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.

Sacrifice? Maybe, with CFL’s. No way with LED’s.

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).

The LED revolution has played a big part in flattening U.S. electricity usage, which since 2005 has done more than even wind and solar combined to hold down carbon emissions.

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.

Left Greens loved Warren’s light-bulb answer.

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.

I was lead author of this NRDC report documenting how California has surpassed the rest of the U.S. in decoupling economic growth from fossil fuels.

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.

Table 1 from “California Stars” shows that from 1975 to 2016 California reduced its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output by 70%. For the other 49 states collectively, the reduction was only 60%. That percentage difference equates to 1,200 million excess metric tons of carbon pollution in 2016 alone—a huge missed opportunity for the rest of America.

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.

CTC policy associate Bob Narus wrote last month that Carbon Tax Advocates Should Embrace a Green New Deal. Here is his mirror-image brief for including a robust carbon tax in a Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal isn’t a policy yet. Right now, it’s mostly an aspirational slogan and a set of bullet points, which is fine for the moment. There’s time to work out the policy details. But it’s important that a robust carbon tax become one of those bullet points, because without it no deal, no matter how new and green, can do everything we need to do to prevent global climate change from spinning out of control.

Rally in Victoria, BC, March 2019. Photo courtesy of Anne Hansen.

Whether a carbon tax is part of the Green New Deal depends on whose Green New Deal you mean. The Data for Progress report, A Green New Deal — essentially Document Zero for the Green New Deal movement — doesn’t endorse a carbon tax but does note that “there is new analysis that a carbon tax will not hamper the economy, particularly as revenues are reinvested smartly in communities.”

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Ed Markey resolution, H.R. 109/S.R. 59, doesn’t mention a carbon tax, or any other potential source of funding for its ambitious goals, but AOC herself has publicly recognized the need for taxes to internalize the externalities of some industries or markets.

The policy details will fall into place over time. In particular, one hopes the many Democratic presidential candidates who have endorsed a “Green New Deal” will say more about what they mean by that — which policies they would include, what they’ll cost, how to pay for it all.

In short, we will have a national conversation about the Green New Deal. To everyone engaged in that conversation, here’s a quick take on why a carbon tax should be part of it:

1. If you believe the IPCC, we have to do everything.

In its most recent report, the IPCC called for roughly halving (from 2010 levels) world carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Achieving that in the U.S. would require a 5 percent annual decrease in carbon emissions from fossil fuels, which would quadruple the actual rate of decline from the mid-aughts to 2017 (see technical note at end). And right now we’re going in the wrong direction: The Rhodium Group estimates that U.S. CO2 emissions rose 3.4 percent in 2018.

With a challenge like that ahead of us, we can’t afford to take any option off the table. As I argued recently, a carbon tax alone will not do the job. But neither will anything else. We need to throw everything we’ve got at the climate crisis, and that definitely includes the most economically efficient tool.

2. A carbon tax will make everyone a partner in the effort.

Addressing the climate crisis is going to demand a heavy dose of government intervention in the economy. But it will require more than that. A carbon tax will deliver economy-wide impact, giving every business and household incentives to change how they produce things and what things they buy. Getting the job done will take billions of dollars in public investments and millions of smaller decisions in the marketplace. A carbon tax will make more of the latter happen.

3. A carbon tax can affect industries that are hard to regulate.

There’s no question that performance standards and other regulations must be a major part of climate policy. But not everything lends itself to such regulation. As energy analyst Hal Harvey explained to Vox’s David Roberts late last year:

It’s hard to set a performance standard that works for glass, pulp and paper, steel, chemicals, and so forth. So in those realms, setting a price is a nice way to handle it. Then businesses can simply internalize the costs and make better decisions.

4. A carbon tax makes everything else we need to do easier.

Want to subsidize renewables? Higher fossil fuel prices will allow smaller subsidies to close the cost gap between carbon-based and renewable power. The same amount of spending on subsidies will then bring more renewables online.

