Calculations by the Carbon Tax Center suggest that the worldwide economic contraction from steps being taken to slow the spread of deadly COVID-19 could halve this year’s rise in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide concentration.

This finding is largely illustrative and encased in caveats. First, the average CO2 level wouldn’t actually fall; rather the business-as-usual annual rise of around two ppm would be trimmed to just one. And for that to happen, the slowdowns in travel, industrial production, goods movement and commercial activity, and the accompanying reductions in use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions, would have to be steep and prolonged, as our calculations show below.

The most critical caveat, of course, is the widespread deaths and massive dislocations bound up with these events. Megadeaths and cataclysmic job losses are not anyone’s preferred path for slowing climate change. Nevertheless, the calculations provided here may be instructive.

U.S. Reductions
Federal bean-counters divide U.S. energy use into four categories: Industrial, Transportation, Commercial, Residential. We assume that the first three contract by 50 percent as factory production tumbles, aviation evaporates, commuting recedes, recreational travel dissipates, and offices, stores and performance spaces remain empty. (April 2 addendum: U.S. gasoline demand for the week ending March 27, before the economy fully shut down in all 50 states, was 27 percent less than in the same year-earlier week, according to Energy Information Administration data.) We assume that residential energy use, which currently is around a fifth of the total, rises by 10 percent due to enforced home-stays.

These assumptions add up to a 37 percent shrinkage in U.S. energy use measured in Btu’s. The fall in carbon emissions might be a bit greater since carbon-free energy sources — nuclear power, wind turbines and solar panels — would keep humming while dirtier coal and petroleum bore the brunt of the cutbacks. We’ll watch to see how other modelers handle the complex calculations.

Rest of World
U.S. carbon emissions now (2017) account for only 15 percent of the world’s total. To baseline the rest of the world’s CO2 we turn to the superb data compilations and visualizations assembled under the aegis of “Our World in Data.” Analysts Hannah Roser and Max Ritchie divide the globe into nine regions, plus International Transport (largely long-distance shipping and aviation).

We assigned various percentage reductions to each region as shown in the graph at right, starting with our U.S. figure of 37% derived above. Other reductions range from highs of 40% (International Transport) and 30% (European Union) to lows of 10% (Africa) and 15% (most of Asia; also Latin America). The worldwide average — again, this is speculative calculating — is 21%.

We again stress that these are guesses and are skewed to the high side; as dire as things are, it still seems unlikely that fossil-fuel burning and consequent carbon emissions will fall this steeply. Moreover, deep contractions probably won’t be sustained for a full year.

Translating CO2 emissions to CO2 levels 
The numbers are largely illustrative and we’ve pushed them hard. Summing the reductions shown in the graph, they imply that 2020 emissions conceivably could fall short of the 2017 baseline or “default” value by 7 to 8 billion metric tons (gigatonnes).

The redoubtable “Skeptical Science” brief, Comparing CO2 emissions to CO2 levels, tells us that each 7.8 gigatonnes of emitted carbon dioxide adds 1 part per million to atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Equivalently, reducing emissions by 7-8 gigatonnes — whether absolutely or relative to a baseline trajectory — averts a 1 ppm rise in atmospheric CO2.

Keep in mind that this would constitute a permanent drop. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would be 1 part per million less than otherwise not only at the end of 2020 but at the end of 2021, 2022 and every year going forward. The boon to climate and humanity, though slight (considering that the world has overshot the postulated 350 ppm maximum safe level by more than 50 ppm), would be indelible.

We hope in future posts to explore how much of the current reduction in CO2 might be negated by economic “bounceback” (short answer: not much); and, more importantly, how the economic and social upheavals from the coronavirus crisis might open up political pathways leading to decisive, longer-term action to bring down carbon emissions without widespread suffering.

Addendum, April 11: See our new post today, CO2 emissions will shrink this year. How much?, for a discussion of parallel but different projections of worldwide 2020 CO2 contractions from Carbon Brief.

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

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confronting Big Oil has delivered little

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 6, 2020

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

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

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

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

I was there to catch a man
I thought I had him by the hand
I only had him by the glove
The War on Drugs, I Was There, 2011

Australia, engulfed in flames, choking in smoke, a billion animals perished, once had a powerful climate solution by the hand: a carbon tax. The nationwide tax on fossil fuels was in effect for just two years, but what an impact it had, helping the country cut its carbon emissions while economic activity climbed unimpeded. During the carbon tax’s middle year, 2013, Australia’s CO2 to GDP ratio had its sharpest drop ever (see graph below).

Australia stands apart, then, not just in the magnitude of its climate-charged horror but in deploying a climate-change antidote, only to lose it to a right-wing, coal-financed backlash. Not even Trump’s dismantling of the Obama pro-climate Clean Power Plan and auto-mileage standards, unsettling as it has been, stands out as cruelly as Australia’s renunciation of its carbon tax.

Unwanted child, stepchild, bastard child … Australia’s carbon tax was all of that. It took effect on July 1, 2012, the keystone of a deal between the Labor Party headed by incoming prime minister Julia Gillard and the pro-carbon tax Green Party, whose votes Labor needed to attain a majority.

As Australian journalist Julia Baird noted in a 2014 NY Times op-ed, Gillard’s earlier pledge to not tax carbon emissions and her “perceived lack of conviction in the policy itself” damaged the tax’s credibility and her own viability. The subsequent electoral victory of a “Liberal” (read: right-wing) government committed to repealing the tax led to its rescission on July 17, 2014.

