Before you take umbrage at the headline, let me be clear: President Trump’s announcement yesterday proposing to freeze federal car-mileage standards at 2020 levels and revoke California’s longstanding authority to set auto emissions standards tighter than federal standards is contemptible.

The mpg freeze will mean more carbon emissions hastening the plunge into climate chaos not only for Americans but for the seven billion other people with whom we share the planet. The California revocation will bring down the curtain on that state’s half-a-century of innovation in low-emissions regulation and technology.

Both moves are archetypal Trumpian policy-by-pique. Their sole purpose is to stick mud in the eyes of Gov. Jerry Brown, who with his father, Gov. Pat Brown, pioneered green state governance; of President Obama, for whom ramping up auto mpg requirements was a cornerstone measure to combat global warming; and of untold numbers of Americans who care deeply for our environment.

The policy, a gift to oil companies, will accomplish nothing while sowing vast damage. Like Trump himself, it is spiteful, sickening and stupid.

But what’s also true is that a mid-range carbon tax could recoup the lost ground. I calculate that a U.S. carbon tax that started next year at a level of $5 per ton of carbon dioxide and increased by $5 a ton each year, with no letup, would, by 2035, be curbing carbon emissions from gasoline use by the same amount that Trump’s cessation of tighter mpg standards will increase them — around 140 million metric tons of CO2 a year.

Moreover, such an economy-wide carbon tax would bring about parallel drops in emissions throughout the economy — in electricity generation, freight-hauling, aviation and industry. I estimate that in 2035, when the hypothetical carbon tax would have reached $85 per ton, those reductions would amount to an additional 980 million metric tons. All told, the carbon tax would suppress carbon dioxide emissions eight times as much as Trump’s mileage freeze will elevate them.

To reflect the hypothetical nature of the carbon tax I express its benefits in the subjunctive (“would”) while employing the definite tense (“will”) for Trump’s intended rollbacks. This is a necessary concession to the arduous and uncertain task of passing a U.S. carbon tax, in contrast to the president’s all-too-real administrative powers — notwithstanding the fierce legal and political challenges that will be mounted against those moves. The point is not to trivialize the White House’s latest destructive act but to highlight the vast potential of a robust carbon tax to cut emissions.

A carbon tax covering gasoline would stand in for higher mpg standards, in part, by nudging consumers to more fuel-efficient vehicles and, thus, incentivizing manufacturers to design and market them. More than that, the higher fuel price could inflect drivers’ day-to-day decisions on how far to travel and, for multi-car families, which car to take, not to mention how aggressively to drive. Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) would shrink somewhat as well, as decision-needles tilt toward car-sharing, trip-chaining, public transit, and walking and biking.

This isn’t to overstate the link between higher fuel prices and lower gasoline use. In our modeling at the Carbon Tax Center we employ a “long-run” gasoline price-elasticity of just 0.35 (discussed and derived here), by which prices at the pump must rise by a third to cut usage by a tenth. It also bears repeating that not all Americans have agency to respond to price rises. But while a binary frame may be useful for viewing individuals’ fuel-use decisions, the aggregate level of fuel use (and the resulting carbon emissions) is the product of literally billions of daily and longer-term decisions.

Moreover, autos (cars and light trucks) make up just one-quarter of U.S. carbon emissions — even when “upstream” oil refining is factored in. The sectors yielding the other three-quarters of U.S. CO2 — electricity, freight, air travel, industry, heating, construction — are more price-elastic, which is why a carbon tax that would recoup the reductions from the higher mpg standards would yield another 7-fold’s worth of reductions.

So yes, Bill McKibben is spot-on to call the mileage freeze Trump’s “stupidest decision yet in his endless attempt to roll back environmental protections.” And yes, a carbon tax of any stripe, let alone one that could rise to $85 per ton by 2035 as in our modeling exercise here, remains nowhere in sight so long as Republican extractionism and malice rule Congress and the White House.

But that’s not cause to ignore or abandon the long-term campaign for a robust U.S. carbon tax. Quite the opposite.

Our Numbers Explained: We used the Rhodium Group’s May 2018 analysis, Sizing Up a Potential Fuel Economy Standards Freeze. For 2035, Rhodium projected a 114 million metric ton fallback in CO2 reductions if oil prices are low, and 32 million tons if prices are high. (The high-price fallback projection is smaller because expensive gasoline would do some of the work of mpg standards in engendering fuel efficiency while also dampening the amount of driving.) We conservatively used the higher figure and added 20 to 25 percent to capture upstream (refinery) emissions, yielding a target of 140 million metric tons. Through trial-and-error, we found that CTC’s carbon-tax model (downloadable as an Excel spreadsheeet) also projects a 140 million metric ton reduction from gasoline use, with a hypothetical carbon tax that would start next year at $5/ton and rise by $5/ton annually, in constant-2017 dollars. The economy-wide (all sectors) reduction is 1,122 million metric tons.

A headline like “Why Carbon Pricing Isn’t Working” isn’t the kind of news carbon tax advocates like to see. But Jeffrey Ball, writing in the July/August Foreign Affairs, has a point:

[E]xisting carbon-pricing schemes tend to squeeze only certain sectors of the economy, leaving others essentially free to pollute. And even in those sectors in which carbon pricing might have a significant effect, policymakers have lacked the spine to impose a high enough price. The result is that a policy prescription widely billed as a panacea is acting as a narcotic. It’s giving politicians and the public the warm feeling that they’re fighting climate change even as the problem continues to grow. (emphasis added)

To be clear, Ball, a scholar-in-residence at Stanford and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, likes and wants carbon pricing. His quarrel isn’t with the concept but with the political execution — or lack of it:

If governments proved willing to impose carbon prices that were sufficiently high and affected a broad enough swath of the economy, those prices could make a real environmental difference. But political concerns have kept governments from doing so, resulting in carbon prices that are too low and too narrowly applied to meaningfully curb emissions.