Want to incentivize clean energy investments, like energy efficiency? Higher fossil fuel prices shorten the payback period on  those investments. Again, we’ll be able to reduce the degree of subsidies or other inducements required to get households and businesses to make those investments.

Carbon taxes can even replace some regulatory efforts. Citizens’ Climate Lobby argues that its fee-and-dividend proposal could reduce emissions in the power sector more and faster than President Obama’s Clean Power Plan proposal. That means regulatory efforts could concentrate instead on sectors, like transportation and buildings, that are less responsive to energy pricing signals than power generation.

5. A carbon tax can affect emissions beyond our borders.

It’s not enough to reduce U.S. emissions. The rest of the world must do its part. (Of course, right now the rest of the world is saying that about us.) A carbon tax with a border adjustment can pressure other countries to impose their own robust carbon pricing measures. The border adjustment adds a fee to imports tied to the level of carbon emissions required to make that product. (This is, admittedly, not an easy thing to do. Adele Morris of The Brookings Institution treats the complications in a policy brief.)

The border adjustment would be waived on imports coming from countries with carbon pricing equivalent to ours. Each country would face a choice: Pay the U.S. a border adjustment on your exports, or pay yourself the equivalent amount via a carbon tax. For countries that export to the U.S. market, that shouldn’t be a hard decision.

6. A carbon tax will raise revenue that can be used for other climate mitigation programs.

A Green New Deal will create lots of jobs primarily by spending lots of money — rebuilding the power grid, subsidizing clean energy, retrofitting buildings, redesigning cities to be less automobile-dependent, creating an infrastructure to recharge electric cars, etc. That money comes from somewhere, and a carbon tax is a logical source of funds — especially a robust tax that would, in the out years, bring in hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

This is only half an argument for a carbon tax, however, because there are reasons based in economic justice to use the revenue differently. Any carbon tax will hit low-income households proportionally harder than high-income ones, and some or all of the revenue ought to be used to offset the tax’s regressive effects. Fortunately, there are many progressive funding streams — including taxes aimed at high incomes, wealth, or financial transactions — for raising the revenue to fund a Green New Deal. But if the only politically practical way to pay for a Green New Deal requires some carbon tax revenue, the revenue will be there.

*   *   *

A carbon tax was never an easy sell on its own, and it won’t be an easy sell as part of a Green New Deal either. David Leonhardt at The New York Times just posted a good history of its difficult political fortunes, and comes down about where we are:

The better bet seems to be an “all of the above” approach: Organize a climate movement around meaningful policies with a reasonable chance of near-term success, but don’t abandon the hope of carbon pricing. Most climate activists, including those skeptical of a carbon tax, agree about this.

Carbon tax advocates should take this call to heart. Even with a Democratic takeover in 2020 — which is no sure thing — the U.S. is some years away from either a Green New Deal or a carbon tax. We should use that time to make sure the ultimate answer is “both.”

Here’s how we calculated our figures in the first numbered paragraph: CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model (downloadable Excel file) puts U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels at 5,409 million metric tons (MMT) in 2010 and 4,992 MMT in 2017. With Rhodium’s 3.4% one-year increase, emissions were 5,162 MMT in 2018. To cut that to 2,704 MMT (half of 2010 emissions) in 2030 requires a 5.2 percent annual drop (calculated by exponentiating 2704/5409 to the 1/12 power – 12 years – which is 0.948). A similar calculation from 2005 emissions of 5,822 MMT to the 2017 figure of 4,992 MMT yields an average annual drop of 1.3% over those 12 years.

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

See opening paragraph for link to the story in Earther magazine.

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

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

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

The huge mutual regard among NYC “livable streets” advocates helped push congestion pricing through the legislature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Monday, The Nation magazine posted “Congestion Pricing Is New York’s Green New Deal,” a piece I co-authored with fellow transit advocate Jeff Blum, casting congestion pricing in New York City as an initial foray of the Green New Deal. Following is the text of the piece, with an addendum instructing Carbon Tax Center subscribers and allies what they can do between now and March 31 — congestion pricing’s legislative deadline — to push the proposal across the finish line in Albany. — C.K.

