Jan. 24, 2017 update: French presidential candidate (and former prime minister) Manuel Valls yesterday renewed Nicolas Sarkozy’s Nov. 2016 call for a carbon border tax on imports from the United States, saying “When Donald Trump declares some kind of economic war on Europe, we must be ready.” More in this Fox News (!) story. 

This post is by Chris Hope, a prominent U.K. climate change policy researcher who served as a lead author and review editor for the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is lifted more or less intact from Chris’s Nov. 15 post, A proportionate response to Trump’s climate plans. We have edited slightly for grammar and added several notes. — CTC.

During the U.S. election campaign, Donald Trump said he would dismantle the country’s domestic climate change policies and withdraw the U.S. from international climate agreements, most notably the Paris agreement which came into force earlier this month. In the week since he became President-Elect, he has given every indication that he is serious in his intentions.

So how should the rest of the world respond? It is tempting to indulge in wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in the real world of a Trump Presidency, this is unlikely to be effective. What is needed is a proportionate response. In France, former president (2007-2012) Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed what may well be the most efficient and effective measure, a climate change tax levied upon all US goods imported into Europe.

[CTC: Chris is referring to “border tax adjustments” — import fees levied by carbon-taxing countries on goods manufactured in non-carbon-taxing countries. World Trade Organization rules permit countries with carbon taxes to adopt “non-discriminatory harmonizing tariffs” to protect energy-intensive trade-exposed industries by eliminating the competitive advantage enjoyed by exports from countries that don’t tax carbon emissions. These tariffs also create incentives for non-carbon taxing countries to adopt carbon taxes, since harmonizing tariffs represent revenue that the exporting country could garner by imposing its own carbon tax. Our Border Adjustments Web page has more information.]

How large should such a tax be? If it is to be proportionate, it should cover the harm caused to the Earth from the production of the goods, a harm that will not be reflected in their price if the U.S. presses ahead with the unfettered use of fossil fuels. Let’s consider some ballpark numbers. The Gross Domestic Product of the US in 2015 was about $18 trillion. U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases in the same year were about 7 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Dividing one quantity by the other, we find that every thousand dollars of U.S. production involves the emission of about 0.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

[CTC: Chris’s 7 billion tonne CO2-equivalent figure is sourced to definitive USEPA data and comprises somewhat more than 5 billion tonnes of CO2, one billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent from methane, and perhaps 0.6 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent from nitrous oxides, hydrofluorocarbons (HFC’s) and other heat-trapping gases.]

The best estimate we have of the global harm caused by these emissions comes from integrated assessment models, like my PAGE09 model which gives a mean value of about $150 per tonne of CO2 if valued by an average citizen in Europe, or $250 per tonne of CO2 if valued by an average U.S. citizen (U.S. citizens are on average about 50% richer than European ones, so they should value an equivalent physical harm more highly).

Applying these mean values as an ad valorem tax on imports of USA goods to Europe results in a tax of about 6%, if the European valuation of harm is used, or 10% with the U.S. valuation. These are higher, but not dramatically so, than Sarkozy’s proposal of a 1–3% tax on US imports.

How much might such a climate tax on U.S. imports raise? The EU presently imports about 400 billion Euros of US goods and services per year. So a 6% tax rate would raise about 25 billion Euros per year, and a 10% rate would raise about 40 billion Euros. If imports of U.S. goods and services have a price elasticity of -1, these revenues would be about 6% or 10% lower respectively.

[CTC: The implied revenue reduction of 25-40 billion euros, or $27-$43 billion in U.S. currency, represents potential U.S. trade losses. They equate to around $100 per capita, or roughly $400 per U.S. family of four.]

If adopted, this idea could be refined further by levying higher rates on U.S. goods that released a great deal of greenhouse gases during their production, and lower rates on others. And of course, in order not to be hypocrites, we in Europe would introduce a strong, comprehensive climate change of about $150 per tonne of CO2 equivalent on our own activities too. But that is only common sense.

The Friday-afternoon tweet from Greenwire nailed it: @Koch_Industries & @VanJones68 united in $$ battling Wash. state #carbontax measure.*

Though they could also have tweeted: Fossil-Fuel Right & Doctrinaire Left team up to battle Wash. state #carbontax measure.

