The Intercept today published Christopher Ketcham’s and my essay, The Shutdown of “Luxury Emissions” Should Be at the Center of Climate Revolt. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments by Carbon Tax Center subscribers and readers. Let us know what you think.

    — C.K., December 13, 2022

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. The world must also rein in consumption.

By Christopher Ketcham & Charles Komanoff ▪ Photos and captions are copied from The Intercept.

SEVEN HUNDRED SELF-DESCRIBED “climate rebels” breached the chain-link fence surrounding Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, the world’s third-busiest hub for international passenger traffic, on November 5. With bolt cutters they opened holes in the fence and poured in, some of them on bicycles, and raced across the tarmac. Others laid ladders against the 9-foot-high fence and topped it on foot.

They had to move quickly before military police, tasked with securing the airport, saw what was happening. The rebels targeted 13 private jets parked or preparing for takeoff, at least two belonging to NetJets, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary that bills itself as the world’s largest jet company and sells fractional ownership shares in private business jets.

They swarmed each of the jets in groups of 20 or 30 or more and sat down before the looming machines, there to stay for the next six-and-a-half hours, unmoving, until at last police waded in and started hauling the rebels to jail. Some of the 413 arrests were violent. “There was fear and rage, for the state of the world and for my own future,” said one of those arrested.

Another 800 people gathered for a march and sit-in at the airport’s main plaza, and at least 30 activists blocked the road that serves as the supply route to Schiphol. Every single private jet at Schiphol ended up grounded that day, not merely the 13 that were surrounded.

“The superrich have got used to polluting as they please with a total disregard for people and planet, and private jets are the pinnacle of these luxury emissions that we simply cannot afford,” Jonathan Leggett, one of the activists, told us. “Our action brought them back to earth. We wanted to show the extremeness and injustice related to this manner of transport.”

In other words: a perfectly tailored climate action. Not a highway sit-down ensnaring hapless motorists and keeping cars running, and emitting, longer. Not sit-ins at banks that broker investments in fossil fuels but don’t directly cause their combustion. And certainly not spattering soup on museum art, with its unsettling aura of sullying humanity’s heritage in order to save it.

No, the Schiphol action went for climate change’s jugular: self-indulgent carbon-spewing. It did so balletically, in the democratic and fuel-efficient motion of humans racing on foot or whirling about on bicycles. And ecologically: In the words of one participant, “We made sure that any planes could still land, because the last thing we wanted was for them to be unnecessarily flying for any longer than they already were.”

It was an action that bared the gluttony and entitlement of fossil fuel usage. “Keep it in the ground” protesters confine their blockades to energy supply infrastructure and studiously ignore the demand half of the equation. 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.

Limits of Green Energy

Climate disorder won’t be remedied through an orderly march of green energy. Replacing fossil fuels with a planetary buildout of wind turbines and solar panels, while simultaneously making and plugging in a billion new electric furnaces and vehicles, looks straightforward in a spreadsheet. In truth, though, ramping up green energy alone won’t cut fossil fuel use quickly enough to meet the Paris warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Supplanting the world’s combustion-based energy infrastructure with an all-electric model will be too lumbering, too roundabout, and too full of its own drawbacks to fully bend the emissions curve in the brief time left.

The world must also rein in consumption. For reasons both symbolic and practical, the climate movement must strike not just at pipelines and mines, but also at obscene wealth.

The justification is unarguable. Large personal fortunes feed carbon consumption and make a mockery of programs to curb it. As well, the surplus wealth of the superrich is probably the lone source of capital that can finance the worldwide uptake of greener energy and also pay for adaptation where it’s most critical.

At the nexus of consumption and wealth sits luxury carbon. Which is why the Schiphol action was so strategic.

Consider that the world’s richest 10 percent account for 50 percent of fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions. Consider that climate reparations, for which the Global South won acknowledgment but little more at last month’s COP27 climate talks, can’t be funded at scale by tweaking wealthy countries’ hidebound taxation-as-usual. Consider that carbon emissions pricing, an indispensable policy tool for shrinking fossil fuel demand, can’t be made politically palatable in the U.S. — even with worthy “dividend” schemes — so long as middle- and working-class families must witness the superrich lording and polluting at will.

Prodigal Aviation

As the Schiphol rebels surely know, luxury carbon, like all manufactured desire, is a contagion, oozing inexorably from the sanctums of the few to become desires of the many. Few Americans, and even fewer Europeans, flew in airplanes in 1950. These days, half of U.S. residents fly each year, averaging half a dozen flights each, according to the industry’s annual “Air Travelers in America” reports. As commercial aviation grew safer and more affordable, feeding the increase, business and pleasure travel became normalized.

Today, “general” aviation — private jets, business jets, air tourism — is undergoing a similar liftoff as well-heeled flyers seek refuge, and a status boost, from the indignities of commercial service. And nowhere is private jetting’s carbon waste as blatant as it is in Europe, with its extensive rail network. Per passenger, private air travel is five to 14 times more carbon-polluting than commercial flights, and 50 times more than high-speed rail, according to the European NGO Transport & Environment.

In the Netherlands, 8 percent of the population takes 40 percent of flights. Worldwide, the difference is even more stark: One percent of the population is responsible for 50 percent of pollution due to aviation, making air travel a textbook example of how pollution by the rich leads to consequences and injustices for those who have not caused the climate crisis.

Naysayers will note that the tactic of occupying and disrupting airports has been tried before, as in the case of the Plane Stupid campaign of the 2000s and 2010s. Radicals in the climate movement such as Andreas Malm, who advocates property destruction of fossil infrastructure, point out that Plane Stupid was ineffective in bending the arc of emissions.

“What the Schiphol people needed to do is destroy the airplanes on the tarmac and then destroy the airplane manufacturers,” said an ecosaboteur named Stephen McRae, an acquaintance of one of the authors, who recently completed a six-year prison sentence for industrial sabotage. Although he no longer participates in such criminal acts of destruction, he has a point. The planes grounded on November 5 are already back in the air. That doesn’t diminish the value of what the Schiphol rebels did, however. Actions that disrupt carbon comfort without violence or hardship are morale-building, the material from which more actions and eventually mass movements are made.

Ripple Effect

A few days after the Schiphol revolt, climate activists under the banner of Scientists Rebellion disrupted operations at private airports in four U.S. states and a dozen other countries, according to a New York Times roundup.

While the Times attributed the rising militancy of scientists to “the increasing clarity of the science,” it was more likely propelled by the impulses that motivated protesters in the Netherlands: rage at a future “thrown away for the profits of a few,” in the words of one Schiphol rebel, and the palpable need “to stand there and know we actually were grounding private jets and … actively stopping this manner of pollution,” per another.

Along with their clarity in targeting the true fountainhead of climate disorder — sybaritic carbon profligacy — what stands out most about the Schiphol action is its organizational breadth and cohesion. On top of the 700 occupying the tarmac and the 800 marching and sitting-in at the main plaza were those “working throughout the day, and in the days and weeks beforehand, in a range of supporting roles,” as one organizer reported, describing legal and media teams, an arrestee support team, and a team of caterers. “The diversity of roles worked to our advantage: There are as many ways to engage with activism as there are people, everyone has their own way of contributing.”