While the Green New Deal basks in the national spotlight, a different but parallel policy idea is advancing in New York. That is Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s plan for congestion pricing, which will charge motorists to drive in the most car-jammed (and transit-rich) part of the city, Manhattan south of 60^th Street.

At first glance the two appear more opposite than related. The Green New Deal is national, congestion pricing is New York-specific. One is expansive, a solar and wind energy-based revitalization of our society and economy. The other seems punitive, making drivers pay for what is now free.

As posted in The Nation. See link at top of this post.

But we believe the two have a great deal in common, both practically and philosophically. Moreover, congestion pricing faces a March 31 legislative deadline to allow initial appropriations for the tolling apparatus to be included in the New York State budget due on that date.

And so we invite Green New Deal adherents — from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the legions of determined climate justice activists who have put the Green New Deal on the political map — to make congestion pricing in New York a stepping stone to the national fight.

To begin, any program to save the climate depends on having cities thrive. Urban residents use only a fraction as much fossil fuels as suburbanites or rural dwellers, not because they are virtuous but because cities, due to their compactness, are inherently lower-carbon. City residents drive less not just because they can take transit but because destinations are close by. Density also dictates that homes and offices use less power and heat. For cities to thrive and grow, automobile traffic must be tamed and restrained, which congestion pricing does with marvelous efficiency.

Congestion pricing shares DNA with the New Deal through emphasis on public investment. Federal spending in the 1930s strung electric wire and conserved the soil, and federally driven investment going forward can decarbonize our economy. In the same way, the congestion toll revenues in New York can pay to modernize the city’s buses and subways — as happened after London adopted congestion pricing in 2003. Thanks to massive transit investment and reappropriation of street space there, nearly 25% more people now enter the center of London daily, mostly on trains, buses and bikes, while car travel speeds have remained stable.

There’s more. Congestion pricing rests upon the Rooseveltian idea to care for the commons — rivers and forests and farmland. Streets and transit are cities’ commons, which America has allowed cars to plunder for a century.

After years of temporizing, transit advocates in New York have finally resolved that the antidote to broken subways and too many automobiles must include charging vehicles to drive in city centers. Both major transit coalitions, the more business-oriented Fix Our Transit and Fix the Subways, led by the impressive grassroots organizing group Riders Alliance, have put congestion pricing at the top of their political agendas. Before long, we predict, Green New Deal supporters will similarly acknowledge that fully unleashing green energy requires a robust carbon tax, not just as a source of funds but to re-set societal defaults, to re-orient incentives and to unlock innovation.

The Markey–Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal resolution is adamant about labor rights and economic justice. So too is the movement for congestion pricing. New York City’s most venerable anti-poverty advocate, the Community Service Society, examined congestion pricing and found that for each low-wage New Yorker who regularly drives into Manhattan, nearly 40 will benefit from better trains and buses paid for with the congestion-toll revenues. In the same vein, the right-of-center Manhattan Institute concluded last year that extending New York’s decade-long jobs boom depends on massive and effective investment in mass transit to allow immigrant and other workers to access jobs.

These considerations appear to have finally pushed New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio off the political fence last month to proclaim support for congestion pricing.

The iconic New York progressive centrist Daniel Patrick Moynihan understood this thirty years ago. As a powerful Senate Committee chairman, he found a way to use a portion of federal gas taxes to decouple urban mobility from automobiles, spurring a rise in transit and bicycling and making cities cleaner and more dynamic.

There is this difference, however. Unlike the Green New Deal, which is open-sourced by design, congestion pricing for New York is being finalized by the state’s governor, who seems intent on keeping the toll levels and other key plan details under wraps till the last minute.

