“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.”

That’s the carbon tax resolution that environmental activist Bill McKibben pressed the Democratic Party Platform Drafting Committee to adopt at its meeting in St. Louis last week. The proposal lost 7-6, as did allied resolutions opposing fracking and investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. Still, the vote is the latest step by carbon taxing on its march into the political mainstream.

Befitting McKibben’s gift for concision, the resolution was scarcely longer than a tweet. But it spoke volumes: carbon emissions must be taxed; ditto, other greenhouse gases like methane; and the tax must be high enough to catalyze an energy revolution. Note also what the resolution did not say: that carbon should be “priced,” an expression that, though useful in its place, can be a weasel word allowing for cap-and-trade schemes. No, the proposal specified a carbon tax, straight up and robust.

Two Congressmembers on the panel were equally unambiguous:

• “Taxing carbon is the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. It will offset the massive societal cost of unchecked carbon emissions.” — Barbara Lee, California 13^th CD
• “This is a very market-y proposal. Companies aren’t internalizing all their costs, they’re externalizing them onto the rest of us. Shouldn’t they be responsible for covering the cost they impose on us? I think yes.” — Keith Ellison, Minnesota 5^th CD

Those are pretty sophisticated arguments. Less so was this objection from Hillary Clinton surrogate Carol Browner:

The concern we have about a carbon tax is that it won’t necessarily achieve reductions. It will generate revenue, but it won’t necessarily achieve reductions because some companies will simply pay the cost. And what we want, and what we think is absolutely essential, is measurable reductions of carbon pollution in the air.

If it’s measurable reductions Browner wanted, she could have cast her eye at British Columbia, where a “starter” carbon tax of just $20 per ton of CO2 cut emissions in its first four years, although those cuts have stalled out, predictably enough, as the tax level stopped rising.

And anyone with a basic grounding in economic policy analysis will see right through Browner’s argument. Those hypothetical “companies [that] will simply pay the cost” of high-carbon energy won’t be around for long; they’ll be supplanted by enterprises that can provide electricity, manufacturing and transport more cheaply because they’ve heeded the carbon price signal and switched from dirty energy to untaxed clean fuels and efficiency. Households and businesses will also adopt sustainable practices that gain cost-effectiveness as the carbon tax takes hold.

Read our follow-up post, Time for Climate Advocates to Move Beyond the Clean Power Plan.

Bizarrely, Browner based her canard about carbon taxes — that they generate revenue rather than cutting carbon — in part on the failure of California’s cap-and-trade system. Presumably, Browner, a prime Democratic Party environmental apparatchik for over two decades, knows better. One can only imagine McKibben’s frustration as he saw carbon taxes tarred with the cap-and-trade brush.

Needless to say, Bill isn’t backing down, as he made clear in his post-mortem in Politico calling out the Clinton campaign for “obstructing change” by locking up the Democratic Party platform. While we’re sad that the carbon tax resolution didn’t pass, we’re pleased that McKibben not only drafted but fought hard for it.

Carbon tax proponents have long seen the logic in having Bill advocate for carbon taxes. Taxing carbon pollution jibes perfectly with the agenda of 350.org, the organization he has built into a formidable global grassroots force. No other policy tool both undermines the profitability of the fossil fuel industry and also leverages divestment (financially and culturally) from that sector.

McKibben’s leadership for carbon taxing in St. Louis — and, hopefully, beyond — is both heartening and important.

The curtain is up on a series of pro-climate action ads in that climate-denialist stronghold, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Four ads are up, with eight more to follow by mid-July, produced and paid for by the center-right advocacy group, Partnership for Responsible Growth.

A good deal of craft has gone into the ads, along with a bundle of money — that space doesn’t come cheap. It’s fair to ask what the payoff might be.

Presumably, the objective is to help induce a critical mass of G.O.P. Congressmembers to support meaningful carbon-pricing legislation, before it’s too late. A president alone can’t implement economy-wide carbon pricing, and barring a broad leftward upheaval in November, at least one chamber in the next Congress will still be Republican.

Getting a few dozen Republicans to break ranks and support a carbon tax would overcome the House Republican bias baked into the electoral math. A bipartisan bill would also give cover to Democratic Senators and Reps from coal states and exurban counties — there are still some left — whose votes would be needed as well.

Of course, that’s been the situation since the G.O.P. took the House in 2010. Cynics who pronounced carbon taxing dead under a Republican Congress have been proven right — thus far. Yet some facts are changing, and not just in the air, with global-average temperature records breaking monthly. Solar and wind electricity in the U.S. now generate more than twice the electricity, jobs and dollars they produced half-a-dozen years ago, with much of that in red states. A low-carbon or even zero-carbon world can’t be written off as a pipe dream.

Those are political facts. Interestingly, three of the four Journal ads thus far are limited to scientific ones: “Carbon Dioxide Traps Heat On Earth,” proclaims Ad #2. “The Earth Has Warmed And We Did It,” says #3, followed by #4, “What Goes Up Doesn’t Come Down.”

