The U.S. power sector is racing past the Clean Power Plan’s emissions target. It’s time for climate advocates to do the same.

Too many climate advocates seem to be investing the Clean Power Plan — the Obama Administration’s project to achieve a 32 percent shrinkage of U.S. electricity-sector carbon emissions from 2005 to 2030 — with iconic significance.

We can understand why: power generation from fossil fuels, primarily coal, was responsible for almost 42 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions in 2005, more than double the share of the next sector, passenger cars.

And we at the Carbon Tax Center will grant that the administrative machinery set in motion by the Clean Power Plan may have accelerated the shift in power generation from coal to natural gas and, secondarily, wind and solar, although that shift was already in high gear before the plan was unveiled two years ago (see chart), driven by cheap and abundant fracked gas and the ongoing renewable-tech revolution.

But the CPP target — a 772 million metric ton drop in annual emissions from electricity generation by 2030 — is already in sight, nearly a decade ahead of schedule. Since 2005, the plan’s baseline year, electricity emissions have fallen (as of 2015) by 518 million tonnes. Ten years in, and with 15 years to go, we’re two-thirds of the way to the goal line. On the past-decade trendline, the target will be met in 2021.

The 2005-2015 rate of decline in power-sector emissions is so far ahead of the CPP that it could be cut by two-thirds going forward and the 32 percent reduction goal would still be met.

The math is elementary, but it bears emphasis in light of the discussion swirling around last week’s debate in St. Louis over the effort of the Bernie Sanders – Bill McKibben forces to ramp up the climate-policy language in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform. This is from Ben Adler’s take in Grist:

The Clinton campaign says its reluctance to accept some of McKibben’s amendments reflects legitimate concerns about the policy implications, not mere political calculation. Not all experts agree that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions, for example. Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board had pointed out in her testimony to the committee a week earlier that a carbon tax does not guarantee emissions reductions, while direct regulation, such as Obama’s Clean Power Plan, does.

Former Bill Clinton and Obama official Carol Browner also leaned heavily on Nichols’ testimony in her remarks in St. Louis in leading the charge that narrowly defeated the McKibben carbon tax, as we noted in our recent post on the debate.

The irony of course is that the Clean Power Plan didn’t actually “guarantee” much of anything, insofar as the plan’s targeted reduction has been happening more or less on its own.

But if power-sector emissions are falling so easily, why bother with a carbon tax at all?

For a lot of reasons. Here are the key ones:

• First, the U.S. needs to blow way past a 32 percent shrinkage in power-sector emissions over 25 years.
• Second, non-electricity emissions of CO2 — now 63 percent of the U.S. total — have fallen little, dropping from 2005 to 2015 by just 190 million metric tons as electricity emissions were falling by 518 million. The majority of those emissions are from gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products, underscoring the importance of offsetting the nearly historically low petroleum prices that businesses and consumers are “enjoying” today and banking on in the future, with carbon taxes.
• Third, we need to shrink not just emissions but the financial and political power of the oil industry. We’ve got to break the cycle that allows fossil fuel corporations to lock in policies — including the “right” to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at no charge — that lock in demand for their product. A carbon tax will help crack that open.

We’ve never underestimated the difficulty of enacting robust carbon taxes in our nearly-closed political system. One piece in many to get us there faster is for the climate movement to see that the Clean Power Plan is yesterday’s plan. As we argued in our prior post, the core of our plan going forward must be Bill McKibben’s carbon tax resolution from St. Louis:

Carbon and other greenhouse gases should be taxed at a rate high enough to spur the transition away from fossil fuels consistent with the temperature goals agreed to in Paris in 2015.

Note: The data underlying our graphic may be found in CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model (Excel file).

“Carbon and other greenhouse gases should be taxed at a rate high enough to spur the transition away from fossil fuels consistent with the temperature goals agreed to in Paris in 2015.”

That’s the carbon tax resolution that environmental activist Bill McKibben pressed the Democratic Party Platform Drafting Committee to adopt at its meeting in St. Louis last week. The proposal lost 7-6, as did allied resolutions opposing fracking and investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. Still, the vote is the latest step by carbon taxing on its march into the political mainstream.

