“We have now disproved the idea that we’re never, in this country, going to tax or charge a significant environmental harm.” That quote, uttered by me this morning to a writer for Earther magazine, is as good a lead-in as any to tell you about an historic victory in New York that I view as a big shot in the arm for carbon taxing.

This past weekend, the state legislature approved a far-reaching, first-time-in-this-hemisphere plan to charge vehicles driven in the heart of a big city — mid and lower Manhattan in this instance — a congestion fee. While the bill punts key details to a new city-state panel, the contours are clear enough: driving a private car into the “congestion zone” south of 60th Street will cost as much as $12 during peak hours, with higher fees for trucks. When the plan starts up, in January 2021, traffic in the zone is expected to thin enough to raise travel speeds in the zone by 12-15%; that figure will rise as the estimated billion dollars a year in congestion revenues (paid by the remaining vehicles) are invested in modernizing the subways.

As most Carbon Tax Center followers and supporters know, I worked hard for this win. Over the past dozen years I spent 5,000 hours (!) creating and deploying a spreadsheet model that is kaleidoscopic enough to calculate the traffic and revenue and environmental benefits of any Manhattan pricing scheme, yet transparent and nimble enough to be used by other Excel jockeys — including the consultants that the governor’s office hired to scope out congestion pricing. I also wrote scores of posts for Streetsblog, the scrappy and admirable blog that is a nerve center for NYC’s “livable streets” community, each post aimed at steeling advocates on some aspect of congestion pricing math, policy and politics.

I say this not to tout my role. The forces that coalesced behind congestion pricing and made it unstoppable were immense, as they had to be to bring along the governor and legislature in the face of widespread cynicism, apathy, resentment and motor-worship. There were scores, then hundreds, then thousands of advocates pushing for this. That said, I believe that my years of calculations, both mathematical and political, lend some gravity to my thoughts on the meaning of this victory.

New York’s enactment of congestion pricing is a big win for climate. Not in the sense of immediately reducing carbon emissions. By itself, the charging scheme will eliminate only around a million tons of CO2 a year (half by reducing vehicle use, and half by diminishing stop-and-go traffic). That’s a mere 1/5,000 of U.S. emissions. But it will make New York — and other U.S. cities, if they follow suit — more fair, civilized and prosperous. That will help shrink the country’s carbon footprint by fostering growth in “inherently green” (smaller-footprint) cities rather than sprawled-out suburbs and exurbs, as Jeff Blum and I pointed out last month in The Nation (and on this blog).

But an even bigger payoff lies, I believe, in establishing the precedent of finally taxing an environmental harm. With congestion pricing, the harm being taxed isn’t emissions, it’s traffic congestion (more technically, each vehicle’s “congestion causation” from abetting the slowing of traffic). The same principle — the most direct way to effectuate less of something is to price it at its true cost — animates carbon taxing.

Society is concluding at last that carbon emissions must be shrunk,  rapidly and radically. That requires (i) intelligently regulating sources of emissions (building codes, efficiency standards), (ii) judiciously subsidizing evolving alternatives (wind, solar), (iii) researching and developing promising new low-carbon demand and supply technologies, and (iv) taxing fossil fuels so that their climate damage figures in their price.

U.S. states and, at times, the national government haven’t done a bad job on the first three. But we’ve never done the last:  taxing fossil fuels’ carbon content and emissions. Indeed, we’ve never explicitly taxed any large-scale environmental harm. And the double defeat of carbon tax initiatives in Washington state made it easy to lose hope that we ever would.

Now, the enactment in New York of a plan that frontally taxes a major societal harm — driving in a congested (and transit-rich) city center — has disproved the idea that substantially taxing an environmental harm is impossible in the U.S. We can put that particular bit of defeatism to rest.

To be sure, enacting a national carbon tax remains a far heavier lift than a single city or state passing congestion pricing. While regional factionalism — between Manhattan and the boroughs, between NYC and its suburbs — was a big hurdle, congestion pricing’s lesser scale allowed the transit benefits from the congestion revenues to take center stage in the advocacy campaign.

Indeed, subway relief paid for with congestion tolls emerged as a far more powerful organizing theme than congestion relief itself. So be it. The takeaway is to make a publicly guided, investment-based program — a Green New Deal — the rubric for tackling climate change and enacting a robust carbon tax as both a pay-for and a powerful change agent.

