Last November, we posted a story, Downturn in U.S. driving led 2020 global CO2 decline, with this lede:

The world’s emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels diminished by more than 1.6 billion metric tons in the first three quarters of 2020 from the same period in 2019, a decline of 6.3 percent. Fully one-fifth of the decline, 320 million tonnes, was due to the nearly 25 percent drop in ground transport in the United States, according to data compiled and made available this week by Carbon Monitor, an international collaboration of energy and climate specialists providing regularly updated, rigorous estimates of daily CO2 emissions.

Scratch that. Carbon Monitor has reformulated its carbon emissions data for U.S. ground transport. The earlier-reported drop of almost 25 percent in U.S. car and truck emissions has been revised to a mere 9 percent shrinkage — a drop of 153 million tonnes for all of 2020 vs. 2019, rather than a decline of 320 million tonnes for Jan-Sept.

With that revision, as well as natural evolution from adding fourth quarter data, we have these results for 2020 vs. 2019:

• Global CO2 emissions fell by 1.37 billion metric tons, a drop of 4.0 percent.
• All eight regions defined by Carbon Monitor registered emission declines, with the exception of China, where emissions rose by 0.5%. Excluding China, world emissions fell by 6.0 percent.
• The U.S. accounted for 35 percent of the global decline, falling by 477 million tonnes. In percentage terms, the U.S. decline, 9.4 percent, was second only to Brazil’s 9.8 percent.
• Carbon Monitor calculates emissions for 8 regions and 5 categories, which makes 40 “nation categories” (8×5). The biggest numerical drop by far was in ground transport (driving ) in the “Rest of World” catch-all category: 370 million tonnes, or 13.9 percent, a figure that feels suspiciously large.
• With that caveat, ground transport accounted for 52 percent of the net decline in emissions, falling by 710 million tonnes. The greatest percentage drop was in domestic aviation, 32 percent.

Carbon Monitor, a British-based NGO that labored mightily to collect the underlying data, hasn’t posted an explanation for radically revising the U.S. ground transport datum. We wrote to its volunteer staff in mid-January to report that gasoline and diesel fuel data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration indicated much lesser drops —  around 13 percent in CO2 emissions from automobiles and 9 percent for trucks, rather than their 24.5 percent for ground transport overall.

We suggested further that CM’s methodology, which relied on extrapolating from reported changes in urban traffic congestion, appeared to grossly underweight changes in suburban and rural driving, which would have created a sharp upward bias in the group’s estimated reduction in emissions. It now appears our hunch was right.

The green table at right shows that by far the steepest decline in global emissions came in domestic aviation, at 32 percent. (International air travel isn’t counted in any of the categories.) Many air travelers deemed it unwise to spend hours in confined aircraft spaces, and teleconferencing filled in for most business travel. The reduction rate might have been higher still, but for “ghost flights” resulting from byzantine government regulations and financial incentives.

The donut chart at left provides another view. It arranges 24 of the 40 “nation categories” in descending order of their 2020 vs. 2019 emission reductions. (Four other categories had emissions increases, two were flat and another ten were too minor to warrant including.)

Finally, some U.S. takeaways:

• The overall U.S. emissions decline, 9.4 percent, far outweighed the 3.5 percent year-on-year drop in real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product, or GDP.
• The decline in CO2 emissions from U.S. power generation, 166 million tonnes, slightly outstripped the 153 million tonne decline in ground travel. In percentage terms, the 10.3 percent drop in electricity emissions outpaced the 9.3 percent decline in emissions from cars and trucks.
• Final 2020 electricity figures will almost certainly show coal-fired electricity production and tons of coal burned at power plants at their lowest levels since before the 1973 oil embargo and OPEC-engineered oil price rises that spurred conversion of oil-fired generation to coal. (Even in 2019, U.S. coal-fired plants produced their fewest kilowatt-hours since 1978, the year preceding the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown, which also spurred an overnight switch to coal, as dozens of reactors were throttled for safety checks.)

U.S. emissions (not to mention world CO2 as well) appear set to roar back this year, as the imminent Democrats’ relief-stimulus package injects nearly two trillion dollars into the economy and pandemic-weary Americans seek to regain normalcy by spending and traveling. The Biden administration will need to move broadly and rapidly with low-carbon infrastructure and incentives to keep U.S. carbon emissions from rebounding sharply over the next several years.

To view the latest census data on U.S. household incomes is to marvel at — and be appalled by — the unequal distribution of income in America.

In 2016, according to official data released last month, the lowest-earning one-third of U.S. households received just one-twelfth of total money income, which the Census Bureau defines as “the arithmetic sum of money wages and salaries, net income from self-employment, and income other than earnings.”