Social solidarity on this scale helped buffer the cruelty of airport police who in some cases “ripped people from their groups and held [them] in painful positions even though they were cooperating,” reported one first-time protester who joined the action as a medic. “What started as a nervous morning ended with a fulfilling and accomplishing situation,” he said. “We did this.”

A post last week by a U-C Berkeley Business School professor got me fretting over the staggering rise in China’s fossil fuel use over the past two decades and wondering what it will take to not just rein it in but reverse it.

Just since 2000, Prof. Lucas Davis wrote in Putting China’s Coal Consumption in Context, the amount of electricity China generates from coal, which of course is the most carbon-intensive of the three fossil fuels — went from one-half that of the United States to six times as much, as shown in his graph reproduced here at left. That’s a 12-fold reversal (!), which he parses into China’s nearly five-fold increase at the same time that U.S. coal-fired electricity production was falling more than two-fold.

It was heartening that Davis, an energy and climate specialist at the business school’s Haas Energy Institute, said straight-up that “The biggest single factor explaining the divergent patterns is that China’s demand for electricity is soaring, while U.S. demand is practically flat.” Too many commentators simplistically credit cheap fracked gas for the sharp, sustained drop in U.S. coal-fired power generation, ignoring the flattening in electricity use that allowed gas-fired electricity to substitute for coal rather than simply add to it — a phenomenon we pointed out in 2016 and again in 2020, in our twin “The Good News” reports, which also quantified wind and solar power’s rising contributions.

That said, the subject here is China, whose electricity use has skyrocketed while its mix has stayed nearly locked in place. The surge in solar and wind electricity generation, though considerable, hasn’t kept coal-fired power generation from growing rapidly. China now accounts for more than half of the entire world’s production of coal-fired electricity, according to Prof. Davis. Moreover, as we show below, China’s year-to-year increases in kilowatt-hours made from fossil fuels have exceeded the same year’s combined increases in wind and solar electricity in all but 2 of those 20 years.

(Note, “coal” and “fossil fuels” are used interchangeably in this post, befitting coal’s dominance over the other fossil fuels in making electricity: in 2020 the respective kilowatt-hours percentages were 95.0% coal, 4.8% gas, 0.2% oil.)

Coal’s Unbroken Electricity Dominance

Following Davis’s lead, we charted China’s annual electricity production by fuel type from data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. To help the graph pop, we consolidated coal, oil and gas into a single fossil fuel supergroup. We also combined wind and solar, and dropped the small “biomass and waste” category.

The biggest takeaway is the unrelenting growth in fossil (coal) generation, despite the concurrent expansion of both hydro-electricity (concentrated in the first decade) and wind and solar (more pronounced in the second decade).

Indeed, coal/fossil accounted for 63 percent of the increase in China’s electricity generation over the entire 20-year period. Even in just the past five years, when wind and solar have enjoyed their greatest increases in absolute terms, 50 percent, or half, of China’s increased electricity generation has been via fossil fuels; solar and wind combined accounted for only a quarter, 25 percent.

To make these changes easier to see we created another graph showing year-to-year growth (or contraction) in the same four categories. Note the 2014-2015 period when fossil-fuel production of electricity barely grew, on account of both below-average growth in total electricity generation and above-average rises in hydroelectric and nuclear power output.

Those two years coincided with a flowering of climate optimism, with the U.S. and China reaching a bilateral agreement to curb emissions — ostensibly dissolving the “alliance of denial” by which both countries used each other’s inaction as a pretext to forego action on climate — and setting the stage for the 2015 Paris climate accord. Beginning in 2016, however, China’s fossil-fuel electricity generation (again, overwhelmingly coal-fired) recovered most of its prior increase pace. Year-to-year growth in fossil output has averaged 200 annual terawatt-hours since then.

When Will China’s Fossil Generation Start to Contract?

At some point, the rises in wind and solar, supplemented by increased nuclear power production, will almost certainly exceed growth in overall electricity demand. That will allow the gargantuan fossil-fuel generation sector to begin to contract, as it has done in the United States since 2007. (Comparing 2021 to 2007, the peak year, U.S. fossil fuel power generation is down more than 16 percent, whereas in China the same metric doubled.)

That kind of turnaround does not appear imminent for China, however, as suggested by the right-hand part of the graph directly above, showing year-to-year changes. Annual rises in fossil electricity production continue to exceed annual rises in wind and solar. (The relative dip in fossil-electricity growth in 2020 was mostly an artifact of the pandemic-induced global economic slowdown.) Indeed, the 2021 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, published in June 2022, shows more than a 400 TWh jump in China’s coal-fired electricity generation, which would be the second largest year-to-year rise in the country’s history, topped only by the 2011 increase.

Moreover, reports of frightful heat waves and drought in much of China this summer almost certainly point to a slackening in hydroelectricity and a resulting upward bump in use of coal-fired power plants. At the same time, the push to electrify transportation, which is progressing much faster in China than in the United States, will spur increased use of electricity, making it harder to bend downward the curve of fossil-fuel burning to make electricity.

(Addendum from Nov 14: The new Global Carbon Budget 2022 report, prepared by an international group of some 100 climate specialists, projects that China’s carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion will decrease by 0.9 percent in 2022 vs. 2021, as reported by the New York Times’ Brad Plumer in Carbon Dioxide Emissions Increased in 2022 as Crises Roiled Energy Markets. We’re tracking this and will update with new data.)

Other Energy Usage in China

Electricity isn’t the only form in which energy is used in China, or anywhere else, of course. Liquid fuels derived from petroleum power cars, trucks, planes and construction machinery. Natural gas and coal burned directly (rather than to make electricity) fuel industry, especially steel and cement making, and also heat homes and non-residential buildings.

But in China, no single energy application rivals the burning of coal to produce electricity. It accounts for around one-third of the country’s primary energy consumption — a figure we computed by multiplying coal’s 55 percent share of 2021 China primary energy (see donut chart) and electricity’s estimated 60 percent share of the country’s total coal consumption (per the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s extensive write-up of China’s energy sector, which we referenced earlier).

In the United States, the electricity sector has functioned as the proverbial low-hanging fruit for decarbonization, literally accounting for the entire estimated 2005 to 2021 decrease of 866 million metric tons in total CO2 emissions from fuel burning. The trend in China has been diametrically opposite, with the country’s 2005-2021 rise in CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels to make electricity more than four times as great as the U.S. decrease.*

(* = Derived as follows: Per EIA data cited in text, China generated 1,866 TWh of electricity from burning coal in 2005, and 4,775 TWh in 2020. The increase of 420 TWh to 2021 (from BP data cited in text) brings the latter figure to 5,195 TWh, which represents a rise from 2005 of 3,329 TWh. We apply the U.S. average of 2.22 lb per kWh from burning coal and raise that by 10% to reflect presumed inefficiencies in China’s coal-fired power sector and also allow a margin to reflect the small but non-zero amount of natural gas-burning to make electricity. Converting to metrics, the calculation is 3,329 x 10^9 x*2.22*1.1 / 2205, yielding a 2005-2021 increase of 3,687 million tonnes of CO2.)

Addendum, Nov. 9

We didn’t see it till today, when it hit the print edition, but on Nov. 3 the NY Times ran a long, sobering piece, China Is Burning More Coal, a Growing Climate Challenge.