True, the emphasis will change if, as we hope, the series builds to a call for a briskly rising (and revenue-neutral) carbon tax. If so, the initial ads will have been conversation-starters. That would be fine, ordinarily. But while we were taking notice of the ads, the July Harper’s arrived, with a provocative essay by the activist-writer Rebecca Solnit that makes one ask if the series ventured off on a good foot.

Solnit’s essay, The Ideology of Isolation, is an unflinching critique of extreme right-wing thought. It begins:

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own.

Any student of ecology, or anyone with a passing acquaintance with John Muir, the 19th century explorer-mountaineer-naturalist who founded the Sierra Club, can see where Solnit is going: the ideology that insists we’re not connected to each other, save for a contingent series of market interactions, is the same ideology that denies the interconnections that make up ecosystems and indeed the physical world.

Muir’s glittering aphorism, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” demands we pay attention not just to flora and fauna but to the megatons of heat-trapping gases we’ve been sending skyward since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the right-wing ideology of disconnection doesn’t just give us license to ignore our effluent, it practically requires that we do so. Solnit again:

On a more fundamental level, the very idea of climate change is offensive to isolationists, because it tells us more powerfully and urgently than anything ever has that everything is connected, that nothing exists in isolation. What comes out of your tailpipe or your smokestack or your leaky fracking site contributes to the changing mix of the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cause the earth to retain more of the heat that comes from the sun, which doesn’t just result in what we used to call global warming, but will lead to climate chaos.

The central meme in ad #2, that the greenhouse effect “isn’t a left or a right issue, it’s science,” may be sweetly reasonable, but the reader has to believe in science in the first place. As Solnit notes,

If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end in denying the reality of facts, which are after all part of a network of systematic relationships between language, physical reality, and the record, regulated by the rules of evidence, truth, grammar, word meaning, and so forth. You deny the relationship between cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, or rather you imagine both as products on the free market, which one can produce and consume according to one’s preferences.

And if those preferences are for the riches and influence that come from owning and exploiting fossil fuels, the resulting facts and science won’t lead ineluctably to the position that climate change is real, occurring and principally man-made. In that scenario, the Partnership’s carefully crafted ads may simply bounce off Journal readers and fall harmlessly to the ground.

To be sure, a campaign as professional as the Partnership’s Journal ads isn’t necessarily seeking to change minds through education. The mere fact of the ads — the idea that Republican backers and lawmakers are being addressed on climate from the center-right — is at least as likely to move the political needle as the logical thread in the text.

All the same, there’s another scenario kicking inside the Beltway — we heard talk of it in DC this month — that suggests that a healthy if not House-regaining shellacking by the Democrats will compel the G.O.P. to finally divest itself of its anti-science brand; and that accepting the reality of climate change and a “Republican solution” in the form of a carbon tax could be part of that reformation.

That scenario might have pointed to a more overtly political approach, though that may be where the Partnership’s series is headed. Meanwhile, the initial set may be viewed here. What do you think?

The headlines just keep coming:

• Mitsubishi Says It Cheated on Fuel Tests for Decades
• G.M. to Compensate 135,000 Owners of S.U.V.s That Overstate Mileage
• Suzuki Admits Test Flaw, But Denies It Cheated

That’s three automakers admitting they misrepresented their vehicles’ gas mileage to regulators and customers, just in the pages of the New York Times in the past month.

But so far as climate is concerned, the real news on auto mileage standards came in an earlier Times story in March, “Automakers Likely to Ask For Leniency in Fuel Rule” (or, in the on-line version, Low Gas Prices Create a Detour on the Road to Greater Fuel Economy).

“With gas prices hovering around $2 a gallon, sales of low-mileage pickups and S.U.V.s have skyrocketed,” the Times noted. “Meanwhile, electric and hybrid models” — the more-efficient designs the automakers banked on selling to meet the government’s 54.5 mpg target for 2025 models — “are languishing in dealer showrooms.”

Here’s the kicker:

Now, with a crucial midterm review of federal fuel-economy rules to begin this summer, automakers are expected to seek adjustments to the government’s formula for increasing mileage and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Proposed changes could include extending the time frame on mileage targets and expanding emissions credits to include enhancements for safety and autonomous driving. (emphasis added)

No, you’re not imagining things. The auto companies’ lobby group Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers has tipped off the Times that it will press the federal government to back off from the 54.5 mpg target. “Talks have already begun with the government in advance of the E.P.A.’s opening the midterm review in June,” longtime AAM spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist told the paper.

Not only that, to rationalize abandonment of the target the AAM is assembling a suite of policy offsets that have nothing to do with fuel efficiency (or greenhouse gas reductions). Automatic braking. Self-driving cars. Will credits for cupholders specially sized for refillable water bottles make it into the package?

None of this should come as a surprise. U.S. gas prices fell 27 percent in real terms last year, the steepest plunge since at least the Second World War, save for a fractionally bigger drop in 2009, the pit of the Great Recession. As The Times noted, and as we predicted at the start of the price slide (and any Econ 101 textbook would guarantee), Americans are rushing to again embrace gas-guzzlers, ensuring the 54.5 mpg target remains a pipe dream and locking in a huge uptick in carbon emissions for years.