At the other end of the scale, the top 7 percent earning households — those with incomes of at least $200,000 — pulled in 27 percent of U.S. income last year. Note the symmetry: those at the top earn four times their pro rata share, while those in the broad bottom earn only one-fourth of theirs.

Stark as these figures are, they don’t capture the full extent of the wealth gaps — the one between the rich and the middle class, and the other between the middle and the poor. These gaps accumulate over generations, as the New York Times noted this week in its trenchant dive into the data, Bump in U.S. Incomes Doesn’t Erase 50 Years of Pain.

These disparities underlay Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last year. And they added fuel to the sense of white grievance that energized Donald Trump’s successful run for the presidency. They also bolster the case for “carbon dividends” — the idea of distributing all or nearly all carbon tax revenues equally to U.S. households popularized as carbon fee and dividend by the non-partisan Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), and more recently advanced by the Republican-led Climate Leadership Council (CLC) under the rubric of carbon dividends.

Using incomes as a proxy for carbon emissions — a rough approximation but a reasonable one, given income-based differences not only in using electricity, gasoline and heating and aviation fuels but also carbon embodied in making and shipping consumer goods — we’ve used the census data to estimate that if all carbon revenues are returned to the public, nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of U.S. households will take in as much or more money in the form of carbon dividends as they would pay out in higher fuel and goods prices due to carbon taxes.

Our figure jibes with the U.S. Treasury Department’s finding in its Jan. 2017 report, Methodology for Analyzing a Carbon Tax, that the lowest seven income deciles will be net beneficiaries of a carbon dividends plan (see Table 6) . Our estimate of the share of U.S. households that will be net beneficiaries under carbon diviends, 65.9 percent before rounding, is up slightly from our prior 65.1 percent “better off” finding based on 2012 incomes. Among those 65.9 percent, which encompass 83 million households, the average gain (carbon dividend netted by carbon tax expense) per $100 billion in total carbon revenue is $415 per year.

While that net gain may seem small — just $8 per week — the revenue amount on which it’s based corresponds to a very modest carbon tax, around $23 per ton of CO2. A robust carbon tax that climbed to a level several times higher would generate correspondingly larger net dividends for the benefiting households. Moreover, the more indigent the household, the greater its estimated net gain.

The breakeven household income point is a shade over $85,000, a level 45 percent greater than the 2016 median household income of $59.000; “typical” households will be net gainers if their income is less, and losers if more. Of course, if the share of carbon revenues dedicated to revenue return is reduced, the percentage of households kept whole under carbon fee and dividend shrinks as well. Our calculations suggest that around two-thirds of carbon revenues must be returned as dividends in order for half of households to have their carbon tax fully offset. (See line chart below.)

A conundrum for the climate movement

The ability of carbon dividends to lift incomes of the bottom half or more of U.S. households creates a conundrum for the climate movement, especially now that Republicans, who traditionally align with capital and wealth, are beginning to sign up for carbon dividend proposals.

The progenitors of CLC’s carbon dividend plan, James Baker and George Shultz, are “exemplars of the outcast center-right GOP establishment,” as I described them recently in the Washington Spectator. At least as impressively, 28 current GOP U.S. House members have joined CCL’s Climate Solutions Caucus and thus signaled their possible openness to a carbon fee that reserves carbon revenues for dividends instead of applying them to cut corporate income taxes.

Yet many on the left are insisting that carbon revenues, or at least a large share of them, be invested in government-administered or financed clean-energy development and transportation infrastructure, especially in so-called frontline communities. Because each dollar of carbon revenue can’t be spent twice, the competing demands of carbon dividends vs. “just transition” proposals threaten to divide the climate movement — as they already did in last fall’s divisive I-732 carbon-tax referendum in Washington state, which I reported this past winter in The Nation magazine.

Ironically, it’s possible (indeed, I believe it’s likely) that allocating carbon revenues to dividends would more reliably benefit low-income families more than would spending the revenues on sustainable energy and transportation. Considering further that revenue-neutral dividend approaches might eventually garner meaningful support from some Republicans, it seems self-defeating for left-leaning or other climate advocates to reject them out of hand.

For our part, CTC supports any viable carbon tax proposal, revenue-neutral or not, provided it would not demonstrably exacerbate economic inequality or other social injustice. Thus far we have refrained from endorsing the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act introduced in July by U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), pending analysis of the regressive aspects of its proposed tax swap to reduce the corporate tax rate to 29 percent, from 35 percent, among other provisions.

