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The Climate Movement In Its Own Way

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The Nation magazine today published my essay, The Climate Movement In Its Own Way. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and offer context.

Use link at top to access the original version of this post in The Nation.

It’s a follow-on to my April 4 essay, also in The Nation, The Case Against Closing Nuclear Power Plants, which I posted here under the title, For Climate’s Sake, Don’t Shut U.S. Nukes. 

The new piece calls on progressives in the climate movement — a bulwark of the magazine’s readership — to move beyond ideology and make the climate movement more pragmatic and holistic by supporting carbon pricing.

In introducing my April 4 post, I wrote:

[This post] implicitly embodies a hope that my willingness to examine my own deeply-held convictions in a new light may encourage others to do likewise with their own climate dogma. Reconsideration of ideologically-based objections to carbon pricing by self-proclaimed progressives would be a good place to start.

Consider today’s post an explicit expression of that hope. 

  — C.K., April 30, 2022

PS: The new post had to be shoehorned into a tight word count. The version below restores a half-dozen phrases cut from the version in The Nation.

The Climate Movement In Its Own Way

After decades of critically documenting nuclear power’s outsize costs, I finally admitted to myself that the carbon benefits from continuing to run US nuke plants are substantial, and in some respects irreplaceable. I made the case for keeping them open in an April article on TheNation.com.

Closing New York’s Indian Point reactors last year was a climate blunder, I wrote. Not just because fracked gas is now filling the breach, but because the need to replace the lost carbon-free power means that new wind and solar farms won’t drive emissions down further. California, facing the same equation, should shelve its plan to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 2024, I said.

“Total bullshit,” a lifelong anti-nuker wrote me. “You should be ashamed.” More representative of the comments, though, was this: “Continued reliance on nuclear power going forward now is part of the price of our collective past failures.”

Amen. The failures propping up US carbon emissions are multiple. Not just Senator Joe Manchin, who torpedoed President Biden’s Build Back Better clean-energy legislation. Not just the Senate Republicans, any one of whom could have cast the critical 50th vote. And not just Big Carbon, whose dark money and disinformation perpetuate climate inaction.

Through its own poor choices, the climate movement is failing as well.

Too many of our climate campaigns are ill-considered. Too much of our legislative agenda is narrow-gauged. Too often, our lens for assessing climate proposals is ideological rather than pragmatic.

Consider the decade-long campaign to induce pension funds and banks to divest their fossil-fuel holdings. Exxon-Mobil’s share price wobbled for years, but since early 2020 Exxon’s stock has risen faster than the market average. Is Big Oil shamed and starved for new capital today? Not with roaring demand for oil and gas. US motorists’ insanely over-powered, super-sized vehicles account for about a tenth of worldwide petroleum consumption. Yet challenges to American motordom come mostly from outgunned cycling and transit campaigners, not the climate movement.

Now, with most federal action blocked, climate activists sought and won a ban on gas heat in new buildings in New York City, though they failed in their first push for a statewide ban.

The drive to “electrify everything” is laudable, given that electricity can be decarbonized whereas gas furnaces and stoves cannot. Yet trying to take the ban statewide elbowed aside bolder ideas, such as legalizing accessory dwelling units and stopping highway widenings.

To be sure, not everyone is ready to admit that fatter highways and pastoral, exclusive suburbs are carbon disasters. But only broader campaigns can link climate to other pressing concerns like homelessness, housing unaffordability, costly gasoline, and traffic violence.

The granddaddy of US climate failures, of course, is the absence of the one policy that economists believe could unlock the vast emissions reductions needed to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius: national carbon taxation.

A robust federal carbon tax isn’t just the sharpest card in the climate policy deck. It’s like adding a whole new deck to the one we already have.

A straightforward “price on carbon” — administered not via easily gamed cap-and-trade schemes but through “upstream” levies on the carbon content of fuels — was once thought appealing to left and right alike. It is now abjured by both.

The right, of course, is both repellently all-in on fossil fuels and hyper-aware that its wealthy base of profligate carbon consumers would pay the most through a carbon tax. Which makes the left’s antipathy to carbon taxes not just surprising but downright bizarre.

This hesitation has multiple strands: seeing carbon pricing as another contrivance of the predatory capitalism that built white wealth off the land and labor of Indigenous and African-descended peoples; suspicion that carbon pricing lets polluters avoid reducing local emissions by purchasing “offsets”; a misplaced conviction that carbon pricing in California has worsened disproportionate pollution burdens on disadvantaged communities; and excessive faith that a regulatory approach can untangle the multiple strands that enforce fossil-fuel dependence.

Economic models abound to show how fast carbon taxes will shrink the use of fossil fuels. Models aren’t life, but they agree broadly that a robustly rising federal tax could, within a decade, dial back US emissions by about a third.

To turn our backs on carbon reductions on that scale is, I believe, suicidal.

Our worsening climate stalemate led me to abandon my silence as existing nuclear power plants were extinguished. A similar rethink on carbon taxes by progressives won’t win over climate denialists. In time, though, with a more far-sighted left ascendant, it could become a stepping stone to climate progress.

Charles Komanoff, a longtime environmental activist and expert on nuclear power economics, directs the Carbon Tax Center.

A Pause in Globalization Could Reset Carbon Emissions — and U.S. Politics

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Last weekend I bicycled to Long Beach, the Long Island town where I grew up. From the boardwalk, squinting into the sun, my riding partner Dave and I could make out a dozen freighters strung in a long line in the Atlantic Ocean, stacked up like aircraft waiting to land.

Giant ships offshore weren’t something you saw often from Long Beach in the last century. A solitary ordinary freighter was noteworthy. The dozen big ships last Saturday doubtless were a symptom of some downstream jam-up in the supply chain. But they were also a telltale of the vast expansion of global trade since globalization took rise several decades ago and made Asian factories the prime U.S. source of consumer goods.

Yellow circles mark cargo ships we saw strung out in the Atlantic. Photo: David Clark.

As coincidence would have it, both Dave and I had read Paul Krugman’s day-before NY Times column, Putin May Kill the Global Economy. “There are good reasons to worry that we’re seeing an economic replay of 1914,” Krugman wrote, referring to “the year that ended what some economists call the first wave of globalization, a vast expansion of world trade made possible by railroads, steamships and telegraph cables.”

Krugman envisages Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggering a replay of 1914. Not just the withdrawal from trade of Russian hydrocarbons and Ukrainian wheat but a “partial retreat from globalization,” i.e., a shrinkage in the “world-spanning supply chains” that now constitute global manufacture.

“What Putin has taught us is that countries run by strongmen who surround themselves with yes-men aren’t reliable business partners,” Krugman says, eyeing China above all. “So if you’re a business leader right now,” he writes, “surely you’re wondering whether it’s smart to stake your company’s future on the assumption that you’ll keep being able to buy what you need from authoritarian regimes. Bringing production back to nations that believe in the rule of law may raise your costs by a few percent, but the price may be worth it for the stability it buys.”

Who can disagree? What Krugman didn’t consider, though, is that the simplification and shortening of global supply chains as an antidote to irrational autocracy could become the political equivalent of carbon taxes on international shipping.

I’ve long harbored the notion that a sufficiently airtight regime of global carbon taxes might put a damper on world trade by making ocean-going shipping more expensive. Much trade would remain, of course, although the extent would depend on the magnitude of the tax. At the margin, though, the enormous movement of raw materials and goods across thousands of miles of ocean (or, more expensively, via air freight) would slow and perhaps even decline.

Krugman didn’t see deglobalization’s silver linings. We do.

The resulting cut in global carbon emissions would be no small thing. Global shipping accounts for 2.2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, Time magazine reported recently, a figure that encompasses methane and other GHG’s and thus probably equates to 3 percent of worldwide CO2.

Deglobalization’s salutary effect on domestic manufacture might ripple even wider. Automation notwithstanding, relocating the making of goods for the U.S. market to the United States would raise factory employment and the number of stable, high-wage jobs. That in turn might restore a semblance of cohesiveness and meaning to the vast hollowed-out regions of middle America that since the Great Recession have turned in despair to opiates — pharmaceutical and political.

To be sure, this can sound very pie-in-the-sky, until you remember the pre-eminent role that dignified, well-paying manufacturing jobs played in U.S. progressive politics in the last century. Starting with Franklin Roosevelt and continuing until Reagan, labor and political organizing in America’s industrial unions played a vital part in furthering racial and economic equality through policies like progressive taxation and civil rights legislation, as historian Michael Kazin recounts in his latest book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.

It’s not a huge stretch to triangulate from Kazin’s history of mid-century democratic capitalism and Krugman’s prognosis of deglobalization to imagine a resurgence in the kind of working-class progressivism that has largely been missing from the push for a Green New Deal. The victory last week through nontraditional, grassroots organizing by the worker-led Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, NY, points in this direction. Over time, rising labor power accompanying renascent domestic manufacturing could help deliver the electoral wins and legislative energies needed to help the U.S. transit from fossil fuels to green energy.