Befitting McKibben’s gift for concision, the resolution was scarcely longer than a tweet. But it spoke volumes: carbon emissions must be taxed; ditto, other greenhouse gases like methane; and the tax must be high enough to catalyze an energy revolution. Note also what the resolution did not say: that carbon should be “priced,” an expression that, though useful in its place, can be a weasel word allowing for cap-and-trade schemes. No, the proposal specified a carbon tax, straight up and robust.

Two Congressmembers on the panel were equally unambiguous:

• “Taxing carbon is the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. It will offset the massive societal cost of unchecked carbon emissions.” — Barbara Lee, California 13^th CD
• “This is a very market-y proposal. Companies aren’t internalizing all their costs, they’re externalizing them onto the rest of us. Shouldn’t they be responsible for covering the cost they impose on us? I think yes.” — Keith Ellison, Minnesota 5^th CD

Those are pretty sophisticated arguments. Less so was this objection from Hillary Clinton surrogate Carol Browner:

The concern we have about a carbon tax is that it won’t necessarily achieve reductions. It will generate revenue, but it won’t necessarily achieve reductions because some companies will simply pay the cost. And what we want, and what we think is absolutely essential, is measurable reductions of carbon pollution in the air.

If it’s measurable reductions Browner wanted, she could have cast her eye at British Columbia, where a “starter” carbon tax of just $20 per ton of CO2 cut emissions in its first four years, although those cuts have stalled out, predictably enough, as the tax level stopped rising.

And anyone with a basic grounding in economic policy analysis will see right through Browner’s argument. Those hypothetical “companies [that] will simply pay the cost” of high-carbon energy won’t be around for long; they’ll be supplanted by enterprises that can provide electricity, manufacturing and transport more cheaply because they’ve heeded the carbon price signal and switched from dirty energy to untaxed clean fuels and efficiency. Households and businesses will also adopt sustainable practices that gain cost-effectiveness as the carbon tax takes hold.

Read our follow-up post, Time for Climate Advocates to Move Beyond the Clean Power Plan.

Bizarrely, Browner based her canard about carbon taxes — that they generate revenue rather than cutting carbon — in part on the failure of California’s cap-and-trade system. Presumably, Browner, a prime Democratic Party environmental apparatchik for over two decades, knows better. One can only imagine McKibben’s frustration as he saw carbon taxes tarred with the cap-and-trade brush.

Needless to say, Bill isn’t backing down, as he made clear in his post-mortem in Politico calling out the Clinton campaign for “obstructing change” by locking up the Democratic Party platform. While we’re sad that the carbon tax resolution didn’t pass, we’re pleased that McKibben not only drafted but fought hard for it.

Carbon tax proponents have long seen the logic in having Bill advocate for carbon taxes. Taxing carbon pollution jibes perfectly with the agenda of 350.org, the organization he has built into a formidable global grassroots force. No other policy tool both undermines the profitability of the fossil fuel industry and also leverages divestment (financially and culturally) from that sector.

McKibben’s leadership for carbon taxing in St. Louis — and, hopefully, beyond — is both heartening and important.

The curtain is up on a series of pro-climate action ads in that climate-denialist stronghold, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Four ads are up, with eight more to follow by mid-July, produced and paid for by the center-right advocacy group, Partnership for Responsible Growth.

A good deal of craft has gone into the ads, along with a bundle of money — that space doesn’t come cheap. It’s fair to ask what the payoff might be.

Presumably, the objective is to help induce a critical mass of G.O.P. Congressmembers to support meaningful carbon-pricing legislation, before it’s too late. A president alone can’t implement economy-wide carbon pricing, and barring a broad leftward upheaval in November, at least one chamber in the next Congress will still be Republican.

Getting a few dozen Republicans to break ranks and support a carbon tax would overcome the House Republican bias baked into the electoral math. A bipartisan bill would also give cover to Democratic Senators and Reps from coal states and exurban counties — there are still some left — whose votes would be needed as well.

Of course, that’s been the situation since the G.O.P. took the House in 2010. Cynics who pronounced carbon taxing dead under a Republican Congress have been proven right — thus far. Yet some facts are changing, and not just in the air, with global-average temperature records breaking monthly. Solar and wind electricity in the U.S. now generate more than twice the electricity, jobs and dollars they produced half-a-dozen years ago, with much of that in red states. A low-carbon or even zero-carbon world can’t be written off as a pipe dream.

