect. It’s not for bean counters only. Like any real-world phenomenon, a carbon tax is multi-dimensional, which means that it has not only an economic component but a political and moral aspect as well.

How so? Everyone knows what the purpose of a carbon tax is. It’s to internalize the externalities, to take the growing costs associated with fossil fuels and bundle them into the price of such fuels so that the individuals using them have a more accurate idea of how much a specific activity truly costs. When drivers understand how expensive gasoline really is when all the attendant costs are taken into account, then they’ll treat it with the respect it deserves.

This is the sort of economic wonkery that no doubt leaves Klein cold. But it is not only an economic argument. Externalities include not only environmental and congestion costs and the like, but such items as the cost of insuring an uninterrupted flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. Expenditures like these aren’t trivial, needless to say. Indeed, one study published in Energy Policy puts them at a stunning $7 trillion for the years 1976-2007, not including the Iraq War, which, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, may wind up costing $3 trillion more. [Read more…]