Charles Komanoff – Page 22

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

Carbon dividends plan gains Exxon’s backing as public climate concern hits new high.

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

Graphic from NORC-AP poll released 6-16-2017 (annotation by CTC).

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

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

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

Climate change is now “extremely or very important” to a majority of Americans.

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

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

CLC’s Wall St Journal ad. Click link in text at bottom for easier read.

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

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

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

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

Showing the Cost Side of the Climate Equation in a New Light

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Doubling the temperature rise quadruples the anticipated damage. Curve shown is most conservative of three presented in new paper discussed here.

I’m tempted to call it the decade’s most important paper on the costs of climate damage. The paper, just published in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental and Resource Economics, upends the long-prevailing approach for estimating the social cost of carbon, potentially laying the ground for putting the SCC (in dollars per metric ton of CO2) into triple digits, from the $44 figure stipulated in rule-making by the Obama White House.

Not only that, the paper presents a trio of climate-damage functions relative to the temperature rise, that let us calculate the estimated global cost to humanity from each global warming increment. The functions vary depending on whether they include so-called “catastrophic damages” from climate change as well as estimates of climate change’s potential drag on future growth in economic productivity.  Each function expresses that cost as the percent of future GDP lost per additional centigrade-degree in global-average temperature relative to the pre-industrial level. (Graph at left, with equation in bold, is the most conservative, i.e., slowest-growing, of the three graphs in the paper. All three are shown in the next graphic.)

The new paper, Few and Not So Far Between: A Meta-analysis of Climate Damage Estimates, is by Peter Howard, economics director at NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity; and Thomas Sterner, professor of environmental economics at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. (Disclosure: Thomas and I have shared a warm personal friendship since the 1980s.) As the somewhat unwieldy title suggests, the paper combines data and results of prior analyses that sought to place a cost on future damages from climate change. In those analyses, “damages” are expressed as a percentage of future global economic product — a somewhat cold-blooded metric that nevertheless allows policy-makers to compare the impacts of climate change on human well-being to the costs of mitigation and adaptation.

The Howard-Sterner paper identifies several sources of bias in previous meta-studies of the temperature-damage relationship. There’s “duplicate bias,” by which early climate-damage models tended to be overly conservative but, because of their primacy, came to be cited multiple times, thus biasing downward the temperature-damage relationships in meta-studies. Moreover, methodological choices or constraints kept some analyses from accounting for non-market climate impacts such as reduced biodiversity or for so-called catastrophic impacts such as collapses of regional or global agriculture.

Earlier analyses also failed “to control for whether market impact estimates [of climate damages] included potential impacts on economic productivity,” write Howard and Sterner. Though it may appear bizarre, until recently many attempts to estimate the temperature-damage function deliberately excluded the prospect that climate change will erode societies’ ability to generate new wealth by inhibiting the accumulation of technological and intellectual capital, which are key drivers of economic productivity and growth. In recent years, renowned climate economist William Nordhaus, whose Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model and long-time intellectual leadership have been integral to estimating the social cost of carbon, has come under criticism for excluding non-market, productivity and catastrophic climate impacts from his modeling.

Graphic from Howard-Sterner paper. We recreated their third-highest curve (“preferred model for non-catastrophic damage”) for our first graphic, above.

As we wrote last Friday, in 2015 the Interagency Working Group (IWG) on the Social Cost of Carbon created by President Obama directed federal agencies to use a “social cost of carbon” equivalent to $37/ton in 2007 dollars. (Note that the official link to the IWG was scrubbed away by the Trump White House, in 2017.) That figure, which equates to $44/ton in 2017 dollars, was drawn in part from the “2013R” version of DICE.

In their paper’s conclusion, Howard and Sterner point out that updating DICE as per their findings “would increase the resulting SCC of the Interagency Working Group by between one-and-a-half to twofold.” While that’s true arithmetically, it’s an understatement of sorts, insofar as their conclusion states clearly that “Using the preferred [model] specification, we find that the 2015 SCC increases by approximately three- to four-fold depending on the treatment of productivity.” However, that increase is attenuated by the IWG’s decision to derive their SCC not only via DICE but with two other temperature-damage models, neither of which are addressed in the Howard-Sterner paper.

Thus, while the authors’ analysis would raise the estimate of the SCC derived solely from DICE by an estimated 209 percent, the need to average the increases for the DICE figures with the unchanged figures from the other models leads the overall increase to be considerably less, though a still substantial 63 percent. Even that lower rise boosts the social cost per ton of CO2 to $72, from the Obama administration’s $44 (both figures in 2017 dollars).

That change is important since it warrants recalibrating the panoply of cost-benefit and other calculations that carbon tax advocates, corporate carbon-cutters and others have been basing on the social cost of carbon during recent years. But there’s more, and here we return to the equation we highlighted (and graphed) in the chart at the top.