Yet the tax appears to have performed brilliantly. With just two years of data, we can’t draw sweeping conclusions. Nevertheless, we have these ineluctable facts about the 24 months in which Australia taxed carbon emissions from all major sources except petrol-fueled transport:

• CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels in Australia fell 2.4 percent in 2013 and 1.1 percent in 2014 — the two steepest year-on-year declines since 1990, when modern record-keeping began.
• Emissions in 2014 were 14 million metric tons less than in 2012. The decline was powered by a 19 million metric ton drop in the electricity sector, which is highly carbon-intensive and thus the most responsive to carbon pricing. (Increases in mining and manufacturing emissions somewhat offset that downturn.)
• Economic activity was unaffected by the carbon tax, as indicated by the minimal difference between the 3.01% average annual rise in GDP for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014 vs. the 3.07% average rise for the remainder of the 1990-2017 period for which we had data.

As each day brings new stories of suffering from the terrifying temperatures (including a continent-wide average 107.4ᵒF on Dec. 18) supercharged by climate change, we can only speculate what might have turned out differently if the country hadn’t abolished its carbon tax in 2014.

For one thing, the 18 million metric ton rise in nationwide emissions since 2014 (to 2017, the last year for which the government has issued data) might have been averted if the carbon price signal had stayed in place. Emissions might even have shrunk if the tax had risen from its roughly $20 per ton level — and if the national government had embarked on a New Deal-style project to harvest the country’s vast solar and wind resources.

Even more, Australia’s action might have rippled through the world. The example of a proudly macho and avowedly hedonistic society explicitly pricing its carbon emissions could have turned heads, particularly in the United States, with its many cultural resemblances to Down Under. The fantasy of a land that produced Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee serving as a global role model for carbon taxing and reduction is delicious, though alas, no more than that.

Had Australia continued taxing carbon, British Columbia, the other English-speaking jurisdiction with an explicit carbon tax, wouldn’t have been dismissible as a unicorn. Carbon tax campaigners in, say, Washington state, whose voters considered but rejected a carbon tax in 2016, would have had more than one drum to pound.

It could be said, of course, that Australia’s rescission of its carbon tax is merely one of a number of missed opportunities around the world to tackle climate change by transparently pricing carbon emissions. In an alternative U.S., influential left-greens like Van Jones, Naomi Klein and Food & Water Watch might have backed that Washington carbon tax referendum — or, at least, not lent their voices to the opposition. Earlier, at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009, U.S. “big green” groups could have thrown their weight behind straight-up carbon taxing rather than try to muscle the convoluted, Wall Street-friendly Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill through Congress.

But Australia’s fateful choice is harder to bear. A country of 26 million people didn’t merely pass up a potential opening six years ago; it turned its back on an actual, promising beginning by bringing to power a confirmed climate denier, Tony Abbott, who axed the tax in 2014 and just a month ago, as his country was becoming a cauldron, complained to an Israeli radio audience that the world was “in the grip of a climate cult.”

When summer ebbs and the fires and smoke recede, Australians should consider how and why they disarmed themselves in the fight to stop climate change; and then make a new start by reinstating a policy that, in the brief time granted, appears to have worked wonders.

For more on Australia’s carbon tax history, click here (the Australia section of CTC’s “Where Carbon is Taxed” page).

Among the gazillion articles, posts and books I read this year, three stand out.

Together, the three reads helped spark the Carbon Tax Center’s transformation from single-minded focus on carbon taxing and toward our new synthesis of taxing both carbon and inequality in support of a Green New Deal. As the year draws to a close, I want to share these pieces with CTC subscribers and visitors.

Two of them, long-form journalism published in Harper’s magazine, plumbed the yellow vest protests in France and the ecological roots of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The third, a searing, book-length exposé of tax inequality in the United States, is already reverberating in the current presidential campaign.

1. A Play With No End: What the Gilets Jaunes Really Want, by Christopher Ketcham, Harper’s, August 2019

(Full disclosure: Christopher and I are longtime friends, close enough that I wrote a eulogy to his stepmother, who died last month, and for us to have had several long conversations about his Gilets Jaunes story as he was setting it to paper last spring.)

The Gilets Jaunes movement, named for the yellow vests that French motorists are required to keep on hand for emergencies, rocketed to public attention last December when their largely rural protests against fiscal austerity reached the capital.

Ketcham drew on his direct observations of three tumultuous yellow vest marches in Paris last winter, in which he talked with hundreds of protesters — working and unemployed people and pensioners whose lives have teetered as their communities have been hollowed out by deindustrialization and megastores. He discovered that the Gilets Jaunes weren’t, as the mainstream media insisted, protesting climate action; they were rising up against the yawning gap separating them from the super-rich, a gap widened by President Macron’s rescission of French wealth taxes just weeks before he pushed through a modest carbon levy that raised prices of gasoline and diesel fuel but left aviation fuel untouched.

“The new carbon tax — nine cents more per liter of diesel, four cents more per liter of gasoline — ­may have been the proximate cause that galvanized the Gilets,” Ketcham wrote, “but the worsening conditions of what the protesters called “l’injustice fiscale” [fiscal injustice] provided the powder for an explosion.”

My conversations with Ketcham helped me appreciate the taint of unjustness that has come to surround stand-alone carbon taxing. That a carbon tax can, in theory, be made income-progressive — something this site has trumpeted for a decade — dissolves into irrelevance so long as the ultra-wealthy can consume fossil fuels with impunity while dominating discourse about our dependence on them.