Of course this is my take, not Krugman’s. What worries him about deglobalization isn’t the prospect that “wealthy, advanced economies will end up slightly poorer” as cheap imports recede. It’s the possible brake on economic advancement in “nations like Bangladesh that have made progress in recent decades [due to] access to world markets.”

Curiously for a columnist who frequently invokes climate change, Krugman didn’t mention the other, more dire prospect facing Bangladeshis: that continued “progress” in the form of fossil-fueled growth will lead to massive destruction of their country as the sea overwhelms it, monsoons fail, crops collapse, and desperate migrations of biblical numbers ravage the inland. Unless some thing or combination of things creates a different future.

In his 2020 novel, The Ministry For The Future, the “speculative fiction” writer Kim Stanley Robinson conjured a distinctive deus ex machina: “crash day” — an anonymous worldwide action causing jetliners to fall from the sky, killing passengers and crews but bringing down the curtain on hydrocarbon-fueled, climate-damaging aviation (zero-carbon airships take their place) and catalyzing, finally, a rapid global turning from fossil fuels.

After a decade of pining for a global carbon tax to reverse American deindustrialization, constrain global shipping, and then some, Krugman’s forecast of an autocrat-driven but nonviolent trade slowdown can look mighty attractive.

Addendum, May 9: A May 4 NY Times story, The Era of Cheap and Plenty May Be Ending, about the new logistical fragility of global supply chains, noted: “More firms reported moving their supply chains out of China to other countries, and American executives were more positive about bringing more manufacturing to the United States.”

No such thing as Green Bitcoin

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Call me a neigh-sayer, but the pretty horses decorating yesterday’s NY Times story about Argo Blockchain, Inc.’s “Green Bitcoin” venture can’t hide the oxymoron that lies beneath: no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels Bitcoin miners build or buy to run their ravenous processors, crypto is fundamentally filthy.

Image from March 22 NYT front-page Business Section. The caption read, “Wind turbines next to Argo Blockchain’s new facility in Dickens County, Texas; the site would be fueled mostly by wind and solar energy.” Photo: Carter Johnston.

The reason is straightforward: all the new green energy we can capture from the air and the sun needs to serve a higher purpose: replacing fossil fuels. Wind farms and photovoltaic arrays stop the combustion that’s causing climate change only when they take the place of coal- and gas-fired power plants. If they’re hooked up to Bitcoin computers, they can’t substitute for anything. The net gain for climate is zero.

To be sure, it’s better to run Bitcoin machines with renewables than with fossil fuels. But even 100%-renewable Bitcoin isn’t climate-positive, since the land supporting the new green stuff powering the Bitcoin mining is perforce unavailable to aid the climate. At some point — a year from now, five years on, ten — some other entrepreneur, one focused on renewables rather than crypto-currency, could have built the same arrays and dedicated their output to the grid. That would actually push out fossil fuel generation and achieve the carbon cuts the climate needs.

If it helps, think of the difference between the engineer’s perspective and the climate economist’s. The engineer counts X many kilowatt-hours of wind and solar feeding Bitcoin computers that draw the same X kWh’s and calls it a wash: “carbon-neutral.” The climate economist sees those figures but also debits the Bitcoin operation for the opportunity cost of its computer banks whose voracity renders the green kWh’s unable to take the place of fossil-fuel kWh’s. The “wash” that the engineer touts is actually the persistence of coal- and gas-fired electricity generation that will keep spewing carbon.

What I call the climate economist’s perspective is something I’ve cultivated lately, since I started rethinking the climate consequences of the closure of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, in New York City’s far-north suburbs. In 2020, in a post I called Drones With Hacksaws, I equated shutting a large source of essentially carbon-free electricity such as Indian Point to unleashing a swarm of hacksaw-wielding drones to lay waste to a hypothetical giant offshore wind farm by lopping off its thousand or more turbine blades. The climate consequences of the two acts were, I argued, identical, since both involved doing away with steadily-functioning zero-carbon power sources whose operation obviated the need to run carbon-fuel-burning power plants.

This photo of the Argo Blockchain electrical distribution panels ran below the horses picture in the NYT story. Powering them takes lots of juice.

Applying this perspective to Argo Blockchain helps us see that from a climate perspective, its wind turbines (and promised solar arrays) add up to nada. The potential climate good from the company’s green power sources is squandered in powering an artificial and unnecessary service. From a climate standpoint, Argo’s wind and solar arrays at best break even, rather than provide a net benefit.

The Times story missed a lot of details: how much electricity Argo Blockchain’s Bitcoin mining facility outside Lubbock, in northwest Texas, will consume; how much of it will come from the row of wind turbines visible in the distance; how much of world Bitcoin “demand” the facility will satisfy. But it did include these helpful pointers:

Crypto mining does not involve any picks or shovels. Instead, the term refers to a verification and currency creation process that is essential to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Powerful computers race one another to process transactions, solving complex mathematical problems that require quintillions of numerical guesses a second. As a reward for this authentication service, miners receive new coins, providing a financial incentive to keep the computers running.

In Bitcoin’s early years, a crypto enthusiast could mine coins by running software on a laptop. But as digital assets have become more popular, the amount of power necessary to generate Bitcoin has soared. A single Bitcoin transaction now requires more than 2,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or enough energy to power the average American household for 73 days, researchers estimate.

Earlier this year, the New Yorker magazine writer David Owen used crypto mining as an object example in his Jan. 15 article, How The Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe. After citing a 2011 U.S. Energy Department (D.O.E.) study touting massive carbon reductions from federal regulations upgrading refrigeration efficiency, Owen trenchantly pointed out that “In 2011, the D.O.E.’s forecasters presumably didn’t anticipate that improvements in energy efficiency would make it increasingly economical to power and cool the server farms that mine and manage cryptocurrencies.”

Owen’s article, which is well worth reading for its narrative power and climate relevance as well as its iconoclasm, was his latest exposition of Jevon’s Paradox, the phenomenon by which increases in energy efficiency lower the price of “energy services” and thus lead to more use, undercutting the efficiency gain. The antidote, of course, is to ensure the energy services — cooling, travel, lighting, and so forth — don’t plunge in price by raising the price of energy provision, as I pointed out a decade ago in a post in Grist, If efficiency hasn’t cut energy use, then what?

We could do that, of course, with a carbon tax.

When it comes specifically to blunting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, there are three broad ways that carbon taxing could help.

Carbon taxing can at least nudge greenward the mix of power sources used by Bitcoin miners: less coal or gas firing, more wind and solar. That won’t make Bitcoin green, but it will lessen its climate-destructiveness.

Second, carbon taxing could cut into Bitcoin’s growth by increasing electricity distribution companies’ economic incentives to bid green power supplies away from cryptocurrency manufacturers, thus making Bitcoin mining cost more.

Last, carbon taxing could conceivably strengthen social-shaming of Bitcoin entrepreneurs and users by reframing crypto as a refuge for losers.

This notion, though admittedly speculative, would be the most enduring. There’s a range of consuming activities that need to be deemed off-limits on account of their unsustainability, destructiveness and uselessness: helicopter flights, driving giant SUV’s, monster-size homes. Crypto belongs on that list.

War, oil, and carbon taxes: A primer

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Prices of gasoline and other petroleum products as well as methane (“natural”) gas were already unusually high in the U.S. before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Less than two weeks on (March 9), they’re at levels not seen since 2008, prompting the usual motorist grumbling but also creating hardship for squeezed families. Here we shed light on four key questions:

  1. Is the backlash against high pump prices an argument against pursuing carbon taxes?
  2. How big a hit are U.S. consumers taking from the higher fuel prices?
  3. Is demand for gasoline sensitive to the price at the pump? If so, how much?
  4. How much could the U.S. cut oil demand, right away?

Q1: Is the backlash against high pump prices an argument against pursuing carbon taxes?

A1: No.

Joseph Majkut explains:

Let’s unpack the tweet from Majkut, former Senate staffer and Niskanen Center climate specialist now with the national security think tank CSIS.

Supply shocks, like today’s, exact monies from businesses and consumers and transfer it to the oil industry — extractors, refiners, traders, brokers, insurers.

Carbon pricing, in contrast, is imposed by governments. And though it leads, deliberately, to higher fuel prices, the tax monies are collected by government and become revenues that can be used for public purposes. The “canonical” outlet — the one increasingly urged by carbon-pricing advocates in NGO’s and government — is to distribute (“transfer,” in Majkut’s phrase) the revenues as equal “dividends” to households.

The wealthiest U.S. household quintile spends 3.3 times as much on gasoline as the poorest. So dividing the revenue pie equally among all households yields a big net plus to lower-income families.

This fee-and-dividend approach, pioneered by Citizens Climate Lobby, is income-progressive because lower-income households spend fewer dollars on fuels (directly plus indirectly) than wealthier households. Fuel price shocks, on the other hand, are regressive because lower-income households spend a larger share of their budgets on fuel.

If these points appear contradictory, please study the donut chart at right, or consult our page, Ensuring Equity. It’s the dividend that makes carbon pricing progressive, and the lack of a dividend that makes oil shocks regressive.

Q2: How big a hit are U.S. consumers taking from the higher fuel prices?

A2: A pretty big one, though it’s probably transitory.