We’ll post more about that in the coming weeks. For now, it’s fair to say that carbon taxing for the U.S. has taken a major step forward. With enactment of congestion pricing for New York City, the road to a carbon tax and meaningful climate policy has definitely gotten clearer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did any group of incumbent politicians fare as badly in yesterday’s midterms as the Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus? That seems unlikely, given the staggering dimensions of the electoral debacle inflicted on them (all figures apply only to the Congressional group’s Republican members):

• 15 members lost their re-election bids (includes cliffhanger defeats of GOP incumbents Mia Love (UT-04) and Tom MacArthur (NJ-3)).
• That’s out of 35 members who were seeking re-election (another 7 stood down, 1 lost his GOP primary, and we exclude 2 members from U.S. territories).
• The loss rate for caucus members — 43 percent — wildly exceeds the roughly 10-15 percent loss rate for Republican House incumbents overall.*
• Caucus members accounted for around half of GOP incumbents’ House losses. (That total, still hard to pin down, appears to be around thirty.)
• With the 15 losses and 8 retirements, the 43-member Republican half of the caucus will dwindle in January to well under half, 20.

[* = Calculating the overall GOP incumbent loss rate isn’t simple, since it requires separating Republicans who stood down from those who ran and lost on Nov 6. District-specific results posted by the Cook Political Report by David Wasserman and Ally Flinn may help. Ditto, Ballotpedia.]

One of the defeated Congressmembers was caucus co-founder and spearhead Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), who was edged out by Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a political newcomer.

Meanwhile, “No Democratic members of the climate caucus lost their reelection bids,” ThinkProgress reported, “although two Democratic members are retiring and one is running for a higher office.”

It is true that Republican caucus members on the whole were more vulnerable than other Republican incumbents, for two separate if complementary reasons. One, deep-red districts where climate concern is relatively low tend to be harder for Democrats to wrest from Republicans. Two, some Republicans whose electoral standing was shaky to begin with saw the caucus as a way to bolster their campaigns. For an effective price of zero, these members could signal their independence from Republican denialism and thus burnish their appeal to Democrats and so-called Independents.

These points aren’t new to readers of this blog. We first conveyed our skepticism of caucus sincerity in June, with a post, Another Carbon-Dividend Group. Will It Matter?, and followed that a month later with Last Chance to Believe In a Republican-Assisted Carbon Tax? As the midterms approached and GOP incumbents lashed themselves ever tighter to the White House denialist-in-chief, we let loose with the more cynical, “Climate Caucus” greenwashing in full force as midterms approach, in September.

In between, we gave caucus co-founder Curbelo his props with Unicorn or Harbinger? A Republican Carbon Tax Is Readied for Debut. We concluded by remarking that with Curbelo’s introduction in July of a carbon tax bill, a GOP first:

A “long national nightmare” of Republican silence and inaction on climate may be starting to end. Whether other G.O.P. lawmakers will stand with Curbelo remains to be seen. He is at least blazing a path, and for that he deserves our thanks.

Alas, Curbelo’s path was never more than a faint trail. The current Republican Party — which a year-and-a-half ago we labeled “a racket to restore patriarchy, extractionism and white supremacy” — wasn’t about to forsake Trump and the Koch Brothers and coal barons for a “unicorn” Republican Congressmember.

Whither the Climate Solutions Caucus, leaderless and downsized by half? (The disappearance of 22 caucus R’s means that 22 D’s will have to leave as well, to conform to its “Noah’s Ark” makeup whereby each Democrat requires a Republican counterpart, lest the caucus’s vaunted “bipartisan” brand be diluted.)

We expect the caucus will disappear. Not just because its membership is being cut in half but because its uselessness has been fully laid bare. In today’s tribal politics, national-level Republicans can’t evince climate concern except as a token gesture, if that. They certainly can’t act on it by, say, renouncing Trump’s renunciation of the Paris climate agreement, or calling for a national carbon tax or fee. Heresy of that sort guarantees being cast out of the party’s belly and into the political wilderness.

Shed a tear, then, for Carlos Curbelo, but only briefly. The Democratic takeover of the House is worth an eternity of Republican caucus members’ feints, signalings or even token bills. As CNN’s John Harwood tweeted today, the House vote “was an all-or-nothing binary — power or no power. [The] Dem[ocrat]s won power.”

One result: There will be fact-finding congressional hearings, on issues from Russia to climate. If we push hard enough, these will include examination of carbon taxing. Climate activists everywhere — in the U.S. and around the world — will be heartened and emboldened to demand and win real climate action, not lip service.

May 2020 addendum: Click here for Citizens Climate Lobby’s current list of Climate Solutions Caucus members. The same list but with photos is available on the Web site of CSC Democratic member Rep. Ted Deutch.

“House Republican will introduce $23 climate fee next week.” That’s the headline of an article today in E&E News reporting that Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a two-term Republican representing Florida’s 26th Congressional District, is finalizing a bill that would impose a carbon-emissions fee on most U.S. fossil fuel-burning sectors and also eliminate or at least pause some federal regulations on climate change.

(Update: The Curbelo bill was introduced on July 23 as H.R. 6463, the Market Choice Act.)

E&E calls Curbelo’s pending bill “a rare effort by a Republican to address global temperature increases by reducing greenhouse gases.” That’s an understatement. To the best of our recollection, the bill would be the first carbon tax proposed by a sitting G.O.P. Congressmember or Senator in roughly a decade.