One passage in particular in Ketcham’s article points to a possible escape from this dilemma — a passage I helped him craft on the roof of my apartment building in lower Manhattan, under the thwack-thwack of helicopters whisking the richest of the 1% to their weekend redoubts:

The war of the Gilets Jaunes against the rich, in the age of climate change, is one driven by an understanding unique to protest movements in France: that the privilege to lord and the privilege to pollute are one and the same.

If that is so — if the privilege to pollute is indeed the privilege to lord — shouldn’t we seek to tax both carbon and the super-rich?

2. Where Our New World Begins: Politics, Power and the Green New Deal, by Kevin Baker, Harper’s, May 2019

If Ketcham’s story put the lie to the media image of the yellow vests as know-nothing French trumpistas, Baker’s article resuscitated the Depression-era New Deal as an ecological project, not just an employment-creating and wealth-creating one. Indeed, in Baker’s telling, the New Deal’s three elements of jobs, production and care for the land were so intertwined as to have been one and the same.

Baker’s article begins in two disaster areas: the pre-TVA, flood-prone, impoverished Tennessee Valley, and the mid-thirties mid-American Dust Bowl:

In their desperation, the people of the Tennessee Valley had begun to cut or burn down more and more of the area’s once copious forests every year, seeking to clear more marginal land for farming, to sell the timber, or simply to heat their homes and cook their meals. Deforestation only further drained the soil, and what little land they had kept slipping away.

And this, about the high plains of eastern Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, across Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas:

The dust storms were not merely blown dirt, frightening as that might seem, but entire weird weather systems marching across the land. The static electricity they generated made fire dance along barbed wire and shorted car ignitions. It electrocuted farm animals and those few crops the blowing dirt had not already smothered — literally blackening vegetables in the patches where they lay. The people in the paths of these storms huddled in the darkness, unable to see their hands before their faces for hours, choking — sometimes choking to death — on the “dust pneumonia” that scarred their lungs as badly as if they had contracted tuberculosis.

Baker reminds us that the dust storms were human-made. Nineteenth-century warnings from the likes of John Wesley Powell — Colorado Plateau explorer and founder of the U.S. Geological Survey — that large-scale farming of the dry lands “beyond the hundredth meridian” was unsustainable, were plowed under by propaganda from mercenary railroads and their government enablers:

Much as the Trump Administration and corporate America react today to the idea of climate change or anything else they don’t want to hear by making stuff up, the government and the railroads … promoted quack theories to serve their purposes. No water? Don’t worry: there was always “dry farming,” “dust mulching,” and the imperishable notion that “rain follows the plow”— or civilization in general.

Linking Trump and today’s corporate America to their rapacious forebears is a constant refrain in Baker’s article. Another is pearl-clutching by mainstream gatekeepers such as The New York Times’ editorial board, both in 1933, opposing FDR’s fast-tracking of TVA authorization and funding (“enactment of any such bill at this time would mark the ‘low’ of Congressional folly”) and in 2019, decrying the sweeping ambition of the Green New Deal resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (“the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself”).

To be fair, that 2019 Times editorial, The Green New Deal Is Better Than Our Climate Nightmare, offered some positives about the resolution. Yet The Times’ tunnel vision is on full display in the passage excerpted by Baker:

Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself. As Mr. Markey can tell you from past experience, the first goal is going to be hard enough. Tackling climate change in a big way is in itself likely to be transformative. We should get on with it.

What Markey and AOC grasp, and, The Times may come to understand, though perhaps too late, is that, in Baker’s words, “We must address climate change, and we must transform the way our political and economic systems work in this country — just as we did during the Great Depression. There is no way to do one vital thing without doing the other.” While TVA, the Soil Conservation Service and many other New Deal initiatives were imperfect, as Baker notes, they pulled the land, and the country, together.

3. The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman.

Saez and Zucman may not have intended it, but their new book — our third and final 2019 read — goes a long way to fulfilling Kevin Baker’s commandment to simultaneously address climate change and transform America’s political and economic systems.

That’s a high compliment for any book, and a particularly startling one for a book whose nominal subject is taxation. But reading “The Triumph of Injustice” is a revelatory experience, making clear just how much has been and is being stolen from working- and middle-class Americans to bloat the already criminally swollen coffers of the super-wealthy.

In 2018, for the first time in at least a century, and perhaps ever, Saez and Zucman report, billionaires — the 400 wealthiest U.S. families — paid lower tax rates than the working class, which the authors define as the bottom half of U.S. households. The respective 2018 tax rates were 23.0% for the billionaires and 24.2% for working class households. In 1960, Saez and Zucman’s graph informs us, the ratio of tax rates exceeded two-and-a-half to one (56.3% to 21.6%); even as recently as 1980, on the eve of Reagan’s ascent to the White House, the ratio was still close to two to one (47.2% to 25.7%).

These percentages are emblematic of American inequality. Plunging tax rates for those at the top of the income pyramid, engineered primarily through diminished taxation of capital (lower rates on capital gains and corporate income) have fueled what Saez and Zucman call “a snowball effect [whereby] wealth generates income, income that is easily saved at a high rate when capital taxes are low; this saving adds to the existing stock of wealth, which in turn generates more income, and so on.” The income pyramid grows ever steeper.

Snowballing is bidirectional. Burgeoning wealth at the top lets the super-rich buy heretofore unimagined political influence, not just through lobbying and campaign contributions but by creating and/or purchasing wealth-glorifying think tanks and media outlets. The result transcends ready-made votes in Congress and state legislatures to include an intellectual and cultural climate that valorizes the wealthy and stifles those who would counter the snowballing by taxing extreme wealth.