Ball is discussing both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade here. Cap-and-trade regimes have been limited to a few economic sectors — most typically, electricity generation. And the caps set so far have been too high (i.e., loose) to generate the robust carbon prices that can really impact these sectors. Though reforms are in the works in both Europe and the U.S., Ball is rightly skeptical about how far they will go.

The news for carbon taxes isn’t much better, so far. A commission of economists convened by the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition last year recommended a tax in the $40-80/ton range by 2020. Only six countries — Sweden, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Finland, Norway, and France — have carbon taxes that high, according to the World Bank.

Ball’s alternative is what he calls “more targeted moves,” but his reasoning seems muddled. He argues that politically feasible levels of carbon taxation won’t change how much or which vehicles people drive, but then endorses higher gasoline taxes to motivate those very changes. (For the record, we estimate the price-elasticity of gasoline to be negative -0.35, meaning that the price of gas has to rise by one-third to reduce usage by one-tenth.) He also contends that carbon taxes give builders no incentive to erect energy-efficient buildings, yet there is abundant evidence that buyers and tenants are willing to pay premiums for efficiency-certified properties (see here and here) — a preference that will only grow if energy prices rise.

Ball urges carbon tax proponents to redirect their efforts to more conventional approaches — basically, regulating the bad stuff and subsidizing the good stuff:

[P]ursuing these measures directly offers a politically realistic path to significant environmental benefit. . . . To the extent that the carbon-pricing experiment lets policymakers and the public delude themselves that they are meaningfully addressing global warming, it’s not just ineffectual; it’s counterproductive.

There’s a double standard here, however. The regulations and subsidies that U.S. environmental and climate advocates have won over the years have a mixed record. Production-tax credits and renewable portfolio standards helped jump-start the meteoric rise in wind and solar, but those gains, while impressive, accounted for a mere one-fifth of the 25 percent drop in carbon emissions from U.S. power generation since 2005 (energy efficiency and the rise in fracked gas each accounted for two-fifths). In transportation, cheap gasoline is a key reason that U.S. drivers are burning more gasoline now than a dozen years ago.

Moreover, directing massive subsidies to carbon capture and sequestration — another remedy Ball endorses — doesn’t look much more politically realistic than serious carbon pricing. And as a general proposition, subsidizing alternatives to carbon-burning fuels is at best only half as effective at cutting emissions as raising the prices of those fuels, as CTC demonstrated in its groundbreaking comments to the Senate Finance Committee four years ago.

If arresting global warming were politically easy, we would have done it already. But it’s not, and discounting perhaps the most potent arrow in our quiver when every other alternative is far more limited in scope doesn’t make much sense. Addressing the climate crisis is hard work; we might as well expend that effort on a policy that could actually do the job.

Everyone’s 2017 was eventful . . . and disruptive . . . and difficult.

From January into April, we, like many of you, marched and protested while trying to see a way forward for carbon taxes under a denialist U.S. regime.

We spoke at gatherings across New York City. We published an article in The Nation magazine decrying left-green dogmatism that doomed the campaign in Washington state to enact the USA’s first carbon tax. We allied ourselves with the Climate Leadership Council’s audacious Republican-branded carbon tax proposal. We published a 120-page guide to state carbon tax prospects compiled by Yoram Bauman, the economist-activist who spearheaded the Washington referendum.

By then we were 100 days into a new administration whose cruelty and heedlessness were sickening. At a climate march in New Jersey, we called the complicit U.S. Republican Party “a racket to restore patriarchy, extractionism and white supremacy.” This truth grew even sharper a month later when Congressional Republicans cheered Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Climate Agreement.

We kept working. We retooled CTC’s carbon tax spreadsheet model, incorporating the latest data, snazzing up the user interface and graphics, and for the first time apportioning refinery emissions among their “downstream” sectors — driving, freight and air travel (jet fuel). With this change and the ongoing shrinkage in coal-fired power generation, driving is gaining on electricity for the dubious distinction of most climate-damaging U.S. sector.

Meanwhile, a campaign for congestion pricing in New York City — fees charged to vehicles driven into and within gridlocked city centers — was gathering steam amid meltdowns in the city’s mass transit system, worsening traffic gridlock, and a void of political leadership. When Gotham’s SUV- and helicopter-riding mayor crowned himself leader of state-and-local-government resistance to the White House, we upbraided him on live radio, setting off a media frenzy that continues today.

But our criticism went beyond tabloid fodder; it pointed to the persistent gap between public postures and personal acts — a breach that carbon taxes could help repair.

Our pivot from national carbon tax campaigning accelerated in August, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo unexpectedly announced his support for congestion pricing. Shortly after, the analytics team advising the governor reached out to me: Would I help them deploy my monster congestion pricing model to score different congestion pricing plans?

Of course I said yes and plunged into massive updating and retooling of the model, which continues as I write this post. Details of the governor’s proposal are expected in a few days and the public debate and legislative donnybrook will almost certainly extend for several months. The fight is important, not just for the sustainability of New York and other global cities, as I argued last week on Streetsblog, but to finally establish in the USA the principle at the heart of carbon taxing: that the most surefire and equitable way to reduce pollution is to make polluters pay for it. [Addendum: The details can be found in my January Streetsblog post, The Fix NYC Congestion Pricing Plan Looks Solid — If Cuomo Aims High, which includes a link to the governor’s panel’s report.]