Politically, then, the appearance of Curbelo’s bill will be a big deal. In terms of straight-up carbon reductions, however, the bill is underwhelming. Our quick take from inputting the bill’s key elements into CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model is that in 2020, U.S. CO2 emissions would be 22% below 2005 levels. To put that in perspective, actual U.S. emissions a year ago were 14% less than in 2005; thus, the 2020 bump from the Curbelo bill is at most 8 percentage points — less, actually, given the ongoing decarbonization of our electricity sector. (The Congressman’s draft fact sheet for the bill optimistically pegs the 2020 reduction at 24%.)

By 2032, the emissions drop from 2005 would reach 30% (per Curbelo) or 29% (per our modeling). But seeing as nearly half of that decrease was already in place without a carbon tax in 2017 — a year that is closer to the 2005 base year than to 2032 — the Curbelo proposal has to be seen as fairly thin on actual climate deliverables. Which is what one would expect from a carbon price that barely exceeds $20 per ton (the bill’s $23 starting price is per metric ton) and rises by only 2% a year above general inflation, although the bill contains a provision to ratchet up the increase if reductions fall short of specified targets.

Nevertheless, there’s a bigger picture to consider. Just yesterday we put up a post bemoaning the possibility that the anti-carbon-tax Scalise Resolution would pass, as it did in 2016, without a single Republican dissent. Now it looks like Rep. Curbelo is set to dissent in spades by shattering the decade-long G.O.P. prohibition against sponsoring or endorsing — let alone introducing — a carbon-tax bill.

If any D.C. Republican was going to take such a step, it was likely to be Carlos Curbelo. His 26th CD, extending from southwest Miami to the Everglades and covering the Florida peninsula’s entire southern tip, is a climate ground-zero twice over — sea-level rise plus hurricanes — and a classic swing district (it went blue by double-digits in the last two presidential races). A year after taking his seat in January 2015, Curbelo co-founded the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus with fellow Floridian Ted Deutch, a Democrat representing the 22nd CD. Whether by conscience or calculation or a combination of the two, Curbelo clearly read the handwriting and elected to break ranks with his party’s denialist orthodoxy.

The Curbelo bill itself is full of political calculation, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It would clear the books of the long-standing federal highway excise taxes — 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline, 24.4 cents for diesel. The carbon tax, with its built-in annual increases, would more than make up the difference, though at the cost of a percentage point or two of economy-wide carbon reductions due to the diluting effect of the swap. The Highway Trust Fund would be a big net winner, receiving 70 percent of the entire revenue take. Whether that’s bad or good depends on whether the increased revenue is allocated to highway expansions or “fix-it-first” infrastructure repairs.

Carbon-dividend proponents continue, as ever, to push for national “fee and dividend” legislation. Today the Washington, DC-based Climate Leadership Council announced formation of a lobbying arm, Americans for Carbon Dividends, headlined by former Senate Republican majority leader Trent Lott, former Senator John Breaux (D-LA) and former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. This follows the news last month that the Climate Solutions Caucus — a project spearheaded by the grassroots Citizens Climate Lobby — has enrolled four new Republican House members, bringing total membership to 78 — 39 R’s and 39 Dem’s (with each new Republican, a Democrat is brought in from a waiting list).

If tenacity trumped reality, CLC and CCL would now be refining their fee-and-dividend proposals into Congressional bills and shepherding them through hearings, markup and, ultimately, legislation. Within a decade of enactment, the money-saving and profit-driven replacement of carbon-belching coal, petroleum and natural gas by low- and zero-carbon fuels, technologies and cultural norms would have pushed U.S. carbon emissions 27 percent below current levels and 36 percent below 2005, the standard baseline year in climate analysis, easily fulfilling our country’s Paris climate pledge. (Figures are based on our modeling of U.S. energy, assuming CLC’s recommended starting CO2 price of $40 per ton, followed by annual rate increases of $5/ton; details here.)

Alas, reality doesn’t bend so easily. Especially when it comes in the guise of a Congress ruled by, as it is often said, Earth’s only major political party (among democratically run countries) that has sworn itself to disbelieve in human-caused climate change and to disavow the necessity or possibility of public policy to combat it. At this writing, 17 months into the Trump administration and 28 months since the Climate Solutions Caucus was founded, not a single Republican member has uttered a word of support for carbon fee-and-dividend legislation, much less written or co-sponsored a CFD-themed bill — even though, from the outset, the political strategy behind CFD has been built on bipartisanship.

By the same token, the impressive list of Republican luminaries standing with CLC/ACD consists entirely of former office-holders: former Sen. Lott, former Reagan and Bush-41 cabinet secretaries James Baker and George Shultz (the latter’s cabinet service actually extends back to the Nixon presidency), and others whose glittering credentials are shown on the CLC and ACD web sites.