A possible increase in the global temperature rise from 2C to 3C is estimated to harm humanity ~5 times as much as the experienced rise from 0C to 1C, according to the Howard-Sterner equations.

In their paper, Howard and Sterner tested various curve shapes to distill the set of temperature-damage relationships they sifted in their meta-analysis. Their most robust functional form was a simple quadratic, by which the total damage to global well-being (expressed as the lost percentage of global economic output) rises by the square of the temperature deviation from pre-industrial levels.

Quadratic curves start slowly and gather steam — much as, when an object is dropped from some height, the distance from its point of release increases more with each passing second. And so it appears with the Howard-Sterner climate-damage function, by which the additional societal damage from each new temperature increment is greater than the damage from the previous increment. (See table directly above.) In fact, the additional damage is a linear function of the temperature rise (as you calculus jocks will have noticed, since the first derivative of any quadratic function is a linear one).

The implications are obvious but nonetheless profound. Arresting climate change isn’t binary, whereby we either stop global warming in its tracks or we don’t. It is, literally, a question of degree, with the importance of reducing and stopping warming intensifying as global temperatures rise. While that appears obvious, experientially — discomfort rises more when the mercury climbs to 100F from 95F than from 90F to 95F; and what goes for heat effects should go for drowned coasts, extreme weather, ecosystem stress, and so forth — now there’s an equation to codify it.

Howard’s and Sterner’s quantification of the accelerating harm as global temperatures increasingly diverge from pre-industrial levels obliges humanity — all of us — to redouble our efforts to tax and eliminate fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emitters at the fastest imaginable rate.

“All these fights trace back to the fact that current energy markets don’t value climate change properly. So states are essentially trying to find a backward way into carbon pricing, first by subsidizing renewables, and now by trying to save nuclear. It’s a really messy way of getting there.”

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Energy analyst Alex Gilbert, in How Retiring Nuclear Power Plants May Undercut U.S. Climate Goals, by Brad Plumer, in The New York Times, June 13. (NB: Quote was stitched together from direct quote and reporter’s commentary.)

Why I Called Out My “Green” Mayor’s SUV Habit

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I set off a media firestorm in New York City last week.

It was Friday morning, the day after Trump repudiated the Paris Climate Agreement, and Mayor Bill de Blasio was using his weekly “ask the mayor” turn on the popular Brian Lehrer radio show (NPR) to tell New Yorkers “We’re going to step up our game” to address climate change. I called in and the screener put me through as “Charles from Manhattan.” Here’s what I said:

Mayor de Blasio, you spoke eloquently a moment ago about stepping up our game in light of Trump’s withdrawal from Paris. How about you stepping up your game, leading by example, getting out of your SUV armada, and if you need to go to the Park Slope “Y” five days a week, rather than a gym near you, why don’t you take mass transit? Or even once in awhile ride a bike, like the vast majority of your fellow New Yorkers, so you will know how we are suffering under a transit system — yes governed by the governor, not by the mayor — but you need to lead by example.

My on-air scolding of NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio last week set off a media firestorm. But his SUV habit reveals deeper failings.

I finished with this:

One of the reasons we are in this climate crisis is because the average person sees elites not playing by the rules that elites seek to impose on everyone else. And you’re not going to be able to lead when you’re sitting in your SUV being chauffeured every day, twelve miles from Gracie Mansion to Park Slope just so that you can ride an exercise bike.

Then it was Mayor de Blasio’s turn. He defended his climate record and called my criticism “cheap symbolism,” as reported by Politico (abridged slightly here):

Charles, I understand the emotional appeal of what you’re saying but I’m just not going to take the bait, my friend.

I have instructed folks in my government to turn our fleet into electric cars. We are moving to renewables, we are retrofitting our buildings, that’s the real leadership — it’s not whether I go to the gym.

Whether I go to the gym does not affect the policies that affect millions of people. I’m going to keep going to the gym. I’m proud to say we have a hybrid. It’s a good car, it’s very fuel efficient. I use the subway when it makes sense to use the subway, and I do stay in touch with what people are going through and I knew it for years and years, because for many years I never had any car.

So it’s easy for you to say that, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with how we change the world. We change the world with policies that affect people and the policies of this city are going to lead to addressing climate change in a much more aggressive way than it’s ever been addressed in the history of New York City.

But again, the issue is not cheap symbolism here. The issue is, are we gonna take action. That’s really the motherlode of addressing emissions in this city. It comes from buildings. We’re going to be very very aggressive about that.

That was that, or so I thought. What I soon learned was that the City Hall media bullpen was going nuts. One of the reporters put my voice together with my first name, and the papers started calling for quotes. By nightfall, their stories were up, with front-page headlines in the Daily News and the NY Post branding the mayor a “green hypocrite” and even the staid New York Times putting my exchange with the mayor at the top of its Metro section.