In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, the U.S. consumed 32.2 quads of methane (“natural”) gas and 43.5 quads of petroleum products. (A quad, or quadrillion Btu, is a standard metric for characterizing enormous energy quantities.)

Methane gas is used for power generation, heating of homes and commercial buildings, and as process heat for industry. Petroleum products encompass not just gasoline but home heating oil, diesel fuel burned by large trucks and machinery, kerosene for aircraft, residual oil for large commercial ships, propane for heating (largely in rural areas that aren’t connected to gas lines) and lubricants. Non-gasoline fuels typically account for a little over half of petroleum usage, with gasoline a bit less than half. (CTC’s carbon-tax model breaks down a lot of these uses.)

On a per-btu basis, i.e., for an equivalent amount of heat or energy, petroleum products are far more costly than methane gas. Gasoline at $4.00 a gallon, the approximate national average pump price in early March, equates to $32 per million Btu; whereas during 2016-2020 methane gas averaged only a little more than $2 per million Btu at the wellhead and $6 delivered to the average customer. (Yes, refining crude oil into petroleum products is really costly.)

We made a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what the disruption of global energy markets due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is costing U.S. consumers. We assumed a 15 percent rise in petroleum-product prices, along with a 50 percent rise in the wellhead price of methane gas as profit-maximizing owners diverted some supplies to LNG tankers bound for Europe. With these assumptions, the impacts on U.S. consumers — businesses along with households — are in the neighborhood of $400 million a day for higher petroleum fuels and $100 million a day for costlier methane gas. (Gasoline accounts for “only” $150 to $200 million of the $500 million total.)

Mathematically, the total, around $500 million a day, works out to around $4 a day in added costs for an average U.S. household. With a robust carbon tax in place, the supply shock would be far smaller. Households wouldn’t be consuming as much oil, and the increased slack in the world oil business would shrink the opportunities for profiteering by oil owners and traders.

Q3: Is gasoline use sensitive to the price at the pump?

A3: More than most people think, though less than we wish.

We examined the price-elasticity of gasoline in 2015, in a post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes. The post presented a linear regression model that correlated year-to-year changes in U.S. gasoline consumption with changes in economic activity (GDP) and in the real (inflation-adjusted) price of gasoline. Here’s what we wrote then:

We “regressed” the annual percentage changes in U.S. gasoline consumption from 1960 through 2014 on three independent variables: (i) the same year’s percentage change in economic activity (GDP); (ii) the same year’s percentage change in the average real retail price of gasoline; and (iii) the average percentage change in that price over the 10 years prior to the current year. The third variable was intended to reflect lags inherent in Americans’ responses to changing gasoline prices, insofar as automobile purchases and location choices that affect usage tend to change over years rather than weeks or months. The parameters may be referred to as income-elasticity, immediate price-elasticity, and lagged price-elasticity, respectively.

Imagine the benefits from impounding vehicles like these for the duration of the Ukraine War — or the climate crisis!

This week we updated the model with gasoline consumption and price data through 2021. Here’s what we found:

  • The  income-elasticity of gasoline consumption is a little over 0.5 (0.53, to be precise), meaning that a 1 percent rise in GDP is associated with a 0.5 percent rise in gas use.
  • The immediate price-elasticity of gasoline consumption is (minus) 0.11, meaning that it takes nearly a 10 percent hike in the average price at the pump to bring about an immediate 1 percent drop in usage; this validates the perception that in the short run. gasoline use is only barely responsive to price changes.
  • The lagged price-elasticity of gasoline consumption is (minus) 0.19. The sum of the immediate and lagged price-elasticities is (minus) 0.30, indicating modest sensitivity of usage to price over a longer time horizon. A sustained 10 percent hike in gasoline prices would tend to elicit a 3 percent drop in usage.

(Incidentally, this 3-variable model — actually, we used 5 variables, including “dummy” variables to isolate gas use in 2020 and 2021, the pandemic years — explains nearly 80 percent of the year-to-year variation in U.S. gasoline consumption.)

Here are four takeaways from our modeling:

  1. Holding prices constant, gasoline usage in the U.S. has been partly decoupled from economic activity, since two units of economic growth lead to only one unit of growth in gasoline use.
  2. U.S. gasoline demand isn’t entirely price-inelastic, though it is nearly so in the immediate (short) run.
  3. Over a longer period, demand for gasoline displays some price-sensitivity, suggesting that by raising pump prices, carbon taxes can have some sway over usage.
  4. Still, the relative price-inelasticity of gasoline indicates that even robust carbon taxes won’t have a big direct effect on usage; the bigger impacts will come from speeding the transition to electric vehicles and, we hope, fostering turns in the culture that promote and valorize reduced fuel use

Q4: How much could the U.S. cut oil demand, right away?

A4: By a lot. (But we won’t.)

In early 2002, not long after the Saudi-enabled attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, I published a blueprint for achieving an immediate (“overnight”) 5% cut in U.S. oil consumption, with the reductions reaching 10% within six months.

I produced this U.S. oil-saving plan in early 2002, hoping to rally post-9/11 public opinion to slash U.S. oil dependence.

Given the reality that changes in capital stocks that underlie oil consumption — the cars people own, the cities and towns where they live — can’t change overnight, the booklet’s guiding idea was to “collectively change individual behaviors” that added up to the 19.3 million barrels of petroleum products being consumed daily in the U.S.

My thinking then was that behavior changes away from petroleum consumption could finally explode from niche to commonplace if the changes were hitched to a higher purpose — national security and patriotism, in this case. Bicycle commuting, carpooling, thermostat setbacks, electricity conservation would become widespread as their aura changed from fringe-y to patriotic.

Sadly, this never caught on. Our declaration “that we face a choice between love of oil and love of country” and our call to the Bush administration “to break with past policies of subsidizing oil consumption and treating every oil-consuming activity, no matter how discretionary or wasteful, as essential,” fell on deaf ears.

Today, U.S. oil consumption is greater than it was on 9/11. U.S. households, businesses and industry consumed an average of 20,540,000 barrels of petroleum products in 2021, around 5 percent more than the 19,700,000 barrels used daily in 2000.

If anything, calls to alter individual behavior to cut down on consumption of oil and other fossil fuels, whether for geopolitical purposes (to shrink Russian government and oligarch cash reserves) or for climate (to dial back carbon emissions), are frequently derided on the left as “lifestyle-shaming” and diversions from the “urgent task of system decarbonization.” In a New Yorker magazine profile of Sunrise Movement organizers earlier this month, for example, one activist dismissed Al Gore’s exhortation in 2006 to replace electricity-gulping lights because “even if you change all the light bulbs in the country, you don’t come close to preventing catastrophe.” In fact, multitudes of bulb swaps since then have helped flatten U.S. electricity demand, keeping hundreds of millions of tons of coal in the ground — this country’s biggest climate triumph to date.

We conclude this post with a screenshot of the opening pages of “Ending the Oil Age.” The full 44-page report may be downloaded here (pdf). Readers with an historical bent, take note: The report also proposed hefty taxes on gasoline and jet fuel that, in my telling, could replace the patriotic impulse to conserve petroleum as the murderous, petro-dollar-fueled attack on the World Trade Center began to recede into the past.

Pages 1 & 2 from “Ending the Oil Age.” Link to the report is in the last text paragraph, above.

Since climate progress is stalled, let’s unload on fee-and-dividend

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Someone chose an inopportune time to beat up on carbon taxing’s fee-and-dividend variant. Not U-C Santa Barbara political scientist Mitto Mildenberger, whose paper, Limited impacts of carbon tax rebate programmes on public support for carbon pricing, co-authored with scholars from Montreal, Vancouver and Bern (Switzerland), appeared this week in the prestigious journal, Nature Climate Change. No, I mean iconoclast blogger David Roberts, who used Mildenberger’s provocative paper as a launching pad to again dunk on carbon pricing and people who still hold out hope for it.

Roberts’ post, Do dividends make carbon taxes more popular? Apparently not., published on Monday on his Volts platform, gets off on the wrong foot right away, claiming:

Economists have long insisted that pricing carbon is the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gases. For years, they hijacked the climate discourse, with untold money and effort put behind proposals for various increasingly baroque pricing schemes, to very little effect. (emphasis added)

Roberts may be right about efficiency and economists, but his description doesn’t fit climate hawks like Citizens Climate Lobby and Carbon Tax Center. We place our chips on carbon taxes not on account of their economic efficiency but because of their unrivaled potential to slash carbon emissions quickly in the U.S. — and also their global portability.

The meat of Mildenberger’s paper and Roberts’ post, distilled in their respective titles, is that in the only two countries with some form of fee-and-dividend carbon pricing, not just public support but basic awareness of the programs, particularly the dividends themselves, is middling at best.

We think this “finding” is both questionable and beside the point. Let’s take a close look at each of those countries: Switzerland and Canada.

Switzerland

Official Swiss notice of this year’s carbon dividend. At the current 1.09 exchange rate, 88.20 CHF = $96.14.