A signal achievement of “The Triumph of Injustice” is its painstaking construction of a century’s worth of tax incidence, not just at the federal level but state and municipal as well. The authors define eight or more tax categories — income, property, corporate, estate, wealth, payroll, consumption and health (the last encompasses payments for private and government health insurance) — and chart their “bite” for each income decile as well as for the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% and America’s 400 billionaires.

As if this tour de force weren’t enough, “The Triumph of Injustice” embeds its calculations and findings in a captivating narrative of American tax history from the colonial era through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the New Deal, the postwar (and bipartisan) high marginal tax rate years, to Reagan’s tax renunciation (“Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem”) and Trump’s tax “reform.” It’s illuminating and disturbing.

It wasn’t just tax erudition that vaulted Saez and Zucman to their status as architects of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wealth tax plans. The likely clincher was their ability to calculate the revenue the Treasury stands to gain, year by year, through various permutations and combinations of raised taxes on capital (in the form of higher tax rate for capital gains, corporate income, and estates); and to explain how strong regulation backed by an aroused public could seal off the multiplicity of escape hatches from the higher taxes.

Somehow, “The Triumph of Injustice” delivers all this in just 200 pages. Even better, Saez and Zucman have posted their wealth and tax-incidence data on their website, taxjusticenow.org. The topper is their elegant, interactive page that lets you Make Your Own Tax Plan and see how the Warren and Sanders plans, or a plan of your own devise, can cut the holdings of the ultra-rich down to size and return American taxation to the relatively egalitarian shape it maintained from the New Deal through the Great Society.

Our Next Steps

At CTC, we are expanding our program around a new synthesis: a Green New Deal funded by taxes on extreme wealth — “taxing inequality,” you could say — and supported by a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

You can read more about this redirection here. We wish to emphasize that it is not an abandonment of carbon taxing. Far from it. Rather, we intend to situate carbon taxes in a broader framework that is suited to both the political dynamics and the climate emergency that will dominate the third decade of the 21st Century, and beyond.

The Carbon Tax Center was founded in 2007 on the belief that the most direct path to decarbonize the world economy lay in enacting a robust U.S. carbon tax and replicating this policy across the globe.

A dozen years on, we are expanding our program around a new synthesis: a Green New Deal funded by taxes on extreme wealth — “taxing inequality,” you could say — and supported by a revenue-neutral carbon tax such as the fee-and-dividend approach espoused by Citizens Climate Lobby.

Here’s why: After decades of denialism by the right and antipathy from the left, we have reached a point where, standing alone, a carbon tax is too fraught politically and too weak economically to serve as the centerpiece of U.S. climate policy. We now believe that the path to decarbonizing the U.S. economy lies in a Green New Deal-inspired infrastructure and investment program funded by taxes on extreme wealth and supported by a carbon tax.

CTC envisions a three-part program to accomplish this:

1. A Green New Deal plan investing $10 to $20 trillion over a 10-year period to develop the infrastructure, industrial capability, and consumer incentives to decarbonize the U.S. energy system within several decades.
2. New taxes on extreme wealth and financial transactions, supplemented by increases in estate taxes, marginal income tax rates, capital gains and corporate taxes, to generate, from the wealthiest American households, the estimated $10 trillion or more needed to pay for the Green New Deal energy programs.
3. A rising charge on carbon emissions from fossil fuels that supports the Green New Deal energy programs by shortening payback periods for green investment and embedding energy efficiency and conservation throughout American society.

 

Our Program Is Unique and Synergistic

Although others have advanced the three individual elements of our program, none have proposed them in combination. Our integrated treatment offers synergistic political and economic benefits:

• Funding the Green New Deal through wealth taxes obviates the need to invest the carbon tax revenues, allowing the carbon tax to be revenue-neutral and thus more politically palatable.
• Assigning the proceeds of the wealth tax to the Green New Deal – a program to preserve the climate and save society – undercuts the argument that confiscating the super-wealthy’s vast fortunes is purely retributive.
• Tying the carbon tax to taxes on extreme wealth connects carbon taxing to its radical roots, making it more palatable to the left.
• Taxing extreme wealth limits the ability of the super-wealthy to maintain their political contributions, think tanks and other channels of influence that are stifling not only climate action but other endeavors to reform politics and society.

This redirection is not an abandonment of carbon taxing. Far from it. Rather, we intend to situate carbon taxes in a broader framework that is suited to both the political dynamics and the climate emergency that will characterize the new decade, and beyond.

CO2-coin logo courtesy of Tommaso Sansone.Click here for a longer and more recent post outlining how we came to embrace this new synthesis.

I’m rarely without one of my own bikes. But lately, dicey weather and scheduling issues led me to add Citibikes to the mix. And during each hassle-free ride I marveled anew that since 2013 the City of New York, home to some of the world’s most contested streets, actually cleared out space for the bicycle docks and racks.

The man who faced down the skeptics — of whom there were many — and saw bike-sharing through? Michael Bloomberg, during his third and final term as mayor.

Earlier this year, Albany legislators wrote language into the state budget that in 2021 will launch the world’s most ambitious congestion-pricing plan in NYC. As visitors to this site know, I fought for this groundbreaking program, as pamphleteer and traffic-modeler. I recognize that congestion pricing’s passage was made possible by a host of advocates in and outside government. High among them was Bloomberg; his bold though unsuccessful push for traffic tolls a dozen years ago laid the ground for this year’s win.