Attempts to toll the entrances to Manhattan’s central core have come up short so many times that any leader worth his Machiavelli might rightly presume that iron-fisted control is the only way to get it done. But that approach is out of step with both the current political era and the enormous momentum to pass congestion pricing in the state budget this month and finally cure the dysfunction of the city’s streets and subways that daily afflicts millions.

A fifth of the way into our new century, awareness is spreading of the folly of giving away for free a finite resource, whether it’s the atmosphere’s capacity to remain temperate or Broadway’s five travel lanes through Times Square.

A Green New Deal, like its illustrious antecedent, can start in New York. Today, congestion pricing can revitalize and unsnarl New York’s subways and streets. Tomorrow, a nationwide mobilization can turn our carbon economy green.

Komanoff, an energy and transportation economist, was “re-founder” of the bicycle advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. Blum was founding executive director of USAction and leader of multiple state and national pro-transit campaigns.

Whether you live in NY State or somewhere else, please visit the Fix The Subway campaign to find out how you can donate time, money or both to pass congestion pricing for New York City now. Or, text DELAY to 52886. Remember, the vote for the budget bill that will include initial allocations for congestion pricing is expected between Friday March 29 and Sunday March 31. Thank you.

Most carbon tax proposals are standalone initiatives. They outline the level at which the tax starts, how fast it rises over time, how the revenue will be used — and not much else. Simplicity has its virtues, for both policy and political reasons. But in the United States, at least, this approach has been unsuccessful.

Carbon tax bills introduced in Congress have gotten as many as a few dozen sponsors — recently even a couple of Republicans — but nary a hearing, let alone serious consideration in committee, even when Democrats controlled one or both houses. Washington State voters turned down carbon tax initiatives in 2016 and 2018 (demonstrating in the process that use of the revenues doesn’t greatly affect political viability). For those who imagined the Climate Solutions Caucus could be the route to bipartisan support for a carbon tax, the cleaning-out of its GOP wing in the 2018 midterms was a body blow.

It was never a surprise that taxes, carbon or otherwise, revenue-neutral or not, would be a tough sell with voters and potentially toxic to politicians. But more than that, a carbon tax by itself, even a robust one, is no longer enough.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey introducing their Green New Deal resolution in Feb. 2019. Photo Saul Loeb AFP/Getty Images, w/ thanks to Politico.

Last fall’s IPCC report on the impacts of a 1.5ᵒC warmer world found that the rate of carbon dioxide emissions must fall 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 to even come close to keeping the temperature rise that low.

If the U.S. had passed a robust carbon tax — one rising at say $10 per tonne per year — a decade ago, we would be on a path to approach that level today. But passing such a tax in 2021 and implementing it in 2022 — which is the earliest that could happen — might not get us much more than halfway to the 2030 goal. And passage even in 2021 is probably a long shot.

The takeaway is that any U.S. carbon tax today must be part of a broader set of policies to address all significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. A solid roadmap for these policies is the new book by energy analyst Hal Harvey, Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy. Harvey and his team outline a suite of policies that “create a powerful symbiosis that can drive deeper carbon emission reductions than policies in isolation while increasing cost effectiveness,” including:

• Performance standards, regulations setting standards for energy efficiency, emissions reductions, and other goals
• Economic signals, including both carbon pricing and subsidies for renewables and efficiency investments
• Support for research and development, both basic research and government collaborations with private-sector R&D

In an interview last fall with David Roberts at Vox, Harvey explained that carbon pricing is most effective in sectors like power generation where clean alternatives exist, but less so where the price signals tend to be swamped by other costs ( e.g., automobiles) or where they don’t necessarily reach the parties that can do something about emissions (think renters who pay the utility bills but don’t design, construct, or maintain the building):

The thing about carbon pricing is, it’s helpful, but it’s not dispositive. There are a number of sectors that are impervious to a carbon price, or close to impervious. A carbon price works when it’s part of a package that includes R&D and performance standards. It does not work in isolation. It helps, but it doesn’t do nearly as much as is required.

