Prices Matter – Page 13

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

"Once the climate tipping point is past …"

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Every so often, you read something that stops you in your tracks. That happened to me yesterday, when I came across this:

We are talking about our grandchildren living in a resource-constrained future where they have a chance to learn to live in balance with the planet, or our grandchildren living in a future truly filled with squalor, death and misery. Once the climate tipping point is past, human beings will pay any price to go back but it will be to no avail. And they will wonder why their ancestors thought driving SUVs and air conditioning the outdoors was more important than water, food and survival of their progeny.

I read this passage yesterday on Amtrak as I was returning to New York City from Washington. Last Saturday, I participated in one of the “Fossil Fuel Disaster Relief Rides” organized by the direct-action environmental group Time’s Up. We hauled supplies by bike to the Rockaways, one of dozens of districts in the New York region devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and we stuck around to help residents drag the sodden wreckage of their living rooms and garages onto the sidewalk. The scene was post-apocalyptic: trash mounds towering over twisted bungalows; dump trucks and ‘dozers lumbering down dirt-caked streets; dust, muck and ruin stretching for miles; the sun filtered through a torn sky. I also knew from published reports that my home town of Long Beach, on the next barrier beach to the east, had similarly been laid waste.

Rockaway Beach, NY, Nov. 11, 2012. Photo: duluoz cats (Flickr).

“Human beings will pay any price to go back but it will be to no avail.” Fittingly, the writer was responding to a post on Streetsblog, the blog of the “livable-streets” movement, that for some dubious reason was pouring cold water on the hope that a carbon tax might figure in the emerging equation for tax and fiscal reform. Not only that, the writer was telling other commenters that a visit to our (Carbon Tax Center) Web site could dispel their doubts that a carbon tax could be made effective and fair. Here’s her comment, in full:

Again, please see the link that Komanoff posted below in the very first comment.  (www.carbontax.org) Most of the questions raised below are answered — how to measure carbon emissions, at what point in the emissions stream to effectively tax it, how a carbon tax can be revenue neutral, why no one is or will ever suggest taxing people breathing, etc.

As to how to deal with off-shoring of carbon emissions, we would indeed have to be more responsible about this than we have been with off-shoring all our other pollution. We could either refuse to trade with countries that don’t impose carbon taxes at similar levels, or we could levy a tariff on all imported products based on the level of that country’s gross fossil-fuel burning carbon emissions. (We would no doubt have to estimate in cases where self-reported numbers are unreliable.) This would have an added benefit of on-shoring manufacturing jobs back to the US.

With a carbon fee and dividend program, people would actually make money as long as they kept their usage below that of the average energy-squandering American. This is not difficult to do! All it takes it takes is simple behavioral changes and/or very small investments of money that will be paid back with lower fuel bills. But there simply must be a price signal or people will not change their energy consumption and carbon emissions patterns. And these carbon emission patterns need to drop immediately. Not by 2020 or 2030. Any plan that talks about doing something 2020 and beyond is a plan to do nothing because it will be too late. It is hypocritical greenwashing designed to distract and pretend, pure and simple.

We are talking about our grandchildren living in a resource-constrained future where they have a chance to learn to live in balance with the planet, or our grandchildren living in a future truly filled with squalor, death and misery. Once the climate tipping point is past, human beings will pay any price to go back but it will be to no avail. And they will wonder why their ancestors thought driving SUVs and air conditioning the outdoors was more important than water, food and survival of their progeny.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the case for a carbon tax made more powerfully and eloquently than in those four paragraphs. I know that I in lower Manhattan and my fellow New Yorkers in the Rockaways and Long Beach and Staten Island now wish we could have paid whatever it would have taken to buy the reduction in sea-level rise and ocean-temperature rise that might have quenched some of the force of Hurricane Sandy. Taking that knowledge and building it into support for a robust U.S. carbon tax is our new mission at the Carbon Tax Center.

PS: As for that Amtrak trip to DC yesterday. That’s where AEI, RFF, the IMF and Brookings held an all-day conference — before a packed house — on The Economics of Carbon Taxes. Click the link to unpack the acronyms and see the program. We’ll post a report soon.