This isn’t meant to disparage these organizations or individuals (excepting current GOP office-holders). We have written glowingly of the fee and dividend concept for a decade, including last year in articles in The Nation and the Washington Spectator. Both pieces praised the Climate Leadership Council’s advocacy, as have our numerous blogs (here, here, and here, inter alia). We were honored to gain George Shultz’s signature on our 2015 Call to Paris Climate Negotiators: Tax Carbon, and are stirred that, in his 98th year, Secretary Shultz continues to devote himself to climate sustainability on behalf of both CLC and Citizens Climate Lobby. We have also worked closely with CCL since its formation in 2009, fielding hundreds of queries from CCL activists on tax incidence, energy modeling and other “technical” matters and gratefully accepting financial contributions from CCL members as well.

So it’s with a measure of sadness that we share here our sense that the time for carbon dividend proposals has probably passed. The center to which Baker-Shultz (CLC) and fee-and-dividend (CCL) were designed to appeal barely exists. It’s not just that no sitting Republican has endorsed Baker-Shultz or indeed fee-and-dividend in any form. It’s also that the Democratic majority that will be needed to pass a carbon tax bill appears unlikely to rally around a revenue-neutral carbon tax, whether it’s organized as fee-and-dividend or some form of tax swap.

To be sure, the Democratic majority’s carbon tax — if and when there is one — may include a degree of “dividending,” but only of a portion of the revenues. That’s because a Democratic carbon tax bill will also insist on directly investing much of the carbon revenues: in renewables, energy-efficiency, mass transit, worker resettlement and retraining, and damage mitigation — rather than relying on the price pull from the tax. (A textbook example of such a “just transition” bill is the state carbon tax proposal developed by NY Renews, the energetic left-leaning grassroots coalition in New York State.)

There’s nothing wrong with that, provided such a carbon tax can pass and that its tax level rises quickly enough over time to overcome the lesser price-sensitivities (“elasticities”) that govern driving, freight, air travel and the like, which make it harder for carbon-pricing to drive down emissions in the economy’s non-electric sectors. But of course a good deal of the intended appeal of carbon dividend plans was that households, with politicians following in their wake, might support raising the carbon tax because the size of their dividend checks would rise in tandem. Diluting the dividends weakens the appeal.

And revenue-neutrality isn’t the only flashpoint lurking in the CLC-ACD proposal. Another element of the deal — one that has won a measure of oil-industry support — would immunize fossil fuel companies against litigation seeking to hold them accountable for climate damage caused by their products. Earlier today, a leading strategist and backer of such litigation, Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund, told the NY Times that “We categorically oppose any deal that shoves trillions in costs down the throats of innocent taxpayers and lets the companies skip away to profit and deceive another day.”

While sentiments like Wasserman’s help rouse the climate base, they don’t point to a policy solution. Like the polar icecaps themselves, the center that would support a revenue-neutral carbon tax or other carbon-tax-based “grand bargain” continues to shrink. As the horrors of the Trump administration and its Congressional Republican enablers continue to mount, there’s no apparent middle ground, whether in climate and carbon-taxing or in any consequential policy-making.

We can commend the ACD initiative — which former Senators Lott and Breaux have detailed in a New York Times op-ed — while bemoaning its lack of political currency. The political struggle to contain climate change has moved to the courts and to the state and local levels. If and when a semblance of sanity returns to Congress and the White House, that state and local mobilization will be critical to enacting the carbon tax and complementary policies necessary to achieve deep cuts in emissions.

Note: A month after we published this post, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), introduced a carbon-tax bill — the first from a Republican member of Congress in a decade — as we reported here.

33 to 28. It may look like a football score, but it’s actually the downsizing of the Republican side of the Climate Solutions Caucus.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA-49) this morning announced he’s not seeking an eleventh term representing northern coastal areas of San Diego County in Congress. He joins departing GOP caucus members Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-27), Dave Reichert (R-WA-08), Ed Royce (R-CA-39) and Pat Tiberi (R-OH-12).

Unless new members are recruited from current House ranks, the caucus’s roster of Republican members is set to fall from its current 33 to 28 by year’s end. The pending 15 percent shrinkage surpasses the overall 9 percent retirement rate among Republican House members this year. (We count 21 of 240 House R’s leaving, excluding a dozen or so moving or aspiring to higher office, based on Ballotpedia.) GOP Caucus members disproportionately represent swing districts, like Issa’s, possibly explaining the difference.

The Noah’s Ark-like conclave — Republican and Democratic Congressmembers enter as pairs, with Republicans the limiting factor — was founded in Jan. 2016 to provide a safe space and political cover for timorous Republicans to act on climate change. To date it’s been mostly cover and little action.

None of the Republican members have uttered a word in favor of carbon taxing, even the intendedly Republican-friendly “fee and dividend” espoused by the caucus’s catalyst, Citizens Climate Lobby, or the carbon dividend proposal devised by the Climate Leadership Council and advanced by Republican elders. Since Trump took office, moreover, none has fought legislation or deregulation enabling the administration’s fossil fuel juggernaut, save for squelching language in the National Defense Authorization Act that would have barred the Pentagon from analyzing climate threats to U.S. military installations.