A carbon tax, whether served straight up or offered as a cheap-oil tax, could have lessened the switch to SUVs and pickups by retaining some of drivers’ anticipatory price pain of filling up at the pump. More than that, though, taxes on gasoline would incentivize a host of ways to reduce gasoline consumption that far transcend mileage standards. Driving less tops the list, but there’s more, as we pointed out last September in one of our most quoted posts, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes:

A carbon tax will affect whether and how far and often to drive . . . which car to take on a family trip . . . how high an mpg rating to demand in the next lease or purchase . . . and, at the societal level, whether public transit investments “pencil out” and might be prioritized over wider highways, and whether hyper-efficient car designs pencil out in corporate boardrooms and venture-capital spreadsheets.

More broadly, as we wrote then, “a carbon tax effectively makes every action that reduces fossil fuel use less costly, by raising the rewards from using less fuel. Taxing carbon will open up multiple paths that will influence the literally billions of daily decisions that determine energy usage and, hence, carbon emissions.”

We have nothing against mpg standards. While they may not have been as impactful as appliance efficiency standards, which have driven “market transformations” in designs of refrigerators, air conditioners and such (and have also mitigated the “decision gap” when appliances need to be replaced overnight and there’s no time to study competing models), they have at least done something to lift actual miles per gallon of U.S. automobiles.

The hitch is that, like standards generally, mpg rules are a narrow-gauge solution to a broad-gauge problem. They address just one aspect (albeit an important one) of a multi-faceted issue: how will we reduce gasoline use quickly, massively and economically.

Not only that, as economist Valerie Karplus pointed out in a 2013 Times op-ed, The Case for a Higher Gasoline Tax, “[A] gas tax provides immediate, direct incentives for drivers to reduce gasoline use, while the efficiency standards must squeeze the reduction out of new vehicles only.” (emphasis added)

We know full well the difficulty of raising the federal gasoline tax that, appallingly, has been stuck at the same rate since 1993, let alone enacting a carbon tax. Still, it’s disconcerting to see “mpg hawks” like the Safe Climate Campaign react to the auto industry’s incipient campaign to water down the 2025 target by calling on the Obama Administration to “close loopholes” in the regs. Those loopholes are there by political design, and they’re not going to be closed by environmentalist lobbying.

This seems like a recipe for failure: doubling down on a rule that’s inherently complex and prone to gaming, that stretches over years if not decades, and that addresses only a piece of the problem.

We all want to diminish use of gasoline. Why not embrace the policy that attacks that usage at the root: a carbon tax.

To grasp how deep the fault line now runs through the Democratic Party and between its presidential candidates, look no further than the exchange between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over a carbon tax in Thursday night’s debate:

Bernie Sanders presses Hillary Clinton on whether she’s in favor of a carbon tax. https://t.co/ev4IeNYpwm #DemDebate https://t.co/lr4D2Gu4rH

— CNN (@CNN) April 15, 2016

SANDERS: I am proud that I have introduced the most comprehensive climate change legislation, including a tax on carbon. Something I don’t believe Secretary Clinton supports.

MODERATOR (to Clinton): Go ahead and respond.

CLINTON: Well, I’m a little bewildered about how to respond when you have an agreement which gives you the framework to actually take the action that would have only come about because in the face of implacable hostility from the Republicans in Congress, President Obama moved forward on gas mileage, he moved forward on the Clean Power Plan. He has moved forward on so many of the fronts that he could, given the executive actions that he was able to take.

And, you know, I am getting a little bit concerned here because I really believe that the President has done an incredible job against great odds and deserves to be supported.

SANDERS: All right, here is — here is a real difference. This is a difference between understanding that we have a crisis of historical consequence here, and incrementalism and those little steps are not enough.

Not right now. Not on climate change. Now, the truth is, we have got to tell the fossil fuel industry that their short-term profits are not more important than the future of this planet. And that means — and I would ask you to respond. Are you in favor of a tax on carbon so that we can transit away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy at the level and speed we need to do?

CLINTON: You know, I have laid out a set of actions that build on what President Obama was able to accomplish, building on the Clean Power Plan, which is currently under attack by fossil fuels and the Right in the Supreme Court, which is one of the reasons why we need to get the Supreme Court justice that President Obama has nominated to be confirmed so that we can actually continue to make progress.

I don’t take a back seat to your legislation that you’ve introduced that you haven’t been able to get passed. I want to do what we can do to actually make progress in dealing with the crisis. That’s exactly what I have proposed.

And my approach I think is going to get us there faster without tying us up into political knots with a Congress that still would not support what you are proposing.

To be clear, what bewilders Secretary Clinton is not a carbon tax, but, as she said, “how to respond.” As a policy wonk par excellence, Clinton almost certainly knows the power of a carbon tax very well.

Clinton probably grasps that taxing carbon emissions cuts to the heart of the climate issue by rewarding each and every step that reduces use of carbon fuels; that it harnesses the power of the market — the market! — to spur innovation and investment in clean energy; and that it makes climate polluters pay and diminishes their political power, thus helping untie the political knots she professes to decry.

