Charles Komanoff – Page 52

Carbon Tax Center

Pricing carbon efficiently and equitably

"Once the climate tipping point is past …"

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Every so often, you read something that stops you in your tracks. That happened to me yesterday, when I came across this:

We are talking about our grandchildren living in a resource-constrained future where they have a chance to learn to live in balance with the planet, or our grandchildren living in a future truly filled with squalor, death and misery. Once the climate tipping point is past, human beings will pay any price to go back but it will be to no avail. And they will wonder why their ancestors thought driving SUVs and air conditioning the outdoors was more important than water, food and survival of their progeny.

I read this passage yesterday on Amtrak as I was returning to New York City from Washington. Last Saturday, I participated in one of the “Fossil Fuel Disaster Relief Rides” organized by the direct-action environmental group Time’s Up. We hauled supplies by bike to the Rockaways, one of dozens of districts in the New York region devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and we stuck around to help residents drag the sodden wreckage of their living rooms and garages onto the sidewalk. The scene was post-apocalyptic: trash mounds towering over twisted bungalows; dump trucks and ‘dozers lumbering down dirt-caked streets; dust, muck and ruin stretching for miles; the sun filtered through a torn sky. I also knew from published reports that my home town of Long Beach, on the next barrier beach to the east, had similarly been laid waste.

Rockaway Beach, NY, Nov. 11, 2012. Photo: duluoz cats (Flickr).

“Human beings will pay any price to go back but it will be to no avail.” Fittingly, the writer was responding to a post on Streetsblog, the blog of the “livable-streets” movement, that for some dubious reason was pouring cold water on the hope that a carbon tax might figure in the emerging equation for tax and fiscal reform. Not only that, the writer was telling other commenters that a visit to our (Carbon Tax Center) Web site could dispel their doubts that a carbon tax could be made effective and fair. Here’s her comment, in full:

Again, please see the link that Komanoff posted below in the very first comment.  (www.carbontax.org) Most of the questions raised below are answered — how to measure carbon emissions, at what point in the emissions stream to effectively tax it, how a carbon tax can be revenue neutral, why no one is or will ever suggest taxing people breathing, etc.

As to how to deal with off-shoring of carbon emissions, we would indeed have to be more responsible about this than we have been with off-shoring all our other pollution. We could either refuse to trade with countries that don’t impose carbon taxes at similar levels, or we could levy a tariff on all imported products based on the level of that country’s gross fossil-fuel burning carbon emissions. (We would no doubt have to estimate in cases where self-reported numbers are unreliable.) This would have an added benefit of on-shoring manufacturing jobs back to the US.

With a carbon fee and dividend program, people would actually make money as long as they kept their usage below that of the average energy-squandering American. This is not difficult to do! All it takes it takes is simple behavioral changes and/or very small investments of money that will be paid back with lower fuel bills. But there simply must be a price signal or people will not change their energy consumption and carbon emissions patterns. And these carbon emission patterns need to drop immediately. Not by 2020 or 2030. Any plan that talks about doing something 2020 and beyond is a plan to do nothing because it will be too late. It is hypocritical greenwashing designed to distract and pretend, pure and simple.

We are talking about our grandchildren living in a resource-constrained future where they have a chance to learn to live in balance with the planet, or our grandchildren living in a future truly filled with squalor, death and misery. Once the climate tipping point is past, human beings will pay any price to go back but it will be to no avail. And they will wonder why their ancestors thought driving SUVs and air conditioning the outdoors was more important than water, food and survival of their progeny.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the case for a carbon tax made more powerfully and eloquently than in those four paragraphs. I know that I in lower Manhattan and my fellow New Yorkers in the Rockaways and Long Beach and Staten Island now wish we could have paid whatever it would have taken to buy the reduction in sea-level rise and ocean-temperature rise that might have quenched some of the force of Hurricane Sandy. Taking that knowledge and building it into support for a robust U.S. carbon tax is our new mission at the Carbon Tax Center.

PS: As for that Amtrak trip to DC yesterday. That’s where AEI, RFF, the IMF and Brookings held an all-day conference — before a packed house — on The Economics of Carbon Taxes. Click the link to unpack the acronyms and see the program. We’ll post a report soon.

When NY Gov. Cuomo 'Got' Climate Change

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Superstorm Sandy has made climate change believers of many, but none better-known than New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. “[C]limate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable,” Cuomo told New Yorkers at a post-Sandy briefing on Wed. Oct. 31, a day and a half after the tidal surge from the storm inundated coastal communities and spread unprecedented devastation across hundreds of miles of shoreline — and far inland as well — in Long Island, New York City and neighboring New Jersey. Lost to flooding, wind and even fire are more than 100 lives, uncounted homes — I’m guessing well over 100,000 — and entire villages and towns. State officials are estimating that damage to the region will exceed $50 billion, today’s NY Times reports, making it the country’s costliest storm other than Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out much of New Orleans in 2005.

Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Manhattan entrance, Oct. 30, 2012. MTA photo by Patrick Cashin.

Cuomo’s words, while unremarkable to anyone conversant with the basics of climate science, were unprecedentedly frank not just for him but for any major U.S. office-holder. They were also unscripted, suggesting that the governor may have had a “conversion moment” in which old perceptions gave way to a new reality. If so, I’ll bet the trigger came on the evening when Sandy struck. That would have been when Cuomo came face-to-face with the massive power of the floods unleashed by the storm.

Here’s how that moment was described by the weekly New York Observer, in its blow-by-blow account of how top city and state officials fought to comprehend the storm’s destructive force:

Joe Lhota (Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief): When I got downtown to meet [NYC Transit head Tom] Prendergast, we were looking at where we were, we both realized how deep the water was at South Ferry station. It didn’t surprise me when we found out later that the water was all way up to the ceiling. It was four feet above the ground that night. And then we walked over to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, where we ran into the governor totally by accident. I don’t know why I went over to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. I really don’t. We hadn’t been told about water rushing in, but we went over there, and boy, what I saw was extraordinary. White-water rapids, and a pace­ — you could have created hydro power.

I’ll use the words that the governor used. It was disorienting. It was. You heard it. You saw it. And you weren’t really sure you were hearing it and seeing it correctly. I never expected the Hudson River to do that.

Josh Vlasto (Cuomo administration communications director and senior adviser): The governor was standing with Lhota at the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the water was rushing in so quickly that the sound was deafening. I think that for him, that was the moment­ — where the water was that night, when you’re down there, standing at the tunnel, there’s so much water that you can’t hear­ — I think the governor would say that was the “We Got a Problem” moment.

Howard Glaser (Cuomo administration director of state operations): It was a sound you never heard before in Lower Manhattan, a rushing river. And then we went over to the World Trade Center and we saw Niagara Falls was pouring into the site.

Those aren’t quotes from the governor, of course, but they may as well be, given how tightly he stage-manages his administration’s utterances and given that Lhota, Vlasto and Glaser all serve at his pleasure.

Nearly halfway through his (first) term, Gov. Cuomo is arguably the state’s most powerful governor since Rockefeller and its most popular chief since FDR. He is already the subject of considerable speculation as a possible Democratic presidential candidate for 2016. At the same time, energy issues concerning renewables, nuclear power and especially fracking are an increasing presence on his state policy and political plate. Like other concerns, political attention to climate change will ebb and flow depending on public pressure and the flow of events. But if the governor indeed had a climate-change conversion moment along the lines I’m suggesting, that moment might just spark policies — incentives, regulations, and perhaps even a state carbon fee — that could turn New York State into a leader in arresting the buildup of carbon pollution in the state’s — and planet’s — atmosphere.