It may seem incongruous that Issa, whose lifelong loathsomeness (full details at Wiki) has run the gamut from petty thievery and dangerous driving to obsessive Obama-bashing, not to mention amassing riches from his blaring, motion-detecting “Viper” car alarm, would have joined the Climate Solutions Caucus. There is no entrance criterion, however. That can be viewed as either a bug, enabling joiners to rack up green cred at no cost, or a feature, helping Republicans who might be seeking to exit the cult of climate denialism incubate pro-climate words and, eventually, deeds.

Both perspectives got a hearing in a feature article on the caucus last week in E&E News, A bunch of House Republicans accept warming. Is it real? Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune spoke for the first group, rhetorically asking, “[W]e are supposed to jump up and down and spew happy talk because now there’s a safe space for people to talk about climate change? Forgive me if I’m not happy.” Others quoted in the story, such as Emily Wirzba of Friends Committee on National Legislation, cited the need to rest climate policy on a bipartisan base, saying “The policy will be stronger even if Democrats take control of Congress, you know you’ll have Republicans that support climate policy.”

Defenders of the caucus also point to victories like inclusion of renewable energy credits (RECs) in the Tax Extender Act of 2017 (S-2256), pleas by Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA-6) and other caucus members to bar oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters or the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and a vote by 11 caucus Republicans that ultimately led the Senate to protect the Bureau of Land Management’s natural gas waste rule to prevent methane venting/flaring. Measured against the full dimensions of the climate crisis, however, these appear little more than baby steps. And measured against Trump’s drumbeat of deregulatory and verbal assaults on climate protection and policy, like his dizzying attack of falsehoods today on the Paris climate agreement, the positive moves by GOP caucus members pale even further.

Nevertheless, Issa and the caucus’s other lame-duck Republican members have a rare opportunity: a full year still in office to speak their minds on climate (or other issues) without fear of being primaried by unabashedly denialist insurgents. They could push back against Trump’s climate lies and call on their party to assume its Rooseveltian mantle of environmental stewardship. In doing so, they could set a standard for their 28 Republican colleagues who hope to keep their seats and, by their caucus membership, have ostensibly committed themselves to pursuing climate solutions.

Let’s hope they do. Otherwise, it becomes even harder to rebut the argument that the path to a better and safer world requires a Democratic sweep of the House, including Republican caucus members, in this year’s midterms.

Could Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s declaration in August that congestion pricing for New York City “is an idea whose time has come” bring needed momentum to carbon taxing?

A strong thread connects congestion pricing and carbon taxes. Just as limited street space in New York warrants a congestion fee, the atmosphere’s limited capacity to absorb carbon necessitates a carbon emissions fee.

Congestion pricing levies fees on vehicle travel into or within the core of a city. Singapore, London and Stockholm have deployed such fees for decades to discourage unnecessary traffic and raise revenue to improve transit and road infrastructure.

I’ve been quantifying the benefits of congestion pricing for New York City city and mobilizing public support for well over a decade. The campaign I’m allied with, called Move NY, proposes tolling car and truck traffic into Manhattan’s central business district, surcharging yellow cabs and Ubers circulating within the CBD, and lowering tolls on outlying bridges that have been used as cash cows to fund transit.

The governor controls the city’s mass transit, and political tradition dictates that congestion pricing legislation must run through Albany. Since Cuomo’s “August surprise” — he rebuffed the idea throughout his tenure as governor — I’ve re-directed my advocacy from carbon taxes to congestion pricing.

That’s a shift in venue but not in philosophy. Both types of fees incentivize all of us who would fire up fossil fuels or occupy road space to do so sparingly. They also help bring forth investment and innovation in alternatives: renewables and efficiency in the case of carbon; transit, cycling and density in the case of urban transport.

A congestion charge for New York will establish in America the foundational principle for a carbon tax: safeguarding our climate and other public goods requires that we charge for uses that damage or deplete it.

Cuomo’s announcement also validates conservative luminary Milton Friedman’s dictum about crises and change:

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

How has the political impossibility of congestion pricing in New York given way to an air of inevitability? As Friedman prescribed, a crisis was required. It came this year, as a twin storm of gridlocked streets and cascading subway delays. But years of concerted advocacy were required to blast through political inertia and lay the crisis at Cuomo’s doorstep.

And true to Friedman’s dictum, NYC advocates for transit and livable streets have developed alternatives: the Move NY plan has dozens of elements that together can unsnarl the streets and modernize transit, as the New York Times reported last month in this profile of the “three amigos” leading the plan: traffic guru “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, political campaigner (and CTC board chair) Alex Matthiessen, and myself.

We don’t yet know if Cuomo’s congestion proposal, which is expected next month, will be strong medicine or weak tea. But as one long-term advocate said last week, the argument is no longer whether to charge a congestion price, but how much.

