Charles Komanoff – Page 31

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

Here’s What’s New in CTC’s Carbon Tax Spreadsheet Model

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We’ve just posted an update to our spreadsheet model — our powerful but easy-to-use tool for predicting future emissions and revenues from possible U.S. carbon taxes. We say taxes, plural, because the model accepts any carbon tax trajectory you feed it and spits out estimated nationwide emission reductions and revenue generation, year by year. Here’s a rundown of what’s new in the update.

1. A year of new data: The most obvious change is the addition of 2014 baseline data on energy use, CO2 emissions and emission intensity for each of the model’s seven sectors.

Our spreadsheet model lets you compare different carbon tax trajectories.

Our spreadsheet model lets you compare different carbon tax trajectories.

2. Smoothing the carbon tax impact: A new feature lets users smooth the impact of the tax to reflect real-world lags in households’ and businesses’ adaptation to more-expensive fossil fuels. (You get to set the adaptation “ceiling” rate; any excess gets carried over to future years.) This feature is helpful for trajectories like the Whitehouse-Schatz bill, whose rate starts with a bang at $45 per ton of carbon dioxide but then rises only slowly. Under our default setting, the reductions from the $45/ton initial charge are spread over four years rather than, unrealistically, assigned to the first year.

3. Future baseline is calibrated to official forecast: We tweaked a few model parameters to make our 2040 emissions forecast without a carbon tax match the analogous forecast in the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook.” This allows for apples-to-apples comparisons with other models that are explicitly calibrated to the EIA/AEO forecast.

[Read more…]

Arctic Oil vs. Carbon Tax? It’s Not Even Close.

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It is true that the stroke of the presidential pen with which Barack Obama last week granted Shell Oil Corp. permission to drill off Alaska’s Arctic Coast cannot also put into force a U.S. carbon tax, without authorization by Congress. And it is all too possible that when climate reality eventually sweeps over the Capitol, the resulting carbon tax may be modest in scale and take a lot longer than a decade to reach the $100/ton level that would drive massive reductions in fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions.

All the same, it’s instructive to compare the capacity of Arctic drilling to supply oil with that of a robust carbon tax to quench the need for it. The outcome — the carbon tax wins — may not surprise. But the lopsidedness is startling: in just its tenth year, the carbon tax proposed last November by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), starting at $12.50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and rising annually by $12.50 as well, would be eliminating the need for oil at around a dozen times the rate at which Shell would be pulling the stuff from the Arctic.

Oil savings from a robust carbon tax dwarf oil "gains" from Arctic drilling.

Oil savings from a robust carbon tax dwarf oil “gains” from Arctic drilling.

Here are the numbers:

♦ Royal Dutch Shell’s Chukchi Sea project is projected by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to extract 4.3 billion barrels of crude over a 44-year period. (See Chukchi Sea Oil & Gas Lease Sale 193 Draft Second Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, Volume 1 [pdf]; go to pp. 6 or 62 or 182 of 694.) This equates to daily production of 268,000 barrels. An estimated 2.2 trillion cubic feet of methane (natural gas) would be extracted as well; on a btu basis that equates to 360 million barrels of oil, or 23,000 barrels a day. Combined extraction of hydrocarbons is then around 290,000 barrels a day. (Note that we have not netted the energy expended to “discover,” extract and transport the oil.)

♦ For the carbon tax, we modeled McDermott’s Managed Carbon Price Act of 2014, setting the annual increases as the midpoint between the bill’s floor and ceiling prices. The price per U.S. (not metric) ton of CO2 in the tenth year, 2024, is $113.40. (Our model, which we’ll update soon, had the tax starting in 2015.) As indicated in the graph, the reductions in petroleum requirements would be substantial in every consuming sector. They sum to 3,486,000 barrels a day — 12 times the 290,000 bpd equivalent anticipated from Shell’s Arctic venture.

The estimated oil savings from the McDermott carbon tax amount to nearly one-fifth of U.S. oil consumption in both 2013 (the last data year in our model) and 2024 projected without a national carbon price. The biggest reduction in absolute terms is in what we call personal ground travel (chiefly driving), which dominates petroleum use. But on a proportional basis the savings would be greater in commercial sectors such as freight movement, oil refining, and construction, as the unmistakable price signal from the annually rising tax drives innovation enabling lower usage.