CTC’s program for 2018

At the national level, the main event by far for carbon taxing this year is to bring an end to Republican climate denialism. This could mean routing the GOP in the midterms, or some other path to repudiating the party’s nearly monolithic rejection of science-based climate policy and its all-out embrace of fossil fuels. It may also require, in the states, dismantling the gerrymandering that, combined with Democrats’ “clustering” in urban precincts, entrenches Republicans’ control of Congress far beyond their share of Americans’ votes.

I’m sorry to say that the notion of a bipartisan federal carbon tax is barely on life-support, as we wrote here last week, decrying the passivity of the Climate Solutions Caucus — the Noah’s Ark-like conclave that we formerly touted as a possible incubator for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Nevertheless, CTC will continue our technical support and policy advice to members of Citizens Climate Lobby and to the Climate Leadership Council. But we harbor no illusions that current Republican officeholders will provide political leadership or even partnership for meaningful carbon pricing legislation.

There’s a corollary: it may be time to rethink revenue-neutral carbon taxes. As much as we love carbon fee-and-dividend, with its powerful logic of linking rising carbon taxes to rising “green checks,” the revulsion against Trump and the G.O.P. could make it harder to sell progressives on programs with a seemingly middle-of-the-road cast. We also can’t dismiss arguments by Frank Ackerman and others that the “fat tail” of climate worst-cases demands national mobilization on a scale that only government action can generate.

Along with political action and some soul-searching, CTC is primed this year to

• Monitor and parse actual carbon emission reductions in states, sectors and countries with carbon pricing, including the 9 RGGI states;
• Assess and fact-check claims of economies decarbonizing without carbon pricing;
• Expand our networking with state and national carbon tax advocates in the U.S. and overseas;
• Seek common ground on carbon taxing with environmental and climate justice advocates;
• Explore alliances with progressives working to meld carbon pricing with “mobilization” strategies;
• Seek out Republicans-conservatives who have genuine interest in non-token carbon taxes;
• Gain a better understanding of the possibilities and limits in fossil fuel divestment and litigation campaigns;
• Continue improving and disseminating our carbon tax spreadsheet model;
• Restock CTC’s Web site;
• Keep writing op-eds and magazine pieces promoting carbon taxes;
• Use our blog to post commentary on unfolding political developments, policy proposals and energy trends.

As we head into the new year, we thank you for your past support and your partnership. Contributions to support our work in 2108 (please use this link) will, as always, play a valuable role in keeping CTC edgy, timely and forward-focused.

We’ve just posted the 2017 update to the Carbon Tax Center’s spreadsheet model of U.S. CO2 emissions. That’s our powerful but easy-to-use tool for predicting future emissions and revenues from possible U.S. carbon taxes. The model, which runs in Excel, accepts any carbon tax trajectory you feed it and spits out estimated economy-wide emission reductions and revenue generation, year by year.

Here’s what’s new:

1. A year of new data: The most obvious update is that we’ve incorporated 2016 baseline data on energy use, CO2 emissions and emission intensity into each of the model’s seven sectors.

2. Oil refining is now allocated to usage sectors: Last year we pulled oil refinery emissions out of “Other Petroleum Products” and into its own category, which accounted for an estimated 6.4% of U.S. CO2 emissions in 2015. We’ve now taken the logical next step and allocated those emissions into the economic sectors that require refining crude into product in the first place: autos (principally gasoline), freight (largely diesel), air travel (jet fuel) and the catch-all “other petroleum” encompassing home heating oil, propane, kerosene and residual oil used by industry. The lion’s share of Refineries’ 6.4% slice of CO2 emissions is now within autos; not only is gasoline by far the largest-volume petroleum product, it also consumes the most energy per unit among the major petroleum products. Although our model is again down to seven sectors, from eight, the change promises a more accurate prediction process by tying demand more closely to emissions.

3. Slimmed-down graphics: We’ve weeded out extraneous graphics so you can focus on what’s key: comparing emission reductions between the Climate Leadership Council’s carbon tax, a carbon tax pegged to the “social cost of carbon,” and future emissions absent carbon pricing. Other graphics break down emissions by sector (see graphic above), depict reductions in oil consumption and show carbon-tax revenues nationally and by household. Most importantly, you can input your own starting tax level and growth path and see how fast (or slowly) emissions fall. That’s still done in the spreadsheet’s “Summary” tab, which we’ve cleaned up to make it easier to navigate.

And don’t overlook these two features we added in 2015:

1. Smoothing the uptake of the carbon tax: The model now captures lags in households’ and businesses’ adaptation to more-expensive fossil fuels. You, the user, set the adaptation “ceiling” rate; the model automatically carries over any excess to future years. This feature is helpful for trajectories like the Whitehouse-Schatz bill, which kicks off with a bang at $45 per metric ton of carbon dioxide but then rises only slowly. Under our default setting, in which the economy in any year is assumed to be able to process only tax increments up to $12.50 per ton of CO2, the reductions from that initial $45/ton charge are spread over four years rather than, unrealistically, assigned to the first year.