I told The Times that collapsing transit was “the fundamental climate issue and the fundamental sustainability issue for the city and state.” (Link is above pic.)

I was able to go deeper in those interviews. My most-teachable moment came on Saturday. The NY Post was doing a follow-up and I said that transit riders “need a voice and we don’t have one,” when neither the mayor nor the governor rides a subway or bus.

There are levels galore, here. Let’s unpack them.

First, when we quantify the direct carbon consequence from the mayor’s mini-fleet of SUV’s from home to gym, we see it’s really small: just 24 pounds of CO2 per trip, which monetizes to a mere half-a-dollar’s worth of climate damage.

(Burning one gallon of gasoline releases 19.57 lb of CO2, we’ll call it 20 lb. Let’s assume two SUV’s, each averaging 20 mpg, though actual mileage is probably less. They’re going 12 miles, so we get 2 (vehicles) x 20 lb/gal x 1/20 gal/mile x 12 miles, which yields 24 pounds of CO2. In 2015 Pres. Obama directed federal agencies to use a “social cost of carbon” of $37 per ton of CO2, in 2007 dollars; that equates to $44/ton in 2017 dollars, which is just 2.2 cents per lb of CO2. So the mayor’s 24 lb per trip is imposing a direct climate cost of 53 cents (24 lb x 2.2 cents/lb).)

It’s true that the official U.S. cost of carbon (since rescinded by Trump) is a low-balled estimate, but even quadrupling it raises the direct climate cost of the mayor’s tailpipe CO2 to just two bucks — befitting the fact that global CO2 is the end-product of billions of actions that are individually insignificant but collectively fraught.

A second level of costs arises from the spatial impacts from driving in a dense city. These are experienced most acutely as traffic congestion and its attendant time cost. And here I mean not mayoral time lost to traffic (since de Blasio gets to read and talk by phone while being ferried to the gym) but the time his auto trip effectively takes from others on the roads, by virtue of occupying space and slowing them down.

As long-time subscribers to this blog may know, I’ve done a lot of analysis of traffic congestion costs in New York City, even to the point of quantifying the time costs from a single additional trip in or near the city’s Manhattan core. This analysis is embedded in the kaleidoscopic spreadsheet I maintain to model “congestion pricing” for New York (download here, Excel required; go to Delays and Delay-Costs tabs) but more conveniently summarized in Time Thieves, an article I wrote a half-dozen years ago with then-Princeton student Will Fisher.

The takeaway for our purposes is that a single mile driven by just one vehicle during ordinary congested conditions in or near Manhattan slows down other vehicles by a combined 8 or 9 minutes (think of it as hundreds of vehicles delayed by a few seconds each). Factoring that by the 24 miles in the mayor’s ride to the gym (12 miles by 2 vehicles), the cars, trucks, cabs and buses in the mayor’s “traffic field” are absorbing an aggregate slowdown of 3 to 4 hours. By any reasonable estimate of the average value of time of those vehicle users, the aggregate cost of the time taken from them by each mayoral ride from his residence to his gym is easily in excess of a hundred dollars.

I told fellow New Yorkers via the NY Post that vulnerable mass transit undermines our city’s sustainability.

That’s two orders of magnitude greater than the direct carbon cost per trip — indicative of the fact that traffic congestion manifests as an inefficiency problem far more than as a climate problem, at least directly. It also demonstrates that the mayor’s (or any other New York car user’s) promise to switch to an electric vehicles won’t put a dent in the societal costs of driving in a congested metropolis.

Yet even those several hours of extra congestion dissolve into insignificance in a city of 8.5 million people and 2 million registered vehicles. The crux of the matter — which I tried to telegraph in my radio remarks but didn’t really nail until that second NY Post interview the next day — is found in this syllogism:

  • New York City is inherently green by virtue of its urban density. This idea was most lucidly distilled by the writer David Owen in his 2009 book, Green Metropolis. Density both facilitates and enforces shorter trips, non-automobile travel, and compact and contiguous living and working spaces, all of which translate directly into smaller carbon footprints.
  • What makes this density possible is our mass transit (subway) system. But it is deterioriating from insufficient investment in equipment and maintenance. (The local press corps is all over this; see for example these vivid stories last month by The Times’ Emma Fitzsimmons, 1 and 2.)
  • Politicians are ignoring this crisis. Neither NY State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who controls the state-chartered Metropolitan Transportation Authority, nor Mayor de Blasio, who has a voice in running the MTA along with a bully pulpit to call out problems and demand solutions, has stepped up to take responsibility. Neither of them ever rides a subway or bus, except in a photo-op.