Still, the projected reduction in gasoline consumption for personal ground travel in 2024, 1.4 to 1.5 million barrels per day, commands attention. [Read more…]

A Carbon Tax Can Carry Earth Day’s Legacy

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In 1970 I was teaching math in a New York City suburb. On Earth Day I stood at a highway off-ramp with members of the high school ecology club. One of their signs read, “The Earth is a Closed Garage.” Another said, “Make Polluters Pay.”

There’s been some progress since then. Breathing New York’s air, once equated to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, is many times safer. Wind turbines now provide five percent of the nation’s power, and electricity produced with solar cells rose ten-fold in the past three years. Driving has flatlined nationwide over the past decade, partly because Americans are strapped but also because the intoxication with cars is wearing off.

That’s great news for the environment, but it’s not nearly enough for climate. CO2 levels are still rising inexorably. Ditto global temperatures, polar ice melting and extreme weather. Emissions need to be cut radically even as seven-and-a-half billion people strive for prosperity.

For that to happen, prices of fossil fuels have to reflect the climate costs of carbon pollution. The way to do this, of course, is with carbon taxes:

To demystify carbon taxes and showcase their appeal, we’re rolling out the Carbon Tax Center’s first video. It explains how a carbon tax will transform investment, re-shape consumption and sharply reduce carbon emissions. As the video shows, no other policy can match its reach or simplicity. No other policy can be replicated globally, from China to Chile to Chad.

A carbon tax is no mere “technical fix.” It’s both a symbol and a means for us to respect nature and each other.

The central messages on Earth Day 1970 were to abide by nature’s limits and make polluters pay. On this Earth Day, let’s spread the word about a carbon tax. Let’s educate and organize so that the U.S. and other nations make taxing carbon the central policy to combat catastrophic climate change and sustain the Earth we love.

Carbon Tax Polling Milestone: 2/3 Support if Revenue-Neutral

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For more years than I care to count, the Carbon Tax Center beseeched pollsters to take Americans’ temperature on revenue-neutral carbon taxes. Time and again we explained that polling about carbon taxes had to incorporate the option of returning revenues to households ― as most carbon tax bills would do. Otherwise, the tax came off as all stick and no carrot, and about as appealing to most folks as a cold shower.

Finally, a Stanford University-Resources for the Future poll asked that question. The results, released today, show that two-thirds of Americans support making corporations pay a price for carbon pollution, provided the revenues are redistributed, i.e., made revenue-neutral. The poll’s finding is the most powerful indication yet that the public is warming to carbon taxation as the premier policy for combating climate change.

Poll-Graphic-Pie-Chart-AltStanford and RFF commissioned the polling firm SSRS to interview 1,023 U.S. adults on climate-related issues in January. Two findings from the poll — that Americans of Hispanic descent are particularly climate-concerned, and that half of Republicans would favor a presidential candidate who supports fighting climate change — led to front-page New York Times stories. (Click here for the story on Hispanics and here for the story on Republicans.) The full poll was made publicly available today at a briefing at the National Press Club in Washington.

The poll was supervised by RFF university fellow Jon Krosnick, who has been polling Americans on climate change for two decades as head of Stanford’s Political Psychology Research Group. Its section on carbon taxation included these two questions: [Read more…]

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Climate Idealism Can’t Hold a Candle to Collective Action

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Why do Copenhageners ride bicycles? The key reason, says Yale economist and best-selling author (“Irrational Exuberance”) Robert J. Shiller, is that Danes are idealists who resolved, after the oil crisis of the 1970s, “to make a personal commitment to ride bicycles rather than drive, out of moral principle, even if that was inconvenient for them.”

“The sight of so many others riding bikes motivated the city’s inhabitants and appears to have improved the moral atmosphere enough,” Shiller wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, that the share of working inhabitants of Copenhagen who bike has reached 50 percent.

From “Copenhagen: City of Cyclists” (2010), a report by the City of Copenhagen.

From “Copenhagen: City of Cyclists” (2010), a report by the City of Copenhagen.

In much the same way, Shiller argues, “asking people to volunteer to save our climate by taking many small, individual actions” may be a more effective way to bring down carbon emissions than trying to enact overarching national or global policies such as carbon emission caps or taxes.