Timed to the start of COP27, the story noted that China’s greenhouse gas emissions grew in 2021 at their fastest pace in a decade, though that was partly an artifact of the slow increase in pandemic 2020. A more startling factoid was that China’s carbon emissions just from burning coal now exceed total energy-related U.S. emissions — a statistic we confirmed by looking up U.S. 2021 energy-related CO2 emissions in our carbon-tax model, 5,289 million metric tons, and computing China’s 2021 CO2 emissions from burning coal to make electricity; coincidentally, they were the same: 5,289 million metric tons.

Though the the story’s subhead said that “Beijing is looking for alternatives,” it presented little if any evidence. Particularly unsettling was the revelation that in contrast to the U.S., where peaking power for the hundred or so highest-demand hours each year comes from quick-start gas-fired generators, China services peak usage with old coal-fired generators that can’t rapidly ramp up and down, which leads to running those plants for thousands of hours a year. Only now is China supposedly retrofitting those plants for more flexible use and, more importantly, beginning to price peak power at premiums that could incentivize customers to install on-site solar to meet peak demand.

Though the Times story includes the obligatory nod to fast-growing wind and solar in China, our second chart, above, makes clear that their growth hasn’t been nearly fast enough to enable a cap on coal-fired power. As we noted, from 2015 through 2020 the growth in coal-fired electricity generation in China was twice that of wind and solar combined. The story’s overall picture is that the planet’s carbon behemoth is not yet intent on backing away from coal.

[Our new page, The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, has much more on the legislation spawned by the Manchin-Schumer deal — what it will and won’t do to emissions, what it means for climate policy, and whether it closes or opens future paths for carbon pricing. — Sept. 1, 2022]

The Nation magazine this morning published my essay, The Manchin-Schumer Deal Could Pay Off—If Congress Acts. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and add graphics for context.

While the deal assiduously, and regrettably, leaves intact the deep, intertwined roots of U.S. fossil fuel dependence, it’s imperative to support it — not just for its beneficial, albeit indirect, impacts on emissions, but because of its potential to materially improve both climate dynamics and political dynamics in the U.S.

Our Comments are open. Let us know what you think.

    — C.K., August 2, 2022

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will knock out less than 10 percent of U.S. climate pollution by 2030, leaving the nation short of even its whittled-down goal of getting emissions 40 percent below the 2005 level.

Why, then, are many climate activists popping champagne corks? And why should progressives of every stripe do likewise? It’s simple. If the deal between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin survives more or less intact, it will upend two deeply debilitating narratives: U.S. climate helplessness and Biden-Democratic Party haplessness.

The haplessness first: The legislation should help dispel the aura of fractious Democrats incapable of doing what we elect them to do: deliver big structural change. This turnabout could boost the Dems’ chances of retaining or even expanding control of Congress in the midterms, making possible not just other climate wins but also gains on voting and reproductive rights, economic justice, and the rest of the progressive agenda we hold dear.

The Inflation Reduction Act likewise marks a turning point, at least for the time being, on long-running, world-damaging U.S. climate helplessness. True, modeling by the Rhodium Group found that the legislation will only deliver a 7 to 9 percent carbon reduction relative to ongoing trends—far short of the massive cuts required for the United States to credibly claim global climate leadership. But by letting millions more Americans experience wind, solar, and energy efficiency—not as abstractions but as palpable engines of economic advancement—the bill opens paths to expansive climate gains going forward.

The omnibus legislation also burnishes green energy investments by packaging them with other popular but less threatening reforms such as affordable prescription drugs and higher taxes on big corporations. Not to mention the chef’s kiss of the bill’s name, the Inflation Reduction Act, signaling Democrats’ attentiveness to this year’s hot-button issue.

Admittedly, this is a lot to hang on a bill that doesn’t directly tackle the entrenched, intertwined systems that have long locked in Americans’ profligate carbon consumption: massively overbuilt roads, decrepit public transit, low-density zoning, anti-urban bias, rampant inequality, and artificially cheap fossil fuels. But, to borrow from Auden, such are our low, dishonest politics. No bill addressing even one of those matters was ever going to pass this Congress, with the modest exception of a fee on “excess” methane leaks from oil and gas wells and pipelines, starting in 2024.

Instead, we get three big, complementary though indirect ways to cut emissions: monetary rewards for wind, solar, and nuclear—yes, nuclear—generators that make electricity without burning fossil fuels; bigger tax credits to purchase electric automobiles and accelerate the demise of fossil cars and trucks; and tax breaks for US factories to manufacture those new wind turbines and solar arrays.

If much of that sounds technical, wait till you hear Rhodium explain that the Inflation Reduction Act will let clean-energy developers transfer their tax credits to third parties that “have tax liability and [thus] the ability to monetize the credits.” The 700-page bill abounds with just such tools to crack open long-standing bottlenecks impeding the shift to clean energy.

The legislation also swarms with fossil-fuel concessions, most notably a requirement that the Interior Department auction off more public lands and waters for oil drilling. The Center for Biological Diversity last week labeled that provision a “climate suicide pact … that will fan the flames of the climate disasters torching our country [and deliver] a slap in the face to the communities fighting to protect themselves from filthy fossil fuels.”

Fossil fuel extraction and processing are indeed filthy and toxic. But expanding U.S. leasing will worsen total warming only slightly. Since fuels are fungible, stopping one carbon source leads Big Oil to tap supply somewhere else. Rather, by cutting overall demand for fossil fuels, the Inflation Reduction Act “will make oil leasing less profitable and therefore less widespread,” as UC Santa Barbara environmental politics professor Leah Stokes noted last Friday on Democracy Now. Fewer communities overall will be ravaged by drilling, let alone floods and other climate havoc.

People complaining about the provision in the #InflationReductionAct that allows for more drilling on federal lands have a VERY different counterfactual than I do. It would almost be like me complaining there is no carbon tax in the bill…#ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction

— Christopher Knittel (@KnittelMIT) July 29, 2022

Let’s also credit the Manchin-Schumer deal’s potential to leverage U.S. emission cuts by palliating our global climate disrepute, a point long made by Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA), who along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the Sunrise Movement, is widely credited with elevating the Green New Deal into political discourse. “You can’t preach temperance from a bar stool,” Markey said in 2008, adding last week that “you can’t ask China, India, Brazil or other countries to cut emissions if we’re not doing it ourselves in a significant way.”

While we shouldn’t over-credit the immediate carbon reductions from the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s imperative to close ranks behind it, as MIT climate economist Christopher Knittel urged on Twitter last week: “People complaining about the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that allows for more drilling on federal lands have a very different counterfactual than I do. It would almost be like me complaining there is no carbon tax in the bill.”

Knittel’s counterfactual, of course, was U.S. climate stasis. Mine was as well, along with Democratic Party squabbling. That may have changed last week. We must make the most of it.

Charles Komanoff, a longtime environmental activist, directs the Carbon Tax Center.

Addendum: The Inflation Reduction Act includes a fee on “excess” methane emissions from oil and gas wells and pipelines of $900 per metric ton of emissions above new federal limits in 2024, increasing to $1,500 per metric ton in 2026. MIT economist Chris Knittel (quoted above) equates the $900 methane fee to $60 per metric ton of CO2, a level that would qualify as a fairly robust nose in the proverbial camel’s tent of carbon pricing.

