A headline like “Why Carbon Pricing Isn’t Working” isn’t the kind of news carbon tax advocates like to see. But Jeffrey Ball, writing in the July/August Foreign Affairs, has a point:

[E]xisting carbon-pricing schemes tend to squeeze only certain sectors of the economy, leaving others essentially free to pollute. And even in those sectors in which carbon pricing might have a significant effect, policymakers have lacked the spine to impose a high enough price. The result is that a policy prescription widely billed as a panacea is acting as a narcotic. It’s giving politicians and the public the warm feeling that they’re fighting climate change even as the problem continues to grow. (emphasis added)

To be clear, Ball, a scholar-in-residence at Stanford and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, likes and wants carbon pricing. His quarrel isn’t with the concept but with the political execution — or lack of it:

If governments proved willing to impose carbon prices that were sufficiently high and affected a broad enough swath of the economy, those prices could make a real environmental difference. But political concerns have kept governments from doing so, resulting in carbon prices that are too low and too narrowly applied to meaningfully curb emissions.

Ball is discussing both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade here. Cap-and-trade regimes have been limited to a few economic sectors — most typically, electricity generation. And the caps set so far have been too high (i.e., loose) to generate the robust carbon prices that can really impact these sectors. Though reforms are in the works in both Europe and the U.S., Ball is rightly skeptical about how far they will go.

I-95, Miami. A robust carbon tax can help un-jam highways while also cutting carbon emissions.

The news for carbon taxes isn’t much better, so far. A commission of economists convened by the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition last year recommended a tax in the $40-80/ton range by 2020. Only six countries — Sweden, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Finland, Norway, and France — have carbon taxes that high, according to the World Bank.

Ball’s alternative is what he calls “more targeted moves,” but his reasoning seems muddled. He argues that politically feasible levels of carbon taxation won’t change how much or which vehicles people drive, but then endorses higher gasoline taxes to motivate those very changes. (For the record, we estimate the price-elasticity of gasoline to be negative -0.35, meaning that the price of gas has to rise by one-third to reduce usage by one-tenth.) He also contends that carbon taxes give builders no incentive to erect energy-efficient buildings, yet there is abundant evidence that buyers and tenants are willing to pay premiums for efficiency-certified properties (see here and here) — a preference that will only grow if energy prices rise.

Ball urges carbon tax proponents to redirect their efforts to more conventional approaches — basically, regulating the bad stuff and subsidizing the good stuff:

[P]ursuing these measures directly offers a politically realistic path to significant environmental benefit. . . . To the extent that the carbon-pricing experiment lets policymakers and the public delude themselves that they are meaningfully addressing global warming, it’s not just ineffectual; it’s counterproductive.

There’s a double standard here, however. The regulations and subsidies that U.S. environmental and climate advocates have won over the years have a mixed record. Production-tax credits and renewable portfolio standards helped jump-start the meteoric rise in wind and solar, but those gains, while impressive, accounted for a mere one-fifth of the 25 percent drop in carbon emissions from U.S. power generation since 2005 (energy efficiency and the rise in fracked gas each accounted for two-fifths). In transportation, cheap gasoline is a key reason that U.S. drivers are burning more gasoline now than a dozen years ago.

Moreover, directing massive subsidies to carbon capture and sequestration — another remedy Ball endorses — doesn’t look much more politically realistic than serious carbon pricing. And as a general proposition, subsidizing alternatives to carbon-burning fuels is at best only half as effective at cutting emissions as raising the prices of those fuels, as CTC demonstrated in its groundbreaking comments to the Senate Finance Committee four years ago.

If arresting global warming were politically easy, we would have done it already. But it’s not, and discounting perhaps the most potent arrow in our quiver when every other alternative is far more limited in scope doesn’t make much sense. Addressing the climate crisis is hard work; we might as well expend that effort on a policy that could actually do the job.

“House Republican will introduce $23 climate fee next week.” That’s the headline of an article today in E&E News reporting that Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a two-term Republican representing Florida’s 26th Congressional District, is finalizing a bill that would impose a carbon-emissions fee on most U.S. fossil fuel-burning sectors and also eliminate or at least pause some federal regulations on climate change.

(Update: The Curbelo bill was introduced on July 23 as H.R. 6463, the Market Choice Act.)

E&E calls Curbelo’s pending bill “a rare effort by a Republican to address global temperature increases by reducing greenhouse gases.” That’s an understatement. To the best of our recollection, the bill would be the first carbon tax proposed by a sitting G.O.P. Congressmember or Senator in roughly a decade.

Any needle-moving from the Curbelo carbon tax would be in the political realm, not in direct emission cuts.

Politically, then, the appearance of Curbelo’s bill will be a big deal. In terms of straight-up carbon reductions, however, the bill is underwhelming. Our quick take from inputting the bill’s key elements into CTC’s carbon-tax spreadsheet model is that in 2020, U.S. CO2 emissions would be 22% below 2005 levels. To put that in perspective, actual U.S. emissions a year ago were 14% less than in 2005; thus, the 2020 bump from the Curbelo bill is at most 8 percentage points — less, actually, given the ongoing decarbonization of our electricity sector. (The Congressman’s draft fact sheet for the bill optimistically pegs the 2020 reduction at 24%.)

By 2032, the emissions drop from 2005 would reach 30% (per Curbelo) or 29% (per our modeling). But seeing as nearly half of that decrease was already in place without a carbon tax in 2017 — a year that is closer to the 2005 base year than to 2032 — the Curbelo proposal has to be seen as fairly thin on actual climate deliverables. Which is what one would expect from a carbon price that barely exceeds $20 per ton (the bill’s $23 starting price is per metric ton) and rises by only 2% a year above general inflation, although the bill contains a provision to ratchet up the increase if reductions fall short of specified targets.

Nevertheless, there’s a bigger picture to consider. Just yesterday we put up a post bemoaning the possibility that the anti-carbon-tax Scalise Resolution would pass, as it did in 2016, without a single Republican dissent. Now it looks like Rep. Curbelo is set to dissent in spades by shattering the decade-long G.O.P. prohibition against sponsoring or endorsing — let alone introducing — a carbon-tax bill.

If any D.C. Republican was going to take such a step, it was likely to be Carlos Curbelo. His 26th CD, extending from southwest Miami to the Everglades and covering the Florida peninsula’s entire southern tip, is a climate ground-zero twice over — sea-level rise plus hurricanes — and a classic swing district (it went blue by double-digits in the last two presidential races). A year after taking his seat in January 2015, Curbelo co-founded the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus with fellow Floridian Ted Deutch, a Democrat representing the 22nd CD. Whether by conscience or calculation or a combination of the two, Curbelo clearly read the handwriting and elected to break ranks with his party’s denialist orthodoxy.

The Curbelo bill itself is full of political calculation, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It would clear the books of the long-standing federal highway excise taxes — 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline, 24.4 cents for diesel. The carbon tax, with its built-in annual increases, would more than make up the difference, though at the cost of a percentage point or two of economy-wide carbon reductions due to the diluting effect of the swap. The Highway Trust Fund would be a big net winner, receiving 70 percent of the entire revenue take. Whether that’s bad or good depends on whether the increased revenue is allocated to highway expansions or “fix-it-first” infrastructure repairs.

G.O.P. carbon-tax trailblazer Carlos Curbelo. Pic credit: Miami Herald.

The bill stands no chance of passage this year, of course, or in almost any imaginable Republican-controlled Congress. Indeed, under the G.O.P.’s Hastert Rule, Rep. Curbelo would need 117 Republican co-sponsors simply to clear the “majority of the majority” threshold and get the bill to the House floor.

If Rep. Curbelo were a Democrat, we would be measuring his bill against Democratic carbon-tax proposals such as Rep. John Larson’s America Wins Act (HR 4209), whose carbon price starts at $49/ton and which devotes $1 trillion to infrastructure (plus transition assistance for coal country and a relatively small “dividend” for households), and which has a few dozen Democratic co-sponsors. And while the Larson bill’s 2%-plus-inflation price increase trajectory has the same slope as Curbelo’s, it operates on a much higher base and thus packs more punch.

But that comparison runs the risk of missing the point: that a “long national nightmare” of Republican silence and inaction on climate may be starting to end. Whether other G.O.P. lawmakers will stand with Curbelo remains to be seen. He is at least blazing a path, and for that he deserves our thanks.

CTC supporter and volunteer Bob Narus contributed research and ideas to this post.

The biennial “Scalise Resolution” condemning carbon taxing is up for a vote in the House this week, according to a report on The Hill news site.

The text of H.Con.Res.119 — “Expressing the sense of Congress that a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy” — may be viewed here. It says, inter alia, that “a carbon tax will fall hardest on the poor, the elderly, and those on fixed incomes,” and that “a carbon tax would reduce America’s global competitiveness.”

The first assertion ignores the possibility of carbon-dividend proposals that would benefit most low-income households by returning more carbon revenues in monthly payouts than they would take away in higher fuel prices. The second ignores the need of U.S. industry to heed the accelerating transformation of global energy markets to low- and no-carbon tech like wind turbines, solar cells and efficient vehicles and appliances.

The resolutions’s other thirteen “whereas’s” are equally vapid, and in fact the Scalise Resolution is just the Republican Party trying to use carbon taxing to beat up Democrats. Nevertheless, the upcoming vote can be seen as a crucial test not just for the Climate Solutions Caucus but for the very idea of a Republican-backed or -assisted carbon tax.

The caucus now has 43 House Republican members. By joining, each took a pledge to “explore policy options that address the impacts, causes, and challenges of our changing climate,” according to the page devoted to the caucus on the Web site of its sponsoring organization, Citizens’ Climate Lobby. It also has 43 Democratic members, per its “Noah’s Ark” approach to climate bipartisanship. We single out Republicans because in 2016, when a similar resolution passed by 237-163, not a single Republican voted No. Sixteen abstained, while six Democrats joined the 231 Republicans to vote in favor.

In the past, House G.O.P. members and their apologists have cited “primary anxiety” — fear of being ousted in a party primary by even harder-right insurgents — as reason to toe their party’s denialist line on virtually anything bearing on climate. But this year’s primaries are now in the rear-view mirror. Any Republican member’s vote against the Scalise Resolution this week would appear to carry no political cost until at least 2020. And by then, climate denial could have become untenable in most House districts, even red ones.

Climate Solutions Caucus member Mark Sanford (R-SC) lost his primary last month. A vote against Scalise could give him a climate “profile in courage.” Pic credit: Getty Images.

Even less peril awaits the ten Republican caucus members whose current term in Congress is their last. Nine have announced their retirement: Bud Shuster (PA), Charlie Dent (PA), Darrell Issa (CA), Dave Reichert (WA), David Trott (MI), Ed Royce (CA), Ilenaa Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Lynn Jenkins (KS), Ryan Costello (PA). A tenth, Mark Sanford (SC) lost his primary last month.

Just a single vote opposing Scalise would end the carbon-tax embargo by which no sitting Republican congressmember or senator has ever endorsed carbon pricing, even just in principle, since 2010. It could signal, in some small way, that at some not-far-off time, a critical mass of Republicans might vote for a carbon tax. Which in turn could validate organizing for revenue-neutral carbon taxing like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s fee-and-dividend proposal.

CCL is rallying its membership to defeat the Scalise Resolution. But my sources say that CCL leadership aren’t focusing their organizing to target Republican caucus-members. That might have been understandable two years ago, when the caucus was in its infancy. But it’s now midway through its third year. It’s fair to demand that Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus to stand up and oppose the Scalise Resolution. If they won’t, why should anyone believe that any Republican will ever stand for a carbon price?

Prominent climate journalists including David Roberts and Kate Aronoff have dismissed the caucus as greenwash for denialists. It may be too much to ask all 43 of its G.O.P. members to form a No bloc on Scalise. But the ten who are retiring at year’s end could take a stand, and perhaps pull in a few Republican holdovers.

As we suggested last month, that could provide political validation for carbon fee-and-dividend and its close cousin, the Climate Leadership Council’s carbon dividends plan. We at CTC aren’t holding our breath. But we’d love to be proven wrong.

July 19 addendum: Four G.O.P. caucus members — Ros-Lehtinen, Fitzpatrick, Love and Curbelo, whose carbon-tax bill is expected to drop next week — voted against the resolution today, as Inside Climate News reported. Two non-caucus Republicans joined them, for a total of six.

Carbon-dividend proponents continue, as ever, to push for national “fee and dividend” legislation. Today the Washington, DC-based Climate Leadership Council announced formation of a lobbying arm, Americans for Carbon Dividends, headlined by former Senate Republican majority leader Trent Lott, former Senator John Breaux (D-LA) and former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen. This follows the news last month that the Climate Solutions Caucus — a project spearheaded by the grassroots Citizens Climate Lobby — has enrolled four new Republican House members, bringing total membership to 78 — 39 R’s and 39 Dem’s (with each new Republican, a Democrat is brought in from a waiting list).

If tenacity trumped reality, CLC and CCL would now be refining their fee-and-dividend proposals into Congressional bills and shepherding them through hearings, markup and, ultimately, legislation. Within a decade of enactment, the money-saving and profit-driven replacement of carbon-belching coal, petroleum and natural gas by low- and zero-carbon fuels, technologies and cultural norms would have pushed U.S. carbon emissions 27 percent below current levels and 36 percent below 2005, the standard baseline year in climate analysis, easily fulfilling our country’s Paris climate pledge. (Figures are based on our modeling of U.S. energy, assuming CLC’s recommended starting CO2 price of $40 per ton, followed by annual rate increases of $5/ton; details here.)

So much for the premise of bipartisanship built into the political strategy for carbon fee-and-dividend.

Alas, reality doesn’t bend so easily. Especially when it comes in the guise of a Congress ruled by, as it is often said, Earth’s only major political party (among democratically run countries) that has sworn itself to disbelieve in human-caused climate change and to disavow the necessity or possibility of public policy to combat it. At this writing, 17 months into the Trump administration and 28 months since the Climate Solutions Caucus was founded, not a single Republican member has uttered a word of support for carbon fee-and-dividend legislation, much less written or co-sponsored a CFD-themed bill — even though, from the outset, the political strategy behind CFD has been built on bipartisanship.

By the same token, the impressive list of Republican luminaries standing with CLC/ACD consists entirely of former office-holders: former Sen. Lott, former Reagan and Bush-41 cabinet secretaries James Baker and George Shultz (the latter’s cabinet service actually extends back to the Nixon presidency), and others whose glittering credentials are shown on the CLC and ACD web sites.

This isn’t meant to disparage these organizations or individuals (excepting current GOP office-holders). We have written glowingly of the fee and dividend concept for a decade, including last year in articles in The Nation and the Washington Spectator. Both pieces praised the Climate Leadership Council’s advocacy, as have our numerous blogs (here, here, and here, inter alia). We were honored to gain George Shultz’s signature on our 2015 Call to Paris Climate Negotiators: Tax Carbon, and are stirred that, in his 98th year, Secretary Shultz continues to devote himself to climate sustainability on behalf of both CLC and Citizens Climate Lobby. We have also worked closely with CCL since its formation in 2009, fielding hundreds of queries from CCL activists on tax incidence, energy modeling and other “technical” matters and gratefully accepting financial contributions from CCL members as well.

So it’s with a measure of sadness that we share here our sense that the time for carbon dividend proposals has probably passed. The center to which Baker-Shultz (CLC) and fee-and-dividend (CCL) were designed to appeal barely exists. It’s not just that no sitting Republican has endorsed Baker-Shultz or indeed fee-and-dividend in any form. It’s also that the Democratic majority that will be needed to pass a carbon tax bill appears unlikely to rally around a revenue-neutral carbon tax, whether it’s organized as fee-and-dividend or some form of tax swap.

To be sure, the Democratic majority’s carbon tax — if and when there is one — may include a degree of “dividending,” but only of a portion of the revenues. That’s because a Democratic carbon tax bill will also insist on directly investing much of the carbon revenues: in renewables, energy-efficiency, mass transit, worker resettlement and retraining, and damage mitigation — rather than relying on the price pull from the tax. (A textbook example of such a “just transition” bill is the state carbon tax proposal developed by NY Renews, the energetic left-leaning grassroots coalition in New York State.)

There’s nothing wrong with that, provided such a carbon tax can pass and that its tax level rises quickly enough over time to overcome the lesser price-sensitivities (“elasticities”) that govern driving, freight, air travel and the like, which make it harder for carbon-pricing to drive down emissions in the economy’s non-electric sectors. But of course a good deal of the intended appeal of carbon dividend plans was that households, with politicians following in their wake, might support raising the carbon tax because the size of their dividend checks would rise in tandem. Diluting the dividends weakens the appeal.

And revenue-neutrality isn’t the only flashpoint lurking in the CLC-ACD proposal. Another element of the deal — one that has won a measure of oil-industry support — would immunize fossil fuel companies against litigation seeking to hold them accountable for climate damage caused by their products. Earlier today, a leading strategist and backer of such litigation, Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund, told the NY Times that “We categorically oppose any deal that shoves trillions in costs down the throats of innocent taxpayers and lets the companies skip away to profit and deceive another day.”

While sentiments like Wasserman’s help rouse the climate base, they don’t point to a policy solution. Like the polar icecaps themselves, the center that would support a revenue-neutral carbon tax or other carbon-tax-based “grand bargain” continues to shrink. As the horrors of the Trump administration and its Congressional Republican enablers continue to mount, there’s no apparent middle ground, whether in climate and carbon-taxing or in any consequential policy-making.

We can commend the ACD initiative — which former Senators Lott and Breaux have detailed in a New York Times op-ed — while bemoaning its lack of political currency. The political struggle to contain climate change has moved to the courts and to the state and local levels. If and when a semblance of sanity returns to Congress and the White House, that state and local mobilization will be critical to enacting the carbon tax and complementary policies necessary to achieve deep cuts in emissions.

Note: A month after we published this post, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), introduced a carbon-tax bill — the first from a Republican member of Congress in a decade — as we reported here.

The rifts over carbon pricing that have engulfed the climate movement in recent years and helped sink the 2016 Washington state carbon tax referendum softened noticeably at a public forum in New York’s Westchester County on Monday evening. Lines of convergence outweighed points of contention, perhaps signaling that proponents of transparent and robust carbon pricing can surmount our ideological differences and move forward together.

The forum, Carbon Tax: Solution to the Climate Crisis, was organized by local climate activist Andrew Ratzkin and held at Pace Law School, whose affiliate, the Pace Energy and Climate Center, has for decades been a bulwark of policy and legal analysis for energy efficiency, renewable energy and environmental taxation. While the four panelists — I was one — hale from different disciplines and generations, we were conversant with climate science, economics and organizing and respectful of each other’s endeavors.

The younger panelists, Dan Sherrell and Shiva Prakash, outlined the ambitious New York State carbon tax proposal developed by NY Renews that has attracted wide support — with sign-on from 143 organizations — through its pledges to apply the carbon revenues to protect low-income families, invest in sustainable energy technology, help workers transit out of fossil-fuel jobs, and remediate “front-line” communities disproportionately damaged by fossil fuel processing and combustion.

While there’s room to question whether spreading the revenues so broadly can achieve all four objectives, NY Renews rests its optimistic projections — which include, by 2030, a halving of New York CO2 emissions and creation of 150,000 net new jobs — on a detailed study by the U-Mass Political Economy Research Institute. The group also formulated its carbon-tax proposal through extensive consultation with advocates from labor, environment, low-income and environmental-justice communities — a far more holistic process than Carbon Washington followed in fashioning its doomed I-732 referendum, and one that should augur well for the eventual legislative effort.

You may have noticed that my description led with the proposed use of the revenues, not the level of the tax. One reason is that the carbon tax amount in any state proposal tends to be constrained by “leakage” concerns over cross-border business flight as well as the political difficulty of getting too far out front of neighboring states; for the record, the NY Renews carbon tax would start at $35 per ton of CO2 and increase indefinitely at 5 percent a year.

The other, weightier reason for emphasizing revenue use is that it has become the boulder on which carbon tax advocacy has splintered. Revenue-investment proponents like NY Renews, who tend toward the political left, want the carbon revenues applied to the “Green New Deal” elements outlined above (and shown in the graphic below) which collectively constitute what they call “the just transition” from coal, oil and gas to renewables.

An opposing revenue-neutral camp tends to be less overtly political, as exemplified by Citizens Climate Lobby, whose 60,000 national members insist on equal return of carbon “dividends” to households as a way of skirting left vs. right fights and building constituencies of support for raising the carbon tax or fee level (since the dividend checks rise at the same rate). The revenue-neutral camp also places greater trust in the ability of the carbon-price signal to motivate pervasive changes in investment, behavior, technology and societal values that will effectuate the flight from fossil fuels, whereas revenue-investors tend to disdain “market forces” and to eye carbon taxes primarily as a revenue source to pay for socially driven and governed wind, solar, weatherization, public transit and electrification.

While these categories are a gross simplification, a synthesis of sorts appeared to come into view on Pace at Monday, along these lines:

• Taxing carbon emissions is so essential AND politically difficult that establishing a U.S. beachhead is more important than demanding a perfect version.
• The impossibility of enacting a carbon tax at the federal level till at least 2021 leaves states as the locus for that beachhead for several years or more.
• Several factors render revenue-neutrality less imperative in state than federal carbon-taxing:
  • The lower tax rates in most state proposals imply lesser need to dedicate revenues to dividends or other income-support;
  • Greater political and cultural cohesion within states allows tailoring carbon-revenue investment to be more politically palatable;
  • Greater role of coalition politics makes some revenue investment necessary to pass state legislation.

While it’s possible or even likely that initial state carbon taxes that are heavy on revenue investment might repel red-state members of Congress as “Christmas-tree” packages, that specter seems less salient than the need to get some carbon-tax boots on the ground — not to mention the need to overturn the G.O.P. majorities and shrink climate-denialist representation in Congress, period.

NY Renews’ proposed state carbon tax allocations.

These bullet points sharpen somewhat the long-established position of the Carbon Tax Center to support virtually any carbon tax formulation that doesn’t demonstrably worsen economic inequality. Still problematic for CTC, however, is the insistence of many revenue-investment adherents that their Just Transition include substantial allocations — as much as one-third, in the NY Renews proposal — to offset and remediate disproportionate fossil-fuel impacts on front-line communities.

Our position, which co-panelist Michael Gerrard also voiced, is that the fastest and surest way to reduce and eliminate those environmental injustices is to enact and ramp up the highest carbon tax that’s politically imaginable. Both Michael and CTC premise this on our conviction that the price signal itself is the salient policy tool within the carbon tax, and that a robust carbon charge will create powerful and ultimately irresistible incentives to reduce and eliminate fossil fuel use — and, thus, emissions and other impacts — across-the-board, not just in selected (wealthy and white) communities. It follows, then, that all communities, including but not limited to environmental-justice communities, will be better protected from both climate damage and “traditional” environmental insults if carbon tax proposals are free from what some lawmakers may consider special dispensations and can be legislated as high as possible.

We at CTC took a first stab at articulating this position in a 2016 blog post. We hope to elaborate on it soon and to elicit responses from NY Renews and other climate activists who carry the environmental-justice carbon-tax banner.

America is anti-urban. This is not a feeling or a passing fancy but a fact. While the House adheres to the principle of one person-one vote, more or less, the Senate is a horror show of anti-democracy. Thanks to the principle of equal state representation, it gives the three percent of the population that live in the ten smallest states the same number of senators as the 54 percent that live in the ten largest. The Electoral College triples the clout of Wyoming, Vermont, and other under-populated states in presidential elections while Article V — the constitutional clause that says that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must approve any amendment — allows thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population to wield an absolute constitutional veto. In case you were wondering, this, in a nutshell, is why an eighteenth-century relic like the Second Amendment will never, ever go away.

But because the least populous states are the least urban for the most part, the result is a profound structural bias in favor of acres over people. And since American politics are also fragmented and de-ideologized, the effect is not only to short-change urban interests but to confuse and obscure them so that Americans no longer recognize what those interests really are.

Here are two examples of how US-style structural anti-urbanism plays out. One involves pot. The other involves carbon.

Although you wouldn’t know it, thanks to a near-century of Washington scare tactics, smokeable marijuana is one of the world’s most benign inebriants. As Lynn Zimmer, a sociologist at Queens College, and John P. Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of New York, showed twenty years ago in “Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts,” large-scale studies of users have “generally supported the idea that marijuana was a relatively safe drug — not totally free from potential harm, but unlikely to create serious harm for most individual users or society.” Contrary to anti-drug alarmists, pot does not harm reproduction or fetal development, it does not damage brain cells, and it does not cause “significant reduction in any pulmonary functions,” most likely because regular users consume at most three to five joints per day versus the ten to forty cigarettes consumed by a typical smoker. Marijuana also does not inexorably lead to an “amotivational syndrome,” which is to say stone-style listlessness, according to Zimmer and Morgan, and it is not a “gateway” to harder drugs either.

So legalization is an attractive alternative for all those seeking to make America a healthier, happier, and — dare we say it? — mellower place. But it is especially attractive from an urban point of view simply because depressed inner cities are where many of the drug war’s social costs are concentrated. Black users are nearly four times as likely to be arrested as whites according to the ACLU, while poor people in general are disproportionately penalized. In New York City’s twenty wealthiest neighborhoods (average family income: $75,000 per year), the arrest rate in 2014 for marijuana possession was just 39 per 100,000; in its twenty poorest (average family income: $34,000), the arrest rate was 498, nearly thirteen times greater.

Thus, support for marijuana legalization should be strongest among minorities and the poor and the politicians they elect. And it would be if America were more democratic. But given its present anti-urban structure — which, by the way, is worsening as the interior continues to lose ground to burgeoning coastal communities — strange anomalies appear.

One is in New Jersey, where Democratic Governor Phil Murphy was elected last fall on a pro-legalization platform. But since Murphy took office in January, replacing the disgraced Chris Christie, marijuana reform has run into a buzz saw of opposition. The resistance comes not only from skittish suburbanites, but, strikingly, from the state legislature’s black caucus. At a recent public hearing in hard-pressed Jersey City, opposition ran so high that a supporter described it as a case of “reefer madness.”

“It will devastate the African-American community,” a Newark religious leader proclaimed. “It will devastate any chance of our children having a future.” Added an ex-Newark public defender named David Evans: “Is legalization going to improve the spiritual health of the people of New Jersey? I don’t think so.”

NJ State Sen. Ronald L. Rice questions legal marijuana’s impact on Newark and other urban communities. AP Photo by Julio Cortez.

But it would improve spiritual health for the simple reason that nothing raises morale more than the knowledge that one will not spend years in prison for the crime of puffing on a harmless weed. Critics do have half a point in the sense that no social policy is cost-free and that inner cities are justified in assuming that they will once again be saddled with a disproportionate burden. As State Senator Ronald Rice, an ex-Marine and ex-Newark police detective who chairs the NJ legislative black caucus, told The New York Times: “[I]t’s being sold on the backs of black folk and brown people. It’s clear there is big, big money pushing special interests to sell this to our communities.”

All too true. But what critics evidently don’t realize — what an inequitable power structure prevents them from realizing — is that, all things considered, inner-city communities will still be better off if non-punitive policies are adopted and the individual is left alone to decide what substances to ingest and what not to. And that’s true even if marijuana reform is revenue-neutral, that is, if it simply legalizes sale and use without dedicating cannabis tax revenues to communities hollowed out by the drug war and mass incarceration. Even a half-good reform is better than nothing.

And now onto the second issue: carbon. The arguments in favor of carbon taxes are every bit as overwhelming as those in favor of marijuana legalization. They discourage carbon-dioxide emissions that are the prime cause of global warming, they encourage a switch from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, and, by de-incentivizing driving, they help thin out the chronic traffic congestion that paralyzes the country’s major metropolitan areas.

But what’s often overlooked is the effect not just on traffic or climate, but on America’s much-abused urban centers. To the degree carbon taxing discourages driving, it encourages a shift to mass transit, which, by its very nature, tends to feed into densely-populated cities. Moreover, mass transit doesn’t just funnel people into such nodes — it funnels economic activity and jobs. To the degree that taxing carbon encourages energy to be used more efficiently, it encourages a switch from cars and trucks to biking, walking, and rail, all of which are more compatible with high urban densities. By altering the incentives, taxing carbon emissions applies the brake to powerful centrifugal forces that have spun employment off into ever more distant exurbs, replacing them with centripetal forces returning them to the old urban cores and central business districtss.

Carbon taxes won’t do this all at once, needless to say, but they will at least start the process moving. This is good news for a lot of people, but especially for urban job seekers who can’t afford a car and can’t pursue job opportunities ever farther out in the suburbs because of racial barriers expressly designed to keep them away. Instead of their going to the jobs, the jobs will go to them.

Given all that, one would expect environmental progressives to clamor for ever more carbon taxes — the bigger the better. But anomalies arise yet again. When the state of Washington decided to submit a modest carbon tax to a referendum in 2016, “progressives” led by DC-based Food and Water Watch countered that the tax was regressive, that “people drive because they have to, not because they want to,” and that “[i]ncreasing gasoline prices only means that struggling families will have to cut back on other expenses to fill up their cars at the pump.” Opposition by such “social justice” groups was one reason that the tax, a US first, went down in defeat by a margin of nearly 3 to 2.

From searing words like these (from “Carbon Pricing: A Critical Perspective,” by the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Climate Justice Alliance), one wouldn’t know that carbon taxing can benefit frontline communities disproportionately.

Like critics of marijuana legalization, however, “progressives” had no more than half a point. Boosting gas prices will negatively affect the working poor, which is why any proper carbon tax should include mitigations in the form of reimbursement, which the Washington referendum provided in spades, or promises to invest revenues in job-creating infrastructure projects. But the idea that “people drive because they have to” is nonsense. Driving is not inelastic. As prices rise, motorists cut back on discretionary driving or search for alternate means of going from here to there. The job of progressives is to demand that government provide such means and that it use its economic power to mold development in a way that is more cost-effective for working people, more environmentally benign, and more economically productive. Progressives also need to stop rejecting widespread evidence that “internalizing” climate damage-costs into the prices of coal, oil and gas instills powerful incentives to move off of fossil fuels, even when government investment lags behind.

The present transportation system meanwhile works less well for more and more people. By 2016, the average American was spending a hundred hours more each year in a car than in 1980, the equivalent of two and a half work weeks. Rush-hour speeds are declining according to a study by Texas A&M University, meaning that commuters are spending more time going less far. By 2012, the average car on the road was more than a year older than in 2007 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the cost of repairs, upkeep, and replacements was up as well. The duration of an average car loan has risen thirteen percent since 2009 while delinquent loans since 2012 have nearly doubled. The typical motorist is stressed sitting in traffic and stressed when struggling each month to pay off his or her loan.

As bad as this is, conditions are even worse for those who can’t afford a car and must therefore spend hours a day traveling by bus to ever more distant work places and then make their way across dangerous highways when they get back home. People like this are stranded in a hostile, highway-bound wilderness, forced to fork over large amounts of cash for a taxi or Uber whenever they want to go to a supermarket, an emergency room, or church.

The system is no less dysfunctional than America’s endless drug wars. Yet an increasingly undemocratic and anti-urban structure not only prevents Americans from acting effectively to fix it, it prevents them from even thinking about how to address a growing list of problems in a constructive way. Politics have broken down, trench warfare has engulfed Capitol Hill, and the showdown between the intelligence community and the White House grows ever more ominous. Is this how the captain of the Titanic felt when he suddenly noticed a mountain of ice looming before him?

Daniel Lazare, author of “The Frozen Republic: How The Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy” and “America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It,” among other books, is an occasional contributor to the Carbon Tax Center blog.

Everyone’s 2017 was eventful . . . and disruptive . . . and difficult.

From January into April, we, like many of you, marched and protested while trying to see a way forward for carbon taxes under a denialist U.S. regime.

We didn’t write this headline, but we agreed with it. The Left’s opposition to the WA carbon tax was a grievous mistake.

We spoke at gatherings across New York City. We published an article in The Nation magazine decrying left-green dogmatism that doomed the campaign in Washington state to enact the USA’s first carbon tax. We allied ourselves with the Climate Leadership Council’s audacious Republican-branded carbon tax proposal. We published a 120-page guide to state carbon tax prospects compiled by Yoram Bauman, the economist-activist who spearheaded the Washington referendum.

By then we were 100 days into a new administration whose cruelty and heedlessness were sickening. At a climate march in New Jersey, we called the complicit U.S. Republican Party “a racket to restore patriarchy, extractionism and white supremacy.” This truth grew even sharper a month later when Congressional Republicans cheered Trump’s repudiation of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Outputs from CTC’s carbon-tax model: download and use!

We kept working. We retooled CTC’s carbon tax spreadsheet model, incorporating the latest data, snazzing up the user interface and graphics, and for the first time apportioning refinery emissions among their “downstream” sectors — driving, freight and air travel (jet fuel). With this change and the ongoing shrinkage in coal-fired power generation, driving is gaining on electricity for the dubious distinction of most climate-damaging U.S. sector.

Meanwhile, a campaign for congestion pricing in New York City — fees charged to vehicles driven into and within gridlocked city centers — was gathering steam amid meltdowns in the city’s mass transit system, worsening traffic gridlock, and a void of political leadership. When Gotham’s SUV- and helicopter-riding mayor crowned himself leader of state-and-local-government resistance to the White House, we upbraided him on live radio, setting off a media frenzy that continues today.

Our radio call-in touched off a roiling debate about the gap between public postures and personal acts.

But our criticism went beyond tabloid fodder; it pointed to the persistent gap between public postures and personal acts — a breach that carbon taxes could help repair.

Our pivot from national carbon tax campaigning accelerated in August, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo unexpectedly announced his support for congestion pricing. Shortly after, the analytics team advising the governor reached out to me: Would I help them deploy my monster congestion pricing model to score different congestion pricing plans?

Of course I said yes and plunged into massive updating and retooling of the model, which continues as I write this post. Details of the governor’s proposal are expected in a few days and the public debate and legislative donnybrook will almost certainly extend for several months. The fight is important, not just for the sustainability of New York and other global cities, as I argued last week on Streetsblog, but to finally establish in the USA the principle at the heart of carbon taxing: that the most surefire and equitable way to reduce pollution is to make polluters pay for it. [Addendum: The details can be found in my January Streetsblog post, The Fix NYC Congestion Pricing Plan Looks Solid — If Cuomo Aims High, which includes a link to the governor’s panel’s report.]

CTC’s program for 2018

At the national level, the main event by far for carbon taxing this year is to bring an end to Republican climate denialism. This could mean routing the GOP in the midterms, or some other path to repudiating the party’s nearly monolithic rejection of science-based climate policy and its all-out embrace of fossil fuels. It may also require, in the states, dismantling the gerrymandering that, combined with Democrats’ “clustering” in urban precincts, entrenches Republicans’ control of Congress far beyond their share of Americans’ votes.

I’m sorry to say that the notion of a bipartisan federal carbon tax is barely on life-support, as we wrote here last week, decrying the passivity of the Climate Solutions Caucus — the Noah’s Ark-like conclave that we formerly touted as a possible incubator for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Nevertheless, CTC will continue our technical support and policy advice to members of Citizens Climate Lobby and to the Climate Leadership Council. But we harbor no illusions that current Republican officeholders will provide political leadership or even partnership for meaningful carbon pricing legislation.

Excerpt from “Results” section of our “BTA” spreadsheet model. A key goal for early 2018: A congestion pricing win for NYC that establishes the “polluter pays” principle in the USA.

There’s a corollary: it may be time to rethink revenue-neutral carbon taxes. As much as we love carbon fee-and-dividend, with its powerful logic of linking rising carbon taxes to rising “green checks,” the revulsion against Trump and the G.O.P. could make it harder to sell progressives on programs with a seemingly middle-of-the-road cast. We also can’t dismiss arguments by Frank Ackerman and others that the “fat tail” of climate worst-cases demands national mobilization on a scale that only government action can generate.

Along with political action and some soul-searching, CTC is primed this year to

• Monitor and parse actual carbon emission reductions in states, sectors and countries with carbon pricing, including the 9 RGGI states;
• Assess and fact-check claims of economies decarbonizing without carbon pricing;
• Expand our networking with state and national carbon tax advocates in the U.S. and overseas;
• Seek common ground on carbon taxing with environmental and climate justice advocates;
• Explore alliances with progressives working to meld carbon pricing with “mobilization” strategies;
• Seek out Republicans-conservatives who have genuine interest in non-token carbon taxes;
• Gain a better understanding of the possibilities and limits in fossil fuel divestment and litigation campaigns;
• Continue improving and disseminating our carbon tax spreadsheet model;
• Restock CTC’s Web site;
• Keep writing op-eds and magazine pieces promoting carbon taxes;
• Use our blog to post commentary on unfolding political developments, policy proposals and energy trends.

As we head into the new year, we thank you for your past support and your partnership. Contributions to support our work in 2108 (please use this link) will, as always, play a valuable role in keeping CTC edgy, timely and forward-focused.

33 to 28. It may look like a football score, but it’s actually the downsizing of the Republican side of the Climate Solutions Caucus.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA-49) this morning announced he’s not seeking an eleventh term representing northern coastal areas of San Diego County in Congress. He joins departing GOP caucus members Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-27), Dave Reichert (R-WA-08), Ed Royce (R-CA-39) and Pat Tiberi (R-OH-12).

Unless new members are recruited from current House ranks, the caucus’s roster of Republican members is set to fall from its current 33 to 28 by year’s end. The pending 15 percent shrinkage surpasses the overall 9 percent retirement rate among Republican House members this year. (We count 21 of 240 House R’s leaving, excluding a dozen or so moving or aspiring to higher office, based on Ballotpedia.) GOP Caucus members disproportionately represent swing districts, like Issa’s, possibly explaining the difference.

The Noah’s Ark-like conclave — Republican and Democratic Congressmembers enter as pairs, with Republicans the limiting factor — was founded in Jan. 2016 to provide a safe space and political cover for timorous Republicans to act on climate change. To date it’s been mostly cover and little action.

None of the Republican members have uttered a word in favor of carbon taxing, even the intendedly Republican-friendly “fee and dividend” espoused by the caucus’s catalyst, Citizens Climate Lobby, or the carbon dividend proposal devised by the Climate Leadership Council and advanced by Republican elders. Since Trump took office, moreover, none has fought legislation or deregulation enabling the administration’s fossil fuel juggernaut, save for squelching language in the National Defense Authorization Act that would have barred the Pentagon from analyzing climate threats to U.S. military installations.

It may seem incongruous that Issa, whose lifelong loathsomeness (full details at Wiki) has run the gamut from petty thievery and dangerous driving to obsessive Obama-bashing, not to mention amassing riches from his blaring, motion-detecting “Viper” car alarm, would have joined the Climate Solutions Caucus. There is no entrance criterion, however. That can be viewed as either a bug, enabling joiners to rack up green cred at no cost, or a feature, helping Republicans who might be seeking to exit the cult of climate denialism incubate pro-climate words and, eventually, deeds.

Both perspectives got a hearing in a feature article on the caucus last week in E&E News, A bunch of House Republicans accept warming. Is it real? Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune spoke for the first group, rhetorically asking, “[W]e are supposed to jump up and down and spew happy talk because now there’s a safe space for people to talk about climate change? Forgive me if I’m not happy.” Others quoted in the story, such as Emily Wirzba of Friends Committee on National Legislation, cited the need to rest climate policy on a bipartisan base, saying “The policy will be stronger even if Democrats take control of Congress, you know you’ll have Republicans that support climate policy.”

Defenders of the caucus also point to victories like inclusion of renewable energy credits (RECs) in the Tax Extender Act of 2017 (S-2256), pleas by Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA-6) and other caucus members to bar oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters or the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and a vote by 11 caucus Republicans that ultimately led the Senate to protect the Bureau of Land Management’s natural gas waste rule to prevent methane venting/flaring. Measured against the full dimensions of the climate crisis, however, these appear little more than baby steps. And measured against Trump’s drumbeat of deregulatory and verbal assaults on climate protection and policy, like his dizzying attack of falsehoods today on the Paris climate agreement, the positive moves by GOP caucus members pale even further.

Nevertheless, Issa and the caucus’s other lame-duck Republican members have a rare opportunity: a full year still in office to speak their minds on climate (or other issues) without fear of being primaried by unabashedly denialist insurgents. They could push back against Trump’s climate lies and call on their party to assume its Rooseveltian mantle of environmental stewardship. In doing so, they could set a standard for their 28 Republican colleagues who hope to keep their seats and, by their caucus membership, have ostensibly committed themselves to pursuing climate solutions.

Let’s hope they do. Otherwise, it becomes even harder to rebut the argument that the path to a better and safer world requires a Democratic sweep of the House, including Republican caucus members, in this year’s midterms.

Could Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s declaration in August that congestion pricing for New York City “is an idea whose time has come” bring needed momentum to carbon taxing?

A strong thread connects congestion pricing and carbon taxes. Just as limited street space in New York warrants a congestion fee, the atmosphere’s limited capacity to absorb carbon necessitates a carbon emissions fee.

Congestion pricing levies fees on vehicle travel into or within the core of a city. Singapore, London and Stockholm have deployed such fees for decades to discourage unnecessary traffic and raise revenue to improve transit and road infrastructure.

I’ve been quantifying the benefits of congestion pricing for New York City city and mobilizing public support for well over a decade. The campaign I’m allied with, called Move NY, proposes tolling car and truck traffic into Manhattan’s central business district, surcharging yellow cabs and Ubers circulating within the CBD, and lowering tolls on outlying bridges that have been used as cash cows to fund transit.

The governor controls the city’s mass transit, and political tradition dictates that congestion pricing legislation must run through Albany. Since Cuomo’s “August surprise” — he rebuffed the idea throughout his tenure as governor — I’ve re-directed my advocacy from carbon taxes to congestion pricing.

That’s a shift in venue but not in philosophy. Both types of fees incentivize all of us who would fire up fossil fuels or occupy road space to do so sparingly. They also help bring forth investment and innovation in alternatives: renewables and efficiency in the case of carbon; transit, cycling and density in the case of urban transport.

A congestion charge for New York will establish in America the foundational principle for a carbon tax: safeguarding our climate and other public goods requires that we charge for uses that damage or deplete it.

Cuomo’s announcement also validates conservative luminary Milton Friedman’s dictum about crises and change:

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

“Subway meltdown” images like this from NY Times in November have filled the city’s paper this year, putting pressure on Gov. Cuomo to find solutions.

How has the political impossibility of congestion pricing in New York given way to an air of inevitability? As Friedman prescribed, a crisis was required. It came this year, as a twin storm of gridlocked streets and cascading subway delays. But years of concerted advocacy were required to blast through political inertia and lay the crisis at Cuomo’s doorstep.

And true to Friedman’s dictum, NYC advocates for transit and livable streets have developed alternatives: the Move NY plan has dozens of elements that together can unsnarl the streets and modernize transit, as the New York Times reported last month in this profile of the “three amigos” leading the plan: traffic guru “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, political campaigner (and CTC board chair) Alex Matthiessen, and myself.

We don’t yet know if Cuomo’s congestion proposal, which is expected next month, will be strong medicine or weak tea. But as one long-term advocate said last week, the argument is no longer whether to charge a congestion price, but how much.

The lesson for climate campaigners is clear: our job is to keep building the philosophical and political groundwork for carbon taxing.

That way, when the seeming political impossibility of carbon taxing gives way to the aura of inevitability, the carbon tax that emerges can be robust, comprehensive and fair.

Snapshot from my Excel model shows key projections for the Move NY plan.

In the meantime, if you live or work in New York City or State, voice your support your city and state rep’s and urge them to support the Move NY congestion pricing plan.

Join and work with Move NY’s grassroots partners such as Riders Alliance, Transportation Alternatives, the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. (More are listed here.)

And don’t stop organizing, teaching and advocating for U.S. carbon taxes.

The trope shown at left, about Trump “holding the planet hostage,” isn’t entirely new. But it came into sharper relief for me over the weekend as I read Robert Jay Lifton’s insightful new book, The Climate Swerve. And it gave added weight to the apostasy of a ranking Republican senator who earlier this month told the New York Times that Trump’s bluster toward North Korea may be setting the United States “on the path to World War III.”

The senator issuing the warning was Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His words capped a 10-day raging argument in which Trump ridiculed Corker’s decision not to seek a third term next year, and Corker tweeted that “the White House has become an adult day care center” struggling to keep its main occupant in check. “He concerns me,” the senator said of the president. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Corker’s blunt talk about Trump brought to mind his independent stance on climate in the months following the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The defeated GOP candidate, Senator John McCain, had been a backer of carbon cap-and-trade, as were many Congressional Democrats and nearly all of the major environmental organizations. Corker took a minority view, speaking out in favor of carbon taxing in a January 2009 hearing before the Foreign Relations Committee:

I wish we would just talk about a carbon tax, 100 percent of which would be returned to the American people. So there’s no net dollars that would come out of the American people’s pockets.

Not everyone back then viewed Corker as a straight shooter. Grist blogger David Roberts lambasted him for “talk[ing] his way inside the carbon policy tent and now … trying to burn it down” by diverting support from cap-and-trade. But the New Republic’s Brad Plumer insisted that “Bob Corker [is] making sense … for a fruitful conservative position” that’s revenue-neutral and transparent. (Roberts now blogs for Vox while Plumer writes for The New York Times.) Indeed, it’s not much of a stretch to credit Corker’s 2009 words as the launch pad for the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s fee-and-dividend idea and its recent offshoot, the Climate Leadership Council’s carbon dividends approach.

Unfortunately, carbon taxing didn’t advance beyond the fringe in either political party, and climate rejection soon became an element of Republican tribal identity, leading Corker to give up on carbon taxes and on climate generally. And for more than a decade few public figures had much to say about nuclear weapons and the specter of nuclear war. That began to change this year with the launch of nuclear-capable missiles by North Korea and Trump’s vow that if “North Korea … make[s] any more threats to the United States, they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Trump has also repudiated the Paris climate agreement and taken steps to annul the Obama Clean Power Plan and to greenlight fossil fuel development across North America. Humankind now is staring at not one but two “apocalyptic twins,” in Lifton’s words: a nuclear threat and a climate threat. Both the parallels and differences between the two are the subject of Lifton’s new book, Climate Swerve, which appears in the immediate wake of climate furies that have devastated Houston, Puerto Rico and Northern California.

Lifton, a psychiatrist who turned 90 last year, has long observed, lived among and written about the perpetrators and victims of some of the 20th Century’s most profound atrocities — the atomic bombings of Japan, the Vietnam War and, of course, the Nazi Holocaust. His writing humanizing the hibakusha (literally, “explosion-affected people”) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his explorations of the “malignant normality” embodied in the Cold War policy of “mutually assured destruction” galvanized public and political support for both the Kennedy-Khrushchev 1963 ban on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing and the Reagan-Gorbachev 1987 agreement eliminating short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

It was only recently, however, that Lifton turned his attention to climate change. His brand-new book, eloquent and spare, has two tracks. In one he encourages what he calls the climate swerve — humanity’s “evolving awareness of our predicament” as we collectively cause, and face, climate ruin. In the other he seeks to bring to climate consciousness his perspective on what was, at least until this year, mankind’s turn from the brink of nuclear ruin.

This passage (slightly edited for readability, emphasis added in bold) is emblematic:

Nuclear and climate threats are separate and different from each other. With nuclear weapons, the mind must contemplate specific things — bombs that bring about revolutionary dimensions of blast, heat, and radiation. The imagined catastrophe is immediate and decisive, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provides a model of unprecedented slaughter and suffering. With climate threat, the mind encounters no new physical entities or things, but rather an incremental sequence of an increasingly inhospitable habitat, a progression rather than an explosion, and a series of projections of what can be expected, as opposed to a clear display of ultimate destruction.

Nevertheless, an irony — and a strangely hopeful one — of Lifton’s book is that Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have produced, for all who care to see, painfully “clear displays of ultimate destruction.” Lush Puerto Rican farmlands and woodlands flattened and laid barren are now literally concrete, as are obliterated California vineyards. Lifton himself put these facts front and center in an op-ed for The New York Times earlier this month (emphasis added):

Climate images have never been able to convey our full planetary danger until now. The extraordinary recent four-punch sequence of hurricanes … threatened the lives of millions of people, obliterated their homes and has raised doubts that some places will ever recover … The hurricanes … provided imagery equivalent to the danger, imagery equivalent to nuclear disaster. When we viewed photographs and film of the annihilated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we sensed that the world could be ended by nuclear weapons. Now these hurricanes have conveyed a similar feeling of world-ending, having left whole islands, once alive in their beauty and commerce, in ruin.

I imagine I’m not the only one brought to tears but also galvanized by those words. They appeared in print on the same Sunday morning, October 8, that Bob Corker called the New York Times to warn about Trump putting us “on the path to World War III.”

While there may not be a direct line from Lifton’s op-ed to Corker’s speaking out, both of their testimonies are proof that we’re not hostages. We still have voices, and both the advance of climate ruin and the renewed chances of nuclear ruin require that we raise them. Republican voices like Corker’s are especially critical, but anyone with power and a pulpit shouldn’t hesitate to use them. And for the rest of us, a letter to our local paper, a Facebook post, or plain old face-to-face sharing can help others grasp the gravity of the risks we are living with and how we can overcome them.