Switzerland’s carbon tax began in 2008 and reached its current level of 96 Swiss francs per metric ton in 2018. Converting metrics and currencies, that equates to $95 per ton of CO2, the kind of level that carbon taxers dream about. According to CTC’s carbon tax model, if the U.S. next year started a $15/ton carbon tax and ramped it up to reach $95 in 2030, emissions in that year would be 33% less than in 2005, taking us 2/3 of the way to the Biden target of halving 2005 emissions in 2030.

Not only that, a U.S. carbon tax at the Swiss level of $95 a ton would generate a carbon dividend in 2030 of $1,500 per person, even allowing for reduced emissions and a larger population and equal shares for children. Surely, a $1,500 carbon check — or, if you prefer (and we do) 12 monthly carbon dividends of $125 per person — would translate into strong and rising popularity, especially considering that a majority of people and households would be expending less than those amounts in increased direct and indirect energy costs.

That’s the straw man. The reality is that Switzerland’s $95/ton (U.S.) carbon tax will deliver only $96 in per-person dividends for the entire year. (See document at left, downloadable here.) That’s less than one month’s worth of what U.S. residents would receive under a full fee-and-dividend scheme for a Swiss-level $95 carbon tax. In that light, it should be no surprise that Mildenberger and his co-authors didn’t find residents of Geneva or Zurich dancing in the streets over their carbon dividends. In U.S. terms, Swiss residents’ 2022 carbon tax dividend is what Americans would get in 2030 from a piddling carbon tax of $5.50 per ton of CO2. 

Why the discrepancy? Why is Switzerland’s carbon dividend only 1/15 as great as what a U.S. dividend would be from a carbon fee of the same level?

Excerpt from Switzerland Federal Office for the Environment document, “The Swiss Approach to Carbon Pricing,” May 2021.

There are four big reasons. First, Switzerland’s energy consumption is far less per capita than that of the United States. Second, hydro-electricity rather than carbon-based fuels like coal and methane powers the country’s grid. Third, the Swiss carbon tax exempts transport and agriculture and more than half of Swiss industry (see graphic at right; full document here). Fourth, part of the tax revenue is siphoned off by businesses before the dividends get calculated.

No wonder, then, that Switzerland’s carbon dividend is so meager. Consider further that, as Mildenberger et al. point out, “Citizens receive their rebates as a discount on their health insurance premiums, with annual notifications about this monthly benefit through health insurance forms.”

Annual notifications through health insurance forms. This is reasonable, even enlightened, public policy. It’s also almost diabolically designed to obfuscate the dividend side of the carbon fee coin.

Canada

Canada’s carbon tax is far more complicated than Switzerland’s. When we last updated CTC’s Canada page, in March 2011, we characterized carbon pricing in the country’s 13 provinces as follows:

  • Six provinces, including Ontario and Alberta, were covered by the federal pricing scheme that would reach $50/tonne in 2023 — around $36/ton in U.S. terms — and then ramp up sharply to $170/tonne by 2030.
  • Four were deploying their own carbon tax, led by British Columbia, which inaugurated the Western Hemisphere’s first meaningful carbon tax in 2008.
  • Quebec and Nova Scotia were part of a two-country carbon cap-and-trade program that is anchored by California.
  • New Brunswick employed an output-based carbon pricing system.

Wording courtesy of UCSB Prof. Matto Mildenberger, lead author of the Nature Climate Journal article discussed here.

Given this patch-quilt, as well as the novelty of carbon pricing in most of Canada, it seems to us unsurprising that polling that commenced in February 2019 (and extended through May 2020, with five “waves” in all) would yield the mixed results reported in the Midenberger paper: upticks in two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, and downturns in the other three, Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The “core question” asked in the Canada polling, as described by lead author Mildenberger, who graciously shared it with us yesterday via email, is shown at left. The language is neutral, perhaps to a fault. It offered no affirmative spin, such as “Canada recently began taxing fossil fuels in order to protect the climate, with the money rebated in ways that will help households get ahead financially.” That kind of favorable tilt could perhaps be justified as necessary to counter the negative vibe surrounding taxation generally.

To be sure, that negative vibe is precisely what drives pundits like Roberts to deride carbon taxing, as he did in the second and third paragraphs of his post:

Over time, political experience with carbon taxes has highlighted a truth that should have been obvious long ago: carbon taxes are taxes, and people don’t like taxes. People don’t like paying more money for stuff.

More broadly, carbon taxes are an almost perfectly terrible policy from the perspective of political economy. They make costs visible to everyone, while the benefits are diffuse and indirect. They create many enemies, but have almost no support outside the climate movement itself. All the political intensity is with opponents.

We get it. We know full well the albatross that taxation always bears. But we also know that taxes on “bads” have been enacted into law. The U.S. government taxes cigarettes, as does every state. New York City taxes grocery bags, and Philadelphia and Berkeley, CA tax sugary soft drinks.

Obviously, taxing something as supercharged financially and culturally as fossil fuels is a much heavier lift, as evidenced by the absence of explicit carbon taxing anywhere in the fifty states. (We exclude federal and state motor fuel taxes, due to their tie-in to roads rather than health or climate; we also exclude New York State’s Petroleum Business Tax, though its support of NYC metro-area transit perhaps merits an honorable mention; conversely, New York City’s congestion pricing program, now scheduled to begin in 2023, will create a strong template for carbon taxing, as we’ve pointed out many times, including in The Nation magazine in 2019.)

So yes, carbon taxing — not fig-leaf $20/ton-and-no-higher carbon taxing a la Exxon or the occasional Republican, but a levy rising steadily to triple digits before 2030 — is hard stuff. But so is just about every other decarbonization policy or program, especially if done at scale.

Well-heeled NIMBY’s have whittled down wind projects for years; now, so too may supply-chain problems. Rooftop solar endures pushback not just from utilities and their high-wage unions but also from concerns that lower-income residents could gett stuck with higher utility bills. Only splinters of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which wasn’t going to be able to deliver its promised 50% cut in emission by 2030 anyway, will pass, thanks to one or two Democratic senators and 50 Republicans. Even the push to electrify everything may find its vaunted carbon benefits a good deal less potent than advocates imagine, an issue we intend to explore in a future post.

A record one-third of Americans in the latest “Global Warming’s Six Americas” are “alarmed” by climate change.

Still, though, the biggest misdirection in the Mildenberger et al. paper and the Roberts post may be their fretting over public opinion in the first place. The public doesn’t have to love carbon fee-and-dividend. It simply needs to embolden political leadership that will enact it (and the raft of complementary policies) into law and ensure that the fee, which shouldn’t be set too high to start, can keep rising over time.

Public opinion increasingly supports climate action, not tepidly but “with alarm,” as the latest Yale – George Mason opinion survey of “Global Warming’s Six Americas” attests (see graphic at right, and more detailed treatment with link here). It’s past time for carbon pricing naysayers to throw off their ideological blinders and get behind policies that can pass and deliver.

PS to David Roberts: Contrary to your Volts post, fee-and-dividend did not “los[e] badly in a public referendum in 2016.” What went down to defeat in Washington state was a sales tax swap of the carbon revenues, necessitated by the state’s constitutional prohibition against dividend-type state tax treatments. And what doomed the proposal was opposition from climate hawks who took umbrage at being leapfrogged politically, and in revenge brought in lefty heavy hitters to slime the measure. But that’s another story.

Huge hat tip to friend of CTC Drew Keeling for Swiss materials and perspective. Drew’s most recent Carbon Tax Center post, Rural disgruntlement, pro-climate complacency sink expansion of Swiss carbon tax, appeared in June 2021.

Why the Carbon Tax Center Questions the Latest Carbon Tax Talk

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Our post last Friday about Build Back Better was already pushing the boundaries by contending that the Biden infra plan won’t actually cut CO2 50% by 2030, when we added this at the end:

We suspect that even a starter, “proof of concept” carbon tax at this time will prove to be a poor idea. Passing a carbon tax in lieu of aggressively raising taxes on high income and instituting taxes on great wealth, as several Senate Democratic climate hawks floated today, amounts to budget-balancing on the backs of both the working poor and the beleaguered middle class. It’s inequitable and a terrible template for the really large carbon taxes that progressive Democrats must eventually enact, in the event they ever reach centrist-proof majorities.

But wait: CTC is supposed to be supporting efforts to pass a U.S. carbon tax. Why, then, were we throwing darts at the Senate Democrats’ trial balloon that was aimed at doing just that?

We have four reasons:

  1. We don’t think Congress can pass a carbon tax in 2021 anyway.
  2. We believe the carbon tax under discussion won’t offer sufficient protection to ordinary Americans.
  3. We doubt that any carbon tax under discussion can generate big enough emission cuts.
  4. We fear that Democratic backing for a carbon tax at this time will make it harder to defeat the climate-denying G.O.P. in the 2022 midterms.

Things were moving fast last Friday afternoon and we weren’t able to polish our remarks. Now, with a bit more time, let’s unpack these points.

1. Congress can’t pass a carbon tax in 2021 anyway.

The make-or-break Senate votes aren’t there. Manchin of West Virginia won’t vote for a carbon tax, Sinema of Arizona can’t be counted on, and it wouldn’t be surprising if a few Senate or House Democrats facing tough re-elections defected as well. And no Republicans will come on board. Carbon-tax proponents and other climate hawks have waited in vain for over a decade for a single sitting Republican member of the Senate to stand up for strong climate action just once. There’s no reason to think our prayers are about to be answered.