The occasion was the news that Koch Industries just poured $50,000 into the coffers of the No On 732 forces. As everyone knows who wasn’t slumbering through the past two decades, the Hard Right takeover of Congress and dozens of statehouses and legislatures owes much to Koch Industries’ prolific bankrolling of reactionary candidates and lobby groups. Brothers Charles and David Koch are billionaires many times over, thanks to Koch Industries’ empire of pipelines, refineries, mines and wells that for generations have spewed carbon pollution into the atmosphere for free.

The Koch brothers are no dummies. They know what fellow fossil fuel exec Robert E. Murray told Kirk Johnson and Coral Davenport of The New York Times the other day: Passing I-732 to enact a carbon tax in Washington state could ignite a trend that “would eliminate the use of all fossil fuels.”

We at the Carbon Tax Center know it too. Which is why we’ve pulled out all the stops to educate Americans from Washington and beyond on the merits of that state’s carbon tax referendum and its potential to kick open the doors to national carbon taxing.

What’s been hard to fathom is the drumbeat from so-called left greens like visionary climate hawk and political activist Van Jones in opposition to the Nov. 8 ballot measure.

In the past two weeks we’ve had to contend with bizarro posts like “Here’s Why a Carbon Tax Helps Fossil Fuel Companies, Not the Environment” (an op-ed in AlterNet by Food & Water Watch) and “Why Exxon Loves the Carbon Tax—and Voters Should Not” (the same group’s op-ed in the ironically named Yes! magazine).

We responded to both last week — before today’s filing by No On 732 revealed that the Koch brothers are helping finance the opposition. Needless to say, only an ideologue could believe that Exxon’s once-a-year opining for hypothetical carbon taxes counts for more than $50,000 in Koch Brothers money against an actual one. (Click here to see the Koch contribution in the No On 732 list.) And sure enough, there was a lot more ideology than reason on display in a press event yesterday in which leading left greens inveighed against I-732.

We were allowed to listen in, but not to speak or ask a question. No transcript or audio has been made available, but here’s a sample of what we jotted down from speakers’ remarks. (Remember, they were addressing a carbon tax that has been meticulously designed to make Washington state taxes less regressive, primarily by dedicating the lion’s share of revenues to slice a full percentage point off the WA sales tax.)

You’re doing climate policy on the backs of the poor. — Van Jones, CEO of Green for All

A “neutral” 732 is perpetuating a one-sided economy of wealth and privilege. This is not a time for more tax cuts for corporations. — Heather McGhee, President, Demos

We stand united to defeat 732. We agree that climate policy cannot be promoted on the backs of the poor. — Mary Kay Henry, president, Service Employees International Union

We’re working on an alternative proposal. There are difficult legal questions. We’re beefing up the struggle after the election. — Rich Stolz, Director, One America

The last quote was in response to a reporter’s question about the alternative to I-732 that the left greens in Washington have talked about for years but never actually written. (Spoiler alert: writing the kind of ballot measure the left greens purport to want is devilishly difficult, in large part because the various groups have competing as well as overlapping interests, which are hard to reconcile. A revenue-neutral measure like I-732 didn’t face that problem.)

The untethering of those quoted statements from the reality of I-732 — a measure meticulously designed around a sales tax cut so low- and middle-income families aren’t harmed — is distressing to me personally. I’m a long-time admirer of every one of the organizations whose leaders I’ve just quoted. As I’ve said many times in this space, I’m a green and I’m on the left. I want to be partnering with Van and Heather and Mary Kay and Rich, not fighting them.

But a carbon tax is too central to climate, and climate is too central to all of our common struggles, for me to sit by and let ideology get in the way of sensible, pragmatic advocacy.

If “friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” it should also be true that activists don’t let activists drive policy from rhetoric.

To Van Jones et al., how does it feel to be on the same side as Charles and David Koch? That’s the corner you’ve painted yourselves into.

*Author’s Note: E&E News tweet lightly edited for clarity.

 

 

 

Paul Goodman, a mid-century American apostle of transformational change, entitled a collection of his letters, “The society I live in is mine.” With apologies to Paul, whose unsparing but inspiring critiques of U.S. corporate government helped shape my generation of radical activists, I’m here to say that the Washington state carbon tax initiative, I-732, is the perfect climate measure for the society we have.