The lesson for climate campaigners is clear: our job is to keep building the philosophical and political groundwork for carbon taxing.

That way, when the seeming political impossibility of carbon taxing gives way to the aura of inevitability, the carbon tax that emerges can be robust, comprehensive and fair.

In the meantime, if you live or work in New York City or State, voice your support your city and state rep’s and urge them to support the Move NY congestion pricing plan.

Join and work with Move NY’s grassroots partners such as Riders Alliance, Transportation Alternatives, the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. (More are listed here.)

And don’t stop organizing, teaching and advocating for U.S. carbon taxes.

The trope shown at left, about Trump “holding the planet hostage,” isn’t entirely new. But it came into sharper relief for me over the weekend as I read Robert Jay Lifton’s insightful new book, The Climate Swerve. And it gave added weight to the apostasy of a ranking Republican senator who earlier this month told the New York Times that Trump’s bluster toward North Korea may be setting the United States “on the path to World War III.”

The senator issuing the warning was Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His words capped a 10-day raging argument in which Trump ridiculed Corker’s decision not to seek a third term next year, and Corker tweeted that “the White House has become an adult day care center” struggling to keep its main occupant in check. “He concerns me,” the senator said of the president. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Corker’s blunt talk about Trump brought to mind his independent stance on climate in the months following the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The defeated GOP candidate, Senator John McCain, had been a backer of carbon cap-and-trade, as were many Congressional Democrats and nearly all of the major environmental organizations. Corker took a minority view, speaking out in favor of carbon taxing in a January 2009 hearing before the Foreign Relations Committee:

I wish we would just talk about a carbon tax, 100 percent of which would be returned to the American people. So there’s no net dollars that would come out of the American people’s pockets.

Not everyone back then viewed Corker as a straight shooter. Grist blogger David Roberts lambasted him for “talk[ing] his way inside the carbon policy tent and now … trying to burn it down” by diverting support from cap-and-trade. But the New Republic’s Brad Plumer insisted that “Bob Corker [is] making sense … for a fruitful conservative position” that’s revenue-neutral and transparent. (Roberts now blogs for Vox while Plumer writes for The New York Times.) Indeed, it’s not much of a stretch to credit Corker’s 2009 words as the launch pad for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s fee-and-dividend idea and its recent offshoot, the Climate Leadership Council’s carbon dividends approach.

Unfortunately, carbon taxing didn’t advance beyond the fringe in either political party, and climate rejection soon became an element of Republican tribal identity, leading Corker to give up on carbon taxes and on climate generally. And for more than a decade few public figures had much to say about nuclear weapons and the specter of nuclear war. That began to change this year with the launch of nuclear-capable missiles by North Korea and Trump’s vow that if “North Korea … make[s] any more threats to the United States, they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Trump has also repudiated the Paris climate agreement and taken steps to annul the Obama Clean Power Plan and to greenlight fossil fuel development across North America. Humankind now is staring at not one but two “apocalyptic twins,” in Lifton’s words: a nuclear threat and a climate threat. Both the parallels and differences between the two are the subject of Lifton’s new book, Climate Swerve, which appears in the immediate wake of climate furies that have devastated Houston, Puerto Rico and Northern California.

Lifton, a psychiatrist who turned 90 last year, has long observed, lived among and written about the perpetrators and victims of some of the 20th Century’s most profound atrocities — the atomic bombings of Japan, the Vietnam War and, of course, the Nazi Holocaust. His writing humanizing the hibakusha (literally, “explosion-affected people”) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his explorations of the “malignant normality” embodied in the Cold War policy of “mutually assured destruction” galvanized public and political support for both the Kennedy-Khrushchev 1963 ban on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing and the Reagan-Gorbachev 1987 agreement eliminating short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

It was only recently, however, that Lifton turned his attention to climate change. His brand-new book, eloquent and spare, has two tracks. In one he encourages what he calls the climate swerve — humanity’s “evolving awareness of our predicament” as we collectively cause, and face, climate ruin. In the other he seeks to bring to climate consciousness his perspective on what was, at least until this year, mankind’s turn from the brink of nuclear ruin.

This passage (slightly edited for readability, emphasis added in bold) is emblematic:

Nuclear and climate threats are separate and different from each other. With nuclear weapons, the mind must contemplate specific things — bombs that bring about revolutionary dimensions of blast, heat, and radiation. The imagined catastrophe is immediate and decisive, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provides a model of unprecedented slaughter and suffering. With climate threat, the mind encounters no new physical entities or things, but rather an incremental sequence of an increasingly inhospitable habitat, a progression rather than an explosion, and a series of projections of what can be expected, as opposed to a clear display of ultimate destruction.