2. The carbon tax under discussion won’t protect enough ordinary Americans.

President Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year. A straight-up fee-and-dividend, which is the type of carbon tax CTC most strongly favors, would violate that en masse, despite being strongly income-progressive.. The reason: most six-figure households are high-carbon consumers and thus would be carbon-taxed more than they would be dividended.

If you’re unsure about that, consider the main finding of Anders Fremsted and Mark Paul’s superb 2017 paper for U-Mass’s Political Economy Research Institute, A Short-Run Distributional Analysis of a Carbon Tax in the United States: While 84 percent of households in the bottom income half would be made better off with carbon dividends, only 55 percent of all households would be beneficiaries. Simple arithmetic on those two propositions indicates that only 26 percent of the more affluent households would benefit. (The calculation: 84% of the bottom half equals 42% of all households. The remaining 13 percentage points of beneficiaries constitute just 13%/50%, or 26%, of the top half.) The optics of squaring such a carbon tax or fee with the pledge aren’t promising.

(If Fremsted and Paul’s finding seems too pessimistic, consider this alternative scenario: if 90 percent of bottom-half households were posited as better off, and same for 65 percent of all households, then the share of upper-half households being made better off would come to 40 percent — higher than the 26 percent above, but still a minority of that group.)

To be clear, CTC has no qualms about raising taxes on the very-affluent as well as the super-rich to make a better society. But raising taxes on the working poor and the beleaguered middle class is another matter entirely. And to the extent that the carbon tax under discussion is meant as a pay-for — literally, to pay for improving America’s physical and social infrastructure — less money will be available for dividends. It’s one thing to set aside a few percent of carbon fee revenues to pay for worker and community transitions, as outspoken climate hawk Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) proposed this summer; but it’s another thing altogether to set aside, say, 25 percent for pay-for’s. Having only 75 percent of carbon revenues available for dividends will consign millions of non-affluent households to paying more for energy and energy-intensive goods than they receive as dividends.

3. The carbon tax under discussion won’t generate big emission cuts.

This objection is somewhat speculative because, perhaps understandably, no Senate Democrat has yet attached a level to their carbon tax trial-balloon. But there’s a tendency to overstate what a modestly-sized carbon tax can accomplish.

For example, Resources for the Future, the influential environmental think-tank cited in last Friday’s New York Times story that touched off the latest carbon tax discussion, projects that a carbon tax that starts in 2023 at $15 per metric ton, rises slowly to $30 in 2028 and then jumps to $50 in 2030, will cut CO2 emissions in that year by 44 percent from 2005 levels. That would represent an 1,850 megatonne drop in emissions from 2019. But plugged into our carbon tax model, those inputs yield only a 775 megatonne drop, or much less than half as much. To be sure, RFF’s modeling also includes a clean electricity standard (a close cousin of the Clean Electricity Performance Program in the Biden package that we discussed in our earlier post), but the CEPP would be partly duplicated by the carbon tax and thus wouldn’t account for the bulk of the difference between our respective model results.

Would we support the more modest RFF carbon tax nonetheless if it could be guaranteed to be economically progressive in the aggregate? You bet we would. Our concern on this score is what we telegraphed in our Sept 27 post: the need to neutralize undeserved hype being vested in any climate policies, including carbon taxes.

4. Democratic backing for a carbon tax now will make it harder to defeat the climate-denying G.O.P. in the 2022 midterms.

We won’t belabor this point. Too much depends on the Democrats’ retaining full control of Congress in next year’s midterms and having a good shot at holding on to the White House in 2024. We believe a lot more organizing, educating and communicating about the power, fairness and benefits of carbon taxes remains to be done before the party is somewhat safely inoculated against the inevitable blowback against even an economically progressive carbon tax. Much of that effort will need to go into bringing environmental justice and other progressive activists into the fold.

What kind of carbon tax does the Carbon Tax Center want?

CTC wants a carbon tax that can pass, that’s certifiably progressive (economically), that is robust enough in its per-ton rate to be able to help eliminate game-changing amounts of CO2 and fossil fuels, and that won’t cause gross damage to the Democratic Party’s brand and thus make it easier for the Trumpian right to regain power.

Translated: We want a fee-and-dividend carbon tax, i.e., a carbon fee whose revenues are returned to U.S. households as equal, pro rata dividends and not used as pay-for’s. The enormous sums needed for climate and a broad array of other infrastructure — amounts that will rise over time as institutions and industries are mobilized to deliver the goods — can and should come from rising taxes on undertaxed forms of wealth: very high incomes, ultra-large fortunes, great inheritances, corporate earnings, and offshored and other avoided taxes.

This structure will let the carbon tax rise steadily over time and perform the function it does best: instill the price incentives and social signals to steer U.S. households, businesses, habits and norms away from fossil fuels and into the broad array of alternatives — everything from bicycles and denser living patterns to wind turbines and solar roofs — that won’t heat our climate beyond repair.

Without a Carbon Tax, Don’t Count on a 50% Emissions Cut

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Since April, when President Biden committed the United States to sweeping cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate advocates have tried to figure out how he could fulfill his goal of a 50 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

Their talk is not of a government-led Green New Deal — too hot for a skittish Congress — but of a tapestry of GND-ish policies, many of them wonky. Heading the list are schemes to shovel government cash to utilities that shut down coal- and gas-fired power plants, and to motorists who go electric.

The 37% reduction we estimate for Biden’s Build Back Better package would be a major achievement. 50% will require a robust carbon tax.

There’s sense in these and the other policy pieces, just as there’s logic in refraining from the one overarching policy that could lead the way to the deep cuts Biden is seeking: an economy-wide carbon tax. Giving businesses and households money to go green is more palatable, though less potent, than charging them for burning carbon.

But it’s fair —imperative, actually — to ask if the numerical cuts being attached to those programs actually add up to 50 percent. We don’t think they do; the hill is too steep. Compared to pre-pandemic (2019) carbon emissions, Biden’s goal entails a massive cut, 42 percent, in under a dozen years.

Decarbonizing on that kind of scale falls outside the bounds of the possible without a stiff carbon emissions price. Our purpose here is to show why, and also point a way around.

1.

To kick off this discussion, consider Robinson Meyer’s June 2021 Atlantic article, A “green vortex” is saving America’s climate future. Its big idea was that “decarbonization by doing” — deploying more electric cars and more grid storage systems and more solar panels — is driving down these low-carbon technologies’ costs, naturally leading to more deployment and increasingly kicking fossil-fueled cars and power plants to the curb.

It’s an attractive if familiar notion, this “green vortex.” Sit back, let green energy grow cheaper and bigger, and watch carbon emitters fade to black. But Meyer overhypes it. After outlining the high points of U.S. carbon reductions over the past decade, he states:

Under America’s new Paris Agreement pledge, the country will need to double the pace of its emissions decline over the next decade. Whatever we’re doing right, we’re soon going to have to do it twice as fast. So we’d better figure out what it is. (emphasis added)

We posed these questions to Meyer, after running calculations on U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning. By our count, which is fully detailed in our carbon-tax spreadsheet (see link, three paragraphs below), those emissions totaled 6,070 megatonnes (million metric tons) in 2005 and 5,250 megatonnes in 2019. That computes to 60 fewer megatonnes each year. The task ahead — dropping another 2,215 megatonnes to slim down to 3,035 (half of the 6,070 benchmark) — requires that from 2019 to 2030 we purge 200 megatonnes each year —3.4 times the annual rate of shrinkage from 2005 to 2019.

Extrapolating from 2020 emissions makes the 2030 target look achievable. We don’t recommend it.

In Meyer’s telling, thanks to the green vortex we’ll manage to double our established pace of decarbonization. He might be right. But what if doubling our average annual decline in emissions from 2005-2019 won’t fulfill Biden’s pledged 50 percent cut by 2030? What if it only yields a 35 percent reduction from 2005 emissions, the standard benchmark? What if cutting emissions 50 percent requires that from now to 2030 future U.S. emissions must come down three to four times faster than they did in 2005-2019?

(Perhaps Meyer, who didn’t reply to our email, used 2020 rather than 2019 as his goalpost. That would give him his “doubling,” but meaninglessly. A year that completely upended energy commerce — in which U.S. air travel fell by a third, for example — might be defensible as a new goal post, but not as a basis for computing a new downward trend.)

2.

To grasp how hard it will be for the Biden administration to bend the emissions curve sharply downward without a carbon tax, let’s look at key sectors. A good tool for that is the national carbon-calculator spreadsheet maintained by the Carbon Tax Center (downloadable 3 MB xls).

The Biden plan’s centerpiece is an idea that has become a darling of climate hawks, the Clean Electricity Performance Program. It’s a $150 billion scheme to decarbonize U.S. electricity generation by paying utility companies to replace coal- and gas-fired plants with carbon-free power from wind, solar, biomass or nuclear sources.