2. Demand impacts vs. Supply side impacts: At the bottom of the Summary page is a new section comparing the projected CO2 reductions from changes in fuels’ carbon intensities (“supply side”) versus reductions from reduced energy usage (“demand side,” e.g., lower electricity purchases, less driving or flying). Under our default carbon tax — the one proposed by former Rep. Jim McDermott — an estimated 58% of projected CO2 reductions are on the supply side (i.e., due to decarbonization); a large minority, 42%, come about through reduced demand, illustrating that subsidies-only policies miss out on huge CO2 reductions. Indeed, clean-energy subsidies undercut decarbonization by stimulating energy usage through lowered energy prices, as we pointed out in our 2014 comments to the Senate Finance Committee.

Please download the spreadsheet — here’s the link again — and run it in Excel. See for yourself the relative efficacy of a carbon tax trajectory that increases by a fixed amount each year, as does the McDermott tax, vs. one like Whitehouse-Schatz that starts high but rises only by small, percentage-driven amounts. See also how much more quickly emissions decline under these and most other carbon tax scenarios, compared to the emission reductions from the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.

As you work (play?) with the model, jot down your thoughts so you can tell us what works and what needs improving. Especially the latter, as we just wrapped the update an hour ago and there are bound to be glitches. Thanks.

Yesterday I biked to Grand Central Station and boarded a commuter train to the Hudson River village of Tarrytown to participate in a forum on carbon taxes. (For readers not from the area, Westchester is the suburban county immediately north of New York City.) My co-panelists were climate organizer Iona Lutey and economist Sara Hsu.

Sara, a professor of economics at the State University of New York, outlined her research and legislative advocacy for a NY State carbon tax, while Iona delivered Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s hopeful message that persistent but collegial citizen engagement can build political will for the group’s “carbon fee and dividend” proposal, even among Republicans. I had a subtle pitch: emissions are falling in the U.S. and flattening in China without the benefit of carbon emissions pricing, yet carbon taxing is essential to accelerate and broaden progress.

I usually make that point with modeling results, but last night I brought something new: a Powerpoint page (shown below) listing a dozen complementary pathways for reducing use of fossil fuels that need the price signal from a carbon tax to. (Download my PPT here.)

All three presentations seemed to hit home with our audience of 40 or so folks, most of whom haled from nearby towns and villages. (The local paper Hudson Independent has a fine summary.) The Q&A was unusually lively. A resident of nearby Croton-on-Hudson had perhaps the most provocative question of all: why trade away the right to sue the fossil fuel purveyors and extractors, as the Climate Leadership Council is proposing in its Republican-branded carbon tax deal, when successful litigation could deliver a double-barreled victory: bankrupting the carbon barons while providing financing for the energy transition to efficiency and renewables?

The question was in response to the support I voiced for the Climate Leadership Council’s deal in my talk and in my previous post here. My primary answer then and now was that there seems to be little chance that oil, coal and gas companies could ever be made to pay more than token amounts for the ruin their products cause. But the question deserves further thought, which I kicked off this morning with this thought experiment:

What if we took all U.S. CO2 from burning fossil fuels over the past century and split “responsibility” for it 50-50, with half of the costs written off as the “fault” of consumers (who weren’t entirely innocent buyers and burners of all that gasoline and fuel-based electricity), and the other half charged to the fossil fuel producers? What magnitude of damages and reparations would that entail?

A molecule of carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for roughly a century, so we need to consider 100 years of fossil fuel combustion. The historical magnitude of U.S. CO2 is more or less known, but for this exploratory calculation we might rough-estimate the century’s total as 60 years worth of last year’s emissions of roughly 5 billion metric tons. To each metric ton we now apply a $50 “social cost of carbon,” though that’s almost certainly far too low, as I wrote here recently.

With these rough assumptions, the producers’ “debt” is then one-half of 60 years x 5 billion metric tons x $50 per ton, which equals $7.5 trillion. Paying that out as damages over, say 20 years implies an annual charge to the producers of $350-$400 billion. Interestingly, that’s the same as the annual revenue from a $75/ton carbon tax.

Let’s now say, improbably but hypothetically, that Congress enacted, and the courts approved, award of those damages to Americans (setting aside, for now, damage claims from the other 7 billion of the world’s people). Where would the money come from? It seems implausible that it could be clawed back from shareholders of the fossil fuel corporations. Could it come from raising the prices of the fuels over the next several decades, in which case it could function as a de facto carbon tax? But if so, why not just enact a carbon tax in the first place?

As you can see, I’m trying to wrestle with this issue. I welcome comments and suggestions.

Meanwhile, Sustainable Westchester and Westchester Power, organizers of last night’s forum, are hosting two more evening panels: Wednesday, July 19 in New Rochelle, and Wednesday, July 26 in Bedford Hills. Details here. I’ll be speaking at both.

The Climate Leadership Council today announced that it has won support for its carbon dividends plan from ExxonMobil and other major corporations, as well as prominent individuals including physicist Stephen Hawking. The news, reported in op-ed pieces, news stories and a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal’s Washington, DC edition, comes just four days after release of a new poll suggesting that climate concern among U.S. voters is surging to new heights.

Let’s start with the poll, released last Friday by the widely respected National Opinion Research Center – Associated Press polling collaborative. While the June 16 NORC-AP press release led with Pres. Trump’s abysmal (64%) disapproval rating, the more momentous result was the one highlighted in the graphic.

Fifty-three percent of people polled called climate change “extremely or very important” to them personally, perhaps the first time a majority of U.S. respondents assigned climate change such a high level of concern. Indeed, climate is often viewed in political circles as a “low-salience” issue, one that people profess to care about but don’t act on politically.