A New York Times post this week, Biden’s Climate Change ‘Revolution’ Isn’t Coming, caught our attention with its trenchant look at climate policy’s low ebb in the wake of two crushing setbacks in just three weeks: the June 30 Supreme Court ruling blowing up EPA’s carbon-regulating authority under the Clean Air Act, and Joe Manchin’s coup de grace to the remnants of President Biden’s Build Back Better climate package.

Drawing on fellow Times writers, opinion editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell painted an unsparing portrait of U.S. — and global — climate stasis as dangerous heat was enveloping Britain, much of Europe and large swaths of the U.S. Here we reprint his post in full, with our commentary as counterpoint.

Biden’s Climate Change ‘Revolution’ Isn’t Coming. Introduction When President Biden took office, one of the first things he did was make a pledge: The United States, he vowed, would finally “meet the urgent demands of the climate crisis” through “a clean energy revolution.” That revolution was to be set in motion by a $2 trillion plan for putting the country on a path to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 and to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. (It now stands at 2.2 degrees.) But after more than a year of negotiations, compromises, deal-making and belt-tightening, that plan appeared to collapse last week when Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia and a key swing vote in Congress, announced that he would not support funding for climate or energy programs. What does the collapse of Biden’s agenda mean for the domestic and global politics of climate action moving forward? Here’s what people are saying.	Biden’s Plan, Though Not Revolutionary, Was Bold. Introduction Even a fully intact Biden plan would have fallen short of its goals. Nevertheless, its scope and reach would have far surpassed any climate program by any major nation. Build Back Better’s carbon reductions and climate benefits would have been numerically substantial and would also have triggered parallel policies in other countries. (Chart is from CTC Sept 2021 post, Without a Carbon Tax, Don’t Count on a 50% Emissions Cut.)
1. The climate deal that wasn’t As my colleagues have reported, experts generally agree that there are two ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the speed and scale required. The first is making fossil fuels more expensive by ensuring that their environmental costs — global warming, for one, but also the staggering harms of air pollution — are reflected in their price. While widely championed by economists, carbon taxes have proved politically unpopular: A carbon tax by ballot referendum in Washington State has failed twice. Biden hoped to take the other approach: reducing emissions by driving down the cost and improving the efficiency of low-carbon energy sources, like wind, solar and nuclear power. Initially, the centerpiece of his plan was a clean energy standard, which would have legally required utilities to draw 80 percent of their electricity from zero-carbon sources by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035. But when Manchin — who made millions from his family coal business and took more campaign money from the oil and gas industry than any other senator — pulled his support from that scheme in October, Democrats pivoted to a $300 billion package of tax credits to encourage the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles. Now, both avenues to decarbonizing the country have been all but closed off. Even before Biden’s plan was whittled down, there was some debate about whether it was sufficient to meet his ambitions. But now that the president’s most powerful tools for reducing emissions have been confiscated by Congress (and the Supreme Court, which last month limited the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate power plant emissions), “We are not going to meet our targets, period,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Santa Barbara, California, who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation. Manchin’s reason for scuttling the negotiations, according to his spokeswoman, was his desire to “avoid taking steps that add fuel to the inflation fire.” But in The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer argues that, in addition to being “extraordinarily bleak for the climate,” Manchin’s reversal will actually worsen inflation: By reducing long-term demand for oil, Biden’s plan would probably have lowered gas prices, and an earlier version of the package would have led to hundreds of dollars in annual energy cost savings for the average U.S. household by 2030, according to an independent analysis from researchers at Princeton. “America’s climate negligence endures,” Meyer writes. “That is not just due to Senator Manchin’s negligence, of course. It is also the collective responsibility of the Republican Party, whose 50 senators are even more resolutely against investing in clean energy than he is.”	1. The long shadow of Washington state’s failed carbon tax referendum Bokat-Lindell could have said, about carbon taxes, that they are widely championed by economists and others who judge robust carbon taxing as uniquely capable of delivering big emission cuts quickly. Still, his characterization of carbon taxes as politically unpopular was fair. He was also on solid ground in pointing to the failed Washington State carbon tax referendum. Perhaps even more than Donald Trump’s concurrent electoral win over Hillary Clinton, the 2016 defeat of Initiative 732 put a hurt on U.S. carbon tax organizing and advocacy. After all, if a carbon tax couldn’t garner an electoral majority in a certified blue state — one with a strong outdoors-nature ethic to boot — it was likely to be a tough sell almost anywhere else. During the run-up to that vote we published a raft of posts calling out progressive icons like Naomi Klein, Van Jones and Mary Kay Henry for willfully distorting I-732 — labelling as a tax cut for the wealthy its swap of the carbon revenues to cut regressive sales taxes, for example. Their high-profile drive-by opposition also encouraged environmental justice groups to view I-732’s revenue-neutral design as a ploy to block green investments in disadvantaged communities rather than a design to offset lower-income households’ higher fuel expenses. Mainstream environmental groups mostly stayed on the sidelines, as did climate champion Bill McKibben. Their neutrality contributed to the 59-to-41 electoral wipeout which poisoned the well for a Green New Deal-style reboot effort in 2018. Fast-forwarding to 2021-2022, it’s also fair to ask why climate activists trained virtually all of their fire on Joe Manchin, perhaps not grasping that his personal and political indebtedness to fossil fuels — duly noted by Bokat-Lindell — placed him beyond their reach. As The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, 50 Republicans blocked Biden’s climate package no less than Manchin. Protests in their home states might have moved the legislative needle or at least thrown down a marker to preserve Democrats’ control of Congress in the coming midterms.
2. A domestic defeat with global consequences Because the United States has spewed more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, it plays a uniquely prominent role in global climate politics. (It’s worth noting that on an annual basis, China is now the world’s largest emitter, having surpassed the United States in 2006, though America’s per capita emissions still far exceed China’s.) Given the United States’ historical “climate debt,” many lower-income countries have made their climate commitments contingent on those of the United States and other rich countries. Especially after Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement, many world leaders were hopeful that Biden would arrive at the Glasgow climate talks last year having secured some legislative achievement as a mark of political seriousness. That, of course, did not happen. Now, the United States’ international climate credibility is even more damaged, which will in turn impede global decarbonization efforts, The Times’s Somini Sengupta writes. “Manchin’s rejection and the recent Supreme Court ruling dealt a heavy blow to U.S. climate credibility,” Li Shuo, the Beijing-based senior policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, told her. It underlines what many people abroad already know, Li said: that “the biggest historical emitter can hardly fulfill its climate promises.” The U.S. climate envoy, John Kerry, is expected to attend the next round of climate talks, in November in Egypt, but will once again have little to show for it. The United States “will find it very hard to lead the world if we can’t even take the first steps here at home,” said Nat Keohane, the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental group. “The honeymoon is over.”	2. Goodbye to the myth of U.S. global leadership on climate We noted upfront that in addition to their sheer numerical weight, Build Back Better’s carbon reductions would have triggered parallel policies in other countries. Bokat-Lindell articulates this well, with framing that, appropriately, prioritizes U.S. climate stewardship as “necessary” rather than merely “sufficient.” What would translate almost automatically from the domestic sphere to the global is U.S. federal-level carbon taxing. The simplicity of a national carbon price alone makes it child’s play to replicate it in any other country — in marked contrast to the welter of tax credits, rules and line items embodying Biden’s climate plan that would be devilishly hard if not downright impossible to copy elsewhere. Moreover, the logical companion piece to a national carbon tax — a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — would powerfully incentivize non-carbon-taxing countries to enact their own in order to capture for themselves carbon tax levies that otherwise would be collected by their carbon-taxing trading partners. That said, the various stories and authorities cited in the Times column have it exactly right. The heavy weight of America’s outsize cumulative carbon emissions, combined with what now must be seen as chronic federal government inaction — aptly summarized by Greenpeace as (“the biggest historical emitter can hardly fulfill its climate promises”) — expose the U.S. as climate laggard rather than leader. Unfortunately, that fact didn’t keep U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who once supported carbon pricing via cap-and-trade (see this 2009 op-ed in the New York Times), from uttering this arrant nonsense this week: “I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change.”
3. Where the politics of climate action go from here The Biden administration will have to rely on its less powerful arsenal of executive actions to make progress on its decarbonization efforts, however short of its initial targets. As The Times’s Coral Davenport explains, the White House could use its regulatory authority to increase vehicle emissions standards, potentially catalyzing the transition to electric vehicles; to compel electric utilities to slightly lower their greenhouse emissions without falling afoul of the Supreme Court; and to plug leaks of methane — an extremely potent greenhouse gas — from oil and gas wells. Biden may also use his pulpit to push for action at the state level, where climate policy has assumed new importance in the absence of federal leadership. “States are really critical to helping the country as a whole achieve our climate goals,” Kyle Clark-Sutton of the clean-energy think tank RMI told The Times. “They have a real opportunity to lead. They have been leading.” Both California and New York, for example, have committed to reaching net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. As far as national electoral politics are concerned, The Times’s David Leonhardt argues, the fact that a single Democratic politician was able to derail Biden’s climate agenda should prompt Democrats to redouble their efforts to increase their Senate majority, particularly by winning over more voters in red and purple states. “It is clear that many blue-collar voters don’t feel at home in the Democratic Party — and that their alienation is a major impediment to the U.S. doing more to slow climate change,” he writes. It is also possible that the government’s sclerosis could spur interest in less conventional and extra-electoral avenues to addressing climate change, among them nuclear power (the promise and drawbacks of which have been explored in this newsletter; the “degrowth” movement; speculative technological fixes such as solar geoengineering; and mass movements of civil and uncivil disobedience, as the ecologist Andreas Malm called for in his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. As the Colorado River reservoirs dry up, as the death toll from the record-setting heat waves and wildfires scorching Europe rises, and as more than a billion people in South Asia recover from a season of heat extreme enough to test the upper limits of human survivability, “this moment feels interminable,” Meyer of The Atlantic writes. “But what is unsustainable cannot be sustained. If one man can block the industrial development of what is, for now, the world’s hegemon, then its hegemony must be very frail indeed.” But then, climate change seems to remain a relatively minor concern among the U.S. electorate: Just 1 percent of voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll named it as the most important issue facing the country; even among voters under 30, that figure was 3 percent. That is just one poll. But it would perhaps be premature to rule out another direction the politics of climate change might take, one that could prove familiar to those who have witnessed how the American public has processed other cumulative traumas, like the drug overdose crisis or gun violence or the pandemic: a resigned acceptance of mass suffering, punctuated by moments of shock that serve only as reminders of how the unimaginable became normal.	3. The impasse at the abyss Bokat-Lindell packed many leads and ideas into his closing section. We’ve touched on a lot of them in the past year. Our high points: A. The “arsenal” of potential executive actions is terribly meager vis-a-vis the task at hand. Stronger CAFE standards, for example, are badly undermined by light trucks’ takeover of the automotive fleet, and are assumed in most climate emission scenarios anyway. B. States-as-climate-loci is also overblown. A full two dozen are solidly red, i.e., fossil fuel dominated. Even in blue states, policy is circumscribed by federal authority and bureaucracy; the holdup of New York’s congestion pricing program by federal highway officials is one case in point. Moreover, visions of 2050 net-zero or 2035 grid decarbonization by California and New York are almost certainly way out in front of actual commitments and have been made needlessly more difficult by nuclear power plant shutdowns. C. Securing a true Democratic Senate majority and retaining the House this November are indeed vital. D. Like Andreas Malm, we believe that direct action in defense of climate and earth needs to come to the fore, as we proposed in two posts last summer inspired by Malm’s book: Christopher Ketcham’s essay, Let’s Blow Up Luxury Carbon, and my own “Rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.” Both are worth your attention. E. The low primacy of the climate crisis among voters is both real and arguably not fatal. The U.S. is beset by so many crises that even so committed a climate scientist as Peter Gleick declared this week his greater alarm over incipient fascism. A greater cause than insufficient ardor of the U.S. failure to enact “revolutionary” or even strong, incremental climate policies is an unproportionate and cumbersome political system that puts up multiple roadblocks to systemic change. Alas, that isn’t poised to change. More and more, it looks like achieving genuine climate action will require passionate and creative direct action. Targets abound: helicopter commuting, crypto “mining,” obstructionists of wind farms or dense housing or congestion pricing, to name a few. Successful actions will be those that harness broad-based and truly intersectional campaigns attacking not just emissions but privilege and wealth. We have an idea or two up our sleeve. Perhaps you do as well. We wish you luck. We still insist that carbon taxing is revolutionary — how can tackling a fundament of fossil fuel dominance be otherwise?