I thought of Goodman today as I read the remarkable “Open Letter from the Millennial Leaders of Carbon Washington and the Yes-on-732 Campaign” to the green establishment leaders who are silent or oppositional on the initiative. Paul was an unabashed champion of youth and an instinctive foe of the old guard, most notably in his best-known book, Growing Up Absurd.

I believe Goodman, renowned for speaking directly, would have relished the millennials’ plain-spoken courage in calling out their heroes’ “deafening silence” on I-732. Devoted to participatory democracy, he would have applauded the millennials’ insistence that the climate crisis “belongs to more than just a handful of non-profit gatekeepers to decide what should be politically realistic and what isn’t.”

I also think that Goodman, a champion of rigor, would have pounced on the insubstantial arguments made by I-732’s “green” opponents, corrected their errors, and alerted them to the absurdity of climate advocates opposing a carbon tax that has advanced to an actual ballot proposition.

Here’s one of those arguments. It’s the first of three bullet points in the message by Washington Conservation Voters telling their members and supporters to vote No:

[I-732] relies solely on economic signals to drive down emissions, which allows all polluters to pay to continue to pollute instead of reducing emissions. Without a carbon cap, we can’t ensure that we will achieve the pollution reductions that are required in state law, but are currently unenforced.

Everything in that paragraph is correct. And all of it is utterly beside the point.

Yes, Initiative 732 relies solely on economic signals to drive down emissions of carbon dioxide. That’s by design. Those signals — higher market prices of fossil fuels — are essential to solve or at least massively shrink the climate crisis. Without them, any climate policy, including the “investment” approach favored by WCV and other green groups opposing or abstaining on I-732, will fall woefully short.

Make no mistake, Carbon Washington, the upstart group that drafted Initiative 732 last year and obtained hundreds of thousands of qualifying signatures to put it on the Nov. 8 ballot, dearly wants society to invest in massive weatherization and solarization of buildings, remediation of polluted communities, better urban and suburban transit, and the like.

So do I. In fact, my other “day job,” aside from running the Carbon Tax Center, is mostly fighting for those very investments and policies in New York City, where I live and work.

Either Carbon Washington or I could have written the first part of WCV’s second bullet:

To reduce carbon emissions quickly, we must not only decrease our use of fossil fuels, we must also rapidly increase our use of clean energy, including solar and wind power and the electrification of transportation. This is the only way for us to transition to a low-carbon economy and significantly decrease our use of fossil fuels.

Well, that transition is precisely what carbon taxes can spark. Raising the prices that businesses and households alike face for coal, oil and gas and for the goods and services manufactured from them will accelerate the society-wide switch to clean energy. Conversely, without those higher fossil fuel prices, solar and wind and electric vehicles and transit will forever be competing with one hand tied behind their backs. Sure, they’ll advance, but not nearly fast and widely enough to push out fossil fuels on the scale our climate requires.

I readily admit — and I’ll wager that Carbon WA will admit as well — that by itself the I-732 carbon tax won’t effectuate that transition either. The tax level specified in the initiative, essentially $25/ton of CO2 after two years, then rising 3.5% a year above general inflation, is too low for that. But that too is by design: the USA’s first statewide carbon tax can’t be super-steep, else industry and agriculture could be hampered vis-à-vis neighboring states, a prospect that would forestall approval by either voters or the legislature.

Rather, the Washington carbon tax is intended as proof of concept. Once a carbon tax has been established in one state, it can be adopted by others, creating a critical mass of political acceptance, demonstrating success in driving down emissions, and disarming the negative arguments on effectiveness, equity and overall feasibility that have stood in the way of a national tax on carbon emissions.

Moreover, as I argued recently, the emerging possibility of a “wave” election transforming the power dynamics in Congress creates a surprise bonus opportunity, in which winning a carbon tax next month in just one state could give tremendous momentum to carbon tax proposals at the federal level.

Even without a Democratic takeover of one or both houses of Congress, the national and global perspective completely moots the insular one inherent in WCV’s complaint that I-732 “can’t ensure that we will achieve the pollution reductions that are required in state law.” Whether or not the particular carbon tax on the Nov. 8 state ballot lets Washington meet those targets is dwarfed by the potential of the carbon tax template to go viral nationally and internationally.

