The impossibility of throttling Big Oil through fossil fuel divestment campaigns was laid bare last week when ExxonMobil announced it was acquiring Pioneer Natural Resources, the #1 driller in the #1 producing U.S. oilfield, the Permian Basin.

In a transaction priced at $59.5 billion, Pioneer shareholders will receive slightly more than 2.3 shares of ExxonMobil stock for each Pioneer share. No banks are involved, no debt, no third parties; and, most noteworthy, no cash. Pioneer’s management evidently holds Exxon’s current and future financial strength in such high regard that it was willing to sign on to an all-stock deal.

Had it been necessary, though, Exxon could have bankrolled the entire acquisition using cash generated by its sales of petroleum products to U.S. and world motorists, truckers, air travelers and shippers. Last year alone, Exxon generated more than enough cash flow, $76.8 billion, to buy Pioneer outright. Its market capitalization stands at $450 billion, triple the lows during the 2020 pandemic year and higher than the $400 billion in 2012, when climate author-activist Bill McKibben kicked off the divestment movement with his Rolling Stone manifesto, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.

McKibben was admirably candid about wanting to “make clear who the real [climate] enemy is”: the fossil-fuel industry, led and epitomized by the oil-and-gas giant ExxonMobil. The eleven intervening years have cemented Exxon’s standing as Big Oil incarnate. Not only is Exxon the industry’s most technologically proficient and politically connected member, it’s the one that for decades sowed disinformation about climate change even as its own scientists advised management to fortify the company’s drilling platforms against rising seas.

Unsurprisingly, “Exxon Knew” ranks high among contemporary climate-protest slogans. And the company certainly merits every ounce of opprobrium directed at it. Divestment was a righteous idea, but it has proven futile.

Wake-Up Call

The Pioneer acquisition should be a wake-up call. If the wave of divestments over the past decade by universities, philanthropies and pension funds had genuinely dented oil industry prospects, Exxon’s stock wouldn’t have had the cachet to lure Pioneer into an all-stock purchase. Nor would Exxon have been able to pull off a Plan B of forking over $60 billion in cash. The ease of the acquisition puts the lie to divestment’s starve-and-shame paradigm intended to dry up dollars and discredit industry brands.

Pressuring institutions to divest from fossil fuels never made much sense as a pro-climate strategy. Targeting any one oil company was never going to be able to restrain carbon emissions. No single company supplies more than a small slice of the world’s petroleum.

Indeed, as Bloomberg News reported last week, even with Pioneer, Exxon will account for only 15 percent of Permian Basin extraction and a far smaller share of world oil production — three or four percent, according to my calculations. At that modest scale, a hole in any one company’s finances would simply make room for others.

Divestment’s futility actually went deeper, though. In the oil business, access to capital markets matters hardly at all. Most of the time the industry is flush with cash. Just about everything it does — exploration, extraction, pipelining, refining, selling — is self-financing, paid for by the ceaseless ka-ching from sales of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, bunker fuel and other petroleum products, not to mention natural (methane) gas, which in 2022 provided nearly three-fourths as much primary energy worldwide as petrol, according to BP’s 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy (covering 2022).

To be fair, divestment campaigning did appear to penetrate Exxon’s inner sanctum in 2021, when the activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 succeeded in electing three directors to ExxonMobil’s 13-person board. “Exxon’s Board Defeat Signals the Rise of Social-Good Activists,” trumpeted the New York Times headline reporting the surprise incursion. Yet the ideological impact, if there was one, was short-lived. All three insurgent members backed the Pioneer acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Indeed, in the Journal story, Charles Penner, architect of the Engine No. 1 campaign, says the Pioneer deal “shows Exxon had heard some of the campaign’s critiques and changed its approach to focus on returns instead of costly megaprojects more dependent on long-term demand.” Oof. The story has nothing from Engine No. 1 on Exxon’s present or future complicity in climate-damaging emissions generated from its products. And nothing in its detailed portrait of CEO Darren Woods suggests that worries about divestment ever cost him a moment’s sleep.

What To Do?

There are so many climate campaigns needing and deserving of the energies now squandered pursuing fossil-fuel divestment. I suggested a few of them in The Climate Movement In Its Own Way, my April 2022 article in The Nation (reposted here at CTC). Here’s a top-10 list (in no particular order):

1. Policy campaigns to curb motor vehicle size and weight
2. Organizing to expedite up-zoning in cities and suburbs and otherwise promote housing density
3. Advancing walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented communities
4. Restricting and overcoming NIMBY power to block wind farms and solar arrays
5. Supporting the operability of existing, well-functioning nuclear power plants
6. Advancing congestion pricing and other road-pricing / traffic-pricing proposals (valuable for themselves and as templates for broad carbon-emission pricing)
7. Taxing extreme wealth, to both attack luxury emissions and promote social solidarity needed to tackle carbon consumption
8. Shrinking the local, state and national reach of the world’s sole major climate-denying political party (whose dysfunction is currently in especially plain sight, as NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie trenchantly documented this week)
9. Reducing animal agriculture through both culture and policy change
10. Advancing or at least keeping alive the idea of robust carbon pricing at the state and especially national level

Note that all of the above measures, except perhaps #8, attack carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions from the demand side, insulating them from the all-too-real whack-a-mole syndrome that undermines most supply-side climate campaigns due to global substitutability by which increased drilling “there” offsets halts to drilling “here.”

Missing from the list: abetting the electrification of cars, trucks, cooking, heating and industry. Why not? For one thing, “electrify everything” has no shortage of NGO advocates like Rewiring America, and, thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, it enjoys generous federal subsidies. For another, decarbonization of U.S. grids is far from complete and, in many states and regions, painfully slow.

Here in New York City, CTC’s home territory, fossil fuel burning today generates more than 90 percent of all electricity (see graphic from Nuclear NY), down from 70 percent since the 2020-2021 closure of the downstate grid’s only large-scale non-carbon generator, the Indian Point nuclear plant.

As a result, rarely if ever is the incremental electricity that my grid calls on to recharge EV’s or energize electric heat pumps generated from a non-carbon source. The same is true at present in much of the United States. Electrification, an essential long-term program, is not yet a carbon-eliminating panacea .

Want to hurt Exxon AND fight climate change? Work to bring robust carbon pricing back into the national policy conversation. A meaningful carbon price — one that quickly ramps up to triple digits per ton of CO2 — will crimp the oil business, the coal business and the fossil-gas business, harming the fossil fuel industry’s shareholder value and political power, while effectuating steady and significant reductions in combustion. And, when considering the to-do list above, keep in mind that robust carbon pricing (#10) enhances all of the others.

Addendum: Two days after posting, we learned that Chevron is acquiring oil giant Hess Corp. in another all-stock deal, this one valued at $53 billion.

Extinction Rebellion takes on heliports in Manhattan during a week of climate action.

This post, written by renowned eco-journalist Christopher Ketcham and commissioned by and published in Truthdig on Sept. 15, describes an action I helped organize and participated in, two days earlier. We repost it here, with permission, because it highlights a rare climate protest that targets fossil fuel “demand” rather than supply. And not just ordinary fuel usage but an egregiously selfish and exclusive one: helicopter travel. 

“Helicopters are a pestilence to New Yorkers and a rotten pinnacle of an economic system that places decadent pleasure over planetary survival,” I declaimed in the XR press release. True externality pricing would shut down the vast majority of helicopter transportation. Absent, or alongside that, last week’s direct action was an attention-getting way of connecting the climate crisis to luxury emissions.

    — Charles Komanoff, Sept. 20, 2023.

* * * * * * * *

The Extinction Rebellionists mustered south of the heliport on the west side of Manhattan at around 2 p.m., just as the sun emerged following a flurry of rain. It was hot when the crowd of 40 people moved as one to stop the howling machines based at Blade Lounge West, a commercial heliport on 30th Street along the Hudson River Greenway. The outsized carbon footprint of those who used the heliport was “obscene,” said the organizers. The afternoon’s goal was to make as much trouble for its operations as possible.

One of the organizers of the action, a 75-year-old energy economist named Charles Komanoff, was prepared to be arrested. He told me he had been feeling unsteady that morning, jittery and fearful, as he handed me his rain slicker and water bottle and backpack to hold.

Months earlier, he had explained his reasons for wanting to shut down helicopter traffic in his native city. “New Yorkers hate helicopters,” Komanoff wrote in an email to Extinction Rebellionists:

Tourist helicopters, Hamptons helicopters…. They hate the noise, the fumes… the arrogance, the power to pollute, the power to act as lords. I hate them too, for those reasons, plus this: helicopters epitomize luxury carbon. They are the essence of the consumption that must disappear *now* if we aim to protect Earth and preserve climate.

Now, Komanoff and his fellow Rebellionists picketed at the vehicle entry to the Blade Lounge West, which is owned and operated by Blade Air Mobility, Inc. They unfurled a banner that said LIFE OR DEATH, and waved XR flags that whipped in the wind, and one pushed a stroller with three baby dolls in it, with a note that read, “Will we have enough food to eat? Can crops survive the heat?” They chanted Helicopters, private planes, your emissions are insane. (They are also profitable: Blade Air Mobility’s $61 million in revenue in 2023 was up 71% on the year.)

Komanoff and I had written an editorial together in 2022 about the absolute need to kill luxury emissions as the stuff of gluttony and entitlement. “‘Keep it in the ground’ protesters confine their blockades to energy supply infrastructure and studiously ignore the demand half of the equation,” we wrote. “This has been a shortcoming of the climate movement for too long, as it passes up one opportunity after another to rouse millions against the class that, even more than the corporations of Big Carbon, perpetuates the climate crisis: the world’s wealthy.”

The protest unfolded in the genteel way of these things. There were cyclists and joggers on the greenway, and tourists walking, and in the glint of the sun off the rippling water, many passersby stopped and asked what was happening.  Two elderly women wanted to participate.  One of the women, 72-year-old Mireille Haboucha, an Egyptian, told the protesters, “We agree with your action. This is what we all need to do.” The friend with whom she was strolling, Barbara Schroder, 75, told me, “We had never thought about luxury emissions, but it makes sense to stop it.”

I asked a 29-year-old lawyer named Dominique why she was there. It was her first climate action, and she asked that her last name not be used. “I’m morally obligated,” she told me.  In that feeling of obligation there was great anger. “There are 30 million people in Pakistan homeless because of floods that happened there a year ago. Thirty million that are homeless because people like the assholes we are seeing today need to take helicopters.”

Dominique was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation, in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a book about the Nuremberg Trials, that complacency seemed to be the main evil which allowed the Holocaust to happen — the world, and especially Germans, just not caring enough to stop the Nazis. “Part of the moral obligation for me is that we are on the brink of, are already in, mass climate genocide,” she told me. “I do not want to be the modern-day equivalent of a complacent 1930s German.”

The night before, at an XR body blockade training event in Brooklyn, a 56-year-old retired schoolteacher told me that, on her farm in Wallkill, in the Hudson Valley, the entire oat crop had failed. First there was drought, in April, then flooding in June.  That was one of many reasons she was at the heliport. She’d been arrested seven times since 2019 for similar actions.

The helicopter traffic did not cease, although the protesters succeeded in blockading the entrance to the parking lot. The CEO of Blade Air Mobility, Rob Wiesenthal, a dapper little man who makes $11.9 million a year, seemed shocked that his poor heliport had been targeted. The executive stood and watched the protesters with a look of despair on his face.  A chopper came blasting in, touching down with a monstrous flatus sound and carrying with it the stink of jet fuel.  Then another and another arrived, their disgorged passengers forced to cut through the crowd of flag wavers and shouters of chants to waiting mammoth SUV taxis that were blocking road traffic because they couldn’t enter the parking lot. (Climate action should involve stopping the SUVs, too, I thought to myself.)

I screamed a question to Wiesenthal over the racket. He smiled and said he had nothing to say to the media on the record. His employees were enraged.  One of them got in a scuffle with a press photographer on hand for the event, trying to grab his camera, cursing and threatening him.  A scowling heliport attendant named Anthony Smith told me, “I called my boys from uptown and they’re gonna take care of this real quick. You’ll see.”

The skies cleared fully, and the sun blazed down, and the protesters knitted their sweaty brows in the heat. Still they picketed and chanted and sang and hurled slogans. A National Guard helicopter, enormous and looking like a black metal buzzard, swooped in, bathing us in poisonous fumes. “Those your boys?” I asked Smith.  “Oh yeah,” he said.  But the black chopper touched the tarmac for less than a minute, then powered up again and was gone in a fury of rotor wash and noise. More helicopters came, Hueys from JFK Airport ($225 one way) and Newark International ($245) and the Hamptons ($1,025).

After an hour and a half, 40 or so officers from the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group arrived bristling with zip ties. Warnings were issued to cease blocking the way, and some of the protesters — the green and yellow teams, as they were called — stepped aside. The red team, which included Komanoff, a 75-year-old woman named Alice, a 60-year-old woman named Heidi, a third woman, Shoshana, and two young men — stood firm, for their intent was to be arrested in symbolic revolt. The cops turned them around, zip-tied their wrists and off they went in a cramped police van. The protesters dispersed. Wiesenthal breathed relief. His faithful employees bumped fists.

What was accomplished? Morale-boosting, the fostering of solidarity and sense of unity of purpose; the building of a community, ready for more action. When the six arrestees were released from the 7th Precinct, they were smiling and proud, and a group of fellow protesters was waiting for them at a nearby restaurant and filled the place with wild applause as they entered. My thought was this crowd needs to gather on a daily basis at West 30th Street. Pain should be felt over and over at Blade Lounge West until its operations become untenable, until Mr. Wiesenthal’s despair is permanent. It’s either that, or what some in the movement say is the next needed step: monkeywrench the choppers and destroy them on the tarmac.

Sunday’s March to End Fossil Fuels in midtown Manhattan was big, loud and vibrant. The organizers put the tally at 75,000. While that may have been over-generous, the march was far and away the largest U.S. climate assemblage in some time.

It was also an occasion to ponder the goals and tactics of the climate movement.

The customary signs and chants denouncing Big Oil and its funder banks were out in force. What felt new, and unsettling, was the vitriol directed at President Biden. Last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its promise to hasten the transition from fossil fuels by accelerating wind and solar and electrification, might as well have been an hallucination.

Ganging Up On Joe

The signs and chants castigating the president flowed like a river. Biden: Declare a climate emergency … Cancel Willow … I didn’t vote for fires and floods.

Yikes. Whatever happened to the Inflation Reduction Act’s nearly half-a-trillion dollars worth of tax credits and other subsidies paying down the cost of renewable electricity from solar and wind farms while also cutting consumer costs to purchase electric vehicles, electric heat pumps, and home and commercial electric battery storage?

The intent of the IRA’s myriad and synergistic incentives isn’t just to grow the U.S. green manufacturing base with good-paying green jobs. It’s to displace fossil-fuel use by retiring petrol-fueled engines and furnaces and simultaneously “greening the grid” by speeding the rate at which wind and solar power usurp electricity generation from coal and methane gas.

As the IRA was snaking through Congress last August, energy analysts were scoping the potential carbon and methane reductions from those displacements, along with estimates of increased emissions from new federal oil and gas leasing that Biden committed to expedite to win the tie-breaking Yes vote from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. One leading think tank, Energy Innovation, concluded that “The bill’s clean energy measures will yield 24 times more emissions reductions than its fossil fuel provisions will increase emissions.” (The firm subsequently raised its 24-to-1 emissions ratio to 28-to-1.)

Seven months later, Biden held up his end of the deal, issuing a permit okaying ConocoPhillips’ $6 billion Willow oil-and-gas drilling venture on Alaska’s North Slope — and threw away the climate good will due him from the IRA. Never mind that the additional carbon emissions from the Biden-Willow “hydrocarbon bomb” will only negate a fraction of the emission reductions from his legislation’s clean electricity and end-use electrification, as I pointed out back in March. Even more poignantly, those additional emissions are more properly estimated to be close to zero. Why? Because what actually burns the carbon fuels and puts the CO2 into the atmosphere is fossil fuel consumption, not supply. If Biden had rejected Willow, the same supply would have been called forth from Nigeria, or Kuwait or some other oil region or state to fill U.S. cars, planes and trucks.

In other words, Willow or any new U.S. drilling activity is nearly irrelevant from a climate standpoint because, as we wrote then, “demand finds a way to create supply,” rather than the reverse.

As we marched, I asked a smattering of anti-Biden sign-holders if the president merited praise for the green energy unleashed by his IRA, rather than criticism for okaying Willow or the other contentious project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia. The typical response was No, we’re in a climate emergency. Any new fossil-fuel infrastructure is too much.

To be sure, trade-offs are hard to wrestle with even in calm moments, much less among a big crowd on the move. But the blank stares about the IRA and occasional flashes of venom against Biden were disquieting, nonetheless. The Times‘ headline for its print report on the march was all too accurate: “Fingers Pointed at President, Protesters Demand End to Fossil Fuels.” Left unsaid is whether protesting Biden climate bombs will seed electoral bombs in 2024, placing our democracy as well as climate in irredeemable peril.

Who’s Really Funding Fossil Fuels?

If the anti-Biden sentiment was novel, the anti-big banks rhetoric was old hat. Blaming the climate crisis on Big Oil and demanding that universities, pension funds and the like “divest” by dumping fossil fuel securities from their holdings, has been a staple of climate organizing for nearly a dozen years, as I decried a year-and-a-half ago, in Exxon doesn’t care if you divest. Neither does climate:

When the writer and climate activist Bill McKibben kicked off the [divestment] campaign in a July 2012 Rolling Stone article, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, the rationale was three-fold: (1) dry up capital and make it harder for the fossil fuel industry to create new mines, wells, pipelines and terminals; (2) weaken the industry’s social and political standing so it couldn’t easily block pro-climate policy; and (3) by hanging a “Dump Me” sign around Big Oil, amp up climate organizing. Not for nothing did McKibben subtitle his Rolling Stone article, “Make clear who the real enemy is.” It was Exxon and its brethren.

That path has proven to be a dead-end, I concluded in my post. One piece of evidence was a simple graph showing that Exxon-Mobil’s share price had outperformed the stock market as a whole since the onset of the Covid pandemic. More evidence, if any were needed, was available in the wonderfully wonky signboard at left that was borne by one of yesterday’s marchers, a vibrant senior citizen affiliated with the McKibben-inspired Third Act.

The amounts that the four banks — Chase, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — have funneled into fossil fuels since the start of 2016 sum to an impressive-seeming $1.27 trillion ($1,270,000,000,000). Yet over the same period, consumption of petroleum products by U.S. families and businesses earned the oil companies a revenue haul nearly three-and-a-half times as great: an estimated $4.29 trillion ($4,290,000,000,000).

[I calculated that figure from the average 19.9 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other petroleum products  kerosene and so forth consumed per day over the same seven years, 2016-2022. (See Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, Table 3.5 Petroleum Products Supplied by Type.) Factoring in (1) there are 42 gallons of petrol per barrel, (2) the seven years total 2,555 days (365 x 7), and 3) an average retail price per gallon sold of $2.00 — a conservative markdown from the actual $2.82 average retail price of gasoline over that period — yields $4.29 trillion.]

Who’s really funding fossil fuels? American households, businesses and institutions, locked into grotesque consumption levels that U.S. climate activists studiously ignore.

To be sure, my dollar comparison has apples-and-oranges elements. Only some of the $4 trillion or more in petrol sales is available for investment in exploration and other petroleum infrastructure. And other banks beyond the Big Four also fund oil investment. On the other hand, U.S. consumption of methane gas and coal fossil fuels now exceeds consumption of petroleum on a Btu basis by 20 percent, suggesting that total fossil fuel revenues over the past six years was probably in the vicinity of $8 billion rather than the $4.3 billion from petroleum products alone.

My point is that bank financing is a much weaker linchpin for creating new fossil fuel infrastructure than most climate activists suppose. What really makes fossil supply possible is the lock-in of consumption of fossil fuels themselves, in billions of routine purchases that, day in and day out, fork over many more dollars to the fossil fuel industry than do the banks.

Or, as Darrell Owens, an analyst with CA YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), the pro-housing group that has spearheaded the recent revolution of expansionary zoning in California, put it recently on Twitter, “Oil drilling [and such] isn’t for fun, it’s in service of carbon intensive demand that can be stopped.” Stopped how? By undoing automobile dependence, incentivizing smaller vehicles, densifying suburbia, introducing congestion and road pricing, and of course, federal-level carbon taxing, as I detailed last year for The Nation magazine (The Climate Movement In Its Own Way).

Uprooting the Source: Carbon Consumption

Happily, some at Sunday’s march saw past Biden and the banks and critiqued the structures of consumption that enforce dependence on fossil fuels, whether directly at the gas pump or the furnace or stove, or indirectly in purchases of products whose manufacture and transportation entail massive quantities of fuel, or in inefficient or indulgent use of electricity, most of which is still made by burning coal or methane gas.

These included stalwarts from Citizens Climate Lobby, including an enthusiastic contingent from Pittsburgh as well as folks from across the Northeast; and individuals whose handcrafted signs called out U.S. car culture not only for its gasoline profligacy but for its stifling of human life and health.

“Tax Pollution, Pay People” packs so much into four words, I said to the sign-holder, a CCL member from Pittsburgh,  who told me his name, which I failed to write down. When I told him mine, he nearly jumped out of his shoes and shouted it to his fellow CCL’ers as if I was Greta Thunberg and Steelers legend Franco Harris rolled into one.

I started to apologize for CTC’s relative quiescence over the past year or two and to explain that I’ve been consumed with helping get NYC’s congestion pricing plan across the goal line. He stopped me short, thanking me for CTC’s work and insisting that, together, we’ll win a nationwide price on carbon before it’s too late.

So there’s my take. Singling out Biden for attack felt excessive and worrisome, since any falloff in enthusiasm will crimp the chances of small-d democratic, climate-aware outcomes in the elections next year. Similarly, more than a decade’s worth of targeting Big Oil and the banks doesn’t appear to have moved the needle for effective climate policy. Going after “luxury carbon,” as Extinction Rebellion did in a small but resonant climate action last week that I helped organize, feels to me like a more empowering path, one that might capture both the populist moment and climate urgency in a single stroke.

But notwithstanding the mis-directions, it was uplifting to be amidst tens of thousands with a like mind: A better world is possible. A better world is necessary. I want a fossil-free president. Amen to that!

The New York Times yesterday published my op-ed, There’s Only One Way to Fix New York’s Traffic Gridlock, co-written with Columbia University climate economist Gernot Wagner.

Our essay is a meticulous and extensive (1,300 words) brief for making drivers feel the pocketbook costs of their vehicles’ traffic-jam causation, via the policy measure known as congestion pricing. In our telling, not only is this policy guaranteed to generate immense benefits for New Yorkers; as the title suggests, we declare it to be the only way to “free … drivers from the traffic snarls that pollute the air and crush the soul.”

The essay was nearly a month in the making and the product of extensive argument-shaping and fact-checking by the Times’ op-ed staff, bespeaking the paper’s commitment to presenting congestion pricing in a positive light. Its appearance broke the mold of the paper’s hesitant past coverage in two important respects:

1. It explicitly rests on the “comprehensive spreadsheet model” of New York traffic and transit I began developing in 2007 (coincidentally, the year I launched the Carbon Tax Center).

2. It let Gernot and me voice the inconvenient assertion that the regional transit agency charged with designing and administering congestion pricing — the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — “through a few fateful, faulty assumptions, underestimated drivers’ propensity to switch trips from cars to other transit options.” These flubs have tied congestion pricing advocates in knots, forcing us to rebut objections of environmental justice impacts that don’t stand careful scrutiny, although they understandably resonate with communities that historically have borne hugely disproportionate damages from highways, energy facilities and other polluting infrastructure.

It’s only a modest stretch to view the Times’ twin breaks with tradition as the Grey Lady’s version of Andrew Cuomo’s bombshell announcement in August 2017 that “congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come” — itself a rupture that set in motion passage of the state statute authorizing congestion pricing in March 2019.

They suggest that the Times may be lying in wait for the right political winds to let advocates of carbon pricing make a parallel case with respect to climate. Not that a carbon tax is “the only way to fix America’s carbon crisis” but, rather, that it’s a complementary policy tool to last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, and an essential one to ensure that green energy actually replaces rather than merely supplements use of fossil fuels.

For the benefit of non-subscribers blocked by the Times’ paywall, and also to enable comments as well as add a few graphics, we present Gernot’s and my op-ed in full.

— C.K., June 9, 2023

The plan to charge drivers to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street, which last month moved closer to federal approval, will deliver two notable gifts to New York and the region when it begins, perhaps as soon as next April.

The first is that congestion pricing will cut traffic not just within the so-called charging zone but on the hundreds of streets and highways that cars use to go to and from that zone. This reduction of almost two million miles traveled in the region each day will free many drivers from the traffic snarls that pollute the air and crush the soul.

Using a detailed benefit-cost analysis that assumes a pricing structure of $15 at peak times, $10 as traffic begins to thicken and $5 at off-peak times, we calculate that the value of those projected time savings to drivers and truckers amounts to nearly $3 billion a year, with time saved in the boroughs and counties surrounding Manhattan exceeding those on the island.

These estimates are based on a comprehensive spreadsheet model of the region’s traffic, developed by one of us (Mr. Komanoff). State officials used that model to write the statute authorizing congestion pricing, which the New York State Legislature passed in 2019.

The other gift will be the $1 billion a year in congestion pricing revenue that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will use to secure $15 billion in bonds to pay for improvements to mass transit in the city. Those upgrades will reduce waiting times and onboard delays — and the precious time subway passengers lose as a result.

Either outcome would be a godsend. The combination has the potential to be transformational for New Yorkers.

Why, then, do many people seem anxious about, if not downright opposed to, congestion pricing? Entitlement plays a part: Why should we suddenly be forced to pay for something that had been free? Another reason surely is disbelief. Many people don’t believe that the revenues — the $1 billion a year from drivers — will actually improve mass transit services. The M.T.A. is a money pit, people say.

They may have a point. But the subway, bus and commuter rail services that the M.T.A. operates are also a marvel and a necessity. After the pandemic lockdowns, the system still delivers 2.5 times as many people a day into the Manhattan core as cars and trucks do, though that is down from four times as many before Covid struck. Still, the M.T.A. must build and manage far more effectively. The same political will that got congestion pricing written into law must be marshaled to eliminate layers of consultants, to bring work rules into the 21st century and to make design-build contracting, in which the project designer and the contractor work together under one contract from the beginning, the rule.

People are also unconvinced that congestion pricing will, in fact, cut congestion. Urban gridlock has come to appear immutable in the United States, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Manhattan core, where travel speeds were averaging a maddening 7 miles per hour before the pandemic. Why should congestion pricing succeed where a century of other remedies — like widening roads to only then narrow them again — has failed?

This question is even more salient after the M.T.A.’s environmental study of congestion pricing, released last summer, which concluded that Manhattan traffic will diminish only because trips that now pass through the city’s center would divert around the island, possibly adding traffic and air pollution to parts of the Bronx, Staten Island, Nassau County on Long Island and Bergen County in New Jersey.

We believe that the M.T.A., through a few fateful, faulty assumptions, underestimated drivers’ propensity to switch trips from cars to other transit options. We don’t say this idly — our estimation is based on decades of studying traffic in and around Manhattan and on basic economic principles.

How much traffic will diminish will depend on the toll design selected by the civic leaders who make up the city-state Traffic Mobility Review Board. They’ll be aiming for the same sweet spot that London, Stockholm and Singapore have attained through their successful congestion pricing programs: 15 to 20 percent fewer car trips into the zone, a cut big enough to reduce the many negatives traffic brings and enough to reap the targeted $1 billion a year in revenues to improve the subways, buses and commuter rail systems. (New Jersey Transit rail and bus and PATH would not share in these revenues.)

The congestion charges have not been set. But the M.T.A.’s model and ours agree that if exemptions are kept to a minimum, it could be as little as $15 for a rush-hour trip into Midtown and $5 to $10 during off-peak hours for E-ZPass holders. (In  London, drivers pay 15 pounds during the day, or nearly $19.)

The benefits of congestion pricing — faster, less stressful travel above and below ground and safer, healthier streets and communities — don’t negate the distress of drivers who understandably don’t want to pay where they now drive free, but they assuredly eclipse it.

In addition to the nearly $3 billion worth of saved time for drivers, we estimate that the myriad other benefits add up to an additional $2.5 billion. Those benefits include fewer crashes, better health from cleaner air and more walking and biking, and time saved for transit riders, thanks to improvements enabled by the congestion pricing revenue. Subtracting the $1 billion drivers will pay to enter the congestion zone, the result will be over $4 billion in annual net benefits, or almost $12 million each day.

Moreover, only a small slice of area residents habitually drive into the Manhattan core. Very few are among the working poor, as the Community Service Society of New York, one of the nation’s oldest antipoverty organizations, found when it endorsed congestion pricing in 2019 and again last year. Many drivers, too, may come to feel less of a sting from paying the toll once they actually experience the less-snarled roads.

Last month, the Federal Highway Administration tentatively approved an M.T.A. report that identified how to alleviate possible harm to disadvantaged communities. Now the public has until Monday to review it.

To opponents of the plan, we say:

The M.T.A. is responding to public concerns. To hasten federal approval, the agency has committed to toll discounts for frequent low-income drivers into the zone and also to encourage pollution reductions such as electrifying diesel-powered refrigeration trucks at the Hunts Point Market in the South Bronx and expanding New York City’s clean trucks voucher program to help pay to electrify diesel trucks elsewhere. These commitments followed public feedback on earlier versions of the plan.

Every car is causing congestion. Stalled highways and jammed streets aren’t just the fault of Uber or U.P.S. or bike lanes or public plazas. Everyone driving to or in New York’s central business district (except in the wee hours) adds to congestion. We estimate that right now, a single round trip by car from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn to Radio City Music Hall in Midtown during most of the day causes $100 to $200 worth of additional delay for everyone else. That makes a prospective $15 or even a $20 peak congestion toll a downright bargain in comparison.

Congestion pricing is the only durable antidote to persistent traffic congestion. The Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate William Vickrey demonstrated 60 years ago that there’s no way out of gridlock without making drivers pay for taking up limited street space. Otherwise, there will always be more car owners wanting to use the available space than there is space to accommodate them.
Drivers all over the city and well beyond stand to gain from this plan. Yes, it will be painful to pay for something that has been free. But it is even more painful to spend hours idling in traffic, knowing that a better path beckons.

Charles Komanoff is a transportation analyst in New York. Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School.

The New York City public affairs site Gotham Gazette today published my essay, For Long-Term MTA Funding, Look to a State Carbon Tax. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and to bring it directly to the Carbon Tax Center’s readership.

 — C.K., May 4, 2023

That huge sigh of relief from New York City mass transit advocates last weekend was for the state budget handshake to tack more than a billion additional dollars a year onto a key MTA funding stream, the Payroll Mobility Tax. According to both my calculations and an announcement from Gov. Kathy Hochul, the agreed-to 75% rise in the tax rate on employee salaries paid by businesses in the five boroughs will add $1.1 billion to the PMT’s ongoing annual $1.8 billion take.

(The numbers prorate imperfectly because the rise in the tax rate, to 60/100 of one percent, applies only in the city; the rate in the seven suburban MTA counties remains 34/100 of one percent.)

The upward bump in the PMT is part of the package to avert a fare hike and service cuts that would have jolted the entire metro region. Raising the same $1.1 billion via the subway farebox, for example, would have required a whopping 35% jump in fares, a calamity that would have triggered enough new car, cab, and Uber trips to slow vehicles in Manhattan by 5% and boosted city and regional carbon emissions by nearly 400,000 tons of CO2 a year — enough to negate the climate benefit of 90 new large wind turbines, according to my modeling. And these figures don’t include lost jobs and commerce from worsened transportation. Reducing service to save the same amount would have produced similar bad outcomes.

Score a big win, then, for transit and New York. But the new revenue comes with a downside: taxes on payrolls discourage hiring and compound our area’s anti-business aura. Moreover, this revenue infusion will almost certainly be not the last but the first in a series the MTA will require throughout the decade to limit future fare hikes and improve service even as ridership continues to lag pre-pandemic volumes. Counting on raising the PMT next time, and the time after that, will be a fool’s errand. There has to be a better way.

I believe there is: enact a modest statewide carbon tax and dedicate a third to a half of the revenue to shoring up public transportation budgets around the state, though principally in New York City.

Reappraising Carbon Taxes

On January 1, Washington state launched its carbon-pricing program, the nation’s second all-sectors carbon charge, with a starting price around $20 per ton of CO2, though most of the emission allowances fetched even higher prices in the first carbon auction, in March. I estimate that the same $20 price applied to all fossil fuels burned in New York State could generate revenues of $3 billion a year (see table).

Dedicating a third of those proceeds to the MTA would add a billion dollars to the authority’s annual revenue. Other slices of the revenue could cure deficits at smaller transit systems around the state.

Even with these allocations, roughly half of the new $3 billion in annual carbon revenues would remain available for a range of purposes from home weatherization to rebates offsetting higher fuel costs for lower-income rural New Yorkers.

Of course, no new tax is ever welcomed with open arms. In recent years, moreover, carbon taxing has lost political standing with left and right alike. Right-wingers, in thrall to fossil fuels, denigrate the very idea of climate concern. Opinions on carbon pricing on the left, while far more nuanced, tend toward an “eat your peas” quality, seeing the promised revenues but not the powerful tides unleashed by the increased fuel prices.

Could a state carbon tax have a chance in New York this time around? I believe so, if only because MTA deficits are untenable and a statewide carbon tax looks like the least-bad long-term antidote.

Consider:

1. New York wouldn’t be the first state to price all carbon emissions. California has done so for a decade, and, as noted, Washington just followed suit.
2. Two-thirds of the $3 billion in carbon tax revenue could go to other, non-MTA uses across the state.
3. Nearly half of the revenues would come from charges on fossil (natural) gas, the very fuel that climate activists are targeting in order to electrify heating and cooking while also shrinking climate-damaging methane leaks from pipelines, wells, and buildings.
4. Carbon taxing’s regressive bias (it takes more dollars from the rich but more proportionally from the poor) would be blunted by its helping keep a lid on transit fares.
5. The affluent suburban counties that will be on the hook for the carbon tax caught a big break by their exemption from the increase in the Payroll Mobility Tax. Moreover, some pro-climate suburbanites might even support a climate-helping carbon tax.
6. Upstate households will be cushioned from the tax by the region’s preponderance of low-carbon electricity from nuclear, hydro, and wind power.
7. Aid to transit could be packaged as an urban corrective to suburban- and rural-facing Inflation Reduction Act federal subsidies for solar panels, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. (Notably, the IRA does not fund urban-friendly mass transit and e-bikes.)
8. Left-leaning climate-justice advocates who shy away from carbon pricing might warm to a policy that cuts emissions by attracting car trips to buses, trains, and subways.

This panoply of advantages points to diverse potential sources of support for a transit-benefitting state carbon tax:

• NYC transit and “livable streets” advocates;
• Economic-justice advocates who recognize affordable transit’s value in combating poverty;
• Climate campaigners who see carbon pricing as a complement to other carbon-cutting policies;
• Suburbanites concerned that future hikes in the Payroll Mobility Tax will come for them;
• “Electrify-everything” proponents working to eliminate fossil gas from residences and other buildings;
• Developers of low-carbon electricity — not just solar and wind providers but proponents of retaining the state’s four upstate reactors and building new ones;
• Energy-efficiency engineers, contractors, and workforces;
• Labor unions whose members fabricate, erect, and maintain the spectrum of green energy projects that a carbon tax will help make more abundant by making fossil sources costlier.

Competing Claimants?

Electricity producers in New York already pay a carbon fee under the multi-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) cap-and-trade program. In addition, Governor Hochul and the statewide climate coalition New York Renews have advanced competing carbon pricing concepts, both of them, somewhat confusingly, dubbed cap-and-invest. Hence, an MTA-focused carbon tax, which would employ a carbon-based charge on fossil fuels extracted or imported into New York State rather than a carbon cap enforced through sales of emission permits, wouldn’t arrive on a blank slate.

RGGI currently charges electricity producers around $14 for each ton of CO2 their generators emit. This levy is generating $365 million of statewide revenues a year, paid as surcharges on power bills, which goes to support investments in energy-efficiency and renewable electricity. While in theory the RGGI charge could be netted against the new carbon tax, the relative ease and importance of decarbonizing electricity production make it preferable to retain it and add the carbon price on top.

Cap-and-invest presents a trickier set of issues, partly because neither the governor’s prospective program included in the new budget nor NY Renews’ more elaborate plan has been fully fleshed out. In addition, the latter is the fruit of years of deliberation and consensus-building among the coalition’s hundreds of participant grassroots groups, who now constitute a formidable host.

At this writing, NY Renews envisions applying $10 billion in carbon revenues over several years in no less than 73 individual spending buckets grouped in four uber-categories: Climate Jobs and Infrastructure includes elements like aiding electric bus manufacture ($100 million) and offshore wind power supply chains ($300 million). Energy Affordability earmarks $1 billion to wipe out utility customer debt and $2 billion to support building electrification. Community & Worker Transition Assistance devotes $600 million to the “just transition” from jobs in carbon fuels to positions in renewable energy. And Community Directed Climate Solutions sets aside $2 billion to unspecified projects in historically underserved and overburdened urban neighborhoods and rural areas.

The NY Renews plan should be seen, then, as a holistic roadmap to make over not just how energy is supplied in the state but how it is consumed and governed. Billion-dollar-a-year allocations to the MTA aren’t the kind of investment its members have envisioned. Nevertheless, exploratory calculations suggest that the carbon payoff from service improvements paid for by a state carbon tax would be impressive.

As an illustration, I have calculated that an average 20% speed-up in subway trips achieved by running more trains at higher speeds would save straphangers and drivers each around 100 million hours a year (the latter from car trips switching to trains) while reducing car and truck emissions by 900,000 tons a year. Even more CO2 would be eliminated because of New York City’s improved competitive advantages vis-a-vis less “inherently green” suburbs and exurbs.

To be sure, so striking a gain in subway performance would almost certainly carry a price tag well over a billion dollars a year. Still, the prospective benefits underscore both the carbon-cutting potential of infusing new funds into subway service and the need to score competing claims for their climate value.

Broader Considerations and Next Steps

Over time, the carbon tax’s revenue base will shrink as its price incentives kick in and other carbon-cutting policies also gather steam. The resulting loss in tax revenues could be counteracted by periodically raising the per-ton tax rate. New York City could supplement the tax through revenue-generating street-management measures such as curbside pricing and other forms of road pricing.

Earlier this year, Community Services Society CEO (and MTA board member) David R. Jones and Riders Alliance executive director Betsy Plum proposed expanding New York City’s Fair Fares program to allow an additional 772,000 lower-income New Yorkers to qualify for half-fare transit passes. The cost, which they put at $142 million a year, should be a candidate for the carbon spending package.

This discussion has centered on the carbon tax’s creation of a new funding pot to maintain and improve transit affordability and performance. But taxing carbon emissions stands to benefit society in two other major ways. It will diminish financial incentives propping up carbon fuels and also support societal paradigms promoting care over harm.

A carbon tax is more than just a pay-for, in other words. Simply making it more expensive to buy and burn carbon fuels discourages fossil fuel use in a multiplicity of ways. Moreover, the very act of pricing carbon emissions can spur “externality taxing” in other realms, from congestion pricing to taxing the sugar content of soft drinks. Making New York the third U.S. state with broad-based carbon pricing will also add momentum to long-sought federal carbon emissions pricing.

Shoring up MTA finances, while reason enough to enact a state carbon tax, isn’t the lone consideration. The crisis of transit funding should be seen as a catalyst to pricing fossil fuels more closely to their true societal costs — a vital goal in its own right.

The next MTA funding crisis-as-opportunity will be upon us soon. The Legislature should move swiftly to study the benefits of taxing carbon emissions as a way to hold the line — and more — on transit fares and service, well in time for next winter’s budget negotiations. Transit and climate advocates and their counterparts in the Hochul administration should consider integrating a transit-focused carbon tax into their agendas.

Taking $3 billion a year for any public purpose, no matter how noble, is no small matter. The time to start selling a transit-supporting state carbon tax is now.

The Nation magazine this morning published my essay, A Bitcoin Mining Exposé Strengthens the Case for a Carbon Tax. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and add tables and graphics.

 — C.K., April 20, 2023

Clean electricity, the backbone of the Biden administration’s strategy for slashing carbon emissions, is becoming daunting to expand.

US wind farms, which last year generated more electricity than all hydropower and solar panels in the 50 states combined, often face years of contention. The entire mid-Atlantic offshore region, an area brimming with wind potential, could be proscribed by Pentagon fretting over interferences with aircraft deployment, Bloomberg News disclosed this week.

But if red tape for green power is a bother, why not get the benefits with none of the fuss? Send commando teams to the 34 large-scale Bitcoin mining sites in the United States that were identified in a New York Times front-page exposé this month. In synchrony, have them sever the facilities’ power cables, which combined demand some 3,900 megawatts of electricity—nearly as much as 3 million households combined.

In a flash, legions of electricity-gulping, combination-seeking computers in Texas, New York, and 13 other states would cease whirring. Like a power surge but in reverse, the fossil-fuel generators energizing so-called cryptocurrency mining—literally, trillions of combination-seeking calculations every second—would dial down. The corresponding drop in carbon emissions would be the same as if thousands of new industrial-size wind turbines could be instantly erected and connected to grids, supplanting electricity now furnished by burning coal and methane gas.

Fanciful? Consider the numbers. The Times helpfully enumerated each Bitcoin mine’s fossil-fueled draw on state and regional power grids along with the associated carbon emissions. It took only a few further steps for me to translate those emissions into generic megawatts of clean power that would defray them. Using today’s customary 300-foot-tall, 3.6-megawatt wind machines as my standard, I calculated a staggering 3,700 turbines.

There you have it: The US Bitcoin industry is single-handedly neutering the entire climate benefit from nearly 10 percent of US wind energy. That’s more electricity than is generated with wind in any single state, save Texas and Iowa.

This raises two uncomfortable questions for the climate movement: Why isn’t it rallying against Bitcoin mines and other parasitic users of carbon fuels? And why isn’t it taking the obvious step of calling for a tax on carbon emissions to reduce those usages while simultaneously extracting revenues from them?

Second question first. Generating the electricity consumed by those 34 Bitcoin mines causes 16.4 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, according to the Times. If the United States had a $100 per ton carbon tax—the current price of carbon emission permits in the European Union’s cap-and-trade system—the carbon levies at the mine mouth and wellhead would be extracting $1.5 billion a year from the fossil fuel companies that power the Bitcoin operations, and depositing it into the Treasury.

To be sure, that money would only fund a mere 2.4 hours of federal spending a year—barely a single baseball game’s worth, under the new hurry-up-and-pitch rules. On the other hand, the tax moneys are twice what Fox News will pay Dominion Voting Systems under the settlement reached this week. And they’re recurring.

But it would not be extinguished. That’s where the climate movement comes in.

Had the tax been in place a decade ago, as I and others urged, the extra expense might have stopped some cyber-currency ventures from the git-go. But if it were put into place today, a robust carbon tax could at least impel Bitcoin miners to economize on electricity, charge more for transactions, or actually contract with greener power providers rather than merely pretending to, as the Times found.

Although no one can pinpoint precisely how a carbon tax would shrink Bitcoin mining’s carbon footprint, let alone any single sector’s, abundant empirical evidence suggests that total US carbon emissions would be around a third less with a triple-digit national carbon tax than without. Bitcoin would not be exempt.

The movement has targeted banks and pipelines for more than a decade, with not much to show in the way of lesser carbon emissions. Why isn’t it disrupting Bitcoin mining and other bloodsucking machines—helicopters, private jets, yachts, super-sized SUVs—that feed on fossil fuels and are predominantly playthings of plutocrats? Why isn’t it going all out to stop highway expansions and eliminate restrictive zoning that lock in energy waste for generations?

Yes, climate activists stopped Keystone XL. They won a ban on fracking in New York. They’re fighting to drive oil drilling out of Los Angeles. Valiant, heroic work. But these and other keep-it-in-the-ground victories are creating little climate benefit. Why? Because the same underlying demand, largely unaffected by those protests, is met by supplies from elsewhere.

The bank protests seem even less focused. Conoco doesn’t need financing from JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo to drill in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The only “bank” it requires is the collective fuel tanks of America’s 280 million motor vehicles, plus aircraft, off-road vehicles, and pleasure boats.

Marching on Citibank does send a message, and activating seniors who might otherwise sit at home posting about their grandkids is soul-stirring. But if divestment and bank-shaming were going to slow the assault on climate, we would have seen bigger results by now.

“If the world wants to limit warming,” Norwegian energy researcher Espen Erlingsen told the Times this month, “it will have to limit demand for oil and gas because [the] industry can deliver this kind of volume for many more decades.”

Amen. The climate movement’s strategy isn’t working. Trying to bottle up supply instead of throttling demand is whack-a-mole without end, chasing after but never stopping capitalism’s dynamism from erupting in crypto mining and 1,001 other climate-destroying products and technologies.

By itself, a carbon tax won’t cure that. But it would at least start to steer innovation and cultural norms away from endless new climate horrors.

As Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath might have said: Either tax carbon or bring on the commandos.

Addendum: My concluding sentence — perhaps too subtle a literary reference — is elucidated in Brian A. Oard’s delightful Mindful Pleasures website. Please note that the ultimatum was uttered not by Sabbath but by his lover, Drenka. — C.K.

(This post was amended on March 31 to include rebuttals of our criticism of the Montana climate-change lawsuit from two distinguished participants.)

Climate agitation was much in the news last week. The Guardian reported on a forthcoming Harvard Environmental Law Review paper suggesting that fossil fuel companies could be held liable for homicide from deaths caused by climate change. A New York Times front-page story previewed a courtroom trial to determine if Montana policies promoting fossil fuels violate that state’s constitutional protections of a healthful environment. And in dozens of cities, activists assembled by noted climate author-organizer Bill McKibben tore up their Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America credit cards to spotlight the big banks’ financing of $1 trillion in fossil fuel projects over the past five years.

In other climate news, however, suburban legislators are contesting a bold initiative from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to compel New York City and surrounding counties to expand housing supply. New York City’s public transit provider is scrounging for revenues to shore up declining subway and bus farebox receipts stemming from the triple-whammy of residual Covid worries, violent-crime fears, and working-from-home. Around the country, meanwhile, just about all of the gargantuan road-widening projects listed in U.S. PIRG’s most recent Highway Boondoggles report are proceeding apace.

Yes, we’re juxtaposing.

The three just-noted happenings threaten to lock in place profligate fossil fuel consumption and associated carbon emissions. Highway widenings engender more driving (“induced demand,” it’s called). Fare hikes and service cuts to transit in NYC and elsewhere will do the same. And bottling up housing supply, as New York’s suburbs and my own borough of Manhattan, along with affluent cities and towns all over the U.S. have been doing for decades, guarantees urban stasis and its evil twin of exurban sprawl, with its accoutrements of carbon-spewing SUV’s, manses and subdivisions — not to mention segregation.

Litigating for Climate

These carbon accelerants might be more bearable if the climate agitation mentioned at the top had genuine prospects for cutting emissions. Do they? Not likely.

Indicting, much less convicting, officers of fossil fuel companies for killing people via their emissions-induced climate change is the definition of quixotic — to my untutored eye, anyway. In court, Big Oil will simply point to the tens of billions of lives uplifted by the fruits of their fuels. And they won’t be spouting nonsense. The raising up of most of humankind out of subsistence, and the resulting cradle-to-grave lengthening of human lifespans, could not have happened without the carbon-fueled Industrial Revolution. Set against those numbers, the millions — if that — of lives provably lost because of climate change will appear as a mere rounding error.

To be sure, the still-rising use of fossil fuels globally has now burst past the point of positive net benefits, especially with the advent, at last, of scalable non-carbon ways to power civilization. But actually effectuating the transition seems a matter for politics, with or without judicial support.

And even if some clarion guilty verdict were rendered in some court, what would be the remedy? Would the fossil fuel industry be made to dismantle itself? What about the billions of motorists, manufacturers and other consumers and producers who would clamor for more. Sorry, there’s no bypassing the messy work of using pricing, regulation and innovation to get off fossil fuels.

I’m almost as skeptical re the Montana litigation — notwithstanding the earnestness of the young plaintiffs, including two brothers who not only are the sons of firearms-industry apostate Ryan Busse but who were motivated to join the lawsuit by the climatological deterioration of their beautiful corner of northwest Montana.

I identify with Lander and Badge Busse. Melting snow in nearby Glacier National Park helped trigger my ecological awakening, but in an opposite fashion from theirs. On a long-ago day in July, driving on the park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road with my grade-school pal, I parked our tiny Renault auto to fetch water dripping from roadside snowbanks. We filled our canteens and started walked uphill toward the source. An hour later, we were a thousand vertical feet above the roadway and following real-life mountain goats under an impossibly blue sky. Bookending our hike into the Grand Canyon a week earlier, that day became my gateway into love of wildness, defense of clean air, and a career in environmental policy analysis and activism.

Most of Glacier’s glaciers are now diminished if not gone, making the lawsuit, Held v. State of Montana, painful as well as valiant. Yet even if the brothers and their co-litigants win their case, what exactly is the remedy? The Montana Supreme Court possesses no magic button whose pressing can end the burning of fossil fuels. Stop drilling or mining in Montana, and producers will up their output from Wyoming. Stop it in all 50 states, and the same suppliers will boost production overseas. Sure, impeding fuel extraction will incrementally drive up fuel prices and take a bite out of demand, but that’s just a sideways blow at best. The solution, as CTC has argued since our founding in 2007, lies in throttling demand for carbon, not stoppering supply.

Montana litigation supporters weigh in

Shortly after this post went up, CTC received this brief rebuttal from a long-time supporter of the Montana suit and the larger Our Children’s Trust campaign to enshrine a legal right to a safe climate:

The Montana climate suit seeks to build case law affirming a right to a stable, livable climate. I liken it to the long-term legal struggle to secure equal treatment under the law for women and people of color.  For example, the legal battle to desegregate schools was a long one built on case law. I agree that any individual state has limited ability to impose a price on emissions, but the Juliana vs. U.S. suit does. It seeks a science-based reduction in emissions sufficient to maintain a stable, livable climate, and proposes a carbon tax as the single most effective policy to achieve that goal.  Likely the courts will only impose emission reductions. Politicians will then be tasked with submitting a plan that is affordable and effective. The Montana and other suits build case law affirming the damage caused by fossil fuel emissions and a right to a livable climate. Courts act more on evidence and less on short-term political pressure.

We also received this note from noted environmental attorney and climate-law expert Michael Gerrard, who directs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School and was featured in the New York Times story noted at the top of this post:

I think we need to attack both the demand side and the supply side. No one action will affect the supply on a macro scale, but cumulatively many could. Montana is one of the nation’s largest fossil fuel suppliers, and if the courts shut down some of that, it would be a good thing. The judge, at least, is taking the case seriously. Whether or not the Montana Supreme Court upholds a decision for the plaintiffs, the case will cast a harsh light on the fossil fuel companies. Most of these campaigns are largely aimed at delegitimizing the fossil fuel companies and reducing their political clout. That is having some effect in blue states, where quite a few strong climate laws are being enacted over the opposition of the fossil companies. And keep in mind that each new coal mine, each new gas-fueled power plant,  and so forth, creates a constituency for its long-term preservation; that needs to be resisted.

Banks and Climate

We come now to last week’s bank protest that Bill McKibben organized with his new “Community of Americans,” Third Act.

As much as I admire Bill’s unflagging zeal and his Third Act cohorts’ earnest willingness to put themselves out there, I strongly question targeting banks as a cause of fossil fuel exploitation and a locus for climate activism.

How will bank reformation impact the use of cars, trucks and planes in the U.S. or elsewhere — use that requires purchases of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel that in turn provide both the financial wherewithal and the political muscle to drill, extract, refine and transport petroleum products whose combustion releases the carbon dioxide that is wrecking our climate?

Should not Third Act and indeed the entire climate movement be organizing and demonstrating for demand-cutting policies and developments such as mixed-use and dense housing, functional-or-better public transportation, bikeable and walkable streets, fuel-economy standards without “light truck” loopholes, and the like? Wouldn’t their energies accomplish more, both short- and long-term, if they were to swarm Albany and other state capitals to demand upzoning, no more highway widenings, and permitting reform to circumvent anachronistic regulations hindering wind farms and solar homes?

In response, Bill would probably say “We need to remind people of the connection between cash and carbon. Literally, somebody who has $125,000 in those banks [Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America] is producing more [carbon] because it’s being lent out to pipelines and frack wells than all the cooking, flying, heating, driving, cooling that the average American does in a year. Five thousand dollars in [those banks] produces more carbon than flying back and forth across the country.”

How do I know? Because that’s exactly what he said on Democracy Now on the morning of the protests (quoted segment begins around 37:45). Try as I might, I can’t follow the logic.

Coda

Notice I haven’t mentioned carbon pricing, except tangentially. Here at CTC we’re laying low on carbon taxing for the time being. U.S. politics still aren’t ready, what with climate-averse Republicans occupying half of Congress, and Democrats wary of the difficult politics. We focus on what’s possible in the here-and-now.

Last year it was the praiseworthy (if imperfect) Biden-Schumer Inflation Reduction Act. This year we’re continuing to do what we can to bring congestion pricing for New York City into being. We’re also quietly nurturing a promising new avenue to advance a New York State carbon price. Please stay tuned!

President Biden’s decision this week to greenlight ConocoPhillips’ $6 billion Willow oil-and-gas drilling venture on Alaska’s North Slope is being cast as a climate disaster first, an ecological disaster second.

That’s backwards, not to mention incomplete. As we explain below, climate damage may be the least consequential aspect of Biden’s decision. More dire is the ecological impact, which will be felt both in Alaska and on America’s roads. But first and foremost, the president’s action is a political debacle.

Biden’s naked, unnecessary expansion of U.S. petroleum extraction into the country’s largest tract of undisturbed public land cuts the legs out from his singular legislative accomplishment so far: the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The IRA’s most public-facing part is its intricate array of consumer subsidies and manufacturing incentives to hasten replacement of America’s two hundred and eighty million petrol-burning cars and trucks with electric vehicles. The Carbon Tax Center came out swinging for this initiative, notwithstanding its tacit endorsement of EV giantism and cold-shoulder of small, urban-appropriate electrics such as bicycles, scooters and neighborhood electric vehicles.

With his Willow go-ahead, Biden has enshrouded the IRA’s proud optics behind a dark curtain. Why direct tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to ramp up electric vehicles, possibly turbocharging U.S. deficits and inflation, if EV’s aren’t going to bring down the curtain on U.S. oil consumption?

Yes, the combustion-to-electricity transition can’t happen overnight. But Willow makes the transition look depressingly distant. Indeed, by pumping up the supply of the fossil fuels the IRA professes to replace, Biden is casting shade on the underlying paradigm to electrify not only vehicles but “everything,” including heating, cooking and industry.

By our calculations, the drop in oil consumption from the IRA’s EV incentives will outweigh the oil supplied from Willow 6-fold. That finding highlights either how big a deal the IRA is or the relatively smallness of the oil venture. But the public is unlikely to see it that way. Rather than viewing Biden’s legislation as transformative, they’ll regard it as banal — helpful, but incomplete without a big assist from business-as-usual fossil fuels.

The “climate bomb” fallacy

CTC has long looked askance at climate campaigns targeting “fossil fuel infrastructure.” We view oil and other fossil supply as the tail, with the carbon dog being the demand that creates both the impetus and the financing to pull fossil fuels from the ground, process them and deliver them to vehicles, engines and furnaces. Stop this well or that pipeline, we contend, and another will be developed to supply the fuels that customers demand.

Yes, this view is oversimplified, but not by much. It is true that each new supply increment pushes down prices somewhat, which then pumps up demand; or, equivalently, bottling up particular supply projects raises industry costs, hence prices, which depresses demand. But these processes are largely indirect and not nearly “one-for-one.” The larger truth, we believe, is that demand finds a way to create supply.

Stop Willow, in other words, and the Permian Basin or the Persian Gulf or emerging oil frontiers like Uganda will serve up replacement supply.

In our telling, then, the only way to stop carbon combustion and climate chaos is to destroy demand. That points straight to carbon taxing, since it directly depresses consumer demand for energy, period, while also engendering conversion of energy supply to low- or zero-carbon sources, particularly in the more fungible electricity sector. Carbon taxes also “play well” with other policy instruments, reinforcing efficiency and regulatory standards.

Accordingly, the true “carbon bomb” isn’t Biden’s Willow signoff nearly as much as America’s 280 million combustion vehicles along with jetliners, helicopters, jet skis and so forth and — to go deeper — the development patterns and acculturation that valorize them. For its part, Willow won’t actually “bomb” Earth’s climate since without it, the same amount of extraction will be done elsewhere (if a tad less fuel-intensively in non-Arctic, non-wild environs).

Alaska’s wild ecosystems and heritage, including Indigenous livelihoods, will arguably be bigger losers than climate, then. Another loser will be our nation’s streets and roads and those who use them, since each opening of the petroleum spigot enables and normalizes the ongoing shift to ultra-large vehicles — both combustion and electric. As urban researcher-scholar David Zipper has shown, the supersizing of the U.S. vehicle fleet is the #1 reason that U.S. road deaths, especially but not exclusively of people riding bicycles and walking, have shot up in recent years even as virtually all other developed nations enjoy steady declines in per-capita traffic fatalities.

IRA vs. Willow: No Contest

The depressing irony about Biden’s approval of the Willow project is that the oil supply it will unlock, an estimated 180,000 barrels a day of crude, according to AP, isn’t particularly large, in oil terms. Notwithstanding the “massive” tag applied in much of the media, ConocoPhillips’ projected output amounts to only 1 percent of 2021 U.S. consumption of 19.8 million barrels of petroleum products per day.

What’s more, Willow’s increment to U.S. supplies will only be one-sixth as much as the need for petroleum that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will obviate by accelerating the uptake of electric passenger vehicles vis-a-vis the baseline pace, i.e., more gradually rising EV sales and use without the incentives in the IRA.

This finding is shown graphically at right. To derive it, we relied on projections in a January, 2023 white paper, Analyzing the Impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on Electric Vehicle Uptake in the United States, prepared jointly by two respected think tanks, International Council on Clean Transportation and Energy Innovation.

The calculation was straightforward. Table 3 of the report shows the ICCT/EI projections of future U.S. electric vehicle shares — not of sales but of registered vehicles in use — under baseline assumptions (no IRA) and four scenarios reflecting different extents of consumer uptake of EV’s. We used the “deltas” (differences) from the base case during the seven years of greatest policy impact, 2026-2032 — they average 19 percent — to compute the gasoline that would be burned nationwide if there were no IRA and the IRA-boosted electric vehicle-miles were instead driven in combustion vehicles.

We assumed 200 million passenger cars averaging 25 mpg and each traveling 12,000 miles per year in 2026, with the number of vehicles rising by 2 million a year and fuel economy inching upward by 0.5 mpg per year, but with no change in per-vehicle miles driven. The amounts of avoided gasoline are easily calculated.

Several simplifying assumptions were involved:

1. We assumed no offsetting petroleum consumed in generating electricity, due to oil’s minuscule share (less than one percent) of national electricity generation.
2. Though ICCT/EI’s deltas don’t apply to states that adhere to California’s more-aggressive zero-emission vehicle rules, we extrapolated them to the entire country.
3. We ignored the IRA’s accelerating effect on electric truck sales and use — almost certainly understating the legislation’s petroleum savings more than our overstatement in bullet #2.
4. We implicitly treated crude oil supply with gasoline demand, a minor simplification that we suspect doesn’t tilt our comparison much one way or the other.

Tongue-tied on the campaign trail?

We don’t mean to be cruel, but until this week we pictured President Biden campaigning for re-election and touting the Inflation Reduction Act’s manifold achievements: Without a single Republican vote, we passed a law freeing us from manipulated, volatile oil prices and corporate despoiling of our climate and our Earth. And the law is creating millions of good-paying jobs for Americans, especially in areas ravaged and ruined by fossil-fuel development.

That’s still true. But with Willow, the purity of the message is gone, taking much of the power with it.

It should have been big news: A report this month from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admitted that the fuel economy of new light-duty vehicles sold in the U.S. last year was no better than the year before. The mix of cars, SUV’s and pickups sold in 2021 averaged the same crummy 25.4 miles per gallon as in 2020.

Flatlining new-vehicle mpg is bad news. It portends more climate damage, worsened pollution and strained household budgets, along with geopolitical turmoil, fattened oil company earnings and brawnier petro-states. It’s also a betrayal of long-standing promises by Democratic presidents, EPA administrators and environmental groups that, together, they would make auto companies achieve ever higher mileages, like 54.5 mpg in 2025, as the Obama administration pledged a decade ago. (See White House 2012 press release, below.)

What happened?

Don’t just blame the Trump administration’s four-year mpg slow-walk and roll-back. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy was forthright in its Dec. 12 press release: EPA Finds No Progress in Vehicle Efficiency as Automakers Sell More Big Models (emphasis added).

“The [auto] manufacturers are canceling out all the efficiency progress as they sell more large vehicles,” said ACEEE senior transportation researcher, Avi Mersky. “And it’s completely allowed under the federal rules.”

CBS News usefully chimed in:

The EPA said in a statement that all vehicle types are at record low carbon dioxide emissions, but “the market shift away from cars and toward sport utility vehicles and pickups has offset some of the fleetwide benefits.” (emphasis added)

In the 2021 model year, cars and station wagons, the most efficient vehicles, fell to 26% of U.S. new vehicle production, well below the 50% market share as recently as 2013, the EPA said. SUVs were a record 45% of new vehicle sales for the 2021 model year, while pickup trucks hit 16%.

Let that sink in: in just eight years, the U.S. market share of new sedans and station wagons fell practically in half, to 26 percent from 50 percent. (And no, CBS, that shift didn’t just offset some of the mpg benefits, it offset all of them, though credit the network for covering the story at all.)

The Hill did well, with EPA report: Vehicle fuel efficiency flat in 2021. Otherwise, there wasn’t much coverage. Sure, Christmas was coming, and there were year-end stories to report. Still, it’s striking that such a big failure in a sector that now produces nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions merited so little attention. (See our CO2 pie chart, further below.)

The silence of the greens

Robustly rising automotive fuel economy was, for decades, a cornerstone of mainstream environmental advocacy. So-called CAFE standards (the acronym denotes Corporate Average Fuel Economy) would, before long, turn most of America’s 200 million passenger vehicles into fuel-sippers, relieving pressure to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and other sacrosanct natural areas, enabling some oil refineries to close, and cutting air and carbon emissions. Just make sure EPA kept ratcheting up the mpg standards, and all would be well.

Things turned out differently, of course. Not only did U.S. miles driven resume rising after a relative caesura from the mid-aughts to the mid-teens, but the fleet mpg average barely budged, due to “the market shift away from cars and toward SUV’s and pickups” noted by CBS News. Compounding the shift, long-standing CAFE loopholes grant bigger vehicles looser mileage targets.

Most of the big U.S. green groups just watched the shift unfold, essentially throwing in the towel. Either they didn’t grasp its extent or they viewed it as unstoppable. Maybe they felt constrained by their members’ and donors’ preference for the roomier and supposedly outdoors-friendly sport utilities. Who knows? But they basically gave up on improving actual vehicle fuel-economy, and the impact has been stark.

Even as the U.S. electricity sector has seen a substantial decline in carbon emissions, an estimated 36 percent drop from 2005 to 2021, the drop for automobiles has been only one-seventh as much — a measly 5 percent. The vastly improved mpg performance that was going to swamp growth in driving simply didn’t materialize.