Those are political facts. Interestingly, three of the four Journal ads thus far are limited to scientific ones: “Carbon Dioxide Traps Heat On Earth,” proclaims Ad #2. “The Earth Has Warmed And We Did It,” says #3, followed by #4, “What Goes Up Doesn’t Come Down.”

True, the emphasis will change if, as we hope, the series builds to a call for a briskly rising (and revenue-neutral) carbon tax. If so, the initial ads will have been conversation-starters. That would be fine, ordinarily. But while we were taking notice of the ads, the July Harper’s arrived, with a provocative essay by the activist-writer Rebecca Solnit that makes one ask if the series ventured off on a good foot.

Solnit’s essay, The Ideology of Isolation, is an unflinching critique of extreme right-wing thought. It begins:

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own.

Any student of ecology, or anyone with a passing acquaintance with John Muir, the 19th century explorer-mountaineer-naturalist who founded the Sierra Club, can see where Solnit is going: the ideology that insists we’re not connected to each other, save for a contingent series of market interactions, is the same ideology that denies the interconnections that make up ecosystems and indeed the physical world.

Muir’s glittering aphorism, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” demands we pay attention not just to flora and fauna but to the megatons of heat-trapping gases we’ve been sending skyward since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the right-wing ideology of disconnection doesn’t just give us license to ignore our effluent, it practically requires that we do so. Solnit again:

On a more fundamental level, the very idea of climate change is offensive to isolationists, because it tells us more powerfully and urgently than anything ever has that everything is connected, that nothing exists in isolation. What comes out of your tailpipe or your smokestack or your leaky fracking site contributes to the changing mix of the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cause the earth to retain more of the heat that comes from the sun, which doesn’t just result in what we used to call global warming, but will lead to climate chaos.

The central meme in ad #2, that the greenhouse effect “isn’t a left or a right issue, it’s science,” may be sweetly reasonable, but the reader has to believe in science in the first place. As Solnit notes,

If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end in denying the reality of facts, which are after all part of a network of systematic relationships between language, physical reality, and the record, regulated by the rules of evidence, truth, grammar, word meaning, and so forth. You deny the relationship between cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, or rather you imagine both as products on the free market, which one can produce and consume according to one’s preferences.

And if those preferences are for the riches and influence that come from owning and exploiting fossil fuels, the resulting facts and science won’t lead ineluctably to the position that climate change is real, occurring and principally man-made. In that scenario, the Partnership’s carefully crafted ads may simply bounce off Journal readers and fall harmlessly to the ground.

To be sure, a campaign as professional as the Partnership’s Journal ads isn’t necessarily seeking to change minds through education. The mere fact of the ads — the idea that Republican backers and lawmakers are being addressed on climate from the center-right — is at least as likely to move the political needle as the logical thread in the text.

All the same, there’s another scenario kicking inside the Beltway — we heard talk of it in DC this month — that suggests that a healthy if not House-regaining shellacking by the Democrats will compel the G.O.P. to finally divest itself of its anti-science brand; and that accepting the reality of climate change and a “Republican solution” in the form of a carbon tax could be part of that reformation.

That scenario might have pointed to a more overtly political approach, though that may be where the Partnership’s series is headed. Meanwhile, the initial set may be viewed here. What do you think?

The headlines just keep coming:

• Mitsubishi Says It Cheated on Fuel Tests for Decades
• G.M. to Compensate 135,000 Owners of S.U.V.s That Overstate Mileage
• Suzuki Admits Test Flaw, But Denies It Cheated

That’s three automakers admitting they misrepresented their vehicles’ gas mileage to regulators and customers, just in the pages of the New York Times in the past month.

But so far as climate is concerned, the real news on auto mileage standards came in an earlier Times story in March, “Automakers Likely to Ask For Leniency in Fuel Rule” (or, in the on-line version, Low Gas Prices Create a Detour on the Road to Greater Fuel Economy).

“With gas prices hovering around $2 a gallon, sales of low-mileage pickups and S.U.V.s have skyrocketed,” the Times noted. “Meanwhile, electric and hybrid models” — the more-efficient designs the automakers banked on selling to meet the government’s 54.5 mpg target for 2025 models — “are languishing in dealer showrooms.”