But cutting to the essence on climate or virtually any other issue, and heeding the political groundswell demanding bold action, just doesn’t seem to be in her DNA, not to mention the DNA of the wing of the Democratic Party that her husband enshrined during his presidency.

The charitable interpretation is that Clinton is wisely refraining from saddling herself with a position that the Republican Party can use to attack her between now and November — as a tax-and-spend Democrat who will damage the middle class. And indeed, a carbon tax is so revolutionary as well as sensible and necessary that Clinton, in stark contrast to Sanders, would likely have a hard time not just defending but championing it against the Republican nominee.

Instead, she would fall back, as she did Thursday evening in Brooklyn, on gasoline mileage and the Clean Power Plan — measures that, as we have explained here ad nauseam, are fine so far as they go, which, alas, isn’t very far. The Clean Power Plan, we pointed out nearly two years ago, merely requires electric power generators (which by now barely account for a third of U.S. climate pollution) to switch from coal to gas and add wind and solar generation at a far lesser rate than they’ve been doing for a decade. As for the vaunted increase in vehicle miles per gallon, it is already being badly eroded by near-record-cheap gasoline, much of it enabled by the explosive rise in U.S. fracking that Clinton supports (and Sanders opposes). [NB: Link in preceding sentence was added in June 2016.]

It’s not that Obama’s actions that Clinton has latched on to aren’t useful. Rather, they don’t go nearly far enough. As Sanders pointed out, “we have a crisis of historical consequence here, and incrementalism and those little steps are not enough.” Nor do they create a policy template for the rest of the world. Outside of Western Europe and perhaps Japan, no other countries possess the bureaucratic machinery to administer the stupendously complex regulations that Clinton touted Thursday evening, and which apparently constitute the limits of her climate vision. While a carbon tax brings its own challenges of transparency and accountability, those now appear manageable in the wake of the Paris climate accord, to which nearly two hundred nations will formally commit at the UN this coming Friday.

To be clear, Clinton is correct that President Obama has accomplished — through creative and steadfast presidential fiat — most of what was possible in the face of implacable Republican opposition. But were she to be honest with herself, she would admit that it’s not nearly enough, especially with emerging revelations leading Scientists [To] Warn of Climate Peril Within Decades, Not Centuries, as the New York Times put it last month.

And were Clinton to seek to inspire Democratic voters, and indeed, the clear majority of Americans who have come to support carbon taxes, provided they’re made economically fair,  she wouldn’t be ducking Sanders’ (and the moderator’s) questions about them. She would be vying with Sanders to see who can fashion the most effective and appealing carbon tax and who can best persuade the American people to demand Congress pass it.

Wyoming, the epicenter of U.S. fossil fuel extraction, is hemorrhaging jobs, the New York Times reported today:

Tumbling prices for oil and gas, along with bankruptcies in the coal industry, have pummeled Wyoming’s energy-dependent economy and eroded a thin safety net for poor and older residents. Energy development helped Wyoming weather the nation’s thin years seven or eight years ago, but now officials estimate that energy companies have shed some 5,500 jobs — a huge number in a state with 580,000 residents.

The coal bust is stark. U.S. coal-fired electricity plants produced nearly 15 percent fewer kilowatt-hours last year, which is down almost a third from their 2007 peak. Total coal mining fell 10 percent, to a 30-year low, and while 2015 state coal extraction data aren’t available, Wyoming, the source of 40 percent of U.S. coal output, of which almost all is exported over huge distances by train or “by wire,” surely took a huge hit. And though production of “hydrocarbons” (oil and gas) is up nationwide, much of the action is now in fracking regions like North Dakota and Pennsylvania; moreover, drilling of new wells has plummeted along with prices.

As the Times reports, the job losses are exacerbated by parochial decisions by the Republican-dominated state government including a refusal to expand Medicaid under President Obama’s health care law. “A literacy program that helped people get high-school equivalency degrees was eliminated,” added the Times, “as were programs that provided dental care and property-tax rebates to low-income old people.”

This is painful to read on many levels, which for me include indelible memories of good times in Wyoming and Montana in the mid- and late seventies. As I wrote, years later:

Defending the American West from ruinous energy development was a particularly intense, gut-level part of that struggle for many of us, including me. I was living in New York then but spending as much time as I could in the Northern Rockies, hiking the high country and getting out onto the land, meeting ranchers, Indians, environmentalists and fellow eco-freaks. I fished for my breakfast in Shoshone streams, played barrelhouse piano in a Montana renewable-energy road show, and got high inhaling Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths at 12,000 feet in the Wind River range.

