Clifford Krauss and Diane Cardwell have a front-page story in today’s New York Times about the challenge that cheap oil poses to the Paris climate agreement. The way that governments respond could make or break the agreement, they say, with huge ramifications for the global fight to stop climate change:

For the climate accord to work, governments must resist the lure of cheap fossil fuels in favor of policies that encourage and, in many cases, require the use of zero-carbon energy sources. But those policies can be expensive and politically unpopular, especially as traditional fuels become ever more affordable.

“This will be a litmus test for the governments — whether or not they are serious about what they have done in Paris,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

The Carbon Tax Center has repeatedly highlighted this challenge over the past twelve months, particularly in economic terms. Cheap oil has meant cheap gas, which has encouraged more driving and a reversion to gas guzzlers. We calculated last month that increased gasoline consumption in the U.S. alone in 2015 produced carbon emissions equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from nine coal-fired power plants. That’s equivalent to the entire annual emissions from burning all fossil fuels for all purposes in Denmark or Ireland.

We concluded that cheap oil risks making a “mockery of just about every scenario to move the U.S. and other countries decisively off carbon fuels.” But that’s not the end of the story. Cheap oil paradoxically presents an historic opportunity to pivot away from oil — and all fossil fuels — for good.

As we wrote last January, cheap oil brings a host of positives, like more jobs in most economic sectors, and negatives, like increased fuel use. The trick is how to safeguard the positives while neutralizing the downside. From a policy perspective, this actually isn’t hard to do, and oil’s low price makes it that much easier (as well as more imperative). The real question is whether we have the political will to do so.

The policy solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, beginning with a refundable tax on oil. The government would collect the tax at ports and wellheads and distribute the revenues equally to households each month, just like in Alaska. Because tax dollars stay in circulation, the amount of money families have to spend doesn’t fall and the economy benefits. Most families of limited means will come out ahead because on average they spend fewer dollars on oil than they will receive in their monthly revenue check.

By simulating higher fuel prices, we can preserve incentives to get more fuel-efficient. As a result, motorists will buy higher-mileage cars and drive them somewhat less, manufacturers will build more-efficient vehicles and aircraft, and cities and counties will be less inclined to  dial back public transit. The same goes for freight movement — goods produced nearby will be advantaged, boosting local agriculture and domestic jobs. You can read more about our proposed oil tax here.

As we and others, including former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, have argued over the past year, the current cheap oil environment is ideally suited for the implementation of a carbon tax. The question remains: do we seize the moment to lock in the good while neutralizing the bad? Or do we instead continue fighting climate change with one arm tied behind our backs?

Editor’s note: Yesterday the world’s most influential newspaper finally did what CTC and other carbon tax proponents have sought for years: publish a ringing endorsement of a U.S. carbon tax. With its editorial, The Case for a Carbon Tax, the New York Times joins the growing community of opinion leaders, policy experts and, yes, elected officials who not only recognize the power of carbon taxes to quickly and equitably reduce emissions but also sense the emergence of a political critical mass that can enact fees into law. This heartening development signals that it’s not too soon to focus on the design of a U.S. carbon tax, especially its magnitude and rate of increase, as CTC senior policy analyst James Handley does in this post.

Which is the more effective way to set a tax on carbon pollution?

A. Start aggressively, then raise the rate slowly (“sprint”).

B. Start modestly, then raise the rate briskly and predictably (“marathon”).

You probably guessed that if the goal is to instill incentives that will bring about big emission reductions fast enough to avoid runaway global warming, the answer is B, the marathon. Yet a leading U.S. Senate advocate of legislative action on climate seems to be starting off like a sprinter, perhaps because his legislation is pegged to estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon that don’t account for the possibility that climate change will turn out to be catastrophically costly.

More on that senator in a moment — after this tutorial:

The Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) is a construct to quantify in monetary terms the damage caused by each additional ton of CO2 added to the atmosphere. While the SCC may sound arcane or academic, estimating its magnitude has real world implications: governments are pegging climate-related regulatory decisions to SCC estimates. A low SCC can make all but the lowest-cost clean-energy policies pencil out as expensive; higher estimates justify more rapid and aggressive measures, since moving too slowly to reduce emissions shows up as a mistake whose costs accumulate at a frightening pace.

Calculating the damage from a ton of CO2 turns on a host of assumptions that span wide ranges. Not surprisingly, estimates of the SCC reported in the peer-reviewed economics literature range from as little as $10 per ton of CO2 to over $400. A profoundly important modeling choice is how heavily to weigh the risks of climate-induced catastrophes. High-risk climate scenarios with nearly infinite costs, such as rapid release of methane from arctic permafrost or sudden sliding of vast ice masses into the ocean, “misbehave” in the equations used for conventional cost-benefit analysis, leading some modelers to omit them altogether.

One widely-used model assumes that economic growth rates will not be affected by climate change, thereby predicting that half of the world’s economic activity would continue after a whopping 18 degrees C of global warming. Other models dilute the high-risk scenarios by assigning them arbitrarily low probabilities that suppress their impact when their costs are averaged in with low-risk scenarios. A further problem in estimating the SCC is the bias toward high “discount rates” that telescope future impacts down to seemingly manageable proportions.

Amidst fraught debate and widely-divergent estimates, the Interagency Working Group has settled on $42 per ton of CO2 as the “official” U.S. government social cost of carbon. While that’s an improvement over past practice that omitted climate costs entirely — tacitly, an SCC equal to zero — the $42 figure grossly understates the large-scale global risks that dominate concern over global warming and climate change. [Read more…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free dumping of CO2 pollution into the atmosphere is nothing less than “theft” from future generations who stand to suffer from unabated global warming, declared University of Chicago economist Steve Cicala at a symposium last week in honor of the conservative icon Milton Friedman. “It is theft,” said Cicala. “That’s a loaded term, but if someone else has a better term for taking something from someone without their consent and without compensating them, I’d be happy to hear it.”

E&E News reports that Cicala and former Obama White House adviser Michael Greenstone, who holds the Friedman chair at the U. of Chicago and directs its Energy Policy Institute, asserted that “if the late free-market economist Milton Friedman were alive today, he’d probably support pricing carbon.”

Free-Market Economist Milton Friedman

According to E&E, Cicala and Greenstone argued that,

Friedman… would have viewed climate change as a negative externality associated with burning fossil fuels and would have believed that society was entitled to recover its losses from those who emit carbon to advance their economic interests… While there is a market for the products that are associated with greenhouse gas emissions — like electricity, fuel and steel — there is no market for the pollution inflicted by their manufacturers on the public. [Read more…]

EPA Rule Embraces Cap & Trade On Weak Evidence (FiveThirtyEightScience)

Tax Vox Editor: Want to Do Something About Greenhouse Gas? Try A Carbon Tax (Forbes)

Are Taxes Key to Curbing Climate Change? (Adele Morris, Christian Science Monitor)

Senate Democrats Plan All-Nighter on Climate Change (NYT)

Carbon Tax Debated By Massachusetts Democratic Governor Candidates (Mass Live) 

Tackle Climate Change with Carbon Tax (Herald, Everett WA)