As mayor, Bloomberg instituted a slew of measures, many of them controversial, that have made New York more healthful and prosperous. All deserve to be counted as green achievements because they have attracted and kept businesses and residents in our dense and efficient, hence low-carbon city. He also, in 2007, called for a U.S. carbon tax, becoming perhaps the most prominent American to back straight-up carbon taxing rather than the convoluted cap-and-trade schemes beloved of mainstream environmental groups back then. More recently, Bloomberg’s post-mayoral contributions to the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign helped shove scores of carbon-spewing coal-fired power plants into early retirement — a certified climate win.

Knowing all this, you might ask why, in an interview with Inside Climate News, I chose to pour cold water on the idea of Bloomberg as a 2020 climate candidate . . . going so far as to call him “the perfect climate candidate for 2007.” (My epithet wrapped ICN’s story yesterday, Bloomberg Is a Climate Leader. So Why Aren’t Activists Excited About a Run for President?)

Why? Because, as I told ICN, I believe that extreme wealth stands in the way of the radical transformations the climate emergency requires.

If, as I believe, rapid and full decarbonization must entail fundamental changes in how humans live and work and organize, then everyone’s lives must transform. It won’t wash for the super-wealthy to go on leading lives of unbounded privilege — luxuriating on their yachts, globetrotting among their mansions, helicoptering from one island or summit gathering to another — burdened only by carbon fees on their huge footprints.

Bloomberg is of that class. That he has greater awareness than his peers is to his credit. But so long as he wields and personifies extreme wealth, he cannot be the avatar of transmuting it into productive use.

In the U.S., new work by the U-C Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman suggests that taxes on extreme wealth and financial transactions, supplemented by increases in estate taxes, marginal income tax rates, capital gains and corporate taxes, will be able to generate trillions of dollars from the wealthiest American households. Those revenues, not carbon tax revenues, must be the funding source of the vast amounts needed to pay for the Green New Deal energy programs.

What I meant by my “Bloomberg 2007” comment is that, with climate damage already skyrocketing and emissions still rising, we’ve shot past the point when a carbon tax could have been the primary policy engine to slash U.S. and other nations’ carbon emissions quickly enough to keep the rise in global temperatures under the presumed 1.5ᵒC ceiling.

That wasn’t so in 2007, the Carbon Tax Center’s inaugural year as well as when Mike Bloomberg vaulted to the front of the valiant band of political leaders and advocates calling for robust carbon taxing. But now, a dozen years on, the climate crisis is too dire, and economic inequality too extreme and enraging, for carbon taxing to function as the main ticket out of climate catastrophe.

In the coming months, the Carbon Tax Center will be retooling our program to reflect our new view that the path to decarbonizing the U.S. economy lies in a Green New Deal-inspired infrastructure and investment program funded by taxes on extreme wealth and supported by a carbon tax. Please watch this space.

As for Mike Bloomberg, we acknowledge, with deep gratitude and genuine respect, his past vision and leadership and thank him for his service. The torch is passing to new leadership that will attack the power to lord and the power to pollute at the same time.

March 2020 addendum: On March 1, just before Bloomberg ended his candidacy, NY Times climate reporter Lisa Friedman posted an unusually substantive and nuanced assessment of his climate record, Fighting Coal Was Supposed to Lift Bloomberg. Here’s Why It Didn’t. The money quote is from Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute:

Bloomberg is a victim of the climate debate moving much faster than the positive realities he helped shape on the ground. In particular, his focus on coal seems passé now that the target of the left is natural gas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forty years ago, the only “screw-in” light bulbs were incandescent. Little-changed since their invention in the late 1800s, “Edison” bulbs were cheap, disposable and staggeringly inefficient. “Small electric heaters that give off a bit of light” is how someone once described them. Coal guzzlers, given how much electric current they drew.

Around twenty-five years ago, compact fluorescent light bulbs became widely available and reasonably affordable. CFL’s were marketed as offering the same illumination as incandescents for far less power, enabling them to quickly pay off their higher initial costs with the saved electricity. But they were unwieldy — taking a bit too much time to reach full brightness, for example — their light was unattractive, and the bulbs contained mercury, rendering them, for some people, off-putting. CFL’s were a climate solution, but far from an ideal one.

Finally, a decade or so ago, LED bulbs came on the market. More efficient than CFL’s, non-toxic, long-lasting and beaming brilliant light through dozens of tiny light-emitting diodes, LED’s are about as perfect a means of artificial illumination as can be imagined. Unsurpisingly, consumers ate them up.

The widespread switch from incandescents to CFL’s and ultimately to LED’s is a big reason that starting in 2005 and lasting for more than a decade, the U.S. economy was able to hold total electricity consumption constant even as output of goods and services grew 20 to 25 percent. So unprecedented was this “decoupling” of electricity from economic activity that we at CTC produced a report, The Good News, celebrating it and explaining it. (Electricity usage did jump nearly 4 percent last year — Trumpism in action, perhaps? — but thus far in 2019 it’s down 2 percent.)

To be sure, more-efficient light bulbs weren’t the only factor holding down power demand. Penetration of digital tech in manufacturing and energy management also helped, as did the emergence of a robust business sector to harness energy efficiency. Ditto the structural shift from heavy manufacturing to service industries, along with a shift to urban living and delayed family formation, which resulted in smaller dwellings with fewer appliances (with the appliances themselves gaining in efficiency due to increasingly ambitious standards).

