Charles Komanoff – Page 19

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

Unicorn or Harbinger? A Republican Carbon Tax Is Readied for Debut.

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“House Republican will introduce $23 climate fee next week.” That’s the headline of an article today in E&E News reporting that Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a two-term Republican representing Florida’s 26th Congressional District, is finalizing a bill that would impose a carbon-emissions fee on most U.S. fossil fuel-burning sectors and also eliminate or at least pause some federal regulations on climate change.

(Update: The Curbelo bill was introduced on July 23 as H.R. 6463, the Market Choice Act.)

E&E calls Curbelo’s pending bill “a rare effort by a Republican to address global temperature increases by reducing greenhouse gases.” That’s an understatement. To the best of our recollection, the bill would be the first carbon tax proposed by a sitting G.O.P. Congressmember or Senator in roughly a decade.

Any needle-moving from the Curbelo carbon tax would be in the political realm, not in direct emission cuts.

Politically, then, the appearance of Curbelo’s bill will be a big deal. In terms of straight-up carbon reductions, however, the bill is underwhelming. Our quick take from inputting the bill’s key elements into CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model is that in 2020, U.S. CO2 emissions would be 22% below 2005 levels. To put that in perspective, actual U.S. emissions a year ago were 14% less than in 2005; thus, the 2020 bump from the Curbelo bill is at most 8 percentage points — less, actually, given the ongoing decarbonization of our electricity sector. (The Congressman’s draft fact sheet for the bill optimistically pegs the 2020 reduction at 24%.)

By 2032, the emissions drop from 2005 would reach 30% (per Curbelo) or 29% (per our modeling). But seeing as nearly half of that decrease was already in place without a carbon tax in 2017 — a year that is closer to the 2005 base year than to 2032 — the Curbelo proposal has to be seen as fairly thin on actual climate deliverables. Which is what one would expect from a carbon price that barely exceeds $20 per ton (the bill’s $23 starting price is per metric ton) and rises by only 2% a year above general inflation, although the bill contains a provision to ratchet up the increase if reductions fall short of specified targets.

Nevertheless, there’s a bigger picture to consider. Just yesterday we put up a post bemoaning the possibility that the anti-carbon-tax Scalise Resolution would pass, as it did in 2016, without a single Republican dissent. Now it looks like Rep. Curbelo is set to dissent in spades by shattering the decade-long G.O.P. prohibition against sponsoring or endorsing — let alone introducing — a carbon-tax bill.

If any D.C. Republican was going to take such a step, it was likely to be Carlos Curbelo. His 26th CD, extending from southwest Miami to the Everglades and covering the Florida peninsula’s entire southern tip, is a climate ground-zero twice over — sea-level rise plus hurricanes — and a classic swing district (it went blue by double-digits in the last two presidential races). A year after taking his seat in January 2015, Curbelo co-founded the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus with fellow Floridian Ted Deutch, a Democrat representing the 22nd CD. Whether by conscience or calculation or a combination of the two, Curbelo clearly read the handwriting and elected to break ranks with his party’s denialist orthodoxy.

The Curbelo bill itself is full of political calculation, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It would clear the books of the long-standing federal highway excise taxes — 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline, 24.4 cents for diesel. The carbon tax, with its built-in annual increases, would more than make up the difference, though at the cost of a percentage point or two of economy-wide carbon reductions due to the diluting effect of the swap. The Highway Trust Fund would be a big net winner, receiving 70 percent of the entire revenue take. Whether that’s bad or good depends on whether the increased revenue is allocated to highway expansions or “fix-it-first” infrastructure repairs.

G.O.P. carbon-tax trailblazer Carlos Curbelo. Pic credit: Miami Herald.

The bill stands no chance of passage this year, of course, or in almost any imaginable Republican-controlled Congress. Indeed, under the G.O.P.’s Hastert Rule, Rep. Curbelo would need 117 Republican co-sponsors simply to clear the “majority of the majority” threshold and get the bill to the House floor.