(Designing Climate Solutions is a rich lode of energy policy wonkery in the best sense. It notes that only 20 countries are responsible for 80 percent of carbon emissions and attacking emissions in a handful of sectors in those 20 countries can deliver a substantial down payment on the overall reductions we need. For more, see both the Roberts-Harvey interview and an extensive summary of the book. There’s also an online Policy Simulator that lets you indulge your inner energy czar.)

There’s also a powerful political argument for joining carbon pricing to a broader climate strategy: In the same way you can hide your dog’s pill in a morsel of meat, wrapping a carbon tax in a package of more popular initiatives — renewables, job-creating infrastructure investments, etc. — can help make the medicine go down. Fortunately, such a package is in the works.

The Green New Deal means many things to many people, but the unifying concept is to position climate change mitigation as a retooling of the U.S. economy, particularly our infrastructure, with massive green investment and millions of green jobs. The closest thing to an official statement of purpose is H. Res. 109, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) with 90 cosponsors and counting. Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a companion resolution in the Senate.

The resolution sees a Green New Deal as “a historic opportunity . . . to create millions of good, high-wage jobs in the United States” by investing in new infrastructure to replace our fossil fuel-based systems and industries. At a moment when economic inequality and economic anxiety have reached political critical mass on both left and right, Green New Deal proponents argue that addressing climate change can also address issues that voters care about more (while — at least for the moment — eliding the awkward question of where the money for all this infrastructure is going to come from).

There’s a surge of grassroots energy behind the idea, most of which appears open to a carbon tax as part of the whole. The Sunrise Movement and its partners are likely to be a much more valuable ally to carbon tax advocates than a colloquium of center-right economists.

And the synergy works both ways. A Green New Deal can make a carbon tax more digestible, and a carbon tax can make a Green New Deal more effective. I’ll have more on the latter point in a follow-up post.

Americans in record numbers now regard climate change not as an abstract possibility but a feature of the here-and-now, according to the latest polling by the highly regarded Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Cover of the Yale-George Mason poll report — the 19th in the decade-long series.

Nearly half of Americans (46%) say they have personally experienced effects of global warming, and roughly the same proportion (48%) believe people in the U.S. are being harmed by global warming “right now,” the Yale-George Mason team reports. Both figures are roughly one-third (15-16 points) higher than in prior surveys and are drawn from interviews with 1,114 adults conducted between Nov 28 and Dec 11 — a period that followed on the heels of the “Camp Fire” that devastated the northern California town of Paradise, but months removed from broiling summer weather in most parts of the country.

More than six in ten Americans (62%) now understand that global warming is largely human-caused, a 10-point increase from March 2015, according to the poll, which may be downloaded in summary (HTML) or full (pdf). Nevertheless, only one in five (20%) recognize the vast agreement among climate scientists around that conclusion, suggesting that the decades-long media-abetted campaign to present “both sides” has obscured this vital scientific consensus.

Here’s how the poll authors reported their key findings:

Our latest national survey finds that a large majority of Americans think global warming is happening, outnumbering those who don’t by more than 5 to 1. Americans are also growing more certain that global warming is happening and more aware that it is caused by human activities. Certainty has increased 14 percentage points since March 2015, with 51% of the public now “extremely” or “very sure” that global warming is happening. Sixty-two percent of the public now understands that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 10 points over that same time period.

It’s well-known that political change is driven not just by yes-or-no poll figures but by salience — how strongly voters care, and whether they feel an issue personally. The Yale-George Mason poll found a record 72 percent of Americans responding that the issue of global warming is “personally important” to them. That figure is up by nine points from the previous poll last March, and the first time since November 2008 that the percentage reached 70.

Record-high acknowledgment that climate matters, though still short of a slam-dunk. One of many striking charts in the Yale-George Mason report.