But perhaps the most telltale confusion in that first WCV bullet point is the charge that I-732 “allows all polluters to pay to continue to pollute instead of reducing emissions.” As the saying goes, that’s a feature of carbon-taxing, or indeed any carbon pricing system, not a bug.

Here’s the thing, or two things: first, in our society, polluters get to choose to pollute; what I-732 does is to finally make polluters pay to do so; second, polluters’ choices — and whether we like it or not, “polluters” means all of us who press a gas pedal or turn on a switch as well as the corporate bosses atop the system that limits our agency to choose — are affected by prices.

Every day, in Washington state alone, millions of decisions are made, some almost microscopic (how fast to accelerate up that hill; whether to drive to the nearby mall or the distant one) and some momentous (Boeing’s design and material selections for future aircraft; how it powers its factories) that together determine energy demand and fuel choice and, thus, carbon emissions.

As much as we might wish otherwise, we as a society can’t take away the freedom to make those choices. We can constrain some choices through regulations such as CAFÉ and appliance standards and building codes and the like. We can expand choice through judicious planning. But regulations and planning by their nature can only address one facet of the many-sided carbon equation. A carbon tax, in contrast, operates on every side. (For more on this point, please download and read our 2014 comments to the Senate Finance Committee on energy subsidies vs. taxes.)

We could conjure Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” if the right wing hadn’t co-opted it to prop up its laissez-faire ideology. Let’s say instead that the tax on carbon pollution embodied by I-732 is neither an upending of our market system nor the “clever tinkering with market forces” alleged by an environmental-justice opponent, but an overdue and essential correction — a way to enable markets to finally tell the truth about what fossil-fuel burning is doing to our climate.

The final point to address here is Washington Conservation Voters’ objection to I-732’s allocation of the carbon tax revenues:

Unfortunately, [I-]732 devotes the revenue created by the initiative on tax cuts, instead of strategically reinvesting in clean energy to accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels and fund an equitable transition for workers and disadvantaged communities.

True again, but just a sliver of the whole truth. “Tax cuts” conjures giveaways to the wealthy, but I-732 is the opposite. It applies most of the carbon tax revenues to cutting the state sales tax, a regressive tax like no other that for decades has slammed Washington’s poorest households and communities. The percentage point cut in that tax, to 5.5% from the current 6.5%, allows the carbon tax to yield a net financial gain for most families in the bottom half.

Imagine if WCV had written the revenue-treatment provisions of I-732 to “reinvest [the carbon tax dollars] in clean energy” and “fund an equitable transition for workers and disadvantaged communities.” Without a doubt, the fossil fuel interests would have blasted the initiative for compounding the financial strains already faced by Washington low- and middle-income families . . . and they would have been right. Branded, correctly, as income-regressive, the carbon tax would have been consigned to a resounding defeat.

Making the carbon tax income-progressive, and not the shibboleth of “appealing to Republicans,” is the main reason Carbon Washington designed Initiative 732 to be revenue-neutral. But that decision has laid bare real fault lines in the environmental community, particularly on energy prices.

Green opponents of I-732 appear to believe that we — Washington, the United States, the world — can craft policies to quickly abandon carbon fuels without rapidly raising their market prices; or that the right energy-investment programs will offset the impacts of those price rises on vulnerable households and communities (a category that since the onset of the financial crisis has grown to encompass perhaps two-thirds of U.S. families).

Proponents believe, as I do, that rapidly raising the market prices of fossil fuels is essential, and that the only sure way to protect households and communities financially is to return the revenues in some progressive fashion. Nationally, that could be via the “dividend” approach propounded by Citizens Climate Lobby. That is probably not practicable for individual state carbon taxes, however, and I believe Carbon WA made the right call to swap out the revenue by cutting the sales tax.

In either case, the carbon reductions sacrificed by returning instead of investing revenue can be recouped by raising the carbon tax rate briskly year after year — a policy that can be enacted if and only if a clear majority of households are made better off or at least kept whole through revenue return.