Just over 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions came from the power sector in 2019, down from 40 percent in 2005, a noteworthy drop that accounted for most of the reductions that Meyer touted in The Atlantic. Let’s assume, as do the White House and its climate allies, that the CEPP’s cash incentives leverage falling prices of solar and wind electricity to achieve the canonical goal of eliminating 80 percent of 2019 power sector carbon emissions by 2030.

The complementary, longer-standing climate policy cornerstone, to “electrify everything,” rests on the eminently reasonable premise that decarbonizing electricity is simpler than mass-producing low-carbon versions of gasoline, natural gas and other carbon fuels. Our calculations optimistically accelerate the uptake of electrified transportation by five years by having the electric shares of cars, trucks and planes in use in 2030 reach levels that in our opinion otherwise aren’t likely until 2035: 20-25 percent for autos, 11-12 percent for trucks and 4 percent for airliners. Those shares are pretty aggressive for 2030, considering that vehicle fleets turn over relatively slowly.

The carbon reductions from this scenario are creditable. With electricity 80% decarbonized and electric vehicles advanced by five years, U.S. CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels would be 35 to 40 percent less in 2030 than they were in 2005. The reduction, more than two million metric tons of CO2 a year, would qualify as by far the greatest extinction of carbon pollution in history.

But why isn’t the reduction 50 percent? Reason #1 is ever-burgeoning travel. Unless policy interventions like road pricing, public transit and density-friendly upzoning can take root on a grand scale — unlikely in just a decade — the emission reductions from hastening electric transportation will largely be offset by more travel, especially as vehicles on our roads grow ever bigger and more power-demanding.[1]

To be sure, our calculations omit other wonky but potentially potent forms of decarbonization such as widespread replacement of gas furnaces by electric heat pumps. Nor do they incorporate low-hanging fruit from reducing the number two greenhouse gas, methane, both via process capture and as a concomitant to phasing out this fossil fuel altogether.

But we should also be mindful that our most crucial assumption — that we’ll double electricity generation’s carbon-free share from 40 percent today to 80 percent by 2030 — is far from assured. Assume that our aspirational 80 percent carbon-free 2030 electricity comes as 24 percent solar photovoltaics, 32 percent wind, and 24 percent combined from nuclear, hydro-electricity and biomass.[2] Getting to 24 percent solar demands that between now and 2030 we install solar cells three-and-a-half times as fast as we have in any three-month period to date,[3] a task that could easily be sidelined by any number of issues involving supply bottlenecks, permits and certifications.

And if that’s not daunting enough, consider that for wind power to contribute its assigned 32 percent, we’ll need to add the equivalent of 75,000 giant wind turbines rated at 5 MW each[4] to America’s landscapes. Numerically, that equates to 25 turbines per county in the U.S. — a formidable task even if America’s NIMBY culture could somehow be conquered. And all of these targets will be even larger if, as seems likely, the CEPP holds down electricity prices, neutralizing what would otherwise be a helpful brake on demand for power.

3.

Since April, we’ve combed policy papers and journalism about fossil fuel emissions for an accounting of cuts that together might meet the Biden 50% target, or at least come close.

The best compilation we found is a policy brief signed by 20 mainstream and environmental justice organizations and released earlier this month by the Center for American Progress.[5] It’s crisp and precise, as is the Sept. 17 write-up, In the Democrats’ Budget Package, a Billion Tons of Carbon Cuts at Stake, by Inside Climate News journalist Marianne Lavelle, that linked to it.

Graphic, courtesy of Center for American Progress. Link in text.

The above graphic from the CAP brief (downloadable pdf) gives a good overview. Since it’s a lot to take in, we’ve broken it into three pieces.

  • Fourteen policies included in Biden’s Build Back Better Act, summing to reductions of 22%. We’ve already covered the three largest, pertaining to clean electricity and electric vehicles. They sum to a 22% reduction from 2005 emissions. We haven’t checked the individual numbers, but the overall figure appears solid.
  • “Additional Regulatory and State Action,” assigned a reduction range of 5%-7%.
  • Two ongoing trends summing to reductions of 23%. The item at far left, 19%: Progress from 2005 to 2021, is supposed to denote the fall in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the 2005 baseline. The companion entry at the top, 4%: Current Trends Through 2030, applies forward from 2021. Together, these items purport to deliver large emission reductions without any new policies — along the lines of Rob Meyer’s “green vortex.”

The percentages credited to the three pieces would indeed carry the Biden plan across the 50 percent reduction threshold. But item #2, unspecified regulatory and state action, is vague and squishy. Worse, #3, “ongoing trends,” is numerically questionable. The CAP policy brief projects that 2030 emissions will be 23 percent below 2005 levels with no further policy actions (known as “business as usual”). Yet our modeling says that 2030 business-as-usual emissions will be just 13 percent under 2005 — a 10 point difference from CAP.

That’s no petty discrepancy. It’s also hard to parse in a blog setting. In addition, we don’t know how CAP and its partners derived their figures (ours are shown in the carbon-calculator spreadsheet we linked to earlier). All the same, here are our hunches as to why CAP’s forecasted emissions trajectory is much lower than ours:

  1. Like Meyer in The Atlantic, CAP could be projecting future emissions from pandemic-depressed 2020 emission levels. In contrast, we think this year and next will bring big rebounds.
  2. CAP may not be accounting for “natural” emissions growth accompanying increased economic activity. Our modeling of business-as-usual emissions has 2030 matching 2019, as decarbonization of electricity is offset by emissions caused by increased travel and industrial activity.
  3. CAP’s figures cover all greenhouse gases, including methane, forest sequestration of carbon, and other activities, whereas ours only cover carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, which tend to be less amenable to change.

Our takeaway is that CAP and its partners are straining to be able to validate the ambition in Biden’s Build Back Better Act to cut emissions by 50 percent.

As noted earlier, a 35-40 percent cut from 2005 to 2030 would still be praiseworthy, even monumental. We would take it in a heartbeat, given the parlous state of American politics and governance. Nevertheless, we ought to be candid about what our policy tools can, and can’t, accomplish.

4.

From @carbontaxcenter, Sept 24.

The point of this post isn’t to weaken support for the Biden package. Monumental cuts are absolutely worth legislating. Nor are we seeking to beat the drum for a carbon tax at this juncture. As CTC has stated repeatedly this year, as early as in this April 2 post, the kind of carbon tax needed to embellish those cuts can’t possibly pass Congress in 2021.

We also suspect that even a starter, “proof of concept” carbon tax at this time will prove to be a poor idea. Passing a carbon tax in lieu of aggressively raising taxes on high income and instituting taxes on great wealth, as several Senate Democratic climate hawks floated today, amounts to budget-balancing on the backs of both the working poor and the beleaguered middle class. It’s inequitable and a terrible template for the really large carbon taxes that progressive Democrats must eventually enact, in the event they ever reach centrist-proof majorities.

Rather, our intent is to try to neutralize the unattainable hype around Build Back Better or other laudable efforts that can’t or don’t include robust carbon pricing.

In case you’re curious, however — we certainly were — we ran our model numbers to see how big a carbon tax would be needed to meet the Biden goal and cut 2005 U.S. CO2 emissions by 50 percent in 2030. Here’s our answer: combined with the CEPP or other measures to ensure 80% decarbonization of electricity (vis-a-vis 2019), along with the same 5-year acceleration of electric cars, trucks and planes we assumed earlier, an economy-wide carbon tax taking effect on Jan. 1, 2022 at a level of $20 per ton (short, not metric) of CO2 and rising each year at $15/ton to reach $140/ton in 2030, would do the trick.

Addendum, Sept 27: Our brand-new follow-on post, Why the Carbon Tax Center Questions the Latest Carbon Tax Talk, elaborates on our critique of the current carbon-tax trial balloon discussed directly above.

[1] Compared to 2005, CO2 emissions in 2030 in this scenario will have fallen by only 23 percent for cars and 9 percent for trucks while increasing by 18 percent for planes, even with accelerated electrification. Another factor holding back emissions progress is increased use of natural gas, as cheap fracked gas finds abundant uses in industry and heating.
[2] The 24 percent combined electricity share for nuclear, hydro and biomass assumes that 2030 generation from those sources remains at current levels. (Their share shrinks slightly because total electricity production rises somewhat; see next footnote.)
[3] Our modeling projects that without a carbon tax, U.S. electricity generation will rise from 4,160 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2019 to 4,800 TWh in 2030, with around a fourth of the increase attributable to electrified transport. Solar’s 24% share of that, 1,153 GWh, requires nearly 900 GW of installed solar capacity, assuming that a GW of solar produces around 1.3 TWh of electricity in a year, for an average capacity factor of 15%. From several sources, including this recent report by the Solar Energy Industries Association, U.S. installed solar at the end of 2020 was around 100 GW. To grow to 900 GW by the end of 2030, the U.S. solar sector would have to add 800 GW over 10 years, or 80 GW a year. From this report by Wood-McKenzie, the U.S. installed 5.7 GW in 1Q 2021 — a 1Q record — which implies an annual rate of 23 GW.
[4] Assuming an average capacity factor of 35%, wind power’s assumed 32% share of U.S. 2030 generation, 1,537 TWh, requires 500 GW of installed capacity, for a roughly 380 GW increment over end-of-2020 capacity of 122 GW, per U.S. DOE. We optimistically assume an average new-turbine size of 5 MW, although an Internet check on Sept 16, 2021 suggests that the U.S. has no operating wind turbine as large as 5 megawatts (see Windpower Monthly’s Ten of the Biggest Turbines). The U.S. has 3,006 counties.
[5] “The Climate Test: The Build Back Better Act Must Put Us on a clear path to cutting climate pollution 50% by 2030.” Statement, “20 Groups Call on Congress To Pass the ‘Climate Test.’” 4-page policy brief (pdf).

“Rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.”

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What drew me to pick up Andreas Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” and read it straight through over the July 4th weekend? Sure, the title was intriguing, but why exactly this book now?

Verso Books, Brooklyn, NY (2021).

It wasn’t July’s climate chaos outbreaks — Oregon’s Bootleg fire, New York’s submerged subways, floods sweeping away picturesque German villages. Those came after July 4th.

Believe it or not, helicopters may have been a factor. The incessant thwack-thwack of tourist and “commuter” heli flights pervades every lower Manhattan sanctum — Governors Island, the Hudson River piers, even my apartment rooftop. The noise is universally loathed, yet, unsurprisingly, earnest entreaties by local anti-heli advocates haven’t moved the needle. With luxury helicopter pollution impervious to public outcry, might it be time to move to direct action? Malm’s book, I thought, might be instructive.

Meanwhile, policies for turning back the climate crisis are stalling out.

June, after all, was when milquetoast moderates Manchin and Sinema gave Senate Republicans carte blanche to filibuster away President Biden’s climate infrastructure bill, thus blocking what might have been a path to carbon-pricing legislation after the 2022 midterms — an idea we spelled out in April.

Closer to home, evidence was mounting that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was turning skittish on the plan I had helped design to dial back automobile gridlock in Manhattan by charging drivers for causing traffic congestion — a scheme he shepherded through the state legislature in 2019.

Bright hopes, dwindling. So why not see what Malm had to say? Though I was ambivalent about the title — not just the “blow up” part, but “pipeline.”

Not even “Ruining Shakespeare in the Park” (as the NY Post’s headline put it) stops tourist helicopter flights over NYC. Heli flight map by Melissa Elstein. Photo, © Helayne Seidman, used by permission.

Here’s why. The Carbon Tax Center largely leaves disrupting the fossil fuels supply chain to others. We fight for demand destruction: crushing the “need” for carbon energy with carbon taxes. Outside of CTC I work for urban transit and practice culture change like redefining my travel wants so I can get to most places I need to reach by bicycle.

The surest way to starve and slay the carbon beast is demand destruction. If you stop a gas well or oil pipeline, another will come into being somewhere else to meet the demand. So go after the demand instead.

Malm’s book really catches fire when he addresses carbon consumption:

Why go after private consumption? Hasn’t the [climate] movement worked hard to shift attention away from consumers — the favored subjects of liberal discourse — to the production of fossil fuels? Wouldn’t pointing to the former represent a slide backwards? But consumption is part of the problem, and most particularly the consumption of the rich. [emphasis added]

At last: a voice on the left not just willing but eager to address the demand for fuels!

Taking a long-haul flight generates more carbon emissions than the average person in dozens of countries around the world produces in a whole year. Graphic + analysis by Niko Kommenda for The Guardian, 2019 (see link in text).

In his post here last week, Let’s Blow Up Luxury Carbon, journalist Christopher Ketcham offered up a few of Malm’s striking stats on luxury consumption. The visual at left, taken from a 2019 report in the Guardian, underlies another from Malm: “There are 56 countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York.”

To be sure, repugnant statistics such as these are by now deadeningly familiar. What I found novel in Pipeline is Malm’s way of articulating the “wanton criminality” of luxury consumption:

When the atmosphere is already glutted with CO2, extravagant excesses have directly injurious effects, which means, to skip the euphemisms, that they send projectiles flying towards randomly chosen poor people. The rich could claim ignorance in 1913. Not so now…  The main source of luxury emissions — the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving — is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations.

Malm goes on to contrast luxury carbon with the “subsistence emissions” of the poor:

Subsistence emissions must be overcome just as much as any other, but they have none of these features of luxury in a CO2-saturated world: wanton criminality, insulation from the fallout, waste promotion, withholding of resources for adaptation, persisting in the most odious variants and ostentatiously negating the very notion of cuts… It follows that states should attack luxury emissions with axes — not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold. [emphasis added]

No such state attacks are happening, of course. If anything, the opposite is true, as Malm observes. France cut back taxes on aviation at the same time that president Emmanuel Macron, “king of climate diplomacy and private luxury … targeted the cars of the popular classes,” triggering the Gilets Jaunes uprising — a point Ketcham made as well in 2019 in Harper’s magazine.

Even the New York Times’ redoubtable Ezra Klein admits he doesn’t know “how to force the political system to do enough, fast enough, to avert mass [climate] suffering.”

“Luxury emissions,” Malm writes, “are left dangling, heavy and rotten, without any state daring to touch them. Time to pick up some sticks and knock the fruit down.”

It might take attacks on luxury-emitting devices to break the spell cast in the sphere of consumption. Much like divestment has strived to remove the license from fossil fuel dividends and replace it with a stigma, the purpose here would be to hammer home another ethics: rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death. [emphasis added]

But how exactly to break the spell? We at CTC aren’t prepared to participate in or urge others to destroy property. The risks are too great, as Ketcham pointed out.

Today marks two years since Ketcham and I gathered on my Manhattan roof and, amid the din of the helicopters, understood that “the power to lord and the power to pollute are one and the same.”

Out of that came CTC’s three-pronged plan to Tax Carbon and Economic Inequality for a Green New Deal — all three elements of which the minority, Republican-controlled Senate now blocks. (Within a day of posting this, we learned that the price of G.O.P. votes for an infrastructure bill that is more highway than climate was to strike funding for new IRS capability to go after billionaire tax cheats.)

Something has to give. We don’t know what. Neither, for that matter, does New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who, like me, this month devoted a weekend to reading Malm’s book:

To the immediate question — how to force the political system to do enough, fast enough, to avert mass [climate] suffering — I don’t know the answer, or even if there is an answer. Legislative politics is unlikely to suffice under any near-term alignment of power I can foresee.

Carbon Tax Obituary, Meet Subsidies Nonsense

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Patience, reader, we’ll get to Atlantic climate columnist Robinson Meyer’s carbon tax obituary soon enough. First, let’s take a look at how the Guardian botched its coverage of a big new report on fossil fuel subsidies from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The Guardian and Atlantic pieces are connected, and not just because both of them ran today. There’s also a through-line from the first to the second, as we show here.

From the Guardian’s July 20 story castigating fossil fuel subsidies. Don’t be fooled by the top two bars — the scary-looking increases are tiny, in dollar terms. Meanwhile, France, shown with a nearly 24% increase, actually dropped its FF subsidies by 22%, from $29.6 bn/year to $23.2 bn!

The Guardian piece, by environment editor Damien Carrington, carried the aggro headline, “‘Reckless’: G20 states subsidised fossil fuels by $3tn since 2015, says report.” And it led with the dramatic graphic at left.

The two bars of shame at the top belong to Australia, which increased its fossil fuel subsidies by 48 percent in 2019 over 2015, and the U.S., with a nearly 37 percent boost. Cue the breast-beating that the world might make real headway on solving the climate crisis if rich nations would simply pull their bloody fossil-fuel subsidies.

But what if we told you that in the terms that really count — dollars — those whopping percentage increases in FF subsidies amounted to a mere several billion: $2.4 billion for Australia (from $5.0 bn in 2015 to $7.4 bn in 2019 — that’s the 48 percent bump), and $4.0 billion for the U.S. (from $11.0 bn to $15.0 bn), according to the country-by-country subsidy figures in the new Bloomberg-NEF Climate Policy Factbook that prompted the Guardian story?

Graphs from the Bloomberg-NEF report show that the combined increase in Australia’s and the U.S.’s FF subsidies was a paltry $6.4 billion.

Here’s the context: the real fossil fuel subsidy — the failure to price carbon emissions to capture even a small portion of their climate and health damages — amounts to around $40 billion a year for Australia and $500 billion for the U.S. Those figures, computed on a conservative carbon price of $100 per metric ton, dwarf the respective governments’ “fossil fuel support” by factors of more than 5 (Australia) and more than 30 (U.S.).

What FF subsidies actually look like, per the Bloomberg-NEF report: Damaging and indefensible, but far from a key driver of the climate crisis. Note also the tiny height of the U.S. bar and the absence of Australia, whose $7.4 bn subsidy would be a mere speck.

To be sure, government supports for fossil fuel development, in the form of grants, targeted tax abatements, loan guarantees and the like, are destructive to both economic fairness and climate protection and should be zeroed out at once. The 10 percent drop since 2015 in such subsidies by the G-20 countries, which together account for nearly three-fourths of global carbon emissions, according to the Guardian, isn’t remotely steep enough.