The 53% figure belies that idea, though the response might have been heightened somewhat because respondents were asked to specifically rate climate (and other issues) rather than to name, say, “the three most critical issues to you and your family.” (The full poll may be downloaded here. See graphic below for a breakout of the climate responses.)

The apparent broadening of public concern could translate into repudiation of climate-denying and ignoring candidates in the 2018 Congressional primaries and elections. It may also provoke more members of Congress to endorse the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s Republican Climate Resolution or take seriously the Climate Leadership Council’s Republican-branded carbon dividends plan.

That plan was formally endorsed today by ExxonMobil, along with fellow oil behemoths BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total S.A.; industrial giants General Motors, Pepsico and Unilever; and prominent individuals like former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Obama Treasury Secretary and Harvard University ex-president Larry Summers, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Laureate and Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The broadening of support, orchestrated by Climate Leadership Council executive director Ted Halstead, constitutes an effort to move simultaneously to the left and right: leftward with a relatively high starting carbon tax rate ($40 a ton) and the income-progressive “dividending” of tax revenues rather than cuts to corporate taxes; and rightward with the backing of ExonMobil, which many climate activists hold in contempt for its decades of funding a network of climate denialists who have helped paralyze climate action in the U.S.

From time to time ExxonMobil has said that it “supports” carbon taxes, but as we reported late last year, it has never backed actual carbon tax legislation and has limited its expressed interest to carbon taxes in the $20/ton range. ExxonMobil’s endorsement of the council’s plan is a step forward for the company that could portend support from other quarters long considered hostile or passive on carbon pollution pricing.

With a high starting tax rate, a commitment to disbanding most federal carbon regulation and an offer to indemnify carbon polluters from litigation over climate damage, the council’s proposal defines a broad new center that could eventually unite political forces from the left and right. That strategy appeared today to gain important validation from Michael B. Gerrard, the influential director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and a widely respected environmental litigator. Gerrard told The New York Times, “If a sufficiently high carbon tax were imposed, it could accomplish a lot more for fighting climate change than liability suits.”

This link goes to the council’s WSJ ad. Treasury Secretaries emeriti Larry Summers and George Shultz have an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, This is the one climate solution that’s best for the environment — and for business. Links to other op-eds and news coverage are at the Climate Leadership Council’s Web site.

As the U.S. president holds the world hostage to his impending decision to accept or repudiate the Paris Climate Agreement, it’s worth noting that the United States could meet its Paris emissions pledge by adopting a Republican-branded carbon tax proposal.

That’s the so-called Baker-Shultz carbon tax devised by the Climate Leadership Council and released in February by a team of Republican luminaries headed by Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz and George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker. The CLC proposal, dubbed “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” would tax U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion at $40 per ton and return the revenues in equal shares to American families (thus the “dividends” in the proposal’s name).

As the Associated Press reminded us at the onset of the holiday weekend, “nearly 200 countries are part of the Paris accord and each set their own emissions targets, which are not legally binding. The U.S. pledged to reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, which would be a reduction of about 1.6 billion tons of annual emissions.”

With informed sources such as Inside Climate News and the New Republic insisting that Trump’s rescission of Pres. Obama’s Clean Power Plan puts our Paris target out of reach, we decided to run our carbon-tax spreadsheet model on the CLC proposal. The result was a bullseye: the model calculates that implementing an economy-wide charge of $40/ton of CO2 on U.S. coal, oil and gas combustion in 2018 would, by 2025, result in total CO2 emissions of 4,242 billion metric tons — a figure 27% less than 2005 baseline emissions of 5,812 billion metric tons. That’s smack in the center of our country’s pledge to reduce emissions by 26% to 28%.

Our numerical finding closely matches CLC’s own estimate of a 28 percent drop in emissions in 2025 vs. 2005 from the $40/ton CO2 charge. And while a majority of the forecasted reduction in emissions from today to 2025 would be in the electricity sector, the expected 45 percent share of reductions in the other sectors (passenger auto and air travel, freight movement, oil refining, etc.) is a big increase from those sectors’ 27 percent share of reductions from 2005 to 2015, reflecting the carbon tax’s power to reduce fossil fuels use more broadly than targeted regulations.

A few important details:

One, CLC’s modeling assumes a 2% per year real increase in the carbon tax following the initial startup at $40/ton. We’ve conservatively assumed zero increase, although our graph also shows a steeper reduction predicated on raising the initial charge by $5 per ton per year.

Two, our two curves coincide for the first few years and begin diverging only in 2021. That’s because we’ve built a “brake” into our model that limits the economy’s uptake of the carbon charge to a rate of $12.50 per ton per year; increases beyond that are carried over into future years. Thus, the full impact of the $40 initial charge imposed in 2018 isn’t felt until 2021.

Three,  the U.S. Paris commitment of a 26-28 percent reduction applies to all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. But since non-CO2 GHG’s such as methane are considered to have more low-hanging fruit, on average, being able to achieve a 27% reduction in CO2 by 2025 should virtually guarantee hitting the target of 27% less greenhouse gases.

Note that we label the Baker-Shultz proposal “Republican-branded” rather than “Republican,” preferring to reserve the latter designation for current Republican office-holders. But it’s striking nevertheless that a carbon tax proposal advanced by erstwhile Republican icons — Messrs. Baker and Shultz held many other senior positions even beyond secretary of state — could enable the present Republican administration to meet our country’s Paris climate-protection targets, and to do so in a straightforward, non-regulatory, “market-friendly” fashion that was once considered a bedrock G.O.P. principle.