Goodness. Rarely do smart people so badly mangle both the historical record and basic economics. I say “people” because Shiller attributes his column’s main points to a new book, “Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” by Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund and Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist. And I say “smart” because the three stand at the top of their profession. Shiller won the Economics Nobel in 2013, Weitzman is a leading light in the economics of climate change, and Wagner is highly regarded young economist.

But mangle they have (I haven’t seen the Wagner-Weitzman book but assume that Shiller represents it fairly).

Let’s start with the history, which is fairly well known to anyone versed in cycling advocacy, as I’ve been since the 1980s, when I spearheaded the revival of New York City’s bike-advocacy group Transportation Alternatives (as recounted here.) Copenhagen’s 40-year bicycle upsurge, and indeed much of the uptake of cycling across Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, came about not through mass idealism but from deliberate public policies to help cities avoid the damages of pervasive automobile use while reducing oil dependence.

If idealism played a part at the outset it was a social idealism that instructed government to undertake integrated policies ­― stiff gas taxes and car ownership fees; generously funded public transit; elimination of free curbside parking; provision of safe and abundant bicycle routes ― that enabled Copenhageners to do what they evidently desired all along: to use bikes safely and naturally.

The telltale is in the graphic. Only one in eleven Copenhageners who cycle have environment and climate in mind. The majority do it because it’s faster than other ways to travel, and around a third of cyclists say they ride because it’s healthy, inexpensive and convenient ― belying Shiller’s meme of Danes idealistically choosing bikes despite their inconvenience vis-à-vis cars. [Read more…]

First Tax Oil, Then Carbon

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Low oil prices and cheap gasoline bring a host of positives and negatives, as befits petroleum’s dual nature as a bestower of motion and light but also smog, traffic and climate change. This clash has bedeviled energy and climate policy for decades. Now we have a golden opportunity to resolve it.

Heading the good things is inexpensive oil’s boost to the economy. Cheap gas gives consumers more money to spend, and that means more jobs and better wages. Geopolitically, low oil prices are a scourge on several bad actors on the world stage, from Russia to Iran. And as drilling gets less profitable, thousands of fragile places might be left alone.

But when oil is cheap, the world gears up to use more of it, which accelerates climate change. For all we rightfully target coal, burning oil releases almost as much climate pollution. Boeing and Airbus are reportedly apprehensive that their latest fuel-efficient aircraft may go begging. And of course the faster oil usage rises, the more quickly the price rebounds, teeing up the next recession.

A refundable oil tax can pave the way for a full-fledged carbon tax.

A refundable oil tax can pave the way for a full-fledged carbon tax.

What’s needed is a way to safeguard the benefits of low oil prices while fending off the downsides. The trick to this feat, which should unite all sides of our fractured body politic, is to let consumers collect a tax on oil. Or rather, have government collect the tax at ports and wellheads and distribute the revenues to consumers each month, the same way Alaska distributes the revenues from its wildly popular tax on its oil flows.

Yes, we take Sarah Palin nationwide, taxing oil and disbursing the dollars — all of them — to U.S. households, the same “dividend” for each.

Because the tax dollars stay in circulation, the amount of money families have to spend doesn’t fall and the windfall to the economy persists. Most families of limited means will come out ahead because on average they spend fewer dollars on oil than they will receive in their monthly revenue check. Economic inequality eases a little, at no cost to economic activity.

Why have the tax at all, then? Answer: to simulate high fuel prices, preserving incentives to get more fuel-efficient. In this way, motorists will keep buying high-mileage cars and driving them somewhat less, manufacturers will build ever-more efficient vehicles and aircraft, and cities and counties will keep broadening their transit infrastructure. The same goes for freight movement ― goods produced nearby will be advantaged, boosting local agriculture and domestic jobs. [Read more…]

We overuse dirty fuels – spending more on them than we would if their full cost was reflected in prices. This is not some kind of government planning argument – it is the straightforward logic of the market: that which is not paid for is overused.”

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Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, in Why Now is the Right Time for a U.S. Carbon Tax, Scholars Strategy Network, Jan. 2015. Summers published a close copy of that post as an op-ed in the Washington Post, Oil’s swoon creates the opening for a carbon tax, on Jan. 4.