But to act as if these supports are the root cause of the world’s emissions profligacy is to badly misread the facts. The G-20 nations pump out around 24 billion metric tons of CO2 annually while pricing this pollution at an aggregate average carbon price of just a few dollars a ton. The absence of a $100 per metric ton carbon price thus constitutes a “subsidy” of $2.4 trillion a year, nearly quadruple the $636 billion in G-20 governmental support for fossil fuels in 2019 shown in the graph directly above.

“Carbon Tax, Beloved Policy to Fix Climate Change, Is Dead at 47”

The heading above is what led Robinson Meyer’s Atlantic column today, pegged, as Morrissey might have sung, to nothing in particular, except, perhaps Meyer’s interest in clicks. (I can confirm receiving a bunch of notices from CTC supporters.)

“The [carbon tax] death,” Meyer intoned with mock gravitas, “was confirmed by President Joe Biden’s utter lack of interest in passing it.” Leave aside that the Biden White House would have to be certified insane to pursue a carbon tax in 2021, with paper-thin House and Senate majorities and an overriding need to cultivate popular support to ward off the usual midterm attrition.

Indeed, we said as much in our post Playing the Long Game for Carbon Fee-and-Dividend back on April 2, in which we applauded Biden and Co. for steering clear of a carbon tax in order to build legislative accomplishments that could grow the Democrats’ congressional majorities and possibly enable a carbon tax in 2023. We were followed a week later by Ezra Klein in the New York Times (“Biden and his team view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous.”)

Meyer is right, however, that carbon taxing “won few friends on the right or left” — for reasons we’ve lamented and detailed in separate, comprehensive write-ups in the “Politics” section of our website, having to do with Conservatives, Progressives, and pursuit of Environmental Justice.

Meyer was gracious, at least, to refer in his headline to carbon taxing as a “beloved policy.” Though what should make it beloved to climate advocates of all stripes isn’t its vaunted economic efficiency but its unique capacity to make huge dents in fossil fuel use in a short period of time. The efficiency of carbon pricing, though an aspect of that, isn’t the point.

And more helpful would have been for Meyer and other climate pundits to do what we’ve attempted here: to put the lie to the idea that removing fossil-fuel subsidies would go a long way to reducing carbon emissions and slowing the climate crisis. That could have — and might still — help climate campaigners focus on the true subsidies solution: to directly, massively and equitably tax carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

New Senate bill would price CO2 at $54/metric ton and tax some particulates, SO2, NOx

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This post was updated, and its headline slightly altered, on July 13, 2021.

A bill introduced in June by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) envisions a hefty price on U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from all sources along with pollution charges on the three primary “criteria” air pollutants — particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides — from large stationary sources near environmental justice communities.

The Save Our Future Act (101-page downloadable pdf) prices CO2 emissions at $54 per metric ton, equivalent to $49 per U.S. (short) ton, starting in 2023, with the price rising each year by a percent equal to 6 percentage points on top of the rate of general inflation.

The bill also proposes to charge emissions of fine particulates, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide from qualified “major sources” (a legal term defined at 42 U.S.C. 7661) located within a mile of any environmental justice community (see definition  and discussion further below). In addition, a border adjustment mechanism would prevent carbon leakage and ensure fairness for U.S. manufacturers, according to a press release from Sen. Whitehouse’s office, while an “environmental integrity mechanism” would raise the charges on CO2 and other greenhouse gases if needed to keep shrinking emissions fast enough to meet a 2050 net zero target.

Pushing the Envelope

The Whitehouse-Schatz bill pushes the envelope of carbon tax legislation. The starting price of $49/ton — pegged to OMB’s conservative estimate of the social cost of carbon — represents a new high. So does the annual increase rate of general inflation plus 6%. Both figures surpass the Climate Leadership Council’s long-standing proposal to start pricing CO2 at $40/ton and raise that price 5% faster than annual inflation (to be fair, the council’s 2017 price base translates to $45/ton or more in 2023, the Whitehouse-Schatz bill’s start year).

Modeling by CTC suggests the Save Our Future Act will cut CO2 34% below 2005 levels in 10 years (without counting ancillary charges on PM-2.5, SO2 and NOx).

The Save Our Future Act is co-sponsored by Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Jack Reed (D-RI), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The Whitehouse press release says the bill is supported by the Utility Workers Union of America, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, National Wildlife Federation, American Sustainable Business Council, Citizens Climate Lobby, Clean Air Task Force, and the World Resources Institute, although sources have reported that neither of the New York groups have formally endorsed it.

We ran the CO2 price in the Save Our Future Act through CTC’s carbon tax model (which you may download via this link). The results, shown above, indicate that the bill won’t fulfill its stated objective to cut carbon emissions in half within a decade, though, to be fair, our modeling doesn’t reflect additional impacts from the prices on the three localized pollutants. Nor does our model capture the likely low-hanging fruit of curbing emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases.

Still, the price-compounding built into the bill limits its efficacy somewhat; even the unprecedented proposal to raise the rate 6% faster than inflation doesn’t boost the price nearly as fast as a straight-up $10/ton annual increment. (Simple math suggests that, with 2% annual inflation, the price won’t spin off annual increments of $10/ton or more until it has reached $125/ton.)

Revenue Treatment

How carbon revenues are used has become central to carbon taxing’s equity and politics. The following four bullet points, taken from the Whitehouse press release, summarize the Save Our Future Act’s proposed treatment:

  1. Environmental justice communities: The bill would invest roughly $255 billion over 10 years in existing energy affordability, pollution reduction, business development, career training, and tribal assistance programs.
  2. Fossil fuel workers and communities: The bill would invest roughly $120 billion over 10 years in economic development, infrastructure, environmental remediation, assistance to local and tribal governments, and wage replacement, health, retirement, and educational benefits for coal industry workers who lose their jobs.
  3. Assistance to states: The bill would fund $10 billion in annual block grants to states and tribes to defray expenses associated with climate change.
  4. Checks to low- and middle-income families: Consistent with the means testing thresholds established for pandemic relief checks in the American Rescue Plan, every eligible adult would receive $800/year and every eligible dependent $300/year, distributed in biennial installments.

Provisions #1 through #3 together would absorb around $500 billion over the law’s first decade, out of the total $4 trillion in revenue that CTC’s model indicates the Save Our Future Act will generate during that time. The difference between those figures — some $3.5 trillion total — pays for the dividend checks noted in provision #4.

The proposed allocation of the vast majority of revenues to the dividends presumably is what delivered support from Citizens Climate Lobby, the national grassroots organization that for the past decade has relentlessly pursued the idea of returning carbon-tax revenues as dividends to U.S. households. Provisions 1 through 3 clearly are designed to win backing for the bill from justice-oriented climate advocates.

Local Air Pollutants

Environmental justice is also evident in the bill’s novel proposal to charge for emissions of fine particulates ($38.90/lb), NOx ($6.30/lb) and SO2 ($18/lb), with those prices rising at the rate of inflation, from qualified “major sources” (a legal term defined at 42 U.S.C. 7661) located in or no more than a mile from an environmental justice community. Our preliminary calculations suggest that all fossil-fuel power stations 25 megawatts or larger, even those with modern combined-cycle technology burning methane gas, would meet the statutory criteria, provided they are sited directly proximate to a community of color.

Other large stationary polluters such as oil refineries, chemical plants and perhaps oil and gas extraction and processing facilities might also qualify. (We are awaiting details from Sen. Whitehouse’s office.) We estimate that coal-fired power plants would be charged for their “local” pollutants at a rate averaging around 5 cents per kWh generated, a fee that would effectively duplicate (i.e., double) the direct impact of the initial $49/ton carbon tax. Gas-fired power generators, in contrast, would pay only around 2/10 of a cent per kWh, on account of their sharply lower emission rates for conventional pollutants, relative to coal. (You can see our assumptions and calculations in the Local Pollutants tab of our carbon-tax model.)

Prospects

Prospects aren’t bright for the Save Our Future Act in the current Congress. The persistence of the Senate filibuster means that 60 out of 100 senators must approve the bill; yet opposition is virtually guaranteed from almost all 50 Republican senators along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and perhaps a few other Democratic senators. Not only that, the Biden White House is unlikely to put its muscle behind the bill, for reasons we laid out earlier this year in our post, Playing the Long Game for Carbon Fee-and-Dividend:

Razor-thin House and Senate margins simply don’t allow for hot-button measures like carbon pricing that might jeopardize other elements of the package in addition to failing on their own. Biden’s task, as he knows full well, is to pass bold, progressive, popular legislation to help Democrats expand their Congressional majorities in 2022 and 2024 and give him a thumping second-term mandate to boot. Then, and only then, can he risk a carbon tax.

Still, let’s credit the Save Our Future Act for pushing the envelope on carbon taxing on the twin key fronts of tax design and revenue treatment. Kudos to Senators Whitehouse and Schatz for seeking support from a diverse set of environmental and justice campaigners. The bill underscores the importance of solidifying a pro-climate Congress to enable such forward-thinking bills to be seriously considered during the second half of the Biden term.