If you believe that the best policy for cutting U.S. carbon emissions — and the easiest political sell — is “cap-and-dividend,” you’re loving a NY Times op-ed keyed to a bill being introduced today by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).

Van Hollen’s Healthy Climate and Family Security Act of 2014 would (i) create a permit system covering CO2 emissions for all fossil fuels extracted or brought into the U.S., (ii) auction off permits equaling U.S. emissions in 2005, (iii) ratchet down the number of permits by 80% by 2050, and (iv) distribute all of the proceeds “to the American people as equal dividends for every woman, man and child,” according to the op-ed, entitled The Carbon Dividend.

CTC finds that a 100% carbon-dividend will improve finances for 65% of U.S. households, not for 80%.

A bill structured like that is fairly ambitious, and it’s good to see it submitted to Congress alongside the McDermott Managed Carbon Price Act of 2014 introduced two months ago on May 28. (Our write-up of the McDermott bill is here.) And the Times op-ed, by U-Mass economics professor James Boyce, is written with unusual grace and persuasiveness, especially at the start:

From the scorched earth of climate debates a bold idea is rising — one that just might succeed in breaking the nation’s current political impasse on reducing carbon emissions. That’s because it would bring tangible gains for American families here and now.

A major obstacle to climate policy in the United States has been the perception that the government is telling us how to live today in the name of those who will live tomorrow. Present-day pain for future gain is never an easy sell. And many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that smells like bigger government.

What if we could find a way to put more money in the pockets of families and less carbon in the atmosphere without expanding government? If the combination sounds too good to be true, read on.

That’s terrific writing, and smartly keyed to the compelling theme that climate policy need not be sacrificial or a greased path to so-called big government. [Read more…]

A revenue-neutral carbon tax, in which all tax revenue would be returned to the public as a rebate check [“dividend”], receives 56% support. The largest gains in support [relative to opinion on a carbon tax w/o revenue mention] come from Republicans.

Conventional wisdom holds that a carbon tax is a political non-starter. However, results from the latest version of the National Surveys on Energy and Environment (NSEE) provide evidence of substantial public support for a tax on the carbon content of different fossil fuels when specific uses of tax revenue are attached. A majority of respondents support a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and an even larger majority support a carbon tax with revenues used to fund research and development for renewable energy programs. The carbon tax coupled with renewable energy research earns majority support across all political categories, including a narrow majority of Republicans. These findings generally confirm previous NSEE results when revenue use options are linked to carbon taxation. These are among the latest findings from the Spring 2014 NSEE [National Survey on Energy and Environment] from the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan and the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. (Click here for source; emphases added.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — Public Views on a Carbon Tax Depend on the Proposed Use of Revenue, from the National Surveys on Energy and Environment (NSEE) / Press Release /July 21, 2014
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Over the Fourth of July holiday, Lorna Salzman forwarded me half-a-dozen emails about “global carbon budgets” that had been posted to an informal list-serve of U.S. and U.K. climate advotes. Lorna and I have been friends and colleagues since 1974; she may have been the first person to take seriously my interest in carbon taxing, circa 2003, and her encouragement had a lot to do with my starting the Carbon Tax Center several years later and more recently to my ramping up my involvement in CTC. This morning I posted the following response.

I have four points:

1. I’m flat-out befuddled by the interest from some in this group in “carbon budgets,” whether national, global or whatnot. I think they’re a dead end politically as well as a dodge scientifically.

The author, 40 miles from his lower-Manhattan home (2012 photo).

Why a dead end? Because nations cannot and will not agree on who should be allowed to consume and emit how much carbon pollution. Because devilish “details” like offshoring will inevitably confound any negotiations. Ditto, population growth, which will require continual dynamic adjustments to national shares.

Why a dodge? Because every link in the emissions-to-catastrophe chain is riven with uncertainty. We don’t know with great precision what level of emissions will lead to any level of warming. We don’t know what level of warming will be catastrophic. There isn’t even agreement on what “catastrophe” is.

What we can agree on is that (i) any feasible level of emission reduction is insufficient, and (ii) deeper reductions are better than shallow ones. These facts are irreconcilable with carbon budgets.

2. A carbon tax must be at the center of any effective policy to rein in emissions. It’s folly to think that regulations (even enlightened ones) and/or clean-energy subsidies (even efficient ones) and/or public-sector mobilization such as by the Allies to win World War II can ever push back comprehensively against the massive tide of cheap fossil fuels (that is: cheap sans a price for their climate damage). [Read more…]

Washington is still abuzz with the surprise defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in this week’s Virginia Republican primaries. We asked former U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Rob Shapiro to comment. Rob, the co-founder and chairman of Sonecon, LLC, an advisory firm that analyzes changing national and world economic and political conditions and their relationship to government policies, is a member of CTC’s board of directors. — C.K.

Rep. Eric Cantor addressing the 2013 Conservative Political Action Committee. Photo: Gage Skidmore

Following Eric Cantor’s unceremonious primary loss, a carbon-tax climate program remains hostage to the divisions cracking apart the Republican Party. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, who represents Bakersfield and the southernmost part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, almost certainly will succeed Cantor as House Majority Leader, with no discernible difference in the GOP’s stance on climate or anything else.

Some pundits insist that Cantor’s defeat will make establishment Republicans more sensitive to Tea Party activists. But apart from raising the debt ceiling to avoid an economically (and politically) catastrophic debt default, when have the GOP’s traditionalists stood up to their ideological fringe on any significant issue? With even once-stalwart Republican supporters of climate reform sidling towards the caucus of climate-change-deniers, serious reforms that require Congress’ approval will attract little if any support from any Republican. [Read more…]