If Rep. Curbelo were a Democrat, we would be measuring his bill against Democratic carbon-tax proposals such as Rep. John Larson’s America Wins Act (HR 4209), whose carbon price starts at $49/ton and which devotes $1 trillion to infrastructure (plus transition assistance for coal country and a relatively small “dividend” for households), and which has a few dozen Democratic co-sponsors. And while the Larson bill’s 2%-plus-inflation price increase trajectory has the same slope as Curbelo’s, it operates on a much higher base and thus packs more punch.

But that comparison runs the risk of missing the point: that a “long national nightmare” of Republican silence and inaction on climate may be starting to end. Whether other G.O.P. lawmakers will stand with Curbelo remains to be seen. He is at least blazing a path, and for that he deserves our thanks.

CTC supporter and volunteer Bob Narus contributed research and ideas to this post.

Last Chance to Believe In a Republican-Assisted Carbon Tax?

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The biennial “Scalise Resolution” condemning carbon taxing is up for a vote in the House this week, according to a report on The Hill news site.

The text of H.Con.Res.119 — “Expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy” — may be viewed here. It says, inter alia, that “a carbon tax will fall hardest on the poor, the elderly, and those on fixed incomes,” and that “a carbon tax would reduce America’s global competitiveness.”

The first assertion ignores the possibility of carbon-dividend proposals that would benefit most low-income households by returning more carbon revenues in monthly payouts than they would take away in higher fuel prices. The second ignores the need of U.S. industry to heed the accelerating transformation of global energy markets to low- and no-carbon tech like wind turbines, solar cells and efficient vehicles and appliances.

The resolutions’s other thirteen “whereas’s” are equally vapid, and in fact the Scalise Resolution is just the Republican Party trying to use carbon taxing to beat up Democrats. Nevertheless, the upcoming vote can be seen as a crucial test not just for the Climate Solutions Caucus but for the very idea of a Republican-backed or -assisted carbon tax.

The caucus now has 43 House Republican members. By joining, each took a pledge to “explore policy options that address the impacts, causes, and challenges of our changing climate,” according to the page devoted to the caucus on the Web site of its sponsoring organization, Citizens’ Climate Lobby. It also has 43 Democratic members, per its “Noah’s Ark” approach to climate bipartisanship. We single out Republicans because in 2016, when a similar resolution passed by 237-163, not a single Republican voted No. Sixteen abstained, while six Democrats joined the 231 Republicans to vote in favor.

In the past, House G.O.P. members and their apologists have cited “primary anxiety” — fear of being ousted in a party primary by even harder-right insurgents — as reason to toe their party’s denialist line on virtually anything bearing on climate. But this year’s primaries are now in the rear-view mirror. Any Republican member’s vote against the Scalise Resolution this week would appear to carry no political cost until at least 2020. And by then, climate denial could have become untenable in most House districts, even red ones.

Climate Solutions Caucus member Mark Sanford (R-SC) lost his primary last month. A vote against Scalise could give him a climate “profile in courage.” Pic credit: Getty Images.

Even less peril awaits the ten Republican caucus members whose current term in Congress is their last. Nine have announced their retirement: Bud Shuster (PA), Charlie Dent (PA), Darrell Issa (CA), Dave Reichert (WA), David Trott (MI), Ed Royce (CA), Ilenaa Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Lynn Jenkins (KS), Ryan Costello (PA). A tenth, Mark Sanford (SC) lost his primary last month.

Just a single vote opposing Scalise would end the carbon-tax embargo by which no sitting Republican congressmember or senator has ever endorsed carbon pricing, even just in principle, since 2010. It could signal, in some small way, that at some not-far-off time, a critical mass of Republicans might vote for a carbon tax. Which in turn could validate organizing for revenue-neutral carbon taxing like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s fee-and-dividend proposal.

CCL is rallying its membership to defeat the Scalise Resolution. But my sources say that CCL leadership aren’t focusing their organizing to target Republican caucus-members. That might have been understandable two years ago, when the caucus was in its infancy. But it’s now midway through its third year. It’s fair to demand that Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus to stand up and oppose the Scalise Resolution. If they won’t, why should anyone believe that any Republican will ever stand for a carbon price?

Prominent climate journalists including David Roberts and Kate Aronoff have dismissed the caucus as greenwash for denialists. It may be too much to ask all 43 of its G.O.P. members to form a No bloc on Scalise. But the ten who are retiring at year’s end could take a stand, and perhaps pull in a few Republican holdovers.

As we suggested last month, that could provide political validation for carbon fee-and-dividend and its close cousin, the Climate Leadership Council’s carbon dividends plan. We at CTC aren’t holding our breath. But we’d love to be proven wrong.

July 19 addendum: Four G.O.P. caucus members — Ros-Lehtinen, Fitzpatrick, Love and Curbelo, whose carbon-tax bill is expected to drop next week — voted against the resolution today, as Inside Climate News reported. Two non-caucus Republicans joined them, for a total of six.

Another Carbon-Dividend Group. Will It Matter?

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Carbon-dividend proponents continue, as ever, to push for national “fee and dividend” legislation. Today the Washington, DC-based Climate Leadership Council announced formation of a lobbying arm, Americans for Carbon Dividends, headlined by former Senate Republican majority leader Trent Lott, former Senator John Breaux (D-LA) and former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. This follows the news last month that the Climate Solutions Caucus — a project spearheaded by the grassroots Citizens Climate Lobby — has enrolled four new Republican House members, bringing total membership to 78 — 39 R’s and 39 Dem’s (with each new Republican, a Democrat is brought in from a waiting list).

If tenacity trumped reality, CLC and CCL would now be refining their fee-and-dividend proposals into Congressional bills and shepherding them through hearings, markup and, ultimately, legislation. Within a decade of enactment, the money-saving and profit-driven replacement of carbon-belching coal, petroleum and natural gas by low- and zero-carbon fuels, technologies and cultural norms would have pushed U.S. carbon emissions 27 percent below current levels and 36 percent below 2005, the standard baseline year in climate analysis, easily fulfilling our country’s Paris climate pledge. (Figures are based on our modeling of U.S. energy, assuming CLC’s recommended starting CO2 price of $40 per ton, followed by annual rate increases of $5/ton; details here.)

So much for the premise of bipartisanship built into the political strategy for carbon fee-and-dividend.

Alas, reality doesn’t bend so easily. Especially when it comes in the guise of a Congress ruled by, as it is often said, Earth’s only major political party (among democratically run countries) that has sworn itself to disbelieve in human-caused climate change and to disavow the necessity or possibility of public policy to combat it. At this writing, 17 months into the Trump administration and 28 months since the Climate Solutions Caucus was founded, not a single Republican member has uttered a word of support for carbon fee-and-dividend legislation, much less written or co-sponsored a CFD-themed bill — even though, from the outset, the political strategy behind CFD has been built on bipartisanship.

By the same token, the impressive list of Republican luminaries standing with CLC/ACD consists entirely of former office-holders: former Sen. Lott, former Reagan and Bush-41 cabinet secretaries James Baker and George Shultz (the latter’s cabinet service actually extends back to the Nixon presidency), and others whose glittering credentials are shown on the CLC and ACD web sites.

This isn’t meant to disparage these organizations or individuals (excepting current GOP office-holders). We have written glowingly of the fee and dividend concept for a decade, including last year in articles in The Nation and the Washington Spectator. Both pieces praised the Climate Leadership Council’s advocacy, as have our numerous blogs (here, here, and here, inter alia). We were honored to gain George Shultz’s signature on our 2015 Call to Paris Climate Negotiators: Tax Carbon, and are stirred that, in his 98th year, Secretary Shultz continues to devote himself to climate sustainability on behalf of both CLC and Citizens Climate Lobby. We have also worked closely with CCL since its formation in 2009, fielding hundreds of queries from CCL activists on tax incidence, energy modeling and other “technical” matters and gratefully accepting financial contributions from CCL members as well.

So it’s with a measure of sadness that we share here our sense that the time for carbon dividend proposals has probably passed. The center to which Baker-Shultz (CLC) and fee-and-dividend (CCL) were designed to appeal barely exists. It’s not just that no sitting Republican has endorsed Baker-Shultz or indeed fee-and-dividend in any form. It’s also that the Democratic majority that will be needed to pass a carbon tax bill appears unlikely to rally around a revenue-neutral carbon tax, whether it’s organized as fee-and-dividend or some form of tax swap.

To be sure, the Democratic majority’s carbon tax — if and when there is one — may include a degree of “dividending,” but only of a portion of the revenues. That’s because a Democratic carbon tax bill will also insist on directly investing much of the carbon revenues: in renewables, energy-efficiency, mass transit, worker resettlement and retraining, and damage mitigation — rather than relying on the price pull from the tax. (A textbook example of such a “just transition” bill is the state carbon tax proposal developed by NY Renews, the energetic left-leaning grassroots coalition in New York State.)

There’s nothing wrong with that, provided such a carbon tax can pass and that its tax level rises quickly enough over time to overcome the lesser price-sensitivities (“elasticities”) that govern driving, freight, air travel and the like, which make it harder for carbon-pricing to drive down emissions in the economy’s non-electric sectors. But of course a good deal of the intended appeal of carbon dividend plans was that households, with politicians following in their wake, might support raising the carbon tax because the size of their dividend checks would rise in tandem. Diluting the dividends weakens the appeal.

And revenue-neutrality isn’t the only flashpoint lurking in the CLC-ACD proposal. Another element of the deal — one that has won a measure of oil-industry support — would immunize fossil fuel companies against litigation seeking to hold them accountable for climate damage caused by their products. Earlier today, a leading strategist and backer of such litigation, Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund, told the NY Times that “We categorically oppose any deal that shoves trillions in costs down the throats of innocent taxpayers and lets the companies skip away to profit and deceive another day.”

While sentiments like Wasserman’s help rouse the climate base, they don’t point to a policy solution. Like the polar icecaps themselves, the center that would support a revenue-neutral carbon tax or other carbon-tax-based “grand bargain” continues to shrink. As the horrors of the Trump administration and its Congressional Republican enablers continue to mount, there’s no apparent middle ground, whether in climate and carbon-taxing or in any consequential policy-making.

We can commend the ACD initiative — which former Senators Lott and Breaux have detailed in a New York Times op-ed — while bemoaning its lack of political currency. The political struggle to contain climate change has moved to the courts and to the state and local levels. If and when a semblance of sanity returns to Congress and the White House, that state and local mobilization will be critical to enacting the carbon tax and complementary policies necessary to achieve deep cuts in emissions.

Note: A month after we published this post, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), introduced a carbon-tax bill — the first from a Republican member of Congress in a decade — as we reported here.

A meeting of minds on carbon taxes

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The rifts over carbon pricing that have engulfed the climate movement in recent years and helped sink the 2016 Washington state carbon tax referendum softened noticeably at a public forum in New York’s Westchester County on Monday evening. Lines of convergence outweighed points of contention, perhaps signaling that proponents of transparent and robust carbon pricing can surmount our ideological differences and move forward together.

The forum, Carbon Tax: Solution to the Climate Crisis, was organized by local climate activist Andrew Ratzkin and held at Pace Law School, whose affiliate, the Pace Energy and Climate Center, has for decades been a bulwark of policy and legal analysis for energy efficiency, renewable energy and environmental taxation. While the four panelists — I was one — hale from different disciplines and generations, we were conversant with climate science, economics and organizing and respectful of each other’s endeavors.

The younger panelists, Dan Sherrell and Shiva Prakash, outlined the ambitious New York State carbon tax proposal developed by NY Renews that has attracted wide support — with sign-on from 143 organizations — through its pledges to apply the carbon revenues to protect low-income families, invest in sustainable energy technology, help workers transit out of fossil-fuel jobs, and remediate “front-line” communities disproportionately damaged by fossil fuel processing and combustion.

While there’s room to question whether spreading the revenues so broadly can achieve all four objectives, NY Renews rests its optimistic projections — which include, by 2030, a halving of New York CO2 emissions and creation of 150,000 net new jobs — on a detailed study by the U-Mass Political Economy Research Institute. The group also formulated its carbon-tax proposal through extensive consultation with advocates from labor, environment, low-income and environmental-justice communities — a far more holistic process than Carbon Washington followed in fashioning its doomed I-732 referendum, and one that should augur well for the eventual legislative effort.

You may have noticed that my description led with the proposed use of the revenues, not the level of the tax. One reason is that the carbon tax amount in any state proposal tends to be constrained by “leakage” concerns over cross-border business flight as well as the political difficulty of getting too far out front of neighboring states; for the record, the NY Renews carbon tax would start at $35 per ton of CO2 and increase indefinitely at 5 percent a year.

The other, weightier reason for emphasizing revenue use is that it has become the boulder on which carbon tax advocacy has splintered. Revenue-investment proponents like NY Renews, who tend toward the political left, want the carbon revenues applied to the “Green New Deal” elements outlined above (and shown in the graphic below) which collectively constitute what they call “the just transition” from coal, oil and gas to renewables.

An opposing revenue-neutral camp tends to be less overtly political, as exemplified by Citizens Climate Lobby, whose 60,000 national members insist on equal return of carbon “dividends” to households as a way of skirting left vs. right fights and building constituencies of support for raising the carbon tax or fee level (since the dividend checks rise at the same rate). The revenue-neutral camp also places greater trust in the ability of the carbon-price signal to motivate pervasive changes in investment, behavior, technology and societal values that will effectuate the flight from fossil fuels, whereas revenue-investors tend to disdain “market forces” and to eye carbon taxes primarily as a revenue source to pay for socially driven and governed wind, solar, weatherization, public transit and electrification.

While these categories are a gross simplification, a synthesis of sorts appeared to come into view on Pace at Monday, along these lines:

  • Taxing carbon emissions is so essential AND politically difficult that establishing a U.S. beachhead is more important than demanding a perfect version.
  • The impossibility of enacting a carbon tax at the federal level till at least 2021 leaves states as the locus for that beachhead for several years or more.
  • Several factors render revenue-neutrality less imperative in state than federal carbon-taxing:
    • The lower tax rates in most state proposals imply lesser need to dedicate revenues to dividends or other income-support;
    • Greater political and cultural cohesion within states allows tailoring carbon-revenue investment to be more politically palatable;
    • Greater role of coalition politics makes some revenue investment necessary to pass state legislation.

While it’s possible or even likely that initial state carbon taxes that are heavy on revenue investment might repel red-state members of Congress as “Christmas-tree” packages, that specter seems less salient than the need to get some carbon-tax boots on the ground — not to mention the need to overturn the G.O.P. majorities and shrink climate-denialist representation in Congress, period.

NY Renews’ proposed state carbon tax allocations.

These bullet points sharpen somewhat the long-established position of the Carbon Tax Center to support virtually any carbon tax formulation that doesn’t demonstrably worsen economic inequality. Still problematic for CTC, however, is the insistence of many revenue-investment adherents that their Just Transition include substantial allocations — as much as one-third, in the NY Renews proposal — to offset and remediate disproportionate fossil-fuel impacts on front-line communities.

Our position, which co-panelist Michael Gerrard also voiced, is that the fastest and surest way to reduce and eliminate those environmental injustices is to enact and ramp up the highest carbon tax that’s politically imaginable. Both Michael and CTC premise this on our conviction that the price signal itself is the salient policy tool within the carbon tax, and that a robust carbon charge will create powerful and ultimately irresistible incentives to reduce and eliminate fossil fuel use — and, thus, emissions and other impacts — across-the-board, not just in selected (wealthy and white) communities. It follows, then, that all communities, including but not limited to environmental-justice communities, will be better protected from both climate damage and “traditional” environmental insults if carbon tax proposals are free from what some lawmakers may consider special dispensations and can be legislated as high as possible.

We at CTC took a first stab at articulating this position in a 2016 blog post. We hope to elaborate on it soon and to elicit responses from NY Renews and other climate activists who carry the environmental-justice carbon-tax banner.

The Carbon Tax Center Last Year . . . and in 2018

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

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

We didn’t write this headline, but we agreed with it. The Left’s opposition to the WA carbon tax was a grievous mistake.

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

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

Outputs from CTC’s carbon-tax model: download and use!

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

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

Our radio call-in touched off a roiling debate about the gap between public postures and personal acts.

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

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

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

CTC’s program for 2018

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

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

Excerpt from “Results” section of our “BTA” spreadsheet model. A key goal for early 2018: A congestion pricing win for NYC that establishes the “polluter pays” principle in the USA.

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

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

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

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

Five Down: Climate Solutions Caucus to lose another Republican

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33 to 28. It may look like a football score, but it’s actually the downsizing of the Republican side of the Climate Solutions Caucus.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA-49) this morning announced he’s not seeking an eleventh term representing northern coastal areas of San Diego County in Congress. He joins departing GOP caucus members Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-27), Dave Reichert (R-WA-08), Ed Royce (R-CA-39) and Pat Tiberi (R-OH-12).

Unless new members are recruited from current House ranks, the caucus’s roster of Republican members is set to fall from its current 33 to 28 by year’s end. The pending 15 percent shrinkage surpasses the overall 9 percent retirement rate among Republican House members this year. (We count 21 of 240 House R’s leaving, excluding a dozen or so moving or aspiring to higher office, based on Ballotpedia.) GOP Caucus members disproportionately represent swing districts, like Issa’s, possibly explaining the difference.

The Noah’s Ark-like conclave — Republican and Democratic Congressmembers enter as pairs, with Republicans the limiting factor — was founded in Jan. 2016 to provide a safe space and political cover for timorous Republicans to act on climate change. To date it’s been mostly cover and little action.

None of the Republican members have uttered a word in favor of carbon taxing, even the intendedly Republican-friendly “fee and dividend” espoused by the caucus’s catalyst, Citizens Climate Lobby, or the carbon dividend proposal devised by the Climate Leadership Council and advanced by Republican elders. Since Trump took office, moreover, none has fought legislation or deregulation enabling the administration’s fossil fuel juggernaut, save for squelching language in the National Defense Authorization Act that would have barred the Pentagon from analyzing climate threats to U.S. military installations.

It may seem incongruous that Issa, whose lifelong loathsomeness (full details at Wiki) has run the gamut from petty thievery and dangerous driving to obsessive Obama-bashing, not to mention amassing riches from his blaring, motion-detecting “Viper” car alarm, would have joined the Climate Solutions Caucus. There is no entrance criterion, however. That can be viewed as either a bug, enabling joiners to rack up green cred at no cost, or a feature, helping Republicans who might be seeking to exit the cult of climate denialism incubate pro-climate words and, eventually, deeds.

Both perspectives got a hearing in a feature article on the caucus last week in E&E News, A bunch of House Republicans accept warming. Is it real? Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune spoke for the first group, rhetorically asking, “[W]e are supposed to jump up and down and spew happy talk because now there’s a safe space for people to talk about climate change? Forgive me if I’m not happy.” Others quoted in the story, such as Emily Wirzba of Friends Committee on National Legislation, cited the need to rest climate policy on a bipartisan base, saying “The policy will be stronger even if Democrats take control of Congress, you know you’ll have Republicans that support climate policy.”

Defenders of the caucus also point to victories like inclusion of renewable energy credits (RECs) in the Tax Extender Act of 2017 (S-2256), pleas by Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA-6) and other caucus members to bar oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters or the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and a vote by 11 caucus Republicans that ultimately led the Senate to protect the Bureau of Land Management’s natural gas waste rule to prevent methane venting/flaring. Measured against the full dimensions of the climate crisis, however, these appear little more than baby steps. And measured against Trump’s drumbeat of deregulatory and verbal assaults on climate protection and policy, like his dizzying attack of falsehoods today on the Paris climate agreement, the positive moves by GOP caucus members pale even further.

Nevertheless, Issa and the caucus’s other lame-duck Republican members have a rare opportunity: a full year still in office to speak their minds on climate (or other issues) without fear of being primaried by unabashedly denialist insurgents. They could push back against Trump’s climate lies and call on their party to assume its Rooseveltian mantle of environmental stewardship. In doing so, they could set a standard for their 28 Republican colleagues who hope to keep their seats and, by their caucus membership, have ostensibly committed themselves to pursuing climate solutions.

Let’s hope they do. Otherwise, it becomes even harder to rebut the argument that the path to a better and safer world requires a Democratic sweep of the House, including Republican caucus members, in this year’s midterms.