First, the Supreme Court blows up EPA’s carbon-regulating authority under the Clean Air Act. Then Joe Manchin torpedoes President Biden’s Build Back Better package.

Climate policy is on the ropes. Is carbon pricing’s moment at hand? Can it move forward in the face of Republican opposition and Democratic indifference?

No federal legislation with a price on carbon has advanced to a floor vote since the “Waxman-Markey” American Clean Energy and Security Act cap-and-trade bill died in the Senate in 2010. Now Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), perhaps Congress’s most outspoken climate hawk, is seeking to tax manufacturers of steel, aluminum, cement and other industrial commodities to the extent that the carbon intensity of their manufacturing process exceeds U.S. averages.

If coupled with a carbon border adjustment mechanism, this approach could establish a U.S. beachhead for carbon emissions pricing at the federal level. The key is its potential to benefit American industry. As Whitehouse puts it, his Clean Competition Act (S. 4355), would “give American companies a step up in the global marketplace while lowering carbon emissions at home and abroad.”

The concept resembles the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) proposal. The Clean Competition Act would charge manufacturers of widely used basic industrial commodities a fee based on their carbon emissions intensity. Firms whose carbon intensity is greater than the U.S. average for that industry would be charged, however, along with importers of goods whose carbon intensity exceeds that of its U.S.-produced counterpart.