We’re updating our carbon-tax model to the latest (2016) baseline. Watch this space for its release in June.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Driving in the United States didn’t just inch upward during the past two years, it practically erupted. Total on-road vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) by cars, trucks and buses jumped by 87.5 billion last year, after increasing the year before by 105.2 billion, according to FHWA data. The two-year increase, nearly 193 billion miles — that’s just under 600 miles for every U.S. resident — is the largest in U.S. history (see graph).

Percentage-wise, the increases may not look momentous — 3.5 percent in 2015 and another 2.8 percent last year. But the two-year growth percentage, 6.4 percent, is the highest in almost three decades. And it comes after a spate of articles and reports celebrating (or decrying, depending on one’s point of view) the arrival of “peak driving,” or, at least, peak driving per capita.

So what’s going on?

The prime factor couldn’t have been population growth; it totaled just 1.4 percent from 2014 to 2016. And let’s not over-credit 4.2 percent economic growth over the same period, since the level of driving is more molasses-like than GDP, as we discuss further below. (Also note that GDP subsumes population, so the two factors wouldn’t be additive.) What about pent-up demand from the 2008-2011 economic slowdown? It makes for good anecdotes but probably not enough to move the dial.

My candidate for key cause of the surge in U.S. driving is super-cheap gasoline, or, more precisely, the precipitous drop in U.S. gasoline prices since 2014.

The nationwide average pump price was $3.43 in 2014, the fourth consecutive year in the mid-three dollar range. It dropped nearly a dollar in 2015, to $2.51, and fell again in 2016, to $2.20. Adjusted for general inflation (which is how we economists calibrate these things), the 2014-2015 price drop was 26.8%, and the 2015-2016 drop was 13.3%. The two-year real fall in price, 37%, is the largest over two consecutive years since at least 1950.

A drop in gasoline prices would cause an uptick in driving. If it’s cheaper to drive a mile, or 100 miles, it stands to reason that people will drive more miles. But how much more? How sensitive is the amount of miles driven (VMT) to the price of gasoline? Or, more precisely, how sensitive are changes in VMT to changes in the price of gas?

The answer: the relationship between VMT and gas prices isn’t super-sensitive; but it’s more than zero, and enough to make a big difference in the amount of driving when gas prices take a large turn.

Let’s look at how the math works. The parameter we’re looking for is the gasoline price-elasticity of VMT (driving). Let’s say it’s negative 0.1. (Negative because a lower price means more driving; and just 0.1 because the connection is probably slim.) Now let’s say the price of gasoline drops by one-fourth, or 25%. Based on the assumed -0.1 price-elasticity, we would expect a 3% rise in driving. (Mathematically, that’s because 0.75 raised to the negative 0.1 power, written as 0.75^(-0.1), is 1.029, which denotes a 2.9% increase.)

Does that feel right? Would a one-fourth drop in the price of gas — not just over a single day or month, but over a sustained period — actually lead people to drive 3% more? Would people take more car trips, or longer trips, to that extent? It seems reasonable that they would, though how much is an empirical question. (Which is why the entire vast literature on price-elasticities is based on observed behavior.)

In the table at right I’ve run the actual drops in the price of gas through that calculation, for two possible VMT price-elasticities: (negative) 0.10, and half that value, or 0.05. For the 0.10 value, the drop in the price of gas would have evoked much or most of the observed rise in driving. For the lower 0.05 value, not so much but still a significant portion. (The influence for 2016 should actually have been greater than shown because of the lagged effect from the 2015 price drop.)

What, then, are the best estimates for the price-elasticity in the literature (again, we’re looking for the change in VMT as a function of changes in the price of gasoline)? For the past decade I’ve relied on a seminal 2007 paper by U-C Irvine transportation economists Ken Small and Kurt Van Dender in which they derived a long-run price elasticity of gasoline consumption for the U.S. of -0.38, with 46% of that being due to changes in the amount of vehicle travel. Multiplying those two figures yields a long-run elasticity of VMT with respect to the price of gasoline of -0.175.

(The Small – Van Dender paper is summarized on CTC’s Effectiveness page — drop down to the first bullet point. The paper, “Fuel Efficiency and Motor Vehicle Travel: The Declining Rebound Effect,” is available here. The result just given appears on p.24 (FN 27). Small and Van Dender also remark that the 46% share of gasoline price elasticity accounted for by VMT declined to 27% when recalibrated to prices and driving behavior observed toward the end of their sample period. It’s also true that their elasticity figures are long-run, whereas the VMT behavior we seek to explain here is short-run, implying a still-lower price-elasticity; on the other hand, when the price of gas changes it’s easier to change the amount of driving quickly than to change miles per gallon, which suggests that the short-run elasticity of VMT might not be many times smaller than the long-run figure.)

My takeaway is suggested by the table above: while numerically the gasoline price-elasticity of VMT is small, the fall in gas prices in 2015 and 2016 was so severe that it almost certainly explains a lot of the observed rise in driving. Of course, rising incomes would also have played a role, but likely a small one. The Small – Van Dender income-elasticity of driving is 0.11 in the short run and 0.53 in the long run. Assuming a value of 0.25 for our purposes, the 2.6% increase in real GDP from 2014 to 2015 would have been expected to evoke only a 0.6-0.7% increase in driving (since 1.026 raised to the 0.25 power is 1.0064); for the 1.6% rise in GDP from 2015 to 2016, the effect on driving would have been smaller still.