Here’s the kicker:

Now, with a crucial midterm review of federal fuel-economy rules to begin this summer, automakers are expected to seek adjustments to the government’s formula for increasing mileage and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Proposed changes could include extending the time frame on mileage targets and expanding emissions credits to include enhancements for safety and autonomous driving. (emphasis added)

No, you’re not imagining things. The auto companies’ lobby group Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers has tipped off the Times that it will press the federal government to back off from the 54.5 mpg target. “Talks have already begun with the government in advance of the E.P.A.’s opening the midterm review in June,” longtime AAM spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist told the paper.

Not only that, to rationalize abandonment of the target the AAM is assembling a suite of policy offsets that have nothing to do with fuel efficiency (or greenhouse gas reductions). Automatic braking. Self-driving cars. Will credits for cupholders specially sized for refillable water bottles make it into the package?

None of this should come as a surprise. U.S. gas prices fell 27 percent in real terms last year, the steepest plunge since at least the Second World War, save for a fractionally bigger drop in 2009, the pit of the Great Recession. As The Times noted, and as we predicted at the start of the price slide (and any Econ 101 textbook would guarantee), Americans are rushing to again embrace gas-guzzlers, ensuring the 54.5 mpg target remains a pipe dream and locking in a huge uptick in carbon emissions for years.

A carbon tax, whether served straight up or offered as a cheap-oil tax, could have lessened the switch to SUVs and pickups by retaining some of drivers’ anticipatory price pain of filling up at the pump. More than that, though, taxes on gasoline would incentivize a host of ways to reduce gasoline consumption that far transcend mileage standards. Driving less tops the list, but there’s more, as we pointed out last September in one of our most quoted posts, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes:

A carbon tax will affect whether and how far and often to drive . . . which car to take on a family trip . . . how high an mpg rating to demand in the next lease or purchase . . . and, at the societal level, whether public transit investments “pencil out” and might be prioritized over wider highways, and whether hyper-efficient car designs pencil out in corporate boardrooms and venture-capital spreadsheets.

More broadly, as we wrote then, “a carbon tax effectively makes every action that reduces fossil fuel use less costly, by raising the rewards from using less fuel. Taxing carbon will open up multiple paths that will influence the literally billions of daily decisions that determine energy usage and, hence, carbon emissions.”

We have nothing against mpg standards. While they may not have been as impactful as appliance efficiency standards, which have driven “market transformations” in designs of refrigerators, air conditioners and such (and have also mitigated the “decision gap” when appliances need to be replaced overnight and there’s no time to study competing models), they have at least done something to lift actual miles per gallon of U.S. automobiles.

The hitch is that, like standards generally, mpg rules are a narrow-gauge solution to a broad-gauge problem. They address just one aspect (albeit an important one) of a multi-faceted issue: how will we reduce gasoline use quickly, massively and economically.

Not only that, as economist Valerie Karplus pointed out in a 2013 Times op-ed, The Case for a Higher Gasoline Tax, “[A] gas tax provides immediate, direct incentives for drivers to reduce gasoline use, while the efficiency standards must squeeze the reduction out of new vehicles only.” (emphasis added)

We know full well the difficulty of raising the federal gasoline tax that, appallingly, has been stuck at the same rate since 1993, let alone enacting a carbon tax. Still, it’s disconcerting to see “mpg hawks” like the Safe Climate Campaign react to the auto industry’s incipient campaign to water down the 2025 target by calling on the Obama Administration to “close loopholes” in the regs. Those loopholes are there by political design, and they’re not going to be closed by environmentalist lobbying.

This seems like a recipe for failure: doubling down on a rule that’s inherently complex and prone to gaming, that stretches over years if not decades, and that addresses only a piece of the problem.

We all want to diminish use of gasoline. Why not embrace the policy that attacks that usage at the root: a carbon tax.

To grasp how deep the fault line now runs through the Democratic Party and between its presidential candidates, look no further than the exchange between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over a carbon tax in Thursday night’s debate:

Bernie Sanders presses Hillary Clinton on whether she’s in favor of a carbon tax. https://t.co/ev4IeNYpwm #DemDebate https://t.co/lr4D2Gu4rH

— CNN (@CNN) April 15, 2016

SANDERS: I am proud that I have introduced the most comprehensive climate change legislation, including a tax on carbon. Something I don’t believe Secretary Clinton supports.

MODERATOR (to Clinton): Go ahead and respond.