The downside to this figure is not just that 28 percent called global warming either not too important or not at all important, but that it took a full decade to regain the high ground of the 2008 poll. Though the report doesn’t include cross-tabs by political allegiance, it’s virtually certain that the persistent “not important” shares, especially from 2010 through last March, reflect  the tendency of many Republicans, knowing that party identity is partly centered around extractionism and climate denialism, to reject the reality of climate change.

The poll did not ask policy questions, so it has no new data on carbon tax acceptance. This is probably just as well in light of the fluid state of opinion on carbon taxing, not just among the public but on the part of climate advocates. Whether or not a carbon tax is included among Green New Deal proposals being aired in the activist community and Democratic Party circles could help determine what future polling has to say about Americans’ acceptance of carbon taxes as denialism and unconcern lose their hold on public opinion.

This post was has been updated to include a video link to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s extended conversation with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and to provide the full quote of her endorsement of externality pricing.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly installed Congressmember from parts of Queens and the Bronx in New York City and the Democratic Party’s brightest new star in at least a generation, breathed fresh life into carbon taxing today from the stage of Manhattan’s fabled Riverside Church. Her remarks came during “MLK NOW,” a day celebrating Martin Luther King’s life and work combating militarism, materialism and white supremacy.

The commemoration was held six days after what would have been Dr. King’s 90^th birthday, and more than a half-century after King ascended the Riverside pulpit to deliver his prophetic speech, Beyond Vietnam. Ocasio-Cortez alluded to the condemnation that rained down on King in the last year of his life for demanding the U.S. end the Vietnam War, saying “King didn’t just sacrifice his life; the way he lived his life was a sacrifice.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking at Riverside Church in New York City, Jan. 21, 2019.

Ocasio-Cortez spoke in an extended on-stage conversation with renowned author and public-intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. Their full, 51-minute conversation may be viewed on YouTube (from the 14:00 mark to 1:05:30). Covering a broad range, the two discussed her call to raise the marginal tax rate on high income to 70 percent; “the case for reparations” — a matter that Coates brought to prominence in his 2014 Atlantic Monthly article with that title; and her conviction that what’s immoral about billionaires is not them as individuals but the system that allows and valorizes them.

Toward the end, Ocasio-Cortez steered the conversation to the climate crisis and called for “structuring an economy that is sustainable, where “the externalities of the damage of some industries or markets get internalized.” (at 1:00:56, emphasis added) There, in a nutshell, is the polluter-pays principle that underlies the idea of taxing carbon emissions.

The remark is noteworthy given Ocasio-Cortez’s prominence in advocating a Green New Deal, the idea of a wartime-style mobilization of government and business to build a net-zero-carbon economy over the next decade. We at the Carbon Tax Center believe that a robust carbon tax must be a pillar in any Green New Deal, not just as a “pay-for” but as a means to incentivize the massive changes in behavior, investment and societal defaults necessary to move U.S. society off fossil fuels.

On a personal note, the Riverside Church event was my first time seeing Ocasio-Cortez in person and hearing her speak extemporaneously and at length. What I saw, heard and felt easily surpassed the hype. Throughout her 50 minutes on stage, she came off as grounded, determined, forceful, informed, fluent and thoroughly conversant with the history and vocabulary of U.S. popular protest and social movements. And, somehow, commanding yet modest.

Not long after Ocasio-Cortez began, I whipped out my pen and pad and jotted down some of her most telling sentences as best I could. Here are some, concluding with the “externality” quote.

Activism is part of governance.

People think of elective office as a leadership position [yet] the real leaders are the writers, journalists, activists and artists.

Marginal tax rates are an economic question, but they’re also a moral question.

“Where do we draw the line in material excess is a question that King asked, that Gandhi asked.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Where do we draw the line in material excess is a question that King asked, that Gandhi asked.

We think of reparations as repairing the damages of slavery, but it’s also the reparation of the damages from the [exclusionary] New Deal and redlining.

I use social media as much to listen as to speak.

We don’t have to compromise our values to find common ground with other people.

The world is going to end in 12 years [due to climate change] and you’re worried about how we’re going to pay for it?