Nevertheless, the revolution in lighting offers the perfect rebuttal to the notion that energy efficiency — the linchpin of quickly eliminating fossil fuels from our energy supply — somehow entails sacrifice. LED’s are superior to incandescents along every criterion, most critically in producing the same or better lighting with more than an 80 percent saving in electricity. And if they cost more to buy, many utilities offer “demand-side” programs to help cut the customer price.

Which makes Elizabeth Warren’s handling of the light-bulb question during yesterday’s climate debate so frustrating. Yes, there was such a question, and it offered a fabulous opportunity to push back against the notion that energy efficiency entails Americans sacrificing. Alas, the opportunity was missed, as can be seen in this edited version of Sen. Warren’s exchange with moderator Chris Cuomo:

Cuomo: Do you think the government should be in the business of telling people what kind of light bulb they should buy?

Warren: Oh come on, give me a break. This is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about. That [climate] is “your” problem. They want to stir up a lot of controversy around light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers when 70% of the pollution and of the carbon we’re throwing into the air comes from three industries. Why don’t we focus there? It’s corruption. It’s these giant corporations that [are] making big bucks off polluting our earth.

To be fair, Warren’s full answer (included here, at the end) had more nuance than this excerpt. She took pains to say “There are a lot of ways … to change our energy consumption. And our pollution. And God bless all of those ways.” But her attempt to deflect Cuomo’s question backfired, because she let his implicit equation of efficiency with deprivation go unchallenged.

Moreover, Warren’s “70% of the pollution comes from three industries” notion is grossly misleading. Yes, it’s the electric power plants, not the person at home, that spews carbon; but cutting demand so those plants slow and stop their emissions during the transition to solar panels and wind turbines is going to require redoubling our efficiency efforts (emulating California would be a great start). Which means continually ratcheting upward efficiency standards for lighting, appliances and industry.

If we can’t proudly defend not just lighting efficiency but the 40-year collaboration of engineers, environmentalists and regulators that painlessly delivered efficiency to the entire U.S. appliance sector (refrigerators, air-conditioners, dishwashers, heat pumps, etc.), how are climate hawks going to champion the necessary choices that may actually entail some sacrifice, such as flying less, driving less mindlessly, welcoming urban density and transit-oriented development, and so on?

That is why Warren’s punt on the light-bulb question hurts. And the harm has been exacerbated by the enthusiastic reaction of prominent left-green commentators. Rebecca Leber at Mother Jones congratulated Warren for “cutting through the dumbest climate argument,” despite the fact that Warren didn’t cut through the argument, she ducked it. At Vox, Li Zhou wrote that “Warren’s response speaks to how the fossil fuel industry [is] eager to shift the framing of subjects like light bulbs and paper straws in order to put the focus on consumer choice and deflect from the larger issue of reducing pollution,” a take that disconnects the vital matter of electric generation pollution from the demand that helps give rise to it.

Sure, it’s politically attractive to put the entire onus for climate catastrophe on giant corporations. But actually tackling and overcoming the climate crisis will require even more fundamental change than dismantling Big Oil.

Following is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Q&A with moderator Chris Cuomo on light bulbs, in the Sept 4, 2019 CNN Climate Town Hall

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/09/04/bernie-sanders-sot-trump-stance-climate-cnn-town-hall-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/climate-change/

Chris Cuomo — The president announced plans to roll back energy saving lightbulbs and he wants to reintroduce four different kinds which I am not going to burden you with but one of the ones is the candle shaped ones and those are in favor for a lot of people. But do you think the government should be in the business of telling people what kind of light bulb they should buy?

Elizabeth Warren — Oh come, on give me a break! (Sighs) You know…

CC: Is that a “yes”?

EW: No… Here’s… Look, there are a lot of ways that we try to change our energy consumption. And our pollution. And God bless all of those ways. Some of it is with lightbulbs, some of it is with straws and some of it… Dang!… is with cheeseburgers. Right? There are a lot of different pieces to this and I get that people are trying to find the part that they can work on and what can they do. I’m in favor of that and I’m gonna support that. But understand, this is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes that we are all talking about.

(Applause)

EW: That’s what they want us to talk about. That this is “your” problem.

(More applause.)

EW: They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers when 70% of the pollution, and of the carbon we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries. And we can set our targets and say by 2028, 2030, and 2035, no more. Think about that. Right there. Now, the other 30% we still gotta work on. Oh no, we don’t stop at 70%. But the point is that’s where we need to focus. And why don’t we focus there? It’s corruption. It’s these giant corporations that keep hiring the PR firms and everyone has fun with and gets it all out there so that we don’t look at who’s still making the big bucks off polluting our earth. The time for that has passed. We have a chance. A chance left in 2020 to turn this around but we are running out of time so we’ve got to do this in 2020 and that means the first thing we’ve gotta do is that we have to attack this corruption head on in Washington and say enough of having the oil industry and the fossil fuel industry write all of our laws in this area. No more!

Transcription by CTC intern Rohan Kremer Guha

The Carbon Tax Center has had qualms since day one about campaigns to compel institutions to divest from their fossil fuel holdings. The morality is great, but impact is lacking.

“Divestment can’t loosen the fossil fuel stranglehold without a carbon tax,” we wrote in a photo caption in our first stand-alone post on divestment four years ago.