CLINTON: Well, I’m a little bewildered about how to respond when you have an agreement which gives you the framework to actually take the action that would have only come about because in the face of implacable hostility from the Republicans in Congress, President Obama moved forward on gas mileage, he moved forward on the Clean Power Plan. He has moved forward on so many of the fronts that he could, given the executive actions that he was able to take.

And, you know, I am getting a little bit concerned here because I really believe that the President has done an incredible job against great odds and deserves to be supported.

SANDERS: All right, here is — here is a real difference. This is a difference between understanding that we have a crisis of historical consequence here, and incrementalism and those little steps are not enough.

Not right now. Not on climate change. Now, the truth is, we have got to tell the fossil fuel industry that their short-term profits are not more important than the future of this planet. And that means — and I would ask you to respond. Are you in favor of a tax on carbon so that we can transit away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy at the level and speed we need to do?

CLINTON: You know, I have laid out a set of actions that build on what President Obama was able to accomplish, building on the Clean Power Plan, which is currently under attack by fossil fuels and the Right in the Supreme Court, which is one of the reasons why we need to get the Supreme Court justice that President Obama has nominated to be confirmed so that we can actually continue to make progress.

I don’t take a back seat to your legislation that you’ve introduced that you haven’t been able to get passed. I want to do what we can do to actually make progress in dealing with the crisis. That’s exactly what I have proposed.

And my approach I think is going to get us there faster without tying us up into political knots with a Congress that still would not support what you are proposing.

To be clear, what bewilders Secretary Clinton is not a carbon tax, but, as she said, “how to respond.” As a policy wonk par excellence, Clinton almost certainly knows the power of a carbon tax very well.

Clinton probably grasps that taxing carbon emissions cuts to the heart of the climate issue by rewarding each and every step that reduces use of carbon fuels; that it harnesses the power of the market — the market! — to spur innovation and investment in clean energy; and that it makes climate polluters pay and diminishes their political power, thus helping untie the political knots she professes to decry.

But cutting to the essence on climate or virtually any other issue, and heeding the political groundswell demanding bold action, just doesn’t seem to be in her DNA, not to mention the DNA of the wing of the Democratic Party that her husband enshrined during his presidency.

The charitable interpretation is that Clinton is wisely refraining from saddling herself with a position that the Republican Party can use to attack her between now and November — as a tax-and-spend Democrat who will damage the middle class. And indeed, a carbon tax is so revolutionary as well as sensible and necessary that Clinton, in stark contrast to Sanders, would likely have a hard time not just defending but championing it against the Republican nominee.

Instead, she would fall back, as she did Thursday evening in Brooklyn, on gasoline mileage and the Clean Power Plan — measures that, as we have explained here ad nauseam, are fine so far as they go, which, alas, isn’t very far. The Clean Power Plan, we pointed out nearly two years ago, merely requires electric power generators (which by now barely account for a third of U.S. climate pollution) to switch from coal to gas and add wind and solar generation at a far lesser rate than they’ve been doing for a decade. As for the vaunted increase in vehicle miles per gallon, it is already being badly eroded by near-record-cheap gasoline, much of it enabled by the explosive rise in U.S. fracking that Clinton supports (and Sanders opposes). [NB: Link in preceding sentence was added in June 2016.]

It’s not that Obama’s actions that Clinton has latched on to aren’t useful. Rather, they don’t go nearly far enough. As Sanders pointed out, “we have a crisis of historical consequence here, and incrementalism and those little steps are not enough.” Nor do they create a policy template for the rest of the world. Outside of Western Europe and perhaps Japan, no other countries possess the bureaucratic machinery to administer the stupendously complex regulations that Clinton touted Thursday evening, and which apparently constitute the limits of her climate vision. While a carbon tax brings its own challenges of transparency and accountability, those now appear manageable in the wake of the Paris climate accord, to which nearly two hundred nations will formally commit at the UN this coming Friday.

To be clear, Clinton is correct that President Obama has accomplished — through creative and steadfast presidential fiat — most of what was possible in the face of implacable Republican opposition. But were she to be honest with herself, she would admit that it’s not nearly enough, especially with emerging revelations leading Scientists [To] Warn of Climate Peril Within Decades, Not Centuries, as the New York Times put it last month.

And were Clinton to seek to inspire Democratic voters, and indeed, the clear majority of Americans who have come to support carbon taxes, provided they’re made economically fair,  she wouldn’t be ducking Sanders’ (and the moderator’s) questions about them. She would be vying with Sanders to see who can fashion the most effective and appealing carbon tax and who can best persuade the American people to demand Congress pass it.