What does this exercise suggest about carbon taxes? Take it as yet one more demonstration that prices influence the level of usage of just about everything, including fuels, energy, even driving. The price sensitivities (elasticities) may not be enormous, but they are felt nonetheless. In 2015 and 2016 they were enough to power a record two-year rise in total U.S. miles driven. And they’ll also act in reverse, which is how a carbon tax — particularly one with a rising price trajectory that can filter out market volatility — can be so powerful in slashing gasoline use and fossil fuel use generally.

And remember, the price elasticity of gasoline use (and its carbon emissions) is at least twice as great as the elasticity of driving with respect to the price of gas, which is what we’ve explored here. (We explored the price elasticity of gasoline in this Sept 2015 post, which is one of our most-viewed ever.)

So when you see someone parading false facts like this one on the New York Times letters page earlier this month,

[F]act — as documented by the Energy Information Administration and experienced by anyone who must drive regularly regardless of cost — fuel prices have little effect on gas consumption. (The letter, from Food & Water Watch, is the third of five in that link.)

you’ll know how to push back.

(This post was updated and expanded on May 3, 2017.)

With the C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil now officially nominated for Secretary of State, the oil and gas giant is being cast as a kinder and gentler fossil fuel behemoth. Here’s the New York Times editorial board’s weekend take:

[Rex] Tillerson assumed the role of chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil in January 2006, and during his tenure the company acknowledged, for the first time, the science underlying climate change. It has said it supports the creation of a carbon tax, which most Republicans have opposed, and it also supported the Paris climate agreement, a major focus of Mr. Kerry’s time in office. Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon the climate pact. In May, Mr. Tillerson told shareholders that “we believe that addressing the risk of climate change is a global issue,” adding that it would require the cooperation of governments, businesses and individuals. (Rex Tillerson, Exxon Chief, Is Expected to be Pick for Secretary of State, Dec. 10, emphasis added)

Missing in this creampuff thumbnail, of course, is #ExxonKnew — the revelations from Inside Climate News and others that Exxon executives suppressed company scientists’ findings in the late 1970s warning of possible catastrophes from the greenhouse effect, and then led a propaganda campaign to block solutions. The editorial also sets an absurdly low bar, in effect giving Tillerson and Exxon credit for “acknowledging” (though not resoundingly endorsing) the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

Also missing — and the primary subject of this post — are any specifics as to the carbon tax level Exxon supposedly endorses.

A modest carbon tax, say $20 to $40 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions, would aid lower-carbon natural gas in substituting for high-carbon coal, an outcome that would dovetail with Exxon’s gas-heavy but coal-light resource base. Whereas a robust carbon tax, one that would ramp up briskly and reach triple digits within a decade, would not only kayo coal but also deal a heavy blow to oil and gas by giving a big lift to carbon-free renewables and shrinking overall energy demand.

Needless to say, there’s zero evidence that Tillerson or anyone associated with Exxon has ever voiced support for a robust carbon tax.

Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to find even a single Exxon statement specifying the amount of a carbon tax the company would support. This morning we combed a bunch of stories reporting on Exxon’s support for carbon taxing:

• Guardian, Exxon Chief Backs Carbon Tax  Jan. 10, 2009
• Wall Street Journal, Exxon Touts Carbon Tax to Oil Industry, June 30, 2016
• Fortune, Why ExxonMobil Is Supporting a Carbon Tax Now, July 10, 2016
• Dallas Morning News, As Exxon ramps up support of carbon tax, imagine the possibilities, July 6, 2016, editorial
• Dallas Morning News, Exxon proud of its role in climate change dialogue, May 24, 2016, op-ed by Suzanne McCarron, Exxon Mobil v-p of public and government affairs

None of these news stories or opinion pieces mentioned a tax level. To model the Exxon carbon tax shown in our graphic, we went back in time to a 2009 D.C. meeting at which a couple of Exxon “governmental relations” officials sat down with carbon tax advocates. The off-the-record session was short on specifics, but the Exxon reps floated a $20 a ton figure. I’ve raised that to $25, more than capturing seven years of inflation, but have kept the tax level flat in real terms over time.

The graph makes apparent how little such a modest tax would reduce carbon emissions. The “robust” carbon tax shown — modeled after the McDermott carbon tax that would start at $11.34 per ton of CO2 and increase by $11.34/ton annually — would, by 2040, be eliminating 4-5 times as much CO2 from U.S. smokestacks and tailpipes as the “Exxon carbon tax.”

In carbon taxing, as elsewhere, the devil truly is in the details. Exxon’s rebuttal, if we can call it that, is a Dec. 2015 blog post by v-p Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil and the Carbon Tax, which is long on the company’s business practices (it uses a “proxy carbon price” in its planning) but woefully short on actual policy support for carbon taxes, for the very good reason that such support has been effectively non-existent.

U.S. Senator (and climate stalwart) Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said this more pointedly in a Jan. 2017 Washington Post op-ed: “Take no comfort in Tillerson’s statements that climate change is real and that Exxon supports a carbon tax; that message was never delivered to the fossil-fuel industry’s political gun decks and is a perhaps a deliberate false flag.”

But the last word — missing words, actually — goes to Tillerson himself, as shown in this May 2017 tweet from Inside Climate News’ Jack Cushman:

Rex outlined his world view to State Department employees today, and said not one word about global climate change. https://t.co/Tv4UZhI4fG

— John Cushman (@jackcushmanjr) May 3, 2017

Original graphic has been revised to include two different “Exxon carbon taxes.” Model them, or your own, using CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet (Excel file).