In closing, let me affirm that I’m a man of the Left. Like Paul Goodman, whom I cited at the top, I’m suspicious of all powerful organizations, private or public. Nevertheless I firmly believe in the capacity of government to do good. If enough other citizens felt the same way, I might well be calling for the investment program that LCV says it wants. Heck, if a majority believed as I do, our country wouldn’t have one of the industrialized world’s most unequal distributions of income and wealth. Instead we would have a social system to support families that stood to lose more from rising fuel prices than they would gain from energy savings.

But we don’t live in that kind of society. We can fight for it, as I and many others in the climate movement do. But we can’t design climate policy for a society we don’t yet have. To turn away from the most potent climate policy instrument we have — one that is now, almost miraculously, being put before the voters of an entire state — would be sheer folly.

Click here for more on I-732, including links to the best and most recent press coverage.

Anyone with a lit screen knows by now that shell-shocked Republicans are abandoning the Trump ship in droves. As the exodus threatens to become a stampede, with a longtime GOP operative declaring that “The Republican Party is caught in a theater fire; people are just running to different exits as fast as they can,” talk of election “win probabilities” is pivoting from the presidential race to Congress.

A Trump collapse could give Democrats back the House,” reported Vox this weekend, citing analysis that a mere six-point Clinton plurality could swing the 31 needed seats in its wake. While that’s probably over-optimistic, a more decisive margin over Trump might do the trick.

The ramifications for climate could be huge: Democratic control of both the White House and Congress clears a path for a federal carbon tax without having to somehow vault over GOP denialists. Which could make next month’s ballot referendum in Washington state, Initiative 732, even more momentous. Enacting the country’s first carbon tax wouldn’t just produce a template for other states; it could spark national legislation establishing a U.S. tax on carbon emissions, perhaps as early as 2017.

Let’s be clear: a U.S. carbon tax isn’t just helpful climate policy. It’s the core of any program for shrinking carbon emissions massively, relentlessly and globally. Only a briskly rising carbon tax rewards and thus bends every investment, decision and behavior toward less use of fossil fuels. Only a carbon tax can be replicated so the world’s nations can meet the commitments they made in Paris a year ago and ratified last month. And only a carbon tax produces revenues that can protect low- and middle-income families as fossil fuel prices rise — as they must to blow open the gates to the renewables-and-efficiency revolution at full scale.

The holistic power of carbon taxing is what motivated the grassroots organizers at an upstart group called Carbon Washington to crisscross the state last year and collect the 350,000 signatures that placed “I-732” on the Nov. 8 ballot. It’s also what makes it vexing that many green groups in the state have refrained from supporting I-732. Some are actively opposing it.

The schism has been covered widely (and insightfully) in recent weeks, most recently by Natasha Geiling in Think Progress. “Opposition to Washington’s historic carbon tax initiative is coming from the unlikeliest of sources,” reads her headline, which then asks, “It’s the only carbon tax on the ballot in the country. So why are some environmental groups fighting it?”

The answers are many. Carbon WA drew up I-732 without consulting fully with the entire spectrum of climate advocates. The design of its carbon tax is more attuned to the market than to government, with the carbon revenues “returned” to households (see graphic) rather than invested directly in clean energy and community remediation. And perhaps the in-state green groups are guided more by local and state concerns while Carbon WA set its sights nationally and globally.

Those points can be parsed endlessly. But the central fact for climate, which the Republican implosion is making more salient daily, is that the fissure in Washington state threatens to sink the initiative and botch our chance to put a carbon tax on the national legislative agenda starting months from now. Polling on I-732 suggests that a deficit in August may have flipped into a slight plus, but a fifth of voters are still undecided, and disunity among climate advocates makes it tougher to seal the deal.

There’s no second chance at this in the Evergreen State. Washington’s legislature has shown no appetite for a carbon tax, and a new referendum can’t get on the ballot until 2018. Organizing in other states has fallen short as well. Whether we like it or not – and the economist in me makes me a big fan – I-732 is the only game going.

The U.S. elections will doubtless take further twists in the final four weeks, but the possibility of debating and actually winning a national carbon tax is suddenly, miraculously upon us. The referendum in Washington state is going to function as the first big test. Whatever its imperfections, the climate movement’s greatest imperative must be to come together and pass I-732.