Wyoming, the epicenter of U.S. fossil fuel extraction, is hemorrhaging jobs, the New York Times reported today:

Tumbling prices for oil and gas, along with bankruptcies in the coal industry, have pummeled Wyoming’s energy-dependent economy and eroded a thin safety net for poor and older residents. Energy development helped Wyoming weather the nation’s thin years seven or eight years ago, but now officials estimate that energy companies have shed some 5,500 jobs — a huge number in a state with 580,000 residents.

The coal bust is stark. U.S. coal-fired electricity plants produced nearly 15 percent fewer kilowatt-hours last year, which is down almost a third from their 2007 peak. Total coal mining fell 10 percent, to a 30-year low, and while 2015 state coal extraction data aren’t available, Wyoming, the source of 40 percent of U.S. coal output, of which almost all is exported over huge distances by train or “by wire,” surely took a huge hit. And though production of “hydrocarbons” (oil and gas) is up nationwide, much of the action is now in fracking regions like North Dakota and Pennsylvania; moreover, drilling of new wells has plummeted along with prices.

As the Times reports, the job losses are exacerbated by parochial decisions by the Republican-dominated state government including a refusal to expand Medicaid under President Obama’s health care law. “A literacy program that helped people get high-school equivalency degrees was eliminated,” added the Times, “as were programs that provided dental care and property-tax rebates to low-income old people.”

This is painful to read on many levels, which for me include indelible memories of good times in Wyoming and Montana in the mid- and late seventies. As I wrote, years later:

Defending the American West from ruinous energy development was a particularly intense, gut-level part of that struggle for many of us, including me. I was living in New York then but spending as much time as I could in the Northern Rockies, hiking the high country and getting out onto the land, meeting ranchers, Indians, environmentalists and fellow eco-freaks. I fished for my breakfast in Shoshone streams, played barrelhouse piano in a Montana renewable-energy road show, and got high inhaling Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths at 12,000 feet in the Wind River range.

The irony is that the energy technologies we insisted could take the place of environmentally and economically ruinous fossil fuel exploitation have finally arrived . . . and Wyoming is perfectly positioned to take advantage. The state ranks #8 out of all 50 in wind energy potential, behind only Texas, Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and the Dakotas, according to estimates by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The NREL data further suggest that developing only the windiest areas in the state — where 80 meter-tall turbines could achieve 30% annual capacity factors — could generate more than 1.9 trillion kWh a year, or triple the electricity now generated from the state’s entire annual coal output. Yet actual Wyoming wind production is around a thousand times less. (See calculations below; note that NREL’s wind potential excludes a quarter of the state’s windy lands that are protected, developed or otherwise inappropriate, and draws on 2010 assumptions that predate recent new productivity from larger turbines and more sophisticated controls.) Yes, unlocking that potential requires big investments in transmission, but the hellish processions of massive unit trains bearing Wyoming coal to the Midwest and South could diminish and cease.

Wyoming looks well positioned for solar as well. The map at left suggests that the Equality State (yep, that’s its motto) is in the top ten, behind California, Nevada, Texas, the Four Corner states, and perhaps Nebraska and Oklahoma. Actual solar electricity generation in Wyoming is nil, however.

Many forces have stopped extensive wind and solar development. Some, like the nation’s only wind production tax, are state-specific; others, like the absence of a carbon price, are more generic. Both of these reflect and reinforce the political power of the fossil fuel industry along with cultural and cognitive biases that valorize carbon fuels at the expense of sustainable energy.

Only time will tell whether the latest downturn in Wyoming’s cycles of boom and bust will lead to a change of heart and in public policy and enable the jobs disappearing from the extractive industries to be replaced by jobs in renewables. For now, this state of rugged but empty landscapes is about to get even lonelier.

Calculations for paragraph preceding solar map: Wyoming coal mines produced just under 400 million tons in 2014. Applying standard factors of 8,500 btu/lb for Powder River Basin coal and 1 kWh generated per 10,000 btu released in combustion, that tonnage would have generated 680 billion kWh. The 2015 figure is almost certainly less, and probably under a third of the 1,944 billion kWh annual Wyoming wind potential estimated by NREL using 2010 technology assumptions.