Today, with a broadened outlook, we would write that divestment can’t loosen the fossil fuel stranglehold without a Green New Deal-level massive investment in decarbonization, with a robust carbon tax playing a major contributory role — a position we outlined in a post earlier this year, Carbon Tax Advocates Should Embrace a Green New Deal.

Our 2015 post outlined why fossil fuel divestment is a dead end:

Divestment by socially responsible investors, universities and even governments won’t starve capital flows to fossil fuel corporations anytime soon. That’s because in a global market, every share of stock we activists dutifully unload will be snatched up in milliseconds by some trader who can bank on humanity’s continued dependence on fossil fuels to continue generating profits. (emphasis added)

Why bring this up now? Because we just stumbled across an illuminating 2018 interview with U-Mass economist Robert Pollin, a prominent climate academic-activist and co-author of a detailed financial analysis of fossil fuel divestment impacts. The interview, posted at Truth Out in May 2018, is entitled, Are Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns Working? A Conversation With Economist Robert Pollin. Sadly but unsurprisingly, Pollin concluded in his analysis, also from 2018, that they aren’t.

Here’s the key excerpt. The questioner is C.J. Polychroniou, a Truth Out contributor and political economist-scientist. We added boldfaced type, for emphasis.

Q: One approach that has become quite popular in recent years is the strategy of divestment. However, the recent study you coauthored with Tyler Hansen questions the effectiveness of the strategy of divestment in reducing carbon emissions. How did your study come to that conclusion?

A: In this new research paper, Tyler Hansen and I concluded that divestment campaigns have not been especially effective as a means of significantly reducing CO2 emissions, and they are not likely to become more effective over time. Our study includes both an analysis of the available data on global divestment patterns as well as a formal statistical modeling exercise that evaluates the impact of divestment events — such as when the New York City pension fund decided last January to sell off all of their fossil fuel company holdings — on the stock market prices of fossil fuel companies.

We found two basic things from this research. First, to date, we found the total level of divestment commitments to be at about 0.7 percent of total global private fossil fuel assets (assets committed to divestment are at about $36 billion while total global private fossil fuel assets are at $4.9 trillion). Second, we found no evidence that any divestment actions, including the recent New York City pension fund decision, has [sic] had any significant negative effect on the stock prices of fossil fuel companies.

The basic problem with the strategy is straightforward. Ethically motivated owners of fossil fuel stocks and bonds — such as the New York City Council — do certainly have the power to sell these assets as a statement of principle and act of protest. But this act of protest will have no direct impact on the operations of the fossil fuel companies as long as investors who are profit-seekers, as opposed to being motivated ethically, are willing to purchase the stocks and bonds that ethically motivated investors have put up for sale. Indeed, the core divestment strategy of selling fossil fuel assets is, at best, incomplete until one addresses this question: Is there somebody out there still willing to purchase these fossil fuel assets, and if so, and at what price? The answer is, yes, there are plenty of people ready to purchase shares of fossil fuel companies as long as they can profit by owning these shares.

In addition, the profit opportunities from owning oil, gas and coal company stocks are not diminished through the divestment-led sales per se. This is because divestment per se does not affect either how much it costs to produce fossil fuel energy or how much consumers are willing to buy. In theory, divestments might be capable of pushing down stock market prices of fossil fuel companies. But it is also likely that any such impact on stock prices is going to remain negligible as long as profit-seeking investors continue to make money. And they will continue to make money unless we succeed in either raising costs of producing fossil fuels or limiting how much fossil fuel energy consumers can buy.

Pollin hastens to add, as we did in 2015, that he and his co-author Tyler Hansen “greatly respect the accomplishments of the divestment movement”:

[Divestment campaigns] enable activists to fight for goals that can be clearly articulated and achieved within the institutions and communities in which they work and live, as opposed to attempting to influence public policies where the decision-making process is more remote. Divestment campaigns also have a demonstrated record of success in raising consciousness as to the urgency of dramatic action on climate change, and the need to confront the power of the fossil fuel industry as the single greatest barrier to advancing a viable climate stabilization project.

Despite these substantial accomplishments, we nevertheless conclude, based on the findings we present here, that most efforts now devoted to divestment campaigns would be better spent on more direct efforts to drive down fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. We simply don’t have time to lose in pushing as effectively as possible on the fundamental goal which we cannot lose sight of — which is to drive CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions down to zero as quickly as possible. We need to remember that, at best, divestment is a means to an end, with the end itself being eliminating emissions.

There’s a wealth of supporting analysis in the Pollin-Hansen paper (here’s link, again). But the takeaway remains that divestment is primarily a tool for movement-building rather than carbon-busting. Climate laggards like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio who wrap themselves in the mantle of fossil-fuel divestment are just green-washing.

Editor’s note: On May 31, energy-climate blogger David Roberts posted How California became far more energy-efficient than the rest of the country, a gorgeous distillation of our report, “California Stars.” Roberts’ post explains the policy dynamics underlying our report’s quantitative findings and shows how California has made energy efficiency and renewables the focal point of the state’s economy. His post also makes clear how far all 50 states still have to go while placing “California Stars” in the national political context.

Yesterday the Natural Resources Defense Council released California Stars, my report quantifying and documenting California’s relative success in decarbonizing its economy since the 1970s. I say “relative” because the report’s measure of success involves not one but two relational metrics: carbon reductions relative to economic activity, and California relative to the other 49 states.

