This section of our Web site covers four subjects:
- Our Democracy: Carbon taxes and other climate policies must be considered and enacted in the real world of political power, marked increasingly by severe structural imbalances that prevent majority-backed ideas from being debated, voted, and passed. This page discusses the crisis in U.S. political institutions and possible ways forward, including curtailing or ending the filibuster.
- Carbon Pricing and Environmental Justice considers the turn against carbon pricing by the environmental- and climate-justice movement — the community of individuals and organizations dedicated to overturning entrenched and disproportionate pollution burdens borne by African-Americans and other communities of color in the United States — and presents evidence that carbon taxing, though ostensibly race-neutral, will strongly benefit disadvantaged communities.
- Progressives and Carbon Pricing — a companion page to the one directly above — offers “10 reasons progressives have soured on carbon pricing” and seeks to distinguish the rhetoric branding carbon taxes as failed neoliberal policy from the reality that a robust carbon price is essential to rapid and equitable decarbonization of the U.S. economy.
- Conservatives: Explores Republican office-holders’ near-monolithic opposition to meaningful climate policy action including carbon pricing, while also covering occasional signs of interest by conservatives in revenue-neutral carbon pricing such as fee-and-dividend.
- Green New Deal: The ambitious climate rubric, built around massive public investment with millions of new jobs converting the American economy to a clean-energy system, that has taken center stage in progressive policy circles.
- Wealth Taxes: Increased taxing of extreme wealth, including but not limited to billionaire profiteering during the Covid-19 pandemic, can be both a source of funding for the Green New Deal and a key means to make American society more just and democratic.
- Covid-19: A page presenting writings about the pandemic that touch on the climate crisis and the future of our species.