Manufacturing and Climate Change

Industrial production is a major generator of climate change. Iron and steel manufacture is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions, according to McKinsey, and aluminum production for around 2%, with cement and ammonia close behind. Current laissez-faire trade policies favor carbon-intensive imports and thus incentivize production in regions with lax emission standards, a phenomenon noted recently in a commentary in Science by 35 academics, mostly from the European Union though including a handful from the U.S. Although raw materials and intermediate goods tend to have high CO2 emissions per unit of value added, they typically face lower tariffs than more finished products with lower carbon intensities.

Whitehouse sees his bill as a way to use U.S. trade policy to drive climate action. He also views its potential to boost U.S. industrial competitiveness as a way to attract bipartisan support. Holcim U.S., whose parent company, Lafarge Holcim, is America’s largest cement manufacturer, supports Whitehouse’s bill.

In its current form, the Clean Competition Act is more conceptual than prescriptive. Should it pass Congress, it will fall to the U.S. Treasury Dept. to codify regulations through administrative rulemaking, which could be complex.

U.S. industrial facilities currently report greenhouse gas emissions to EPA. The bill would use these data and also require submission of electricity use and product weight of covered goods.

So far, so good. Data reporting could be trickier for imported goods, however. Whitehouse’s bill states that, absent specific data, the carbon intensity of an imported good shall be that country’s GDP divided by its “production-based greenhouse gas emissions,” i.e., its economy’s overall carbon intensity. While country-level fossil fuel emissions and GDP data are available, translating those figures to a country’s CO2 emissions per unit of product could be contentious.

Carbon Intensities Compared

Whitehouse and colleagues argue that the U.S. economy is only around half as carbon-intensive as our trading partners’, on average — two-thirds less than China, and three-fourths less than India. While these differences hold promise for attracting domestic political support, they’re not stand-ins for industry-specific data, especially insofar as ratios for specific industrial sectors appear to be less steep.

Steel

According to a recent analysis, U.S. manufacture of steel in blast furnaces and basic oxygen furnaces (BF-BOF) is estimated to emit an average of 1.9 tons of CO2 per ton of crude steel. The respective factors for China and India are 2.1 tCO2/t and 2.9 tCO2/t. Since the U.S. also produces steel in efficient electric arc furnaces utilizing scrap metal, these differences may understate the U.S. advantage. Another study, by the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), found that indeed, the prevalence of electric arc furnaces, the relatively low carbon footprint of U.S. electricity production, and a greater reliance on natural gas rather than coal give U.S. steel production a significant advantage over virtually all major trading partners.

Aluminum and other commodities

U.S. aluminum manufacturers also fare well, with an average carbon intensity of just under 8 tCO2/t vs. nearly 13 tCO2/t for China and 15.5 tCO2/t for India. With cement, however, U.S. production is less energy-efficient on average than in China and India, which have newer factories. However, those countries’ greater coal-dependence for electricity generation may tip the carbon intensity scale in favor of the U.S. For ammonia, the U.S. is likely less carbon-intensive than coal-reliant China, which emits an estimated 45% of that sector’s worldwide CO2 emissions while producing only 30% of the product.

Another factor to consider in evaluating the performance of U.S. industry vs. trading partners is the country of origin. According to the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, most U.S. steel imports come from Canada, Brazil and Mexico, while most of our imported cement comes from Canada and Turkey, and most of our imported aluminum from Canada.

Still, China dominates world production of steel, and if CBAM should become established with the European Union or, better yet, with a “climate club” including the U.S., Canada, the UK, the EU and Japan, China’s CO2 emission liability could motivate it to reduce its emissions rather than be disadvantaged in international markets.

Outlook

Could America’s overall carbon superiority over our trading partners help Sen. Whitehouse’s Clean Competition Act attract support from House and Senate Republicans? Climate Leadership Council V-P Catrina Rorke, in a June 13 presentation to Citizens’ Climate Lobby members, cited interest among Republican senators in connecting trade and greenhouse gas emissions. In an August 2021 letter to President Biden, 19 G.O.P. Senators led by Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Dan Sullivan (R-AS) called on the U.S. to work with EU and other trading partners to design a common approach to climate and trade policy.

While bipartisan action would fly in the face of a dozen years of untempered Republican opposition to climate policy, Sen. Whitehouse is to be commended for pursuing his novel approach. For the climate’s sake, let’s hope his efforts aren’t unrequited.

Note: This post was amended on July 6 to include @bobinglis’s June 30 tweet, shown below.

Maybe we’re grasping at straws. But we see a possible silver lining in this week’s grievous Supreme Court ruling striking down US EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions via the Clean Air Act.

The gleam of hope is not that the decision didn’t dismember the federal government’s entire “administrative state” apparatus — you know, the tapestry of rules, regulations and procedures designed to further societal health, safety and accountability. We fear investigative journalist Amy Westervelt may be right that the ruling is a harbinger of steps in that very direction.

What I’m not seeing a lot of people get is that the West Va v EPA verdict is a harbinger. It’s the first step not the death blow. Overstating it obscures that, leaving people thinking it’s all over and ill-prepared for what comes next.

— Amy Westervelt (@amywestervelt) July 1, 2022

Rather, our thin beam of optimism is the opening the ruling could provide for carbon tax proponents to persuade our fellow climate advocates to lean less on fraught, slow and even quixotic approaches for tackling climate change, and to instead turn increasingly toward carbon taxing as a more-holistic and bulletproof way to bring down stubbornly high carbon emissions, both in the U.S. and worldwide.

In recent years, this space has done battle with what we’ve regarded as inadequate or even illusory climate strategies.

* We’ve criticized the decade-long campaign to divest financial and social institutions from fossil fuels, arguing in our posts and on our evergreen pages that capital will easily find ways to finance whatever legal product consumers demand, especially a product so economically and psychologically fraught as gasoline.

* We’ve hit back at the IMF’s unfortunate labelling of fossil fuels’ vast externality costs — both climate damage and immediate human-health harms — as “subsidies,” for fostering the fantasy that citizens need only stop their governments from bestowing public tax dollars on fossil fuel companies, and Big Carbon will crumble and wither away.

* We’ve even questioned the keep-it-in-the-ground movement, arguing, heretically, that “Oil that doesn’t flow to refineries through the Dakota Access Pipeline [to take one example] will instead come from somewhere else – Kuwait or Texas or a hundred other places – to be burned in cars, trucks and planes.” Our movement’s focus, we’ve argued, must be demand, not supply.

* And we’ve looked long and hard at the climate value of environmental regulation — the very approach the Supreme Court threw under the bus yesterday. Look at how, a year ago, we contrasted the fabulous success of the 1970 Clean Air Act and its 1977 and 1990 amendments in  slashing concentrations of particulates and other harmful pollutants in “ambient air,” with the less-technology-amenable issue of carbon emissions:

These and similar successes have led many climate advocates to urge similar regulatory pathways to curb carbon emissions. [Yet] regulatory approaches may offer only modest prospects for controlling and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, for several reasons. For one thing, the absence of antipollution devices for capturing or lowering CO2 emissions limits the scope of technology-forcing regulation. For another, promulgation of regulations is necessarily piecemeal and reactive. Moreover, the regulation-setting and administering process itself is cumbersome, delay-prone and subject to legal challenge by carbon interests.