California Stars: Lighting the Way to a Clean Energy Future establishes that from 1975 to 2016, the nation’s largest state reduced the fossil fuel inputs needed to support a constant amount of economic activity 18 percent faster than the rest of the country — a difference with enormous climate consequences. Had the other 49 states matched California’s rate of improvement, the report finds, annual emissions of carbon dioxide nationwide would be lower today by nearly 25 percent, or 1,200 million metric tons of CO2 — the equivalent of all carbon pollution from U.S. passenger vehicles.

There’s more about California Stars further below and in a graceful blog post by long-time NRDC attorney and energy strategist Ralph Cavanagh, who oversaw the report. I was principal author, which may come as a surprise to readers who have followed my career of late. For one thing, the report has nothing to do with carbon taxing. Moreover, a decade ago NRDC and I were on opposite sides of an internecine struggle over carbon pricing, with NRDC backing cap-and-trade and me, on behalf of the Carbon Tax Center, insisting on straight-up carbon taxes. More recently, in 2015, in a blog post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes, I went to considerable lengths to counter criticisms from an NRDC energy-efficiency superstar that carbon taxing was too blunt an instrument to do much good in cutting down emissions.

All the same, for over 40 years it has been abundantly clear, even from my East Coast perch, that even without a carbon tax, California’s government has steered its economy more assertively toward energy efficiency and renewable energy than has any other U.S. state. (California does have a modest cap-and-trade program.)

Through the California Energy Commission, a first-of-a-kind agency legislated in the last year of Gov. Ronald Reagan’s administration and staffed in Gov. Jerry Brown’s first (1974 and 1975, respectively), California established not just the first efficiency standards for major appliances and buildings but a process for continually updating those standards to align with — and further incubate — technological advances by which cooling, heat and light may be furnished with progressively smaller energy inputs. These policies, along with innovations that enabled electric and gas utilities to bankroll customer “end-use” efficiency investments, later spread to most of the other 49 states, greatly amplifying their single-state impacts. But they took root first and, it appears, most deeply in California.

Needless to say, these policies thrilled me, even from afar. And the policies themselves seemed firmly planted in a statewide culture of energy efficiency and innovation. To be sure, you couldn’t discern that culture in the state’s sprawling subdivisions and freeways, but you could sense it in the passionate conversations about energy that caromed among the policy beehives that were springing up around the state: at the California Energy Commission and the state Department of Natural Resources; at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and its Energy Resources Group and at Stanford; at NRDC, which was making efficiency standards sexy not only to other environmentalists but to appliance manufacturers and builders; and at the Environmental Defense Fund, whose pathbreaking analyses were suggesting that investing in efficiency and renewables could make utilities financially stronger.

The font of this activity was Gov. Brown. Whether or not he grasped all of the intricacies — and he probably did — Brown’s personal asceticism and hippie-ish disdain for standard modes of consumption (at least in his first go-round as governor) seemed to furnish the cultural DNA for California’s quiet but consequential energy-policy revolution. This was palpable during my three working trips to the state during Brown’s first term: in 1976 when I campaigned around the state for a ballot measure limiting new reactors; in 1977 when I testified for EDF and NRDC in nuclear power siting cases in San Diego and San Francisco; and in 1978 when I spent a month in Los Angeles with the PhD economist Vince Taylor, workshopping my analyses of cost escalation in nuclear power.

Within a year, that work would catapult me to national prominence, when the Three Mile Island reactor outside Harrisburg, PA melted down and I, providentially, had the computer printouts (regression analyses of the relentlessly rising costs to build nuclear plants throughout the 1970s) that answered the question on the lips of seemingly every energy-journalist in America: what would the TMI accident do to nuclear power economics? Almost overnight, my energy-policy work narrowed to a single-minded focus on nuclear power costs — which ended only when I took up urban-bicycling advocacy near the end of the 1980s.

By the early eighties, then, I had to give up my close watch on California’s energy efficiency progress. Last September, however, with Gov. Brown’s fourth and final term drawing to a close and with climate concern skyrocketing in the U.S., the time seemed right to determine how far California had actually gotten off fossil fuels since the start of that quiet revolution in energy governance in the seventies. CTC intern (and U-Chicago rising sophomore) Rohan Kremer Guha and I dug up California-specific fossil fuel and GDP data and placed it alongside data for the U.S. as a whole, which led to a preliminary version of the table above.

In a nutshell, we found that from 1975 (the approximate start date of that revolution) to 2016 (the most recent year with consistent data):

• California’s use of fossil fuels increased by 23 percent, a bit more than the rate for the rest of the U.S. (20 percent)
• During that same period, California’s economy more than quadrupled in size, far surpassing the other 49 states’ tripling
• Adjusting the first figures by the second, California reduced its use of fossil fuels per unit of GDP by 70 percent; for the rest of the U.S., the reduction rate was 60 percent

The last bullet point led directly to the startling finding reported at the top of this post: Had the other 49 states reduced fossil fuel use relative to economic activity at the same pace as California, nationwide carbon emissions would have been lower in 2016 by 1,200 million metric tons, or 24 percent.

Proof indeed, not just of California’s leadership but of the rest of the country’s sluggishness . . . and of the consequences of the gap between the two. Because of that sluggishness, the U.S. missed a chance to eliminate carbon pollution equivalent to CO2 emissions from all 200 million passenger cars and (light) trucks in the country. I pitched a report built on this analysis to our friends at NRDC, and our collaboration produced this report.

I’ll have more to say soon, not just on the report itself but on what it says about Jerry Brown’s climate record. You can download the report (pdf) directly from NRDC’s Web site and comment on it here via the link just below the headline near the top of this post.