Last night I spoke at a forum on carbon taxes organized by NYC350. The venue was the Ethical Culture Society building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Coming of age politically in the early sixties in a New York suburb, I was greatly influenced by the humanist perspective I heard in weekly radio broadcasts by the society’s leader, Algernon D. Black.

I shared the podium with two prominent climate advocates – renowned climate scientist James Hansen and Cecil Corbin-Mark of WE ACT for Environmental Justice. Here are my remarks.

I want to thank 350NYC and the NYC Grassroots Alliance for convening us and inviting me. Because my time is limited – as it should be, to allow for discussion – let me dive right in.

Since not all of you know me, I brought a display of books I wrote or helped write, along with my contact information.

The Price of Power (1972) was an exposé – the first – of rampant pollution from U.S. fossil-fuel generating stations. Power Plant Cost Escalation (1981) quantified the skyrocketing costs to build nuclear power plants. Then I turned to what we now call livable-streets activism. With books, organizing and direct action and, yes, arrests.

This work had great impact. Less successful, I admit, has been my campaigning over the past decade for congestion pricing to rationalize and improve transportation in New York City, and for carbon taxes nationwide to slash climate-destroying emissions.

I have something heretical to say about the Standing Rock occupation: For all its rightness in asserting the sovereignty of Native Americans and protecting native people’s water, for all its courage in standing up to militarized assault, for all its importance in building the climate movement, and for all its audacity in winning the first big direct-action victory of the Trump Era, yesterday’s stirring triumph by the Standing Rock resistance will do nothing to slow carbon emissions — by itself.

Oil that doesn’t flow to refineries through the Dakota Access Pipeline will instead come from somewhere else – Kuwait or Texas or a hundred other places – to be burned in cars, trucks and planes, as The Onion reminded us last month.

The last part of that Q&A tells us what we need: demand destruction. Massive demand destruction. And key to demand destruction is carbon taxing. Not a token tax, like Exxon or an occasional Republican supports, or says they do; but a robust, briskly rising carbon tax that, over time, will transform the entire economic and social structure that locks people and communities into fossil fuels. A tax that rewards any and every behavior and investment that uses less coal, oil or gas, not more.

A carbon tax of that magnitude will generate enormous revenue – an issue I’ll come back to. But first I want to explain why demand destruction on the scale we need won’t come from other policies and campaigns unless they’re backed by a robust carbon tax.

De-subsidize Fossil Fuels? By all means. But when U.S. taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuels are expressed per gallon, they’re actually pretty small. Most of the IMF’s $5 trillion annual figure for worldwide fuel subsidies is “externalities”: air pollution and especially climate damage. De-subsidizing fossil fuels means taxing them. (More here.)

Clean-Energy Subsidies? They’ve done wonders for renewables. But as wind and solar grow – and they’re on track this year to provide nearly 7 percent of U.S. electricity – subsidizing them is going to get unaffordable. And 7 percent of electricity is only a few percent of energy. Renewables have a long way to go. (More here.)

Efficiency Standards? These are also doing wonders, forcing design changes in appliances, vehicles and buildings that “market forces” alone would not have brought. But these savings too aren’t enough. Standards are reactive, they’re slow and shot through with loopholes. Standards are also piecemeal and scattershot, forever trying to catch up with evolving technology. (More here.)

Most important, standards alone can’t motivate the changes in behavioral patterns that maximize energy savings. Consider mileage (CAFÉ) standards. Yes, they’re valuable, but at best they affect only half of the gasoline-usage equation.

We’re not going to get deep cuts with half-measures. A carbon tax – a robust one – is no half-measure. It’s the one policy that can elicit the billions of carbon-reducing decisions and behaviors that a swift full-scale transition to clean energy requires.

On an individual level, a carbon tax will motivate switches from disposable plastic bottles to refillable ones. Carbon taxes will motivate businesses to produce goods domestically, retaining and growing jobs, as shipping prices rise. Now multiply those examples across the board. Everything will “pencil out” more toward low-carbon and zero-carbon sustainability.

Those changes will add up. The higher the tax, the bigger and faster the reductions. (More here.)

This enormous tantalizing potential is what the Carbon Tax Center fights for. It’s also why the fracturing of the climate movement that contributed to the defeat of the carbon tax referendum last month in Washington State is so distressing.

Because my time is limited, I’ll make just a few points about that campaign.

First, the “sales-tax swap” in the Washington carbon tax – lowering the state sales tax to cushion the bite from the carbon tax – was the only available ironclad way to protect low and moderate-income families from the higher-priced energy. Castigating it as a right-wing “tax cut” was misleading and wrong.

Second, the tax proponents kept the price relatively low – $25/ton though rising over time – because any one state is limited in how it can go. The point of the measure was not to make Washington state carbon-free but to break the national logjam and start a stampede leading to a U.S. carbon tax. And the experience of British Columbia shows that even a modest carbon tax has a noticeable impact.

Third, the “Left Greens” who opposed the Washington initiative because it didn’t invest the revenues in communities never came up with an actual plan to do so. The opponents were also unpersuaded that a carbon tax would cut emissions across-the-board, including in frontline communities. To me, it’s axiomatic that it will.

We have to do better next time. The Keep It In The Ground movement needs to embrace carbon taxes. Not as a “good idea” but as a central demand. And, while we can and should debate details of carbon tax design, including revenue treatment, we need to get behind any and every carbon tax that keeps low and moderate-income families whole.

There aren’t many “next times” left. We need to bring our movements together.