We backed up that argument with reasoning from a penetrating paper by Case Western University law professor Jonathan Adler. The sidebar at right has Prof. Adler’s own “key takeaways” from the summary version he published on the Niskanen Center’s website. We highlighted two: A, climate regulations that aren’t clearly authorized by legislation will be particularly vulnerable to legal challenges — as we saw this week, when the six right-wing justices took advantage of the absence of explicit mentions of climate or carbon in the Clean Air Act and its amendments. And B, compared to emission-control regulations, a Congressionally enacted carbon tax should be less vulnerable to such challenges.

This isn’t to say that a carbon tax is just around the corner. We readily admit that a path to enacting a meaningful federal carbon tax — not a token, Exxon-style levy that damages coal but not oil or gas, but a robust carbon price that can reach triple digits in a half-dozen or fewer years — is almost impossible to discern.

Rather, now that essentially all of the prominent alternatives have been eviscerated or emasculated, it’s time for climate advocates to rethink, and, hopefully, relinquish, their anti-carbon-pricing positions.

The Carbon Tax Center has strived to be a climate team-player. At least since the start of the Trump administration, we’ve acknowledged the near-impossibility of passing a federal carbon tax in the current political configuration, and have instead pulled for less-ambitious but more-achievable (or so they seemed) incremental steps.

Just last fall, we wrote that “There’s logic in refraining from the one overarching policy that could lead the way to the deep cuts Biden is seeking: an economy-wide carbon tax. Giving businesses and households money to go green [instead] is more palatable, though less potent, than charging them for burning carbon.”

But we’ve also strived to be truth-tellers. That’s why we called that 2021 post, “Without a Carbon Tax, Don’t Count on a 50% Emissions Cut.” And it’s why we’re a little less inclined than some of our climate comrades to go into full mourning over yesterday’s Supreme Court decision .

Supreme Court leaves it up to Congress to act on climate change. That’s OK because Congress can enact a carbon tax and a carbon border adjustment that can make the solution go worldwide. Tax pollution. Un-tax income. Conservatives in Congress, here’s your chance! We need you!

— Former Rep. Bob Inglis (@bobinglis) (R-SC) June 30, 2022

Please also note that unlike the indefatigable Bob Inglis, who bravely fought for carbon pricing as a six-term Member of Congress (1993-1999, 2005-2011) from South Carolina’s 4th District, we’re not calling on “Conservatives in Congress” to push for carbon taxing. We would love it if even a few did, but that ship sailed over a decade ago, as we’ve summarized on CTC’s Conservatives page.

To sum up: Yes, the Supreme Court ruling was ignorant. Yes, it was destructive. Yes, it’s almost certainly a harbinger of worse. But it didn’t demolish policies that were on course to rescue our planet and make Biden a climate hero.

Yesterday’s decision did damage, but maybe it pulled some wool from our eyes as well.

(As published today in NYC-based Gotham Gazette. Footnotes appear at end. — C.K., May 13, 2022)

Like time in Steve Miller’s classic-rock song, New York’s decarbonization targets keep slipping into the future.

Highway widenings are spurring more driving. Suburban resistance to upzoning is locking in energy-demanding sprawl. Electricity from the state’s wind turbines shrank last year,¹ even as climate advocates, relying on dodgy U.S. Energy Department modeling, overstate future carbon reductions from “electrifying everything.”²

Promising developments like offshore wind leasing and new transmission to carry hydroelectricity from Quebec barely compensate, if at all, for carbon emissions unleashed by closing the Indian Point nuclear plant. As I have pointed out elsewhere, shutting existing zero-carbon power sources means that new ones don’t actually cut emissions; at best, they keep us running in place, punching huge holes in pledges to achieve a carbon-free power grid by 2040.

To this dreary picture, add crypto mining — enormous networks of electron-eating computers running 24-7 so that digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum can maintain virtual “coins” or “tokens” in encrypted ledgers that bypass traditional third parties like banks.

From Buffalo and the Finger Lakes to the state’s northern tier, crypto entrepreneurs are building new generators or firing up retired ones to power their crypto mining operations. Other crypto sites draw on the grid.

Self-sourced or not, the requisite electricity ends up forcing additional burning of fossil fuels, as Sierra Club researchers documented in extensive comments this week to the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, pushing the state’s ambitious decarbonization goals further out of reach. To what end?

In Uber’s Footsteps

Enigmatic, opaque, futuristic — crypto-currency cries out for historical analogues. Here’s one: Uber.

Uber burst on the scene in the early 2010s not as a new form of transportation but a new kind of network enabling a reconfiguration of transportation. Its appeal was tailored around three promises: it would enhance traffic efficiency by eliminating cruising for fares; it would extend convenient for-hire vehicle service outside Manhattan; and it would end service refusals to people of color.

The packaging — sleek and app-enabled — augured a frictionless, digital future. With a few taps New Yorkers could summon a chariot.

The results were mixed. We now know that stockpiling of Ubers in Manhattan has wrought even more gridlock than taxi cruising. But Uber did broaden access to for-hire vehicles, even as it bled ridership from the MTA and, worse, rained economic ruin on the incumbent yellow-cab industry.

Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies come with their own glossy promises, though these are more chameleon-like. (Earlier this year New York Times columnist Paul Krugman disparaged them as “word salad.”) Among them, as Annie McDonough reported recently in City & State, is the prospect of liberation from ingrained discriminatory banking and lending by U.S. financial institutions.

“[Crypto backers] see the technology as an economic equalizer,” writes McDonough. “A tool not just for the rich to get richer, but for people who have been discriminated against by banking institutions or locked out of investment opportunities, including people of color and low-income communities.”

Really? In New York, and almost certainly anywhere else, unbanked households overwhelmingly lack the requisite credit history or liquid assets — bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards — to purchase cryptocurrency tokens. Moreover, scammers and grifters are finding crypto fertile territory for high-tech swindles, as New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo noted this month. An arguably safer and more effective way to root out credit segregation would be to speed Biden administration rulemaking to add teeth to the Community Reinvestment Act — the 1977 law intended to repair decades of redlining.

The emergence of crypto-front groups like the National Policy Network of Women of Color in Blockchain demonstrates the industry’s readiness to exploit deep-seated bitterness over legacy redlining. So does the participation in crypto lobbying of Bradley Tusk, the one-time Mike Bloomberg consigliere who a decade ago deftly deployed Black fury over persistent taxi discrimination to help Uber eradicate cabbies’ exclusive right to pick up street hails in Manhattan and subsequently helped fend off serious regulation of the app-ride industry for several crucial years.

Let’s Burn Up The Grid

There is no registry of electricity consumed by crypto mining in New York State. Worldwide, though, crypto burns through an estimated 91,000 gigawatt-hours (or, 91 billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity annually, according to a New York Times survey of crypto last September. Some 16% of that, or 15,000 GWh, is said to be consumed in the United States.

While New Yorkers are accustomed to thinking of our state as resource-poor, crypto miners are now exploiting half-a-dozen hydro power sites and formerly boarded-up fossil-fuel plants in northern and western New York. One industry source cited by City & State estimates that 13-14% of his company’s U.S. crypto mining takes place in our state. Extrapolating that share across the industry, crypto is annually consuming 2,000 GWh of electricity in New York State — a figure that could grow not just with increased transactions but with ever-more complex digital encryption.