That said, crunch time is coming for carbon dividend apostles. If the late summer hurricanes that have ravaged southeast Texas, Caribbean nations and much of Florida won’t induce Republican office-holders to spurn their party’s denialist orthodoxy and embrace revenue-neutral carbon taxing, it’s fair to ask if they’ll ever push for genuine climate solutions.

Note: This post was originally headlined “Worsening Economic Inequality Should Broaden Support for Carbon Dividends.”

 

 

 

 

We’ve just posted the annual update to our spreadsheet model — our powerful but easy-to-use tool for predicting future emissions and revenues from possible U.S. carbon taxes. The model, which runs in Excel, accepts any carbon tax trajectory you feed it and spits out estimated economy-wide emission reductions and revenue generation, year by year.

Here’s what’s new:

1. A year of new data: The most obvious update is our incorporating 2015 baseline data on energy use, CO2 emissions and emission intensity for each of the model’s eight sectors.

2. Oil refining made explicit: We’ve added an eighth sector: oil refining. Until now, refinery emissions were lumped with “Other Petroleum Products,” which was too broad-brush, especially considering that they accounted for an estimated 6.4% of U.S. CO2 emissions last year. Refinery fuel use now has its own sector. This not only trims the catch-all “Other” category, allowing greater precision; it also ensures that future changes in use of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products are carried through the supply chain to yield emission changes in the refining process, not just at the exhaust pipe.

3. Sharper graphics: The graphics in this post are among the dozen with which the spreadsheet conveys the rapid reductions from robust carbon taxes, especially vis-a-vis well-meaning but limited policies such as the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan.

4. Emissions consequences of cheap oil: While the model is baselined to official U.S. forecast energy prices (from the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook”), the current version is the first in which the 2015-2016 oil price slump reverberates for many years. The lower baseline price projections for gasoline and other petroleum fuels don’t change the predicted impact of carbon taxes on demand for those fuels, but they do establish a higher usage trajectory than in previous years, underscoring the need for a robust carbon tax.

As a reminder, here are two key features we added last year:

1. Smoothing the carbon tax impact: The model can reflect lags in households’ and businesses’ adaptation to more-expensive fossil fuels. The user sets the adaptation “ceiling” rate; the model automatically carries over any excess to future years.) This feature is helpful for trajectories like the Whitehouse-Schatz bill, which kicks off with a bang at $45 per ton of carbon dioxide but then rises only slowly. Under our default setting, in which the economy is assumed to react in any year only to tax increments up to $12.50 per metric ton of CO2 ($11.34 per short ton), the reductions from that initial $45/ton charge are spread over four years rather than, unrealistically, assigned to the first year.

2. Demand impacts vs. Supply side impacts: At the bottom of the Summary page is a new section comparing the projected CO2 reductions from changes in fuels’ carbon intensities (“supply side”) versus reductions from reduced energy usage (“demand side,” e.g., lower electricity purchases, less driving or flying). Under our default carbon tax — the one proposed by Washington Rep. Jim McDermott — an estimated 58% of projected CO2 reductions are on the supply side (i.e., due to decarbonization); a large minority, 42%, come about through reduced demand, illustrating that subsidies-only policies miss out on huge CO2 reductions. Indeed, they undercut reductions from decarbonization by stimulating energy usage through lowered energy prices, as we pointed out in our 2014 comments to the Senate Finance Committee.

Please download the spreadsheet — here’s the link again — and run it in Excel. See for yourself the relative efficacy of a carbon tax trajectory that increases by a fixed amount each year, as does the McDermott tax, vs. one like Whitehouse-Schatz that starts high but rises only by small, percentage-driven amounts. See also how much more quickly emissions decline under either carbon tax scenario, compared to the Clean Power Plan and other regulatory policies forced on the Obama Administration by the recalcitrant Republican-controlled Congress.

As you work (play?) with the model, jot down your thoughts so you can tell us what works and what needs improving. Thank you.

Note: graphic at top has replaced similar graph that (confusingly) expressed carbon tax in terms of annual increments.

How $100/bbl oil has changed U.S. production and consumption (Econobrowser)

The pie charts for electricity, jet fuel, etc. are similar, meaning that carbon
taxing can be made "income-progressive" via pro rata revenue distribution.

CTC’s proposed national carbon tax, $37 per ton of carbon ramped up each year for at
least 10 years, would reduce emissions by almost 4% annually — more than 30% by 2017.

Because CO2 stays “resident” in the atmosphere for at least a century, the U.S.
is responsible for more than 3x as much active greenhouse gas as China.

Because coal has the highest carbon content per Btu, it is
taxed at the heaviest rate under a straight carbon tax.