It’s safe to say that Mayor de Blasio isn’t steeped in this logical chain connecting density, transit and leadership. For evidence, look no further than the end of his radio rejoinder to my harangue, in which he called the city’s building stock the “motherlode” of emissions and, thus, his climate focus. While it’s true that heating and powering the city’s offices and apartments generates a good deal more CO2 than fueling our cars and trucks, that’s because extensive and efficient mass transit keeps down automobile use. Take that away — as the governor and mayor are effectively doing by turning their backs as the subways fall apart — and transportation emissions will surely rise.

But the stakes are higher still. Low-CO2 NYC can’t grow or even maintain its current population without reliable and humane transit. Businesses and families won’t suffer a city dependent on undependable transit and will locate in less inherently-green cities or suburbs instead. And while in theory leaders could care enough about transit to make it work even if they never stepped onto a train or bus, ours have shown no inclination to do so in their combined decade in office (6.5 for Gov. Cuomo, 3.5 for Mayor de Blasio).

Maybe the only way the situation gets turned around is if each of them is stuck on a jammed, sweltering, subway … or is forced to wait on a packed platform as the minutes tick and the tension mounts. And not just once, but again and again.

That, in a nutshell, is why I called up and berated the mayor. As I told The Times, I’d been pondering it for weeks. The combination of Trump’s craven Paris announcement and the mayor’s wrapping himself in the mantle of climate savior gave me an opening and also pushed me over the edge.

I’ll close with a bit of irony inspired by Nicole Gelinas, the trenchant urban affairs analyst at the Manhattan Institute and New York Post columnist. In her Monday column, Bill de Blasio is a climate change hypocrite, she noted:

People will use less carbon — eventually — not because they’re nice, but because it will be more expensive. The world’s governments could achieve this effect more quickly through a carbon tax. Why not get it over with now? Because it’s too hard, politically and practically, to change people’s behavior by making them pay the full purported cost of carbon — that is, asking you to pay for next decade’s hurricane with your gas purchase today. (emphasis added)

Yes and no. Enacting a carbon tax is hard, but not necessarily impossible. But in this case, as we’ve seen, even a stiff carbon tax wouldn’t impel de Blasio to switch to subway from SUV; and that’s probably true even if he were paying for the ride from his own pocket.

What’s needed are new social norms that will make my radio complaint so ordinary that it’s not news; and unnecessary besides, because the idea of being chauffeured 12 miles to a gym would be nearly extinct. That is where a carbon tax would help.

The Four Best Reads on Trump and Paris

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If you’re not shaken by Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Climate Agreement yesterday at the White House, you’ve wandered into the wrong Web site.

Those “individual nationally-determined commitments” whose sum is, or was, the Paris agreement may be woefully insufficient to stop climate ruin; yet reaching the agreement was an enormous step forward, marking the time the world began moving in concert, if haltingly, toward capping, reducing and eliminating climate-destroying emissions.

A transcript of Trump’s Rose Garden remarks is here, for anyone who cares to look. Rather than prate on, I’ve chosen to link to the four most penetrating pieces about this calamitous misstep that I’ve seen. Here are brief samples from each:

1. Mike Grunwald, in Politico, Why Trump actually pulled out of Paris

It wasn’t because of the climate, or to help American business. He needed to troll the world — and this was his best shot so far.

Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from this carefully crafted multilateral compromise was a diplomatic and political slap: it was about extending a middle finger to the world, while reminding his base that he shares its resentments of fancy-pants elites and smarty-pants scientists and tree-hugging squishes who look down on real Americans who drill for oil and dig for coal.

The real triumph of Paris wasn’t America’s promises; it was the serious commitments from China, India and other developing nations that had previously insisted on their right to burn unlimited carbon until their economies caught up to the developed world.

2. Paul Krugman, in The New York Times, Trump Gratuitously Rejects the Paris Climate Accord

As Donald Trump does his best to destroy the world’s hopes of reining in climate change, let’s be clear about one thing: This has nothing to do with serving America’s national interest. This isn’t about nationalism; mainly, it’s about sheer spite.

Pay any attention to modern right-wing discourse and you find deep hostility to any notion that some problems require collective action beyond shooting people and blowing things up.

Beyond this, much of today’s right seems driven above all by animus toward liberals rather than specific issues. If liberals are for it, they’re against it. If liberals hate it, it’s good. Add to this the anti-intellectualism of the G.O.P. base, for whom scientific consensus on an issue is a minus, not a plus, with extra bonus points for undermining anything associated with President Barack Obama.

3. 350.org founder Bill McKibben, also in The Times, Trump’s Stupid and Reckless Climate Decision

It’s a stupid and reckless decision — our nation’s dumbest act since launching the war in Iraq. But it’s not stupid and reckless in the normal way. Instead, it amounts to a thorough repudiation of two of the civilizing forces on our planet: diplomacy and science. It undercuts our civilization’s chances of surviving global warming, but it also undercuts our civilization itself, since that civilization rests in large measure on those two forces.