Even holding at 2,000 GWh, that’s a lot of juice: more than the electricity generated last year from all the solar panels on residential buildings in the state, or more than what will come from the first 100 promised offshore wind turbines once that industry launches (see graph below). And, though crypto in New York consumes less electricity than all current solar or wind, that comparison is of no comfort, as those renewable sources need to be displacing fossil fuels (primarily fracked gas) from the state’s grid — which they can’t do if their output is effectively being consumed mining Bitcoin.

The operative word, “effectively,” encompasses two distinct but complementary dynamics. Grid dynamics dictate that any new locus of demand such as Bitcoin forces utilities to draw more heavily on fossil-fuel generators, because the non-carbon sources — nukes as well as renewables — already run as flat-out as they can. The climate dynamic is that from a statewide perspective, additional use of fossil-fuel generators negates the carbon-reduction benefits that wind and solar and nuclear would otherwise provide.

This perspective casts a harsh light on claims that a particular crypto installation is being renewably sourced. Connecting crypto to a refurbished hydro dam or solar or wind farm may sound green, but all those whirring hard drives are really siphoning off carbon-free electricity that now “won’t be available to power a home, a factory or an electric car,” as the Times’ 2021 story put it. (One hopes that the irony of crypto adherents miscounting green electrons doesn’t carry over to their currency bookkeeping.)

Carbon Tax vs. Crypto?

A stiff New York State carbon tax could slow and even reverse the rise of cryptocurrency here (likewise nationwide).

The rise in electricity prices would undermine whatever competitive advantage Bitcoin miners gain from locating in New York. Some miners would leave, new ones would stay away, and those who stay would endeavor to blunt the impact of the tax by upgrading their efficiency.

Not only that, crypto miners seeking zero-carbon generation increasingly would find themselves competing with non-crypto businesses seeking to contain their power costs. Other businesses, less power-intensive per dollar of revenue, would be in position to outbid the crypto companies.

The prospective flight to other jurisdictions could help build momentum to tax carbon emissions there as well, as more states and countries come to conclude that crypto jobs and revenues aren’t worth straining their grids, not to mention trashing their air-sheds and stealing their quiet.

This isn’t to hold out carbon taxing as a one-bullet crypto killer — we need many bullets for that, the bigger the better — but to illustrate its broad potential to stop frivolous (and in this case imbecilic) new uses of electricity before they can gain a foothold.

Why not regulate crypto away? That battle would consume years, tying down policy resources while emissions continued to spew. Worse, we have neither the time nor the ability to see around corners required to enact, piecemeal, restraints on each new locus of energy demand.

Even as energy-efficiencies continue to do wonders — total U.S. electricity use last year was just a few percent higher than in 2005³ — underpriced electricity elicits new hellspawns of needless use that undo much of that progress.

Carbon taxes by themselves can’t solve everything that ails climate. But they could, for a change, get the solutions out in front of the problems.

***
Charles Komanoff, long-time New York policy analyst and environmental activist, directs the Carbon Tax Center. On Twitter @Komanoff.

¹US Energy Information Administration, “Electric Power Monthly,” Table 1.14.B, “Utility Scale Facility Net Generation from Wind,” shows 4,522 GWh in New York State in 2020 and 4,387 GWh in 2021.

²To estimate future carbon reductions from the December 2021 New York City ban on gas heating and cooking in new buildings, the law’s proponents and the Dec. 15, 2021 New York Times story reporting on it both cited a Dec. 10, 2021 post, Stopping Gas Hookups in New Construction in NYC Would Cut Carbon and Costs, by the consultancy RMI. The RMI authors note that their calculations employed future electricity grid emission factors modeled by U.S. DOE’s National Renewable Energy Lab’s “Cambium” dataset. Examination of that dataset reveals, inter alia, that it assumes a non-existent five-fold increase in New York State on-shore wind-generated electricity from 2020 to 2022.

³Figures from US Energy Information Administration, “Electric Power Monthly,” Table 7.2a Electricity Net Generation: Total (All Sectors)” supplemented by Table 10.6 (“Electricity Net Generation from Distributed Solar”) indicate total U.S. electricity generation of 4,164,565 GWh in 2022 and 4,055,785 GWh in 2005. For those interested, the implied compound annual average growth rate over those 17 years is a minuscule 0.17 percent.

Correction: This post was amended on May 26 to reflect the fact that New York’s estimated 13-14% share of U.S. crypto mining applies to a single crypto company rather than industry-wide. The extrapolation to other companies is the author’s, not the source’s.

May 16 addendum: We strongly recommend How crypto made me fall in love with carbon pricing all over again, an April 27 essay by Frontier Group energy analyst Tony Dutzik covering the intersection of crypto mining, carbon pricing, energy demand and Jevons Paradox.

 

The Nation magazine today published my essay, The Climate Movement In Its Own Way. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and offer context.

It’s a follow-on to my April 4 essay, also in The Nation, The Case Against Closing Nuclear Power Plants, which I posted here under the title, For Climate’s Sake, Don’t Shut U.S. Nukes. 

The new piece calls on progressives in the climate movement — a bulwark of the magazine’s readership — to move beyond ideology and make the climate movement more pragmatic and holistic by supporting carbon pricing.

In introducing my April 4 post, I wrote:

[This post] implicitly embodies a hope that my willingness to examine my own deeply-held convictions in a new light may encourage others to do likewise with their own climate dogma. Reconsideration of ideologically-based objections to carbon pricing by self-proclaimed progressives would be a good place to start.

Consider today’s post an explicit expression of that hope. 

  — C.K., April 30, 2022

PS: The new post had to be shoehorned into a tight word count. The version below restores a half-dozen phrases cut from the version in The Nation.

The Climate Movement In Its Own Way

After decades of critically documenting nuclear power’s outsize costs, I finally admitted to myself that the carbon benefits from continuing to run US nuke plants are substantial, and in some respects irreplaceable. I made the case for keeping them open in an April article on TheNation.com.

Closing New York’s Indian Point reactors last year was a climate blunder, I wrote. Not just because fracked gas is now filling the breach, but because the need to replace the lost carbon-free power means that new wind and solar farms won’t drive emissions down further. California, facing the same equation, should shelve its plan to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 2024, I said.

“Total bullshit,” a lifelong anti-nuker wrote me. “You should be ashamed.” More representative of the comments, though, was this: “Continued reliance on nuclear power going forward now is part of the price of our collective past failures.”

Amen. The failures propping up US carbon emissions are multiple. Not just Senator Joe Manchin, who torpedoed President Biden’s Build Back Better clean-energy legislation. Not just the Senate Republicans, any one of whom could have cast the critical 50th vote. And not just Big Carbon, whose dark money and disinformation perpetuate climate inaction.

Through its own poor choices, the climate movement is failing as well.

Too many of our climate campaigns are ill-considered. Too much of our legislative agenda is narrow-gauged. Too often, our lens for assessing climate proposals is ideological rather than pragmatic.

Consider the decade-long campaign to induce pension funds and banks to divest their fossil-fuel holdings. Exxon-Mobil’s share price wobbled for years, but since early 2020 Exxon’s stock has risen faster than the market average. Is Big Oil shamed and starved for new capital today? Not with roaring demand for oil and gas. US motorists’ insanely over-powered, super-sized vehicles account for about a tