Up-to-the-minute data show a 25 percent drop in electricity generation from fossil fuels this year by the five major European nations.

Combined kilowatt-hours made from burning coal, oil and gas in France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy totaled 209 terawatt-hours in the first five months of 2020 vs. 279 TWh in the same period a year ago, according to data aggregated by the Renewable Energy Institute from each country’s official sources and provided to the Carbon Tax Center. (A terawatt-hour equals a million megawatt-hours or a trillion watt-hours.)

Data for the United States for the same period show a lesser percentage drop, 9 percent, in electricity generation from fossil fuel plants. Nevertheless, in absolute terms the U.S. decline of 80 terawatt-hours of fossil electricity generation, from 924 TWh during Jan-May 2019 to 844 TWh in 2020, slightly exceeded the European shrinkage of 70 TWh. (The U.S. electricity sector is roughly twice as large as that of the five European countries combined, and the U.S. fossil-fuel component of electricity generation is three to four times as large as its European counterpart.)

Leading the way in Europe’s 2020 fossil-fuel power shrinkage is Germany, which until recently was widely maligned for prioritizing cuts to nuclear power rather than to its coal and lignite power generation since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Through May of this year electricity production from fossil fuels in Germany is down by 29 TWh, a 31 percent drop from 2019. Britain followed close behind with a 17 GWh decline in fossil fuel power generation, a 30 percent cut from the prior year.

Propelling these declines are the lockdowns to contain the Coronavirus. Though the declines in road travel and aviation have received the lion’s share of attention, the EU and US data indicate that the power sector too has shrunk as economic activity has shriveled. Total electricity generation fell by 8 percent in the five European countries and 6 percent in the United States. Insofar as most lockdowns went into effect halfway through the period covered by the data, in mid-March, the figures suggest that the percentage declines in electricity since then may have been double the five-month figures, or on the order of 15 percent.

Curiously, nuclear power production also fell in the same period, and at a slightly greater pace than electricity generation overall: by 12 percent in the five European countries and 7 percent in the United States. (See chart at right, courtesy of the Renewable Energy Institute.) However, those declines were substantially offset by gains in renewable electricity generation, which in turn may have been abetted by what AccuWeather is calling the sunniest spring in Germany’s and England’s recorded histories.

“When demand falls, as it has during the Covid-19 pandemic due to measures taken to reduce the spreading of the virus, it is the fuel-based power generation that is economically hit,” wrote Tomas Kåberger, REI executive board chair, and Romain Zissler, senior researcher at REI, in a blog post reporting the 2020 and 2019 electricity data. “Falling demand results in lower prices in competitive markets,” they noted. And while “falling prices affect all producers’ margins, those who really suffer are the owners of power plants that have marginal costs so high that they cannot produce electricity at all,” wrote Kåberger and Zissler. “They lose all income, demonstrating the high risk of investing in fuel-based electricity generation.”

While the contractions in economic activity from the Coronavirus are expected to be transitory, the climate crisis of course is ongoing and deepening. Nevertheless, the data presented here demonstrate how the combination of electricity savings and renewable energy can leverage rapid decreases in fossil fuel-generated power and its carbon emissions.

When official GDP data are reported, it is likely that both the 25 percent drop in fossil fuel electricity in western Europe and the 9 percent decline in the United States in the first five months of the year will have exceeded the percentage decreases in economic activity. The job of western societies and governments is to expand policies to perpetuate and deepen the fossil fuel reductions during times of prosperity.

These 2020 findings mirror CTC’s analysis from last week demonstrating that during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019, the combined effects of increased wind power, expanded solar electricity and continued growth in electricity savings accounted for the lion’s share of the enormous (one-third) drop in CO2 emissions from the United States power sector, far outpacing the contribution from replacing coal with fracked methane.

Among the gazillion articles, posts and books I read this year, three stand out.

Together, the three reads helped spark the Carbon Tax Center’s transformation from single-minded focus on carbon taxing and toward our new synthesis of taxing both carbon and inequality in support of a Green New Deal. As the year draws to a close, I want to share these pieces with CTC subscribers and visitors.

Two of them, long-form journalism published in Harper’s magazine, plumbed the yellow vest protests in France and the ecological roots of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The third, a searing, book-length exposé of tax inequality in the United States, is already reverberating in the current presidential campaign.

1. A Play With No End: What the Gilets Jaunes Really Want, by Christopher Ketcham, Harper’s, August 2019

(Full disclosure: Christopher and I are longtime friends, close enough that I wrote a eulogy to his stepmother, who died last month, and for us to have had several long conversations about his Gilets Jaunes story as he was setting it to paper last spring.)

The Gilets Jaunes movement, named for the yellow vests that French motorists are required to keep on hand for emergencies, rocketed to public attention last December when their largely rural protests against fiscal austerity reached the capital.

Ketcham drew on his direct observations of three tumultuous yellow vest marches in Paris last winter, in which he talked with hundreds of protesters — working and unemployed people and pensioners whose lives have teetered as their communities have been hollowed out by deindustrialization and megastores. He discovered that the Gilets Jaunes weren’t, as the mainstream media insisted, protesting climate action; they were rising up against the yawning gap separating them from the super-rich, a gap widened by President Macron’s rescission of French wealth taxes just weeks before he pushed through a modest carbon levy that raised prices of gasoline and diesel fuel but left aviation fuel untouched.

“The new carbon tax — nine cents more per liter of diesel, four cents more per liter of gasoline — ­may have been the proximate cause that galvanized the Gilets,” Ketcham wrote, “but the worsening conditions of what the protesters called “l’injustice fiscale” [fiscal injustice] provided the powder for an explosion.”

My conversations with Ketcham helped me appreciate the taint of unjustness that has come to surround stand-alone carbon taxing. That a carbon tax can, in theory, be made income-progressive — something this site has trumpeted for a decade — dissolves into irrelevance so long as the ultra-wealthy can consume fossil fuels with impunity while dominating discourse about our dependence on them.

One passage in particular in Ketcham’s article points to a possible escape from this dilemma — a passage I helped him craft on the roof of my apartment building in lower Manhattan, under the thwack-thwack of helicopters whisking the richest of the 1% to their weekend redoubts:

The war of the Gilets Jaunes against the rich, in the age of climate change, is one driven by an understanding unique to protest movements in France: that the privilege to lord and the privilege to pollute are one and the same.

If that is so — if the privilege to pollute is indeed the privilege to lord — shouldn’t we seek to tax both carbon and the super-rich?

2. Where Our New World Begins: Politics, Power and the Green New Deal, by Kevin Baker, Harper’s, May 2019

If Ketcham’s story put the lie to the media image of the yellow vests as know-nothing French trumpistas, Baker’s article resuscitated the Depression-era New Deal as an ecological project, not just an employment-creating and wealth-creating one. Indeed, in Baker’s telling, the New Deal’s three elements of jobs, production and care for the land were so intertwined as to have been one and the same.

Baker’s article begins in two disaster areas: the pre-TVA, flood-prone, impoverished Tennessee Valley, and the mid-thirties mid-American Dust Bowl:

In their desperation, the people of the Tennessee Valley had begun to cut or burn down more and more of the area’s once copious forests every year, seeking to clear more marginal land for farming, to sell the timber, or simply to heat their homes and cook their meals. Deforestation only further drained the soil, and what little land they had kept slipping away.

And this, about the high plains of eastern Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, across Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas:

The dust storms were not merely blown dirt, frightening as that might seem, but entire weird weather systems marching across the land. The static electricity they generated made fire dance along barbed wire and shorted car ignitions. It electrocuted farm animals and those few crops the blowing dirt had not already smothered — literally blackening vegetables in the patches where they lay. The people in the paths of these storms huddled in the darkness, unable to see their hands before their faces for hours, choking — sometimes choking to death — on the “dust pneumonia” that scarred their lungs as badly as if they had contracted tuberculosis.

Baker reminds us that the dust storms were human-made. Nineteenth-century warnings from the likes of John Wesley Powell — Colorado Plateau explorer and founder of the U.S. Geological Survey — that large-scale farming of the dry lands “beyond the hundredth meridian” was unsustainable, were plowed under by propaganda from mercenary railroads and their government enablers:

Much as the Trump Administration and corporate America react today to the idea of climate change or anything else they don’t want to hear by making stuff up, the government and the railroads … promoted quack theories to serve their purposes. No water? Don’t worry: there was always “dry farming,” “dust mulching,” and the imperishable notion that “rain follows the plow”— or civilization in general.

Linking Trump and today’s corporate America to their rapacious forebears is a constant refrain in Baker’s article. Another is pearl-clutching by mainstream gatekeepers such as The New York Times’ editorial board, both in 1933, opposing FDR’s fast-tracking of TVA authorization and funding (“enactment of any such bill at this time would mark the ‘low’ of Congressional folly”) and in 2019, decrying the sweeping ambition of the Green New Deal resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (“the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself”).

To be fair, that 2019 Times editorial, The Green New Deal Is Better Than Our Climate Nightmare, offered some positives about the resolution. Yet The Times’ tunnel vision is on full display in the passage excerpted by Baker:

Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself. As Mr. Markey can tell you from past experience, the first goal is going to be hard enough. Tackling climate change in a big way is in itself likely to be transformative. We should get on with it.

What Markey and AOC grasp, and, The Times may come to understand, though perhaps too late, is that, in Baker’s words, “We must address climate change, and we must transform the way our political and economic systems work in this country — just as we did during the Great Depression. There is no way to do one vital thing without doing the other.” While TVA, the Soil Conservation Service and many other New Deal initiatives were imperfect, as Baker notes, they pulled the land, and the country, together.

3. The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman.

Saez and Zucman may not have intended it, but their new book — our third and final 2019 read — goes a long way to fulfilling Kevin Baker’s commandment to simultaneously address climate change and transform America’s political and economic systems.

That’s a high compliment for any book, and a particularly startling one for a book whose nominal subject is taxation. But reading “The Triumph of Injustice” is a revelatory experience, making clear just how much has been and is being stolen from working- and middle-class Americans to bloat the already criminally swollen coffers of the super-wealthy.

In 2018, for the first time in at least a century, and perhaps ever, Saez and Zucman report, billionaires — the 400 wealthiest U.S. families — paid lower tax rates than the working class, which the authors define as the bottom half of U.S. households. The respective 2018 tax rates were 23.0% for the billionaires and 24.2% for working class households. In 1960, Saez and Zucman’s graph informs us, the ratio of tax rates exceeded two-and-a-half to one (56.3% to 21.6%); even as recently as 1980, on the eve of Reagan’s ascent to the White House, the ratio was still close to two to one (47.2% to 25.7%).

These percentages are emblematic of American inequality. Plunging tax rates for those at the top of the income pyramid, engineered primarily through diminished taxation of capital (lower rates on capital gains and corporate income) have fueled what Saez and Zucman call “a snowball effect [whereby] wealth generates income, income that is easily saved at a high rate when capital taxes are low; this saving adds to the existing stock of wealth, which in turn generates more income, and so on.” The income pyramid grows ever steeper.

Snowballing is bidirectional. Burgeoning wealth at the top lets the super-rich buy heretofore unimagined political influence, not just through lobbying and campaign contributions but by creating and/or purchasing wealth-glorifying think tanks and media outlets. The result transcends ready-made votes in Congress and state legislatures to include an intellectual and cultural climate that valorizes the wealthy and stifles those who would counter the snowballing by taxing extreme wealth.

A signal achievement of “The Triumph of Injustice” is its painstaking construction of a century’s worth of tax incidence, not just at the federal level but state and municipal as well. The authors define eight or more tax categories — income, property, corporate, estate, wealth, payroll, consumption and health (the last encompasses payments for private and government health insurance) — and chart their “bite” for each income decile as well as for the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% and America’s 400 billionaires.

As if this tour de force weren’t enough, “The Triumph of Injustice” embeds its calculations and findings in a captivating narrative of American tax history from the colonial era through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the New Deal, the postwar (and bipartisan) high marginal tax rate years, to Reagan’s tax renunciation (“Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem”) and Trump’s tax “reform.” It’s illuminating and disturbing.

It wasn’t just tax erudition that vaulted Saez and Zucman to their status as architects of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wealth tax plans. The likely clincher was their ability to calculate the revenue the Treasury stands to gain, year by year, through various permutations and combinations of raised taxes on capital (in the form of higher tax rate for capital gains, corporate income, and estates); and to explain how strong regulation backed by an aroused public could seal off the multiplicity of escape hatches from the higher taxes.

Somehow, “The Triumph of Injustice” delivers all this in just 200 pages. Even better, Saez and Zucman have posted their wealth and tax-incidence data on their website, taxjusticenow.org. The topper is their elegant, interactive page that lets you Make Your Own Tax Plan and see how the Warren and Sanders plans, or a plan of your own devise, can cut the holdings of the ultra-rich down to size and return American taxation to the relatively egalitarian shape it maintained from the New Deal through the Great Society.

Our Next Steps

At CTC, we are expanding our program around a new synthesis: a Green New Deal funded by taxes on extreme wealth — “taxing inequality,” you could say — and supported by a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

You can read more about this redirection here. We wish to emphasize that it is not an abandonment of carbon taxing. Far from it. Rather, we intend to situate carbon taxes in a broader framework that is suited to both the political dynamics and the climate emergency that will dominate the third decade of the 21st Century, and beyond.

The Carbon Tax Center was founded in 2007 on the belief that the most direct path to decarbonize the world economy lay in enacting a robust U.S. carbon tax and replicating this policy across the globe.

A dozen years on, we are expanding our program around a new synthesis: a Green New Deal funded by taxes on extreme wealth — “taxing inequality,” you could say — and supported by a revenue-neutral carbon tax such as the fee-and-dividend approach espoused by Citizens Climate Lobby.

Here’s why: After decades of denialism by the right and antipathy from the left, we have reached a point where, standing alone, a carbon tax is too fraught politically and too weak economically to serve as the centerpiece of U.S. climate policy. We now believe that the path to decarbonizing the U.S. economy lies in a Green New Deal-inspired infrastructure and investment program funded by taxes on extreme wealth and supported by a carbon tax.

CTC envisions a three-part program to accomplish this:

1. A Green New Deal plan investing $10 to $20 trillion over a 10-year period to develop the infrastructure, industrial capability, and consumer incentives to decarbonize the U.S. energy system within several decades.
2. New taxes on extreme wealth and financial transactions, supplemented by increases in estate taxes, marginal income tax rates, capital gains and corporate taxes, to generate, from the wealthiest American households, the estimated $10 trillion or more needed to pay for the Green New Deal energy programs.
3. A rising charge on carbon emissions from fossil fuels that supports the Green New Deal energy programs by shortening payback periods for green investment and embedding energy efficiency and conservation throughout American society.

 

Our Program Is Unique and Synergistic

Although others have advanced the three individual elements of our program, none have proposed them in combination. Our integrated treatment offers synergistic political and economic benefits:

• Funding the Green New Deal through wealth taxes obviates the need to invest the carbon tax revenues, allowing the carbon tax to be revenue-neutral and thus more politically palatable.
• Assigning the proceeds of the wealth tax to the Green New Deal – a program to preserve the climate and save society – undercuts the argument that confiscating the super-wealthy’s vast fortunes is purely retributive.
• Tying the carbon tax to taxes on extreme wealth connects carbon taxing to its radical roots, making it more palatable to the left.
• Taxing extreme wealth limits the ability of the super-wealthy to maintain their political contributions, think tanks and other channels of influence that are stifling not only climate action but other endeavors to reform politics and society.

This redirection is not an abandonment of carbon taxing. Far from it. Rather, we intend to situate carbon taxes in a broader framework that is suited to both the political dynamics and the climate emergency that will characterize the new decade, and beyond.

CO2-coin logo courtesy of Tommaso Sansone.Click here for a longer and more recent post outlining how we came to embrace this new synthesis.

Editor’s note: On May 31, energy-climate blogger David Roberts posted How California became far more energy-efficient than the rest of the country, a gorgeous distillation of our report, “California Stars.” Roberts’ post explains the policy dynamics underlying our report’s quantitative findings and shows how California has made energy efficiency and renewables the focal point of the state’s economy. His post also makes clear how far all 50 states still have to go while placing “California Stars” in the national political context.

Yesterday the Natural Resources Defense Council released California Stars, my report quantifying and documenting California’s relative success in decarbonizing its economy since the 1970s. I say “relative” because the report’s measure of success involves not one but two relational metrics: carbon reductions relative to economic activity, and California relative to the other 49 states.

California Stars: Lighting the Way to a Clean Energy Future establishes that from 1975 to 2016, the nation’s largest state reduced the fossil fuel inputs needed to support a constant amount of economic activity 18 percent faster than the rest of the country — a difference with enormous climate consequences. Had the other 49 states matched California’s rate of improvement, the report finds, annual emissions of carbon dioxide nationwide would be lower today by nearly 25 percent, or 1,200 million metric tons of CO2 — the equivalent of all carbon pollution from U.S. passenger vehicles.

There’s more about California Stars further below and in a graceful blog post by long-time NRDC attorney and energy strategist Ralph Cavanagh, who oversaw the report. I was principal author, which may come as a surprise to readers who have followed my career of late. For one thing, the report has nothing to do with carbon taxing. Moreover, a decade ago NRDC and I were on opposite sides of an internecine struggle over carbon pricing, with NRDC backing cap-and-trade and me, on behalf of the Carbon Tax Center, insisting on straight-up carbon taxes. More recently, in 2015, in a blog post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes, I went to considerable lengths to counter criticisms from an NRDC energy-efficiency superstar that carbon taxing was too blunt an instrument to do much good in cutting down emissions.

All the same, for over 40 years it has been abundantly clear, even from my East Coast perch, that even without a carbon tax, California’s government has steered its economy more assertively toward energy efficiency and renewable energy than has any other U.S. state. (California does have a modest cap-and-trade program.)

Through the California Energy Commission, a first-of-a-kind agency legislated in the last year of Gov. Ronald Reagan’s administration and staffed in Gov. Jerry Brown’s first (1974 and 1975, respectively), California established not just the first efficiency standards for major appliances and buildings but a process for continually updating those standards to align with — and further incubate — technological advances by which cooling, heat and light may be furnished with progressively smaller energy inputs. These policies, along with innovations that enabled electric and gas utilities to bankroll customer “end-use” efficiency investments, later spread to most of the other 49 states, greatly amplifying their single-state impacts. But they took root first and, it appears, most deeply in California.

Needless to say, these policies thrilled me, even from afar. And the policies themselves seemed firmly planted in a statewide culture of energy efficiency and innovation. To be sure, you couldn’t discern that culture in the state’s sprawling subdivisions and freeways, but you could sense it in the passionate conversations about energy that caromed among the policy beehives that were springing up around the state: at the California Energy Commission and the state Department of Natural Resources; at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and its Energy Resources Group and at Stanford; at NRDC, which was making efficiency standards sexy not only to other environmentalists but to appliance manufacturers and builders; and at the Environmental Defense Fund, whose pathbreaking analyses were suggesting that investing in efficiency and renewables could make utilities financially stronger.

The font of this activity was Gov. Brown. Whether or not he grasped all of the intricacies — and he probably did — Brown’s personal asceticism and hippie-ish disdain for standard modes of consumption (at least in his first go-round as governor) seemed to furnish the cultural DNA for California’s quiet but consequential energy-policy revolution. This was palpable during my three working trips to the state during Brown’s first term: in 1976 when I campaigned around the state for a ballot measure limiting new reactors; in 1977 when I testified for EDF and NRDC in nuclear power siting cases in San Diego and San Francisco; and in 1978 when I spent a month in Los Angeles with the PhD economist Vince Taylor, workshopping my analyses of cost escalation in nuclear power.

Within a year, that work would catapult me to national prominence, when the Three Mile Island reactor outside Harrisburg, PA melted down and I, providentially, had the computer printouts (regression analyses of the relentlessly rising costs to build nuclear plants throughout the 1970s) that answered the question on the lips of seemingly every energy-journalist in America: what would the TMI accident do to nuclear power economics? Almost overnight, my energy-policy work narrowed to a single-minded focus on nuclear power costs — which ended only when I took up urban-bicycling advocacy near the end of the 1980s.

By the early eighties, then, I had to give up my close watch on California’s energy efficiency progress. Last September, however, with Gov. Brown’s fourth and final term drawing to a close and with climate concern skyrocketing in the U.S., the time seemed right to determine how far California had actually gotten off fossil fuels since the start of that quiet revolution in energy governance in the seventies. CTC intern (and U-Chicago rising sophomore) Rohan Kremer Guha and I dug up California-specific fossil fuel and GDP data and placed it alongside data for the U.S. as a whole, which led to a preliminary version of the table above.

In a nutshell, we found that from 1975 (the approximate start date of that revolution) to 2016 (the most recent year with consistent data):

• California’s use of fossil fuels increased by 23 percent, a bit more than the rate for the rest of the U.S. (20 percent)
• During that same period, California’s economy more than quadrupled in size, far surpassing the other 49 states’ tripling
• Adjusting the first figures by the second, California reduced its use of fossil fuels per unit of GDP by 70 percent; for the rest of the U.S., the reduction rate was 60 percent

The last bullet point led directly to the startling finding reported at the top of this post: Had the other 49 states reduced fossil fuel use relative to economic activity at the same pace as California, nationwide carbon emissions would have been lower in 2016 by 1,200 million metric tons, or 24 percent.

Proof indeed, not just of California’s leadership but of the rest of the country’s sluggishness . . . and of the consequences of the gap between the two. Because of that sluggishness, the U.S. missed a chance to eliminate carbon pollution equivalent to CO2 emissions from all 200 million passenger cars and (light) trucks in the country. I pitched a report built on this analysis to our friends at NRDC, and our collaboration produced this report.

I’ll have more to say soon, not just on the report itself but on what it says about Jerry Brown’s climate record. You can download the report (pdf) directly from NRDC’s Web site and comment on it here via the link just below the headline near the top of this post.

Texas Tech physicist Katherine Hayhoe is investing in a home studio. How do I know? She tweeted about it last night:

Why should we care? Because the professor’s studio upgrade is a microcosm of what a carbon tax — and only a carbon tax — can do for climate.

Some context: Prof. Hayhoe is a renowned voice for climate sanity. At Texas Tech, in Lubbock, she teaches atmospheric science and political science — a potent combination tailored to her dual repertoire of climate physics and climate communications.

These days Hayhoe is inundated with speaking requests, to the point that compelled her to face the tie between her air travel and greenhouse gas levels. Thus the studio upgrade. Now, she tweeted last night, “When I receive a speaking invite, my first question is: could I do a low-carbon video talk? Thanks to peoples’ willingness to give new-fangled tech a try, I now give about 3/4 of my talks this way!” [Click here for Prof. Hayhoe’s complete Twitter thread on the matter.]

Air travel is often trotted out as evidence that climate change is unstoppable — and not without reason. It’s already five percent of U.S. CO2 emissions (some put its climate impact higher, due to flying’s unique atmospheric interactions), a share that is rising, as befits air travel’s “luxury-good” status as an activity that rises faster than incomes. Schemes for lower-carbon propulsion systems, from biofuels or electric motors to hydrogen or high-tech dirigibles, are mostly still at the drawing boards. Packing more passengers into fewer and smaller seats is probably nearing its limit (though perhaps steeper baggage fees will push down per-passenger emissions a bit further).

At least for the immediately foreseeable future, the primary antidote to air travel’s escalating emissions must be to fly less. A carbon tax can bend flying’s demand curve downward, but alternatives like teleconferencing must be part of the process. The better the technology — in ease of use (on both ends), clarity and capability — the more people who will follow in Prof. Hayhoe’s footsteps. Before long, virtual presenting and meeting could grow from quirky to normal. Societal norms will reset, perhaps to the point where jetting to and fro will seem as odd as turning down a trip due to carbon appears today.

There are two strands here. One, just noted, is about resetting societal defaults: passing on your second cousin’s third wedding out in Reno not just because the carbon tax has made the trip costlier but because the reflexive, “Nothing could keep me away” has become “This time I’m going to pass” as society has adapted to higher ticket prices (and, perhaps, flying has lost some of its prestige).

The other is about innovation. To stick with our air travel example, ways to participate without physically showing up will inevitably grow more feasible and tantalizing as the carbon tax drives demand toward that direction. Some of the adaptive innovation will be along known paths like teleconferencing, but some will doubtless be along paths few of us can imagine — save for the innovators awaiting the market opportunity.

This stuff won’t be won by regulations, standards or subsidies, but it’s central to slashing emissions, in my opinion. It’s the reason that throughout 2019, as climate progressives brainstorm and settle on the elements of a Green New Deal, CTC will be fighting to ensure that robust carbon taxing is one of them: not simply to generate revenue to pay for green infrastructure but to incentivize the million and one innovations that, even if we can’t yet spell them out, will be key to crushing the structures of demand that still have us hooked on carbon fuels.

 

The day after the Congressional climate solutions caucus added its 30th Republican member, a dozen U.S. Senators, all Democrats, introduced a bill that could help gauge how serious these House R’s are about tackling the climate crisis.

The Pollution Transparency Act, sponsored by Sen. Michael Bennet and 11 fellow Senators including Warren (D-MA), Wyden (D-OR) and  Whitehouse (D-RI), would establish a federal interagency working group to codify a cost of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to be used in federal rule-making, cost-benefit analysis and other administrative actions.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the climate solutions caucus reached a new milestone yesterday when it inducted its its 30th Republican member, Rep. Mimi Walters, from California’s Orange and Riverside Counties. The caucus, created and sponsored by the non-partisan Citizens Climate Lobby, has been admitting Republicans and Democrats in matched pairs since its formation in early 2017. There’s no shortage of Democrats eager to join, so the limiting factor is the other, largely climate-denying side of the aisle.

(The milestone was reported this morning in an E&E News story, Caucus Hits 60 Members, located, unfortunately, behind a paywall.)

The Bennet bill, summarized at left, would effectively codify, in legislation, the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) promulgated several years ago by the Obama administration and used in federal rule-making until recently. A number of states have adopted regulations based on the Obama SCC; for example, in 2016 the NY Public Service Commission calibrated its “zero emission credit” subsidy for nuclear power plants to the SCC.

To be sure, the SCC is a very imperfect benchmark, as we and others have noted repeatedly. It also falls far short of a carbon tax or price; by itself it will incentivize only a tiny fraction of the myriad behavioral changes, technical innovations and cultural shifts that an actual carbon or greenhouse-gas fee would spark.

Yet administrative recognition that emitting greenhouse gases imposes a cost is valuable. So too would be the symbolism of Republicans amounting to one-tenth of sitting G.O.P. representatives and senators — officially resolving that unpriced burning of fossil fuels isn’t quite free. And if they act in concert, the members of the climate solutions caucus could gain a modicum of political cover against the ruling denialist line while casting their first public vote for climate action.

A companion bill to Sen. Bennet’s has been introduced in the House by Rep. Donald McEachin (D-VA-4), according to Bennet’s press release, which also lists as a key endorser a leading Republican economist: Glen Hubbard, Dean of Columbia School of Business and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush.

When facing a precipice, the first step away is the most critical. Will these climate-aware Republicans take it?

State-level carbon taxes offer a path to the ultimate climate solution.

This post was first posted on the Huffington Post on April 26. It was co-authored with Yoram Bauman, the PhD economist who founded Carbon Washington and co-chaired the carbon tax initiative in that state last fall. Yoram was principal author of the new CTC report featured here.

The Carbon Tax Center is out with a new report timed to the surging climate movement. We surveyed all 50 U.S. states (and Washington, DC) to identify the ones with the most favorable conditions for enacting a statewide carbon tax. Joining the report is a toolkit to help advocates push for a carbon tax in their state.

Campaigns for state carbon taxes educate the public and advance the idea on the policy map. A carbon tax in one or more states will create facts on the ground that can appeal to the Left and Right alike and upend the climate stalemate.

The world’s leading climate experts agree that putting a price on carbon emissions is essential for slowing and eventually stopping global warming. The artificial marketplace advantage of unpriced carbon pollution has helped coal, oil and gas gain a stranglehold over our economic system and social structures. Charging these fuels for their climate damage is the fastest path to the clean energy future that we need to protect our cities, coasts and civilization from climate devastation.

Enacting a carbon tax in a single state can be a gateway toward the ultimate remedy: a national carbon tax. Look at Canada, where a successful carbon tax in British Columbia, that country’s third largest province, prompted Prime Minister Trudeau to commit the nation to carbon pricing starting next year.

None of the world’s five top emitters — China, United States, Russia, India, Japan — has a carbon tax covering even a province or state. Yet the grassroots movement to end the fossil fuel era has never been stronger, as evidenced by last weekend’s Marches for Science and the anticipated massive April 29 People’s Climate March.

Below are thumbnails of the eight states we determined have the best prospects for enacting carbon taxes. Our map shows another six states with carbon tax “potential” along with eleven more where only one barrier (e.g., an apparently legal impediment) stands in the way.

Residents of these states—indeed, residents of all states—must speak up, advocate, and demand that their lawmakers take action; in many states citizens can also act directly through ballot measures. Our report and toolkit explain where, why and how.

Why do we march? To make a statement, to influence news coverage, to affect policy and politics — of course. But also to inspire each other; to build community, to find one another.

I joined the NYC March for Science today for a couple of hours. Time will tell if we made the news or if only the main march in DC got covered. But I sure found myself inspired by the people I encountered.

Hey, let’s see who’s that older man in the lab coat and a Tufts cap? Daniel Wellner, professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical Center on Manhattan’s east side. Dig a little and learn that he was born in Belgium in 1934, and, with two older siblings, was taken in during the Nazi occupation by a Catholic family with 8 children who raised them as their own. After the war, Daniel’s brother married one of the 8 and settled, happily, in Syracuse where he taught physics at the university and still does research. Daniel emigrated to NYC in 1949 and never left. He has run 52 marathons and is registered to ride in next month’s Bike NY 5-boro bike tour.

The young woman hoisting the “ICE Has No Agenda” sign is a Smith College junior majoring in Africana Studies and minoring in Environmental Sciences. She told me that she’s just back in NYC after several months with a crew from college doing marine research in the Caribbean. Her mother, a remedial math teacher and director of the Willow Interfaith Women’s Choir, lamented that the U.S. government refused the crew’s proffer of their research findings on water temperature and species counts. The data is being sent instead to the Dominican Republic science ministry. Both mother and daughter were steadfast.

So many people. So many signs. So many stories. So much resolve.

And so many girls and women! They seemed, to me, to outnumber the boys and men. A good thing, likely signifying the growing ranks of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) as well as their continued leadership following the Jan. 21 Women’s March that ignited the Resist Trump movement.

The light sprinkle turned to a steadier rain and I decided to light out for home. All of the Citibike stations on Broadway were shuttered on account of the march — needlessly, I thought — and I was ready to trek over to Ninth Avenue where there was an active station. But wait, there’s a marcher ahead, walking a Citibike. I caught up to him and asked if I could take it off his hands. We started negotiating the terms when he remembered that Citibiking was free today all over town, for Earth Day. He handed me the bike, I pulled on my rain gear, and half-an-hour later I was home.

Next up, for me: the 2017 People’s Climate March on April 29. I’ll be speaking at the Climate Rally Bergen and Beyond, a satellite rally in Bergen County, NJ, as part of a great line-up of local speakers and musicians. I’ll be talking about why carbon taxes are central to climate sustainability and justice.

The rally is at the Bergen County Courthouse, 10 Main St, Hackensack, NJ 07601. It starts at 10 a.m. and wraps around 11:30. You can RSVP, here.

The rally location is less than six miles from the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, so I’ll be biking there. If you’d like to ride together, meet me on either side of the bridge. We’ll leave from the NY side, 178th St & Cabrini Blvd, at 9:00 a.m. sharp. We’ll stop briefly on the NJ side at Hudson Terrace and leave from there at 9:10.

If you live in the NYC area and aren’t able to go to DC on April 29, I hope to see you in NJ!

This post was researched and written by CTC intern Michael Kendall. More recent info, including 2016 carbon emissions data, are in the U.K. section of our Where Carbon Is Taxed page.

The United Kingdom, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and a kingdom built on coal, has cut emissions of carbon dioxide to levels not seen since the late 19th Century, according to a report from the UK consultancy, Carbon Brief.

CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) totaled just 381 million metric tons (“tonnes”) last year, a 6 percent decrease from 2015 and 36 percent less than levels in 1990 (or 44 percent less than levels in 1970 when CO2 emissions peaked at 685 tonnes).

As Carbon Brief noted, total UK emissions hadn’t been that low since 1894, save for 1921 and 1926, when miner strikes paralyzed the coal industry.

Coal burning is disappearing from the former perennial bastion of coal, while use of oil and gas is down considerably from 2005, despite upticks since 2014 for both fuels. At the same time renewables are thriving, with a Carbon Brief analysis showing that wind generated more electricity throughout the UK than coal in 2016.

Data from British Petroleum’s comprehensive annual Statistical Review of World Energy show coal consumption in 2015 down 38 percent from 2005. That steep drop has driven down total CO2 emissions from UK fossil fuel combustion nearly 25 percent over the same period. (The UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will release official figures later this month.)

These reductions stem from a coordinated effort to cut emissions, reliant upon setting a national price on carbon in 2013. “Perhaps the most consequential factor,” says Carbon Brief editor Simon Evans, “is the UK’s top-up carbon tax, which doubled in 2015 to £18 per tonne of CO2.” (Brits sometimes refer to their carbon tax as a “top up” tax since it was intended to top up the carbon price determined via the auctioning of emission permits under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.)

The UK carbon tax equated to $24-$25 per short ton in 2016, at last year’s average 1.5-to-1 sterling to dollar exchange rate (the exchange rate is a good deal lower at this writing in 2017, however), and converting metric to short tons. A carbon tax targets coal above all, on account of coal’s higher carbon content per Btu compared to oil or gas, which enhances the profitability and deployment of zero-carbon substitutes for coal-fired electricity, such as wind. And in fact Evans has charted the month-by-month collapse in coal use.

Last week Drax, an energy generation company specializing in biomass, presented commissioned research taking carbon pricing a step further. The researchers modeled the likely impact on use of coal and natural gas and CO2 emissions from alternatively removing or doubling the UK carbon tax. Their models show that without the carbon tax, coal generation would have doubled and emissions would have risen 21 percent, significantly undercutting past emission gains; whereas doubling the tax would have cut coal generation by an extra 47 percent and shaved another 10 percent off overall CO2 emissions.

Continuing the good news: belying the standard notion that pricing carbon emissions must increase household energy bills, UK households paid less in energy bills (gas plus electricity) in 2016 than they did in 2008. We’ll look to Simon Evans for a summary:

Since 2008, household consumption of gas is down by 23% and electricity by 17%, cutting the average bill by £290 and more than offsetting the increase in policy costs over the same period… These energy savings are largely the result of energy efficiency policies and regulations, from UK rules mandating more efficient condensing boilers to EU product policy on more efficient fridges and ovens.

In short, while the price per kWh of electricity has risen for UK households, improvements in efficiency have cut household usage even more, enabling total household costs to fall. This stands as a model instance of regulation working in tandem with carbon pricing, as more-efficient appliances became more available due to regulation and more attractive due to the higher unit cost of electricity.

A further dividend of electricity savings, of course, is that the nationwide increase in electricity from wind turbines and gas-fired generation has been at the expense of coal rather than in addition to it — mirroring the U.S. experience since 2005 that we distilled and quantified in our December report, The Good News.

Where does the carbon tax stand now, with last year’s Brexit vote set to remove the UK from the European Union? The government’s March 2011 Budget set a 2020 target of a £30 per tonne tax on CO2, but in 2014 that figure was reduced to £18 via a price cap until 2020. In 2016 this cap was extended to 2021 “to limit the competitive disadvantage faced by business and reduce energy bills for consumers.” (See “The Carbon Price Floor” House of Commons briefing paper, p.3.)

Last week’s Spring Budget 2017 is vague about the future of the carbon price floor, stating that the “government remains committed to carbon pricing” but reserving details until the Autumn Budget 2017. The most promising statement in the budget is this, at page 34: “Starting in 2021-22, the government will target a total carbon price.” It suggests that the UK intends to continue to price carbon despite the country’s imminent exit from the EU. Carbon Brief provides a fuller analysis of the Budget’s potential impact on climate policy.

The U.S. power sector is racing past the Clean Power Plan’s emissions target. It’s time for climate advocates to do the same.

Too many climate advocates seem to be investing the Clean Power Plan — the Obama Administration’s project to achieve a 32 percent shrinkage of U.S. electricity-sector carbon emissions from 2005 to 2030 — with iconic significance.

We can understand why: power generation from fossil fuels, primarily coal, was responsible for almost 42 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions in 2005, more than double the share of the next sector, passenger cars.

And we at the Carbon Tax Center will grant that the administrative machinery set in motion by the Clean Power Plan may have accelerated the shift in power generation from coal to natural gas and, secondarily, wind and solar, although that shift was already in high gear before the plan was unveiled two years ago (see chart), driven by cheap and abundant fracked gas and the ongoing renewable-tech revolution.

But the CPP target — a 772 million metric ton drop in annual emissions from electricity generation by 2030 — is already in sight, nearly a decade ahead of schedule. Since 2005, the plan’s baseline year, electricity emissions have fallen (as of 2015) by 518 million tonnes. Ten years in, and with 15 years to go, we’re two-thirds of the way to the goal line. On the past-decade trendline, the target will be met in 2021.

The 2005-2015 rate of decline in power-sector emissions is so far ahead of the CPP that it could be cut by two-thirds going forward and the 32 percent reduction goal would still be met.

The math is elementary, but it bears emphasis in light of the discussion swirling around last week’s debate in St. Louis over the effort of the Bernie Sanders – Bill McKibben forces to ramp up the climate-policy language in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform. This is from Ben Adler’s take in Grist:

The Clinton campaign says its reluctance to accept some of McKibben’s amendments reflects legitimate concerns about the policy implications, not mere political calculation. Not all experts agree that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions, for example. Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board had pointed out in her testimony to the committee a week earlier that a carbon tax does not guarantee emissions reductions, while direct regulation, such as Obama’s Clean Power Plan, does.

Former Bill Clinton and Obama official Carol Browner also leaned heavily on Nichols’ testimony in her remarks in St. Louis in leading the charge that narrowly defeated the McKibben carbon tax, as we noted in our recent post on the debate.

The irony of course is that the Clean Power Plan didn’t actually “guarantee” much of anything, insofar as the plan’s targeted reduction has been happening more or less on its own.

But if power-sector emissions are falling so easily, why bother with a carbon tax at all?

For a lot of reasons. Here are the key ones:

• First, the U.S. needs to blow way past a 32 percent shrinkage in power-sector emissions over 25 years.
• Second, non-electricity emissions of CO2 — now 63 percent of the U.S. total — have fallen little, dropping from 2005 to 2015 by just 190 million metric tons as electricity emissions were falling by 518 million. The majority of those emissions are from gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products, underscoring the importance of offsetting the nearly historically low petroleum prices that businesses and consumers are “enjoying” today and banking on in the future, with carbon taxes.
• Third, we need to shrink not just emissions but the financial and political power of the oil industry. We’ve got to break the cycle that allows fossil fuel corporations to lock in policies — including the “right” to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at no charge — that lock in demand for their product. A carbon tax will help crack that open.

We’ve never underestimated the difficulty of enacting robust carbon taxes in our nearly-closed political system. One piece in many to get us there faster is for the climate movement to see that the Clean Power Plan is yesterday’s plan. As we argued in our prior post, the core of our plan going forward must be Bill McKibben’s carbon tax resolution from St. Louis:

Carbon and other greenhouse gases should be taxed at a rate high enough to spur the transition away from fossil fuels consistent with the temperature goals agreed to in Paris in 2015.

Note: The data underlying our graphic may be found in CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model (Excel file).