But it’s not just science that [Trump is] blowing up. The Paris accord was a high achievement of the diplomatic art, a process much messier than science, and inevitably involving compromise and unseemly concession. Still, after decades of work, the world’s negotiators managed to bring along virtually every nation: the Saudis and the low-lying Marshall Islanders, the Chinese and the Indians. One hundred and ninety-five nations negotiated the Paris accord, including the United States.

The changes [committed to at Paris], and similar ones agreed to by other nations, would not have ended global warming. They were too small. But the hope of Paris was that the treaty would send such a strong signal to the world’s governments, and its capital markets, that the targets would become a floor and not a ceiling; that shaken into action by the accord, we would start moving much faster toward renewable energy, maybe even fast enough to begin catching up with the physics of global warming. There are signs that this has been happening: The plummeting price of solar energy just this spring persuaded India to forgo a huge planned expansion of coal plants in favor of more solar panel arrays to catch the sun. China is shutting coal mines as fast as it can build wind turbines.

4. David Roberts in Vox, Trump’s Paris climate decision shows the threat rising tribalism poses to the planet

The hallmark of tribalism (a term I prefer to “nationalism,” as it gets at the deeper roots) is that it views the world in zero-sum terms — if one tribe benefits, it is at another tribe’s expense. As has been much remarked (see my post on Trump’s mindset), this describes Trump to a tee. He views all interactions, both personal and international, in terms of dominance and submission.

Tribalism has also entirely subsumed the US conservative movement. The intellectual core has all but rotted; what remains are older, rural and suburban white men and their wives, angry that their tribe is being demoted from its hegemonic position. At a barely beneath-the-surface level, Trumpism is about restoring old hierarchies: the powerful over the powerless, whites over minorities, men over women.

A zero-sum perspective is inherently hostile to collective agreements and treaties. It can only see such agreements as attempts by the weak to bind and restrain the strong (a theme that popped up again and again in Trump’s announcement on Paris). Trump was inclined to see things that way already, no matter what he was told.

That is the backdrop to Trump’s decision. It’s not that Paris particularly constrained him — it didn’t constrain him at all, actually — but the very notion of committing to collective action bothered him (and Steve Bannon). From his perspective, the US has tons of fossil fuels, and that gives the US power. Voluntarily reducing dependence on fossil fuels threatens US dominance.

Trump doesn’t just want that dominance — he wants to signal it, to shove it in other countries’ faces. Staying in the agreement, even if it was substantively meaningless, didn’t send the right signal.

McKibben ended his piece with this:

And so we will resist. As the federal government reneges on its commitments, the rest of us will double down on ours. Already cities and states are committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Atlanta was the latest to take the step. We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves. Not just because he didn’t take climate change seriously, but also because he didn’t take civilization seriously.

Maybe it was the McKibben passage I put in bold that led me to call out my own mayor, NYC’s Bill de Blasio, for his transportation hypocrisy, on a radio call-in this morning. (Watch this space next week, for details.) A small step, to be sure, but I intend to take another tomorrow, and the day after, as I know you will as well.

Baker-Shultz carbon tax would let U.S. keep its Paris pledge

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

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

The vertical distance from actual 2005 emissions (5,812) and projected 2025 emissions with the green triangle (4,242) is 1,570, which is 27% of the 2005 amount (all figures in million metric tons of CO2).

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

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

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

A few important details:

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

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

You can input your own carbon tax rates into our model. This screen is on the spreadsheet’s Summary page.

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A climate solution where all sides can win”

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Perhaps no one in the U.S. has done more lately to drive public and political opinion toward carbon taxes than Ted Halstead and his Climate Leadership Council. The council’s Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends is the first Republican-based carbon tax proposal to insist not only on starting high (at $40 per ton of CO2) but also “dividend-ing” the revenues to U.S. families rather than using them to pay for corporate tax cuts (as favored by the political right) or investing them in transit, renewables and other elements of “the just transition” (as favored by much of the left).

This income-progressive but limited-government path, which Halstead and the council astutely brand as Republican, has generated a broad swath of editorial support, not just on the two coasts but also in conservative, carbon-heavy Texas. Partly that’s because the proposal would downsize or outright rescind direct federal regulation of carbon emissions, which the council argues would be mooted by the market pull of a robust (and rising) carbon tax. It’s also because Halstead has the verbal facility and personal magnetism to make his points appealing and convincing.

Not just his first name, then, makes Halstead an ideal “TED” talker, as you can see in the 11-minute talk (13, counting Q/A with moderator Chris Anderson) he taped in April and released yesterday.

Below, we present an abridged version of Ted’s talk. The full transcript can be viewed along with the video presentation.