Nevertheless, an irony — and a strangely hopeful one — of Lifton’s book is that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have produced, for all who care to see, painfully “clear displays of ultimate destruction.” Lush Puerto Rican farmlands and woodlands flattened and laid barren are now literally concrete, as are obliterated California vineyards. Lifton himself put these facts front and center in an op-ed for The New York Times earlier this month (emphasis added):

Climate images have never been able to convey our full planetary danger until now. The extraordinary recent four-punch sequence of hurricanes … threatened the lives of millions of people, obliterated their homes and has raised doubts that some places will ever recover … The hurricanes … provided imagery equivalent to the danger, imagery equivalent to nuclear disaster. When we viewed photographs and film of the annihilated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we sensed that the world could be ended by nuclear weapons. Now these hurricanes have conveyed a similar feeling of world-ending, having left whole islands, once alive in their beauty and commerce, in ruin.

I imagine I’m not the only one brought to tears but also galvanized by those words. They appeared in print on the same Sunday morning, October 8, that Bob Corker called the New York Times to warn about Trump putting us “on the path to World War III.”

While there may not be a direct line from Lifton’s op-ed to Corker’s speaking out, both of their testimonies are proof that we’re not hostages. We still have voices, and both the advance of climate ruin and the renewed chances of nuclear ruin require that we raise them. Republican voices like Corker’s are especially critical, but anyone with power and a pulpit shouldn’t hesitate to use them. And for the rest of us, a letter to our local paper, a Facebook post, or plain old face-to-face sharing can help others grasp the gravity of the risks we are living with and how we can overcome them.

(This post was researched and co-authored by CTC volunteer Diane Englander.)

A prominent Minnesota politician is hitching her candidacy for governor to a carbon dividend plan designed to reduce climate-damaging emissions and create jobs in clean energy.

State Auditor Rebecca Otto unveiled her Minnesota-Powered Clean Energy Plan on Sept. 20. The landing page of her gubernatorial campaign website depicts her on a rooftop driving home a solar inverter with a socket wrench. “Rebecca Otto walks the talk,” the page proclaims, urging voters to elect “a Governor who will actually do something about climate change.”

Otto’s plan is centered on a carbon charge that would begin at $40 per metric ton of CO2 and increase by 10% each year — a trajectory steep enough to cut carbon emissions by almost 30 percent (below 2005 levels) within a decade if applied nationally, according to CTC’s carbon tax model (Excel file), though not as much if applied only in a single state.

Three-fourths of the carbon revenues from Otto’s proposal would fund “Quarterly Clean Energy Cash Dividends” that Otto estimates will pay $600 a year to every Minnesota resident, with the dividend growing in tandem with the rising carbon price. The remaining 25% of the new revenue would fund “Clean Energy Refundable Tax Credits” for up to 30% of the cost of household energy-efficiency investments including electric cars, solar panels, triple-pane windows and insulation, and heat pumps.

The tax credits will “create tens of thousands of good-paying new private-sector jobs — often paying more than $80,000 per year — in every community across Minnesota,” Otto says, with “the work able to be financed with no money down” in many cases.

The 54-year-old Otto is one of six aspirants to the nomination of the state Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Minnesota Democratic Party organization has been known since the 1940s. Others include a U.S. Representative and the Mayor of St. Paul. Local newspapers suggest as many as a dozen Republicans may also contend to replace Gov. Mark Dayton, the two-term incumbent who is not seeking re-election. The race is viewed as “wide open” by Carleton College political scientist Steven Schier.

An Illinois native who now lives in the small town of Marine on St. Croix, northeast of the Twin Cities, Otto is serving her third consecutive four-term as state auditor. In 2006 she handily defeated the incumbent Republican, then won by a squeaker in 2010, becoming the only Democrat ever re-elected to the office. In her 2014 re-election she won by her widest margin to date, outpacing Gov. Dayton by six percentage points.

Otto’s plan is a variant of the fee and dividend approach espoused by the non-partisan Citizens’ Climate Lobby and, more recently, the Republican-leaning Climate Leadership Council. It charges fossil fuel providers a fee pegged to their fuels’ carbon content and returns revenues to households as equal “dividends.” Her 25% allocation to clean energy tax credits can be seen as a pragmatic concession to business and job concerns that invariably arise in state-level carbon-pricing campaigning.

Otto is arguably the highest-profile U.S. political candidate to attach a campaign to an explicit and transparent price on carbon. She says that her 11 years as state auditor have taught her that Minnesotans want economic opportunity along with solutions to pressing problems such as climate change. She also views her program as a counterweight to “fossil fuel interests [that] spend billions to control our democracy and sow doubt and confusion [to] protect their profits at the expense of Americans.”

Minnesota has a history of seeking to address climate change. In the 1990s, state activists including the St. Paul-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance mounted a campaign for a billion-dollar state “tax shift” to reduce income and property taxes by taxing energy and fuels. While their proposal didn’t make it into law, it laid the groundwork for later carbon tax efforts. Since 1993 the Minnesota legislature has required the state Public Utilities Commission to incorporate air pollution costs into decision-making on power plants. In July the PUC ordered this “shadow price” raised to a range of $9.05 to $43.06 per short ton of CO2 by 2020. (Utility Dive gives details and explains the wide range.)