The irony is that the energy technologies we insisted could take the place of environmentally and economically ruinous fossil fuel exploitation have finally arrived . . . and Wyoming is perfectly positioned to take advantage. The state ranks #8 out of all 50 in wind energy potential, behind only Texas, Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and the Dakotas, according to estimates by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The NREL data further suggest that developing only the windiest areas in the state — where 80 meter-tall turbines could achieve 30% annual capacity factors — could generate more than 1.9 trillion kWh a year, or triple the electricity now generated from the state’s entire annual coal output. Yet actual Wyoming wind production is around a thousand times less. (See calculations below; note that NREL’s wind potential excludes a quarter of the state’s windy lands that are protected, developed or otherwise inappropriate, and draws on 2010 assumptions that predate recent new productivity from larger turbines and more sophisticated controls.) Yes, unlocking that potential requires big investments in transmission, but the hellish processions of massive unit trains bearing Wyoming coal to the Midwest and South could diminish and cease.

Wyoming looks well positioned for solar as well. The map at left suggests that the Equality State (yep, that’s its motto) is in the top ten, behind California, Nevada, Texas, the Four Corner states, and perhaps Nebraska and Oklahoma. Actual solar electricity generation in Wyoming is nil, however.

Many forces have stopped extensive wind and solar development. Some, like the nation’s only wind production tax, are state-specific; others, like the absence of a carbon price, are more generic. Both of these reflect and reinforce the political power of the fossil fuel industry along with cultural and cognitive biases that valorize carbon fuels at the expense of sustainable energy.

Only time will tell whether the latest downturn in Wyoming’s cycles of boom and bust will lead to a change of heart and in public policy and enable the jobs disappearing from the extractive industries to be replaced by jobs in renewables. For now, this state of rugged but empty landscapes is about to get even lonelier.

Calculations for paragraph preceding solar map: Wyoming coal mines produced just under 400 million tons in 2014. Applying standard factors of 8,500 btu/lb for Powder River Basin coal and 1 kWh generated per 10,000 btu released in combustion, that tonnage would have generated 680 billion kWh. The 2015 figure is almost certainly less, and probably under a third of the 1,944 billion kWh annual Wyoming wind potential estimated by NREL using 2010 technology assumptions.

In February, 2016, shortly after we put up this post, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations’ aviation agency, announced an agreement with the global aviation industry to impose binding limits on CO2 emissions for all new airplanes delivered after 2028. The New York Times reported on this development here.

And in May, Brad Plumer at Vox posted an informative thought-piece, Solar planes aren’t the green future of air travel. But here’s what could be., exploring different trajectories for aviation efficiency and demand and their impacts on carbon emissions. It’s worth a read.

In July, Coral Davenport at the Times reported that the Obama Administration is moving to propose fuel-efficiency standards for commercial aircraft, probably during the lame-duck period after Election Day.

— Editor.

Shipping and aviation combined account for only an estimated five percent of global CO2 pollution. But some experts project this share doubling or even tripling as globalization accelerates. How can those emissions be reduced, and would a carbon tax help?

Shipping, which is believed responsible for 3% of world CO2, is already the most energy-efficient large-scale way to move cargo, pound for pound and mile for mile. Moreover, shipping fuel costs already comprise about half of operating costs, and efficiency standards for new large ships took effect last year. How would a carbon tax on maritime fuel (primarily residual fuel oil, a/k/a bunker fuel) spur further efficiency and innovation? Air carriers also have incentive to conserve fuel since it accounts for about one-third of ticket prices. How would a carbon tax on aviation fuel lead to reduced emissions in that sector?

A good starting point is two recent pieces by New York Times science reporter Henry Fountain describing design and operating innovations underway in shipping and aviation.

Shipping

The simplest and most immediate way to improve ships’ efficiency is to slow down. “Slow steaming” — reducing speed by at least several nautical miles per hour — can slash fuel consumption and thus CO₂ emissions. Efficiency can also be raised through advanced engine design and by reducing drag by polishing propellers, coating hulls with algae-inhibiting paint, reshaping bows and adding fins or ducts to propellers. One promising new device called “Silverstream” cuts water friction by laying a carpet of tiny bubbles along the hull so it rides mostly on air.

Then there’s fuel choice. The single largest force in reducing U.S. CO2 emissions in recent years has been displacing electricity generators powered by dirty, high-carbon coal, with lower-Btu and lower-CO2 combined cycle plants burning natural gas. Similarly, new ships fueled by liquefied natural gas (LNG) are beginning to replace freighters and tankers powered by dirty tarlike bunker fuels, reducing CO2 emissions by 15-20%. The climate downside to this trend is methane “slip” — emissions of unburned methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 (per pound), a problem that marine engine manufacturers are beginning to tackle.

Perhaps the biggest pathway through which carbon taxes could cut greenhouse gas emissions from shipping would be by altering the cost equation between distant imports that must be transported thousands of miles, and domestically produced goods. The resultant reduced demand for shipping would translate not only to less CO2 (and methane) but less air and water pollution, fewer megaports and, perhaps most importantly, retention or creation of domestic manufacturing jobs. The potential job-producing impacts of a carbon tax covering shipping should interest those building “blue-green” alliances and clearly deserves further study.

Aviation

A month after his article on shipping innovations, Times reporter Fountain tackled aviation, reporting on innovative aircraft designs, new lighter materials and more efficient air traffic practices. Composite materials, which now comprise about half of the airframe of the new Boeing 787, have made new planes much lighter. More efficient jet engines are being installed on existing aircraft. And operational measures like altering flight paths to glide downward and better management of air traffic, both at airports and in the air, can further reduce emissions.