We need a killer app to climate policy. In the technology world, a killer app is an application so transformative that it creates its own market, like Uber. In the climate world, a killer app is a new solution so promising that it can break through the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress.

These include the psychological barrier. Climate advocates have long been encouraging their fellow citizens to make short-term sacrifices now for benefits that accrue to other people in other countries 30 or 40 years in the future. It just doesn’t fly because it runs contrary to basic human nature.

Next is the geopolitical barrier. Under the current rules of global trade, countries have a strong incentive to free-ride off the emissions reductions of other nations, instead of strengthening their own programs.

Finally, we have the partisan barrier. Even the most committed countries are nowhere near reducing emissions at the required scale and speed. And the partisan climate divide is far more acute here in the United States. We are fundamentally stuck, and that is why we need a killer app of climate policy to break through each of these barriers.

I’m convinced that the road to climate progress in the United States runs through the Republican Party and the business community. So in launching the Climate Leadership Council, I started by reaching out to a who’s who of Republican elder statesmen and business leaders, including James Baker and George Schultz, the two most respected Republican elder statesmen in America; Martin Feldstein and Greg Mankiw, the two most respected conservative economists in the country; and Henry Paulson and Rob Walton, two of the most successful and admired business leaders. Together, we co-authored “The Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends.” This represents the first time that Republican leaders put forth a concrete market-based climate solution.

Our carbon dividends solution is based on four pillars.

1. The first is a gradually rising carbon tax. Although capitalism is a wonderful system, like many operating systems, it’s prone to bugs, which, in this case, are called “market failures.” By far the largest is that market prices fail to take social and environmental costs into account. That means every market transaction is based on incorrect information. This fundamental bug of capitalism, more than any other single factor, is to blame for our climate predicament.

In theory, this should be an easy problem to fix. Economists agree that the best solution is to put a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels, otherwise known as a carbon tax. This would discourage carbon emissions in every single economic transaction, every day of the year. However, a carbon tax by itself has proven to be unpopular and a political dead end. The answer is to return all the money raised directly to citizens, in the form of equal monthly dividends. This would transform an unpopular carbon tax into a popular and populist solution, and it would also solve the underlying psychological barrier that we discussed, by giving everyone a concrete benefit in the here and now.

According to the US Treasury Department, the bottom 70 percent of Americans would receive more in dividends than they would pay in increased energy prices. That means 223 million Americans would win economically from solving climate change. And that is revolutionary, and could fundamentally alter climate politics.

2. But there’s another revolutionary element here. The amount of the dividend would grow as the carbon tax rate increases. The more we protect our climate, the more our citizens benefit. This creates a positive feedback loop, which is crucial, because the only way we will reach our long-term emission-reduction goals is if the carbon tax rate goes up every year.

3. The third pillar of our program is eliminating regulations that are no longer needed once a carbon dividends plan is enacted. This is a key selling point to Republicans and business leaders. So why should we trade climate regulations for a price on carbon?  Our plan would achieve nearly twice the emissions reductions of all Obama-era climate regulations combined, and nearly three times the new baseline after President Trump repeals all of those regulations. Our plan by itself would meet the high end of America’s commitment under the Paris Climate Agreement, and the emissions reductions would continue over time. We would end up with less regulation and far less pollution at the same time, while helping working-class Americans get ahead. Doesn’t that sound like something we could all support?

4. The fourth and final pillar of our program is a new climate domino effect, based on border carbon adjustments. Now that may sound complicated, but it, too, is revolutionary, because it provides us a whole new strategy to reach a global price on carbon, which is ultimately what we need. Once one major country or region adopts carbon dividends with border carbon adjustments, other countries are compelled to follow suit [to prevent paying border adjustments to countries with carbon taxes]. One by one the dominoes fall. And this domino effect could start anywhere.

Let’s take China as an example. China is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but what its leaders care even more about is transitioning their economy to consumer-led economic development. Well, nothing could do more to hasten that transition than giving every Chinese citizen a monthly dividend. In fact, this is the only policy solution that would enable China to meet its environmental and economic goals at the same time.

That’s why this is the killer app of climate policy, because it would enable us to overcome each of the barriers we discussed earlier: the psychological barrier, the partisan barrier, and, as we’ve just seen, the geopolitical barrier. All we need is a country to lead the way. And one method of finding what you’re looking for is to take out an ad. So let’s read this (shown at left) one together.

 

 

As US falters, Canada must lead movement on carbon tax

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This post, which I co-authored with Josha MacNab of the Pembina Institute, appeared in The Hill last week in slightly altered form. — C.K.

Against the backdrop of a Trump administration seeking to drag the United States’ economy back to the coal age, Canada’s clean growth strategy is a breath of fresh air. Now more than ever, Canada needs to continue to innovate on decarbonizing its economy, and a central plank of that strategy is putting a price on carbon pollution.