Until we all start pitching in and holding people accountable, I’m going to let [our enemies] have it.

There was once almost a consensus among our great thinkers [including] Einstein and Dr. King that capitalism had an expiration date.

Democratic Socialism means introducing modes of democracy beyond just elections and throughout the economy . . . structuring an economy that is sustainable, where the externalities of the damage of some industries or markets get internalized.

In bookends to her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez explained why she’s not fearful about taking strong stands. As a Puerto Rican teen in a white suburban high school, she said, she learned not to pay attention when someone tried to put her down. Now, in Congress, she sees herself not as an individual seeking to rise in politics who must practice caution but as a participant in an unstoppable movement to advance democracy and create a just society.

Note: Dr. King’s 1964 speech referenced in my tweet may be found here.

Texas Tech physicist Katherine Hayhoe is investing in a home studio. How do I know? She tweeted about it last night:

Why should we care? Because the professor’s studio upgrade is a microcosm of what a carbon tax — and only a carbon tax — can do for climate.

Some context: Prof. Hayhoe is a renowned voice for climate sanity. At Texas Tech, in Lubbock, she teaches atmospheric science and political science — a potent combination tailored to her dual repertoire of climate physics and climate communications.

These days Hayhoe is inundated with speaking requests, to the point that compelled her to face the tie between her air travel and greenhouse gas levels. Thus the studio upgrade. Now, she tweeted last night, “When I receive a speaking invite, my first question is: could I do a low-carbon video talk? Thanks to peoples’ willingness to give new-fangled tech a try, I now give about 3/4 of my talks this way!” [Click here for Prof. Hayhoe’s complete Twitter thread on the matter.]

Air travel is often trotted out as evidence that climate change is unstoppable — and not without reason. It’s already five percent of U.S. CO2 emissions (some put its climate impact higher, due to flying’s unique atmospheric interactions), a share that is rising, as befits air travel’s “luxury-good” status as an activity that rises faster than incomes. Schemes for lower-carbon propulsion systems, from biofuels or electric motors to hydrogen or high-tech dirigibles, are mostly still at the drawing boards. Packing more passengers into fewer and smaller seats is probably nearing its limit (though perhaps steeper baggage fees will push down per-passenger emissions a bit further).

At least for the immediately foreseeable future, the primary antidote to air travel’s escalating emissions must be to fly less. A carbon tax can bend flying’s demand curve downward, but alternatives like teleconferencing must be part of the process. The better the technology — in ease of use (on both ends), clarity and capability — the more people who will follow in Prof. Hayhoe’s footsteps. Before long, virtual presenting and meeting could grow from quirky to normal. Societal norms will reset, perhaps to the point where jetting to and fro will seem as odd as turning down a trip due to carbon appears today.

Three stages of air travel: physical / digital / something just beyond the horizon.

There are two strands here. One, just noted, is about resetting societal defaults: passing on your second cousin’s third wedding out in Reno not just because the carbon tax has made the trip costlier but because the reflexive, “Nothing could keep me away” has become “This time I’m going to pass” as society has adapted to higher ticket prices (and, perhaps, flying has lost some of its prestige).

The other is about innovation. To stick with our air travel example, ways to participate without physically showing up will inevitably grow more feasible and tantalizing as the carbon tax drives demand toward that direction. Some of the adaptive innovation will be along known paths like teleconferencing, but some will doubtless be along paths few of us can imagine — save for the innovators awaiting the market opportunity.

This stuff won’t be won by regulations, standards or subsidies, but it’s central to slashing emissions, in my opinion. It’s the reason that throughout 2019, as climate progressives brainstorm and settle on the elements of a Green New Deal, CTC will be fighting to ensure that robust carbon taxing is one of them: not simply to generate revenue to pay for green infrastructure but to incentivize the million and one innovations that, even if we can’t yet spell them out, will be key to crushing the structures of demand that still have us hooked on carbon fuels.