Otto’s plan would go much further, of course, embedding actual carbon costs in fuel and electricity prices and perhaps igniting a spark among the other 49 states. In an article this week for Scientific American, States Can Lead the Way on Climate Change, Otto wrote that “If other state leaders adopt similar proposals, the 2018 midterm elections could become a watershed moment when America seizes on a new state-level approach to tackling climate change and finally begins to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg.”

At a minimum, Otto’s campaign ensures that not just climate change but the idea of actually charging for carbon emissions will be front and center in next year’s Minnesota gubernatorial race. If she wins, however, her proposal still faces two potential hurdles: the state legislature and the Minnesota state constitution, whose Article 14, Section 10 could be interpreted as requiring that “excise taxes” on gasoline be paid into the state’s highway distribution fund (see discussion in CTC’s report, Opportunities for Carbon Taxing at the State Level, pp 91-92). However, if the carbon price is construed otherwise, e.g., as a fee, Otto’s proposal could be in the clear.

Carbon taxing isn’t something you expect to see mentioned in What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s memoir about losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. But deep in the book’s weeds we find a telling new window into how Clinton “blew the biggest slam dunk in the history of American politics” (as one political pro vented to New Yorker editor David Remnick; expletive deleted here).

Around p. 240* Clinton brings up carbon dividends — a form of carbon taxes — as the type of “bold, creative ideas” she says Democrats must offer Americans. She generously name-checks Peter Barnes, an avatar of carbon dividends, and points to Alaska’s “Permanent Fund” that annually divvies up North Slope oil royalties equally to all state households. Then she writes:

[S]ome Republican elder statesmen such as former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson recently proposed a nationwide carbon dividend program that would tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American … Under such a plan, working families with small carbon footprints could end up with a big boost in their incomes. [Bill and I] spent weeks working with our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my campaign … Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families, which I had pledged not to do. (emphasis added)

Like so much with Clinton, this passage is strong on details and weak on vision.

Clinton is right that carbon dividend schemes will raise incomes of most working families. She is right that their gain will come at the expense of affluent families, whose carbon footprints are larger. Revenue distribution from a fixed revenue pie is, by its nature, zero-sum: what is disbursed to one class of recipients can’t be available to another.

Of course, any policy that transfers wealth from rich to poor is by definition income-progressive, which puts carbon dividends squarely in the Democratic Party tradition of Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson. Climate benefits aside, carbon dividends’ distributional benefits make the policy a natural for progressives, as we pointed out last week in our post, The climate solution that boosts income for over 60% of Americans — the ones who most need it.

But did Clinton’s policy team really “spend weeks” searching for the carbon-revenue equivalent of a perpetual motion machine — one that would diminish inequality without costing “affluent families” a dime? Doubtful. The impossibility would have been obvious in fifteen minutes, especially to her policy-smart husband. Besides, carbon dividends didn’t suddenly originate with James Baker et al.; they’ve been a staple of carbon tax advocacy for nearly a decade. Their distributional impacts are well-established.

What’s more likely, and as Clinton herself hints, is that her team spent weeks trying to find the messaging to sell carbon dividends to her upper-middle-class base. But that should have been easy as well; their message could have gone like this:

Carbon dividends are a policy we can put in place quickly to accelerate our country’s transition from climate-killing, health-killing fossil fuels, with no new administrative machinery, which the rest of the world can emulate. Those who are doing well will have to contribute more for the common good, but this is a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to one another — part of something bigger than ourselves. (Bold section are Clinton’s own words, from the discussion of carbon dividends in her book; prior text is mine.)

Yes, Trump and his backers would have pilloried Clinton for backing a carbon tax. But she was being hounded anyway for a hundred other reasons, both real and ginned up. Why not take a stand? Indeed, why not take a page from Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign playbook? In his April 14, 2016 debate with Clinton, for example, Sen. Sanders unapologetically supported “a tax on carbon so that we can transit away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy at the level and speed we need to do.”

Watching that debate, I imagined Americans who were tepid or worse on carbon taxing nonetheless admiring Sanders’ forthrightness. Some might even have been swept up with a new openness to the idea of carbon taxing.

To be clear, failure to back carbon taxing isn’t why Hillary Clinton lost last November. But her inability to stand for something bold like carbon dividends was indicative of her incapacity to transcend policy details and connect them to a larger vision. And that arguably cost her the election every bit as much as  Comey, Russia and the other usual suspects.

* Page number from “What Happened” is approximate, as viewed on a Kindle. The conception and shape of this post benefited greatly from CTC supporter and blog contributor Rachael Sotos. Note that our original headline, “Hillary Clinton and the Missing Carbon Dividends,” has been changed.