British Columbia’s groundbreaking 2008 carbon tax introduced carbon pollution pricing to the Western Hemisphere. With 86% of Canada’s population now covered by a carbon price, and 100% to be covered by 2018 under the national benchmark, our country is well-positioned to be an international beacon of progress and a major competitor in the clean global economy.

Here are four big reasons Canada should strengthen its resolve to move forward on carbon pollution pricing.

1. Canada is not alone

Given the effectiveness of carbon pricing in reducing climate-damaging emissions, it should come as no surprise that 25% of global carbon pollution is already or about to be covered by a carbon price. That represents over 40 countries, including seven of the world’s 10 largest economies.

China has already piloted cap-and-trade in 5 provinces and 2 cities, making it the second largest carbon market in the world, after the European Union. Later this year China’s carbon pollution market is expected to go national, making it the world’s largest. Carbon pollution pricing is now a maintream approach and Canada is positioned to demonstrate how to do carbon pollution pricing well.

2. Carbon pollution pricing will help Canada become a clean tech powerhouse

The global clean tech market is currently worth $1.15 trillion and expected to more than double to $2.5 trillion in 2022, according to Analytica Advisors. Yet Canada’s share of this vital pie is shrinking (from 2.2% to 1.3% of the market over the last 10 years) as other countries outpace us in clean tech development.

Carbon pricing is one of the tools clean tech entrepreneurs cite as key to supporting innovation. By moving forward on carbon pricing and other clean growth policies, Canada can catch up and be positioned to take advantage of growing and shifting global market opportunities. Currently, 23% of Canadian clean tech exports are destined for non-U.S. markets, but this share is anticipated to increase to more than 30% in the next four years.

3.  Carbon leakage and competitiveness concerns can be addressed by smart design

Identifying and mitigating competitive disadvantages must be a priority for Canada to ensure that pricing carbon pollution doesn’t result in carbon leakage and doesn’t adversely impact the economy. Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission estimates that around 5% of Canada’s economy (with variation between 2-18% depending on the province or territory) could be subject to competitiveness impacts if the country has a higher carbon pollution price than jurisdictions with whom we trade. Craig Alexander, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada, recently argued that competitiveness impacts would be less than 0.15% of GDP and not a justification to delay.

Where impacts are felt, carbon leakage issues can be addressed by the design of the pricing framework. Any measures taken to address competitiveness concerns for emissions-intensive, trade-exposed sectors should maintain the incentive to reduce pollution, as well as be targeted, transparent, consistent, temporary and simple.

4. Carbon pollution pricing lets the market drive the solutions

Along with some 140 other countries, Canada committed 18 months ago in Paris to do its part to reduce carbon pollution sufficiently to stay well below 2 C of warming. In order to achieve that goal, government has two main levers with which to shift to a lower-carbon economy: pricing and regulation. As a market-based mechanism — with support from both ends of the political spectrum — carbon pollution pricing sets the rules of engagement and lets the market pick the most efficient and effective ways to grow the economy. It supports innovation and ensures that those technologies and solutions that deliver the best results are the ones that thrive and go on to be competitive exports to a rapidly decarbonizing global economy.

With the U.S. waffling on its commitment to the Paris Agreement, it’s more important than ever for Canada to step up to be a global leader and demonstrate that addressing climate change is how we will build a strong economy that can weather the storms to come.

Josha MacNab is the British Columbia director at the Pembina Institute, Canada’s leading clean energy think-tank. Charles Komanoff, an economist, is the cofounder and director of the New York-based Carbon Tax Center.

Remembering May 4

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It would be nice if a time-traveler told us that some day May 4 will be remembered not as the day Obamacare began to be dismantled but the day Congress committed to taking on climate change – and doing it with a carbon tax.

As we know, the House voted today to pass a Republican bill that strips away essential features of the Affordable Care Act. The CBO had no time to score the bill; some Members (all Republicans) who voted for it evidently hadn’t read it.

If the Senate votes the same way, an estimated 24 million people and their families will suffer, some of them grievously, so that multimillionaires can pay less taxes and enforce their ideology that casts need as a moral failing rather than an opportunity (or, at least, obligation).

This tweet speaks for a lot of people:

https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/860209068211806209

Yet also today, Thursday, a dozen Members of Congress, six from each party, introduced a climate study bill, one that “would create a commission to look for economically viable solutions to climate change,” as reported by Inside Climate News.

Yes, a measly study bill. But one that would create a bipartisan National Climate Solutions Commission directing the Government Accountability Office to survey and rank emission reduction policies. The eventual report, which would likely ratify a national carbon tax of some sort, could offer GOP denialists a way out of their obstructionism.

An identical bill, also called the Climate Solutions Commission Act, failed to pass in 2016. Nevertheless, Inside Climate News said that today’s bill introduction “reflects how a small but increasingly vocal group of Republicans is embracing the reality of climate change and pressing the issue in Congress.”

It’s hard to gauge whether and how much Republicans will ever come around on climate. Nor can we say just how many members who voted today for the GOP’s health care” bill will be drummed out of Congress next year, as Washington Post political blogger Paul Waldman demanded just hours after the 217-213 vote. What we do know is that millions of us are working on defending and trying to extend social and economic and racial justice, including affordable health care, and also organizing for climate.

The May 4 health care vote may prove to be a right-wing Waterloo. And, just possibly, the re-introduction today of the Climate Solutions Commission Act may start the ball rolling for a carbon tax that helps save the climate.

We’ll leave it there. You may want to read our March 17 post about another, Republican congressional climate resolution, along with our updated Conservatives page.

And this just in from ICN reporter Sabrina Shankman: the 12 bill sponsors are Representatives John Delaney (D-MD) and John J. Faso (R-NY), who introduced it, and Reps. Curbelo (R-FL), Deutch (D-FL), Meehan (R-PA), Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Lowenthal (D-CA), Peters (D-CA), Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Schneider (D-IL), Stefanik (R-NY) and Suozzi (D-NY). Representatives Faso, Curbelo, Meehan, and Stefanik also signed the 2017 House G.O.P. Climate Resolution linked to directly above.

We join New Jerseyans in marching for climate

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What to do on April 29: march with hundreds of thousands in DC, or speak at the Bergen & Beyond Climate Rally, a “satellite” people’s march in New Jersey? The NJ rally was reachable by bike, so the decision was easy. I pedaled away from my house in lower Manhattan at 8 a.m, met my friend Josef at the foot of the George Washington Bridge bike path at 9, and we arrived at the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack before the 10 a.m. start. The ride was hilly and heavily trafficked, but nothing we weren’t used to. The rally was terrific, with 300 of us, fine music, energetic speeches and no shortage of great signs. Here are some, along with my remarks. Big thanks to rally organizer Janet Glass and photographer Jessie Glass. — C.K.

Google Maps nailed it: a bit under two hours to cycle from lower Manhattan to Hackensack.

Let’s begin with good news: decarbonization of the world’s energy is under way.

U.S. carbon emissions fell last year, again, and are almost 15% less than in 2005.

China’s emissions have flatlined for three years running.

In Great Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, CO2 emissions have fallen to levels not seen since the late 19th Century.

The solar and wind revolution is accelerating.

Energy efficiency is now a profit center for business and industry.

This ought to be heartening. But at best it is a bare minimum.

And even this progress is under assault.

You and I know that. Which is why we’re here today.

More good news: hundreds of thousands of us are assembled today in Washington and cities and towns like this one across the country.

Surveying the crowd.

We’re standing and marching for climate and for each other.

We’re standing to turn American politics upside-down … or, I should say, rightside-up.

Like millions of Americans, we see what the GOP has become: a racket to restore patriarchy, extractionism and white supremacy.

The main message.

And we see the Democratic Party for what it is: a well-meaning but too often frightened, ineffectual band of centrists who shy from the radical action we need.

At the March for Science last week, a sign said: Trust Scientific Facts, Not Alternative Facts, and we all agree.

To stop climate ruin, we need economic facts, and fast. We need prices of fossil fuels that tell us the truth about climate damage caused by fossil fuels.

We can get that economic truth with carbon taxes — not token carbon taxes, not Exxon-style carbon taxes, but robust carbon taxes that put the damage from carbon pollution squarely and fairly into the prices of fuels.

Like it or not, the prices of fuels and energy are a dominant factor in how we choose and use them — and, thus, in how much carbon pollution we generate.

The artificial marketplace advantage of unpriced carbon pollution has helped coal, oil and gas gain a stranglehold over our economic system and social structures.

We can break that stranglehold by charging fossil fuels for their climate damage. That’s the fast path we need to the clean energy future that will protect our cities, coasts and civilization, our farms and forests and all living beings, from climate devastation.

We can do this. We can build a grassroots tide so powerful that centrist Democrats who have shied from carbon taxes, and Republicans who belittle climate concerns altogether, will either come around or be booted from office.

Obstructed sign at right proclaimed: “Unpaid Protester!”

Join Citizens Climate Lobby. Demand that your elected rep’s, and the people vying to replace them, endorse carbon taxes at the state and national level. And demand that 350.org, Sierra Club and other climate advocates do the same.

We can do this, we can tax carbon, while protecting the poor and the disenfranchised.

I want to end with a line from that soulful Isley Brothers song, Harvest for the World:

Gather everyone, gather all together. Overlooking none, making life get better for the world.

That’s what our climate movement is about.

That’s what the Resistance to Trump is about.

Thank you for being here. Gather everyone, gather all together. Overlooking none, we’ll make life get better for the world.