What did eventuate from the big bulk-up of U.S. passenger vehicles has been a far greater menace to pedestrians, cyclists and users of smaller vehicles. Due to their greater mass and taller profile, those super-sized sport ute’s and pickups are tougher to maneuver and control, are harder to see around, are often driven with a greater sense of entitlement, and cause more damage when they hit someone.

Automotive researcher-journalist David Zipper tied things up recently for Bloomberg News, in a post trenchantly titled, “US Traffic Safety Is Getting Worse, While Other Countries Improve,”:

Uniquely, the US has seen larger SUVs and pickup trucks dominate its domestic car market. While the profitability of this trend has delighted automakers, the weight and height of these vehicles places other road users in greater danger. Research has linked the ascent of SUVs to the surge in US pedestrian deaths.

Possible futures for U.S. passenger vehicles

In his Bloomberg post, Zipper also noted that in other countries, “higher gasoline taxes (as well as weight-based fees adopted by countries like France) have slowed adoption” of large vehicles. (Doubtless there’s also a reinforcing cultural factor, or “path dependence,” that frowns on supersized vehicles and demurs from designing infrastructure around them, which discourages their use and thus helps keep the higher taxes on bigger vehicles politically defensible.)

Higher gasoline taxes are a form of carbon tax, of course. Indeed, resistance to increasing taxes on gasoline has always been a central sticking point to enacting carbon taxes — ironically so, given that those who cry the loudest tend to be big-car owners whose choice of vehicle effectively has them taxing themselves by locking them into purchasing more gallons.

Nevertheless, another locus of opposition to taxing gasoline to reduce its use has been — surprise! — the same green groups that habitually put all their chips on CAFE standards and other regulatory mechanisms. Sometimes these groups have even badmouthed the idea that gasoline use is somewhat price-elastic, mistaking short-term inflexibility for long-term (a confusion I pointed to in my 2015 post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes — scroll down to “Argument #3”).

The supposed impossibility of reducing the use of gasoline by raising its price has been part and parcel of Big Green’s attachment to mpg standards — despite the fact that mileage reg’s do nothing to reduce driving and its vast negative consequences: not just traffic congestion but also poor health (sedentary living, car crashes, noise) and general unaffordability (car loan costs, upkeep expenses, costlier housing due to cars’ consuming urban and suburban land).

This does not bode well for enacting weight or weight-distance charges on the increasingly electric fleet of U.S. passenger vehicles. Yet weight-based fees might be our best bet for reining in the size and weight of EV’s and, thus, serving four vital societal objectives: (i) ensuring that shortages of lithium or other minerals critical to electric-vehicle batteries don’t hold back electrification of transportation; (ii) curbing the amount of electricity that must be generated to drive the EV fleet; (iii) easing the stresses that larger vehicles impose on urban and suburban form; and (iv) reducing traffic carnage, especially to pedestrians, cyclists and users of small vehicles.

With the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which we at Carbon Tax Center strongly supported from the git-go (our extensive, ongoing write-up of the IRA is here), the Biden Administration has put in place an array of mutually reinforcing, intelligently crafted subsidies and incentives to electrify U.S. passenger travel. Climate and transportation advocates alike should now work to craft and enact incentives to steer vehicle electrification toward smaller, lighter, less-dangerous and city-friendlier forms of individual and family transportation. The choice between carbon taxes or weight-based charges or hybrids of the two is less important than getting strong incentives in place widely and soon.

While the world is abuzz with the news that a fusion laboratory in California recently generated more energy than the reaction consumed, a different breakthrough in Europe may portend bigger, faster progress on carbon emissions and climate: European national governments and the European Parliament have reached an agreement to tax imported goods and materials based on the carbon dioxide emitted in making them.

The levies will initially apply to imports of iron and steel, cement, aluminium, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity, according to Euractiv, the Brussels-based pan-European news site specializing in EU matters, which also reported that the mechanism “will mirror the EU’s own domestic carbon price.”

That price — the price of emissions allowances traded on the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) — on Dec. 1 was 85 euros per metric ton, equivalent to around $91 per metric ton, or nearly $83 per short (U.S.) ton, a far higher price than the starting levies embodied in most U.S. carbon tax proposals. If “mirrors” means “duplicates,” imports from non-carbon-taxing countries may soon face steep charges indeed.

With the agreement, which caps more than a year of negotiations, the European Union is poised to “insert climate-change regulation for the first time into the rules of global trade,” the Wall Street Journal noted. Pascal Canfin, chair of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, was even more emphatic, telling the New York Times that “We are putting carbon and climate at the heart of trade.”

The Journal added that “The plan, known as the carbon border adjustment mechanism, would be the world’s first tax on the carbon content of imported goods.”

CBAM could become a breakthrough

What could make the EU agreement a climate breakthrough is the tantalizing possibility that carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs) may compel the United States, China and other major emitters to finally enact national carbon taxes or equivalent carbon-pricing mechanisms.

The initial step in this scenario, which the Journal says “the EU is expected to adopt in the coming weeks as part of a sweeping package of legislation [to] step up the bloc’s efforts to limit global warming,” is to tax imports of key industrial commodities like steel, aluminum and cement to the extent that the carbon intensity of their manufacture exceeds EU averages. Exporters then have two ways to avert the trade tax. They can cut down on the carbon emitted to produce their product. Or the country in which they produced it can tax carbon emissions to the same level as the EU’s carbon price.

The climate wins either way. The first way directly cuts emissions in the industrial sectors covered by the tax. The second cuts emissions indirectly, but far more broadly, via the carbon tax’s economy-wide incentives that steer all energy supply and demand away from fossil fuels by making the market prices for coal, oil and gas reflect at least some of their climate damage.

The announcement from Europe follows by less than a week the Biden administration’s transmission to the EU of a proposal suggesting “creation of an international consortium that would promote trade in metals produced with less carbon emissions, while imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and elsewhere,” according to the New York Times.

While the Biden proposal is merely a “concept paper” and is being kept under wraps, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which drafted it, has at least given it a name — the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum. The Times story called it “the first concrete look at a new type of trade arrangement that the Biden administration views as a cornerstone of its approach to trade policy … one [that] would wield the power of American and European markets to try to bolster domestic industries in a way that also mitigated climate change.”

The trade concept paper appears to embody the principles underlying the Clean Competition Act (S. 4355) introduced in June by U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), perhaps Congress’s most indefatigable climate hawk, to tax both domestic and foreign manufacturers of steel, aluminum, cement and other industrial commodities to the extent that the carbon intensity of their manufacture exceeds U.S. averages.

(A July post here by CTC contributor Mike Aucott, A Novel Way to Price Industrial Carbon Emissions?,” has terrific details on how CBAMs would look from a U.S. perspective, and includes a link to a comprehensive  report by the Climate Leadership Council on the relative carbon advantage of U.S. industry compared to Russia, China and the authoritarian petro-states. In a similar vein is a September report from Resources for the Future that compiles carbon emission intensities of both domestic and foreign producers for 39 industrial sectors.)

As for nuclear fusion …

We’re thrilled that on Dec. 5, the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA achieved an historic first in efforts to harness nuclear fusion, when their laser-driven fusion device, in a brief (100 trillionths of a second) burst, achieved “positive net energy” by generating a flow of neutrons carrying 3 megajoules of energy, exceeding by almost 50 percent the 2.05 megajoules the lasers consumed in the process, as New York Times science correspondent Kenneth Chang reported yesterday.

That’s terrific news for science and, maybe someday, human prosperity and global sustainability. It’s been a long time coming.

We’ve been reading, and dreaming, about the wonders of fusion power — seemingly low and short-lived radioactivity, impossibility of runaway reactions or meltdowns, abundant resource base (deuterium and tritium in seawater), and of course carbon-free — since the 1960s.

But for almost as long, we’ve been mindful of the dauntingly high hurdles that nuclear fusion must clear to ever operate on a commercial, global scale. As climate activist and author Bill McKibben usefully pointed out this week, “producing [the Livermore Lab] reaction required one of the largest lasers in the world.” Not only that, “the reaction creates neutrons that can destroy the very equipment required to produce it” through chronic embrittlement.

Amplifying those concerns, Arthur Turrell, deputy director for research and economics at the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) Data Science Campus, and author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet, reminded listeners on the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday that for the Livermore Lab breakthrough to lead to the advent of commercial, global-scale electricity, it must be miniaturized and also made modular and scalable.

Perhaps this can happen someday, with enough time, money and commitment. But the march to that point will be measured not in years but in many — multiple — decades.

Consider that a quarter-century elapsed from the first sustained fission chain reaction at the University of Chicago, in 1942, to New Year’s Day 1968, when the first non-prototype nuclear power plants in the United States, Connecticut Yankee and San Onofre 1 (around 500 megawatts each), achieved commercial operation. And harnessing nuclear fission was a far simpler task than achieving breakeven with nuclear fusion, judging by the multiple order-of-magnitude scale differences between Enrico Fermi’s fission team — which operated in a confined space beneath the college football stadium! — and the enormous National Ignition Facility shown in the photograph.

Clearly, it would be folly to ease up on the multiple, synergistic programs to move the U.S. and the rest of the world off of fossil fuels, including implementing the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and progressing with carbon pricing. As Stephen Sondheim’s mythical, murderous barber Sweeney Todd pronounced, in a somewhat different context: The work waits!