There’s more. New flexible aircraft wings are being tested to reduce drag. “Distributed propulsion” — locating an array of electric motors at the leading edge of aircraft wings for takeoff and landing, while using jet-fueled engines at the wingtips for cruising – is reportedly showing promise to reduce fuel consumption and resultant CO2 emissions. Of course, research and adoption of innovations like these depend heavily on rising fuel prices, which makes the 2015 price plunge so concerning.

In addition to driving new technology, a carbon tax would soften demand for air travel. The pull of a carbon tax would add impetus for more and better ground transportation alternatives, particularly high-speed inter-city and regional rail services to supplant short-hop flights. Technology such as video-conferencing can curb travel needs while saving time and money for businesses and individuals; a carbon tax would encourage such behavior to become our cultural norm. And even absent direct substitutes, costlier air travel would lose market share to other discretionary activities, almost all of which would be less carbon-intensive.

Culture Change?

We return to the questions posed earlier: with fuel costs already their single largest expense, why should fuel price increases spur changes in shipping and aviation designs, equipment and practices?

For one thing, whereas unrelenting fuel price volatility undermines incentives to conserve and innovate, a predictably-rising carbon tax would be more likely to ensure that investments in nascent shipping and aviation technologies actually pay off. The best ideas will move off the drawing boards and into practice faster and more widely.

More broadly, a carbon tax would not just move shipping and aviation down the fossil fuel demand curve; it would create a new, lower demand curve by boosting every substitute for, and every alternative to, high-carbon activity. In layman’s terms, a global, economy-wide, briskly-rising carbon tax would induce a culture change.

The need for a broad, all-inclusive price signal raises another key point. Not only was the December Paris climate accord mute about the best economic tool to achieve emission targets; the agreement left out international shipping and aviation altogether.

Climate activists are urging a carbon tax on shipping and aviation not only to spur reductions in climate pollution but as a revenue source to finance global climate mitigation. A new report from the International Monetary Fund suggests that a carbon tax of $30/ton of CO2 on offshore maritime and aviation emissions alone could generate $25 billion of revenue a year, while noting that national governments may have only weak claims to that revenue. Dedicating it to global climate finance might help resolve a thorny issue in climate negotiations while closing a gap in the Paris framework.

Photos: Flickr, New York Times

British Columbia, Canada’s third-most populous province, began taxing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions from combustion of fossil fuels nearly seven and a half years ago, pursuant to the province’s Carbon Tax Act. The province-wide tax commenced on July 1, 2008 at a level of $10 (Canadian) per metric ton (“tonne”) of CO2 and increased by $5 per tonne in each of the next four years, reaching its current level, $30/tonne, in July 2012.

The point of the tax is to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It is therefore surprising that very little detailed quantitative analysis of the tax’s efficacy in reducing emissions has appeared to date. Answers haven’t been readily available to fundamental questions such as: Have British Columbia emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas actually fallen? If they have, by how much? How have the reductions in BC emissions stacked up against the rest of Canada, which does not tax carbon emissions (save for modest taxes in Alberta and Quebec)? How does the recent trajectory of British Columbia emissions compare to that prior to the onset of the tax? Which sectors have shown the biggest, or the smallest, declines?

The Carbon Tax Center searched for answers to these questions during 2015. Not finding definitive data, we set out to develop our own. The result is a new report, British Columbia’s Carbon Tax: By the Numbers, which available here. A spreadsheet with supporting data is available here.

BC’s carbon tax is both the most comprehensive and transparent carbon tax in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. A recent assessment by two leading environmental economists stated that “British Columbia has given the world perhaps the closest example of an economist’s textbook prescription for the use of a carbon tax to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

Moreover, the BC tax is gaining adherents. On the eve of the Paris climate summit, in November 2015, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley committed to a similar carbon tax. Alberta’s tax will begin in 2017 at $20 per metric ton and rise in 2018 to $30, matching the current level in British Columbia. Although Canada’s two most populous provinces, Ontario and Quebec, are moving toward carbon cap-and-trade systems, the new Trudeau administration in Ottawa could choose to fashion a national carbon tax from British Columbia’s, with the possibility of higher tax levels to evoke larger emission reductions.

Executive Summary and Key Findings

British Columbia introduced a carbon tax in 2008. Since then, per capita emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases covered by the tax have declined, continuing a downward trend that began in 2004. Averaged across the period with the tax (2008 through 2013; no data are available for 2014), province-wide per capita emissions from fossil fuel combustion covered by the tax were nearly 13 percent below the average in the pre-tax period under examination (2000-2007).

The 12.9% decrease in British Columbia’s per capita emissions in 2008-2013 compared to 2000-2007 was three-and-a-half times as pronounced as the 3.7% per capita decline for the rest of Canada. This suggests that the carbon tax caused emissions in the province to be appreciably less than they would have been, without the carbon tax.

To allow comparability, the above figures are per capita. They also exclude emissions from electricity production ― a minor emissions category for British Columbia, which draws most of its electricity from abundant (and zero-carbon) hydro-electricity, but a major emissions source for much of Canada. On a total emissions basis (not per capita), British Columbia emissions of CO2 and other GHGs covered by the carbon tax but excluding the electricity sector averaged 6.1% less in 2008-2013 than in 2000-2007. (The reduction was 6.7% when electricity emissions are counted.) The 6.1% contraction is roughly what would be expected from a small carbon tax such as British Columbia’s. (See sidebar on page 5.)

The carbon tax does not appear to have impeded overall economic activity in British Columbia. Although GDP in British Columbia grew more slowly during 2008-2013, the period with the carbon tax, than in 2000-2007, the same was true for the rest of Canada. From 2008 to 2013, GDP growth in British Columbia slightly outpaced growth in the rest of the country, with a compound annual average of 1.55% per year in British Columbia, vs. 1.48% outside of the province.

GHG emissions increased in British Columbia in 2012 and again in 2013, not just in absolute terms but also per capita. This suggests that the carbon tax needs to resume its annual increments (the last increase was in 2012; its bite has since been eroded by inflation) if emissions are to begin again their downward track.

Click here to read the full report.

Paris climate negotiators wrangling over global temperature goals might want to spend a moment pondering cheap gasoline.

Fact: after years of steady gains, average gas mileage of new vehicle purchases in the U.S. is down almost a mile per gallon this year, according to data from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.

Fact: Through September, total miles driven in the U.S. this year are up 3.5 percent ― the largest increase in decades.

One thing is driving both trends: cheap gasoline. The average price of gas sold in the U.S. over the past ten months is 25 percent below last year’s price — the steepest drop in at least 70 years. Americans are responding by driving more and dumping sedans for SUV’s and pickups.

Gasoline consumption is on track to rise nearly 3 percent this year. The additional carbon dioxide will be the equivalent of a full year’s emissions from nine coal-fired power plants. (My yardstick is 600 megawatts per plant, operating at 70% capacity factor. See note at end of post for link to calculations.) And that doesn’t count the substantial “upstream” emissions from refining crude oil into gasoline.

Or, if you prefer, the likely 2015 increase in U.S. CO2 emissions caused by cheap gasoline, an estimated 30-35 million metric tons, will equal the entire annual emissions from burning all fossil fuels for all purposes from Ecuador . . . or Denmark . . . or Ireland . . . or Switzerland (take your pick). [Figures are here; multiply by 44/12 to convert from C to CO2.]

Can we be sure this year’s increase in gasoline use is entirely due to the drop in price? Not completely. But the inference is strong.

First, gasoline usage is at least mildly price-sensitive. Based on gasoline’s long-run price-elasticity, a 25 percent drop in price would touch off a roughly 10 percent increase in usage. The entire jump in demand wouldn’t be seen overnight, of course; it would take a decade or so for the lower price to work its way through car buyers’ purchase decisions (as well as manufacturers’ design choices). The 3 percent uptick this year is in line with what one would expect in the initial year.

Second, U.S. gasoline consumption stayed within a fairly narrow band from 2008 to 2014. Prices at the pump held steady as well, except during the worst of the great recession. What’s different this year is the plunge in price.

This year’s jump in CO2 emissions is bad enough. What’s really worrisome is that cheap oil — hence, cheap gasoline — is going to be with us for awhile. So say the experts who prepare the government’s Annual Energy Outlook forecast. I recently compared the 2025 forecast gasoline price between the 2012 AEO, which preceded the price collapse, and the 2015 AEO, which reflects it. Correcting for inflation, the government is projecting a 29 percent lower price of gas in 2025 than it projected three years ago.

When you run the lower price forecast through the price-elasticity for gasoline, you get this startling projection: in 2025, U.S. motorists will buy — and burn — nearly 13 percent more gasoline than would have been expected under the earlier (higher) price forecast. The associated increase in U.S. CO2 emissions in 2025 because gas will be cheaper is going to be huge: it equates to the annual output of 36 coal-fired power plants.

But let’s not stop there. Cheaper crude oil is bringing not just cheaper gas but cheaper diesel and cheaper jet fuel. I’ve run the reduced 2025 AEO price forecasts for all petroleum products through their respective price-elasticities, and the result is truly scary: Compared to projected 2025 emissions with the pre-plunge price trajectory, lower petroleum prices will result in 450 million metric tons of additional U.S. CO2 emissions in that year.

The increase will equal 8-9 percent of today’s U.S. CO2 emissions from all fossil-fuel burning. It will undo nearly all of the vaunted reductions in U.S. emissions since 2005. It will be the emissions equivalent of 100 additional coal-fired power plants. And that’s just for the U.S.

The antidote, of course, is a carbon tax — either a straight-up carbon tax or a hybrid one that surcharges petroleum products. A surcharge would reflect non-climate harms from oil consumption like traffic congestion, also place a charge on oil revenues’ corruption of governance in the U.S. and the Middle East.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote last January that cheap oil created a political opportunity for a carbon tax. We followed that here with First Tax Oil, Then Carbon. But to our knowledge no one has quantified how dire the need is — until now.

Cheap oil will make a mockery of just about every scenario to move the U.S. and other countries decisively off carbon fuels. Except scenarios based on carbon taxes.

Note: Calculations of increased oil consumption, resulting increase in CO2 emissions, and coal-plant equivalents, may be found in CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model (Excel file).

If any climate legislation could garner at least nominal bipartisan support, it might be Rep. John Delaney’s Tax Pollution, Not Profits Act. Delaney is in his second term representing Maryland’s 6th CD, which runs from the DC suburbs to the western end of the state. His proposal, introduced on Earth Day at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, would tax carbon dioxide and CO2 equivalents from methane and other sources at a rate of $30 per metric ton, increasing annually at 4% above inflation. The measure includes border tax adjustments to protect energy-intensive domestic industry from unfair competition from nations that haven’t enacted carbon taxes.

Delaney’s measure offers a sweetener to conservatives: a promise to apply roughly half of carbon tax revenues to reduce the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 28%. The bill would also provide monthly payments to low- and middle-income households and fund job training, early retirement and health care benefits for coal workers. At least as critically, at the AEI unveiling, Delaney committed near-apostasy by suggesting that his carbon tax could substitute for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, final regulations for which EPA issued last month.

The Carbon Tax Center assessed the Delaney proposal’s effectiveness using our 7-sector model. We project that in its third full year the measure’s $30 price would reduce U.S. CO2 emissions to 8% below emissions in the year before enactment. Unfortunately, its schedule of 4% annual real rises is too tepid to continue reducing emissions more than fractionally over the longer term. The low upward price trajectory is a shortcoming shared by the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, introduced by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) in June.

In contrast, carbon tax proposals introduced in this Congress by Rep. John Larson (D-CT) and Rep. James McDermott (D-WA) would rise briskly to exceed $100 per metric ton within a decade, which we estimate would reduce U.S. emissions below this year’s levels by more than one-fourth in that time (and by nearly a third below 2005 emissions).

In an online discussion forum hosted by OurEnergyPolicy.org, Rep. Delaney asked for comments on his proposal. Below, we group and summarize those comments. [Read more…]

Even in ecologically-minded Washington and Oregon, states where voters want government action on climate change, a divide among environmentalists threatens to undermine progress on the issue. A Carbon Washington ballot initiative to create a statewide carbon tax is gaining momentum, as we wrote last month. Yet several environmental groups are attacking the proposal as politically infeasible and socially regressive.

Instead, state and regional groups like Climate Solutions and the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy are pushing “clean” fuels standards. Their proposal, patterned on regulations in California and British Columbia, would mandate a mere 10% drop in the carbon intensity of transportation fuels over 10 years ― a small fraction of the deep reductions needed.

Their course is difficult to fathom. Carbon taxes would cut emissions more and cost less than clean fuels regulations. And dividing environmentalists in order to pursue a lesser policy makes no sense strategically. Here are three reasons why a clean fuels standard doesn’t stack up:

1. Clean fuels standards won’t be effective

A model used by the Washington State Department of Commerce allows us to compare projected emissions reductions from the clean fuels standard with the carbon tax proposed by Carbon Washington in a measure known as I-732. (The tax would start at $10/ton of CO2, rise to $25 in year two, then increase 3.5% annually plus inflation.)

The 10% clean fuels standard would lower overall Washington CO2 emissions only 4% by 2040, not even a quarter as much as the 18% reduction projected from the I-732 carbon tax.

The reason is simple: a clean fuels standard only attacks emissions from the supply side of one sector, albeit an important one, transportation. In contrast, a carbon tax works across the entire economy, influencing every carbon-related decision about both supply and demand in every sector ― manufacturing, heating, electricity, etc. This means that, while a clean fuels standard only affects the carbon content of liquid fuels, a carbon tax also incentivizes less fuel usage, period. This transforms economies, cutting pollution and congestion through a vast array of actions encompassing urban density, freight logistics, walking, cycling, transit, and more mindful decision making.

In short, the difference in emissions between a carbon tax and a clean fuels standard is the difference between a society that takes current levels of automobile dependence as a given, and one that seeks to support a myriad of ways to transition to something different.

2. Clean fuels standards are more expensive

The Oregon Environmental Council writes:

The Clean Fuels Program costs the state virtually nothing. The burden of responsibility for reducing pollution is placed on the oil industry.

This conspicuously ignores how the oil industry passes down its costs of compliance to consumers in the form of higher prices. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has said gas prices will rise between 4 and 19 cents per gallon. An industry lobby group, the Western States Petroleum Association, is garnering support to repeal clean fuels by highlighting this not-so-hidden price increase.

Consumers aren’t stupid, they generally realize more regulations mean higher prices. A carbon tax raises fossil fuel prices too, of course ― that’s the point; but the revenue it generates can be disbursed to consumers as income or sales tax cuts, or via a straight-up “dividend” check, as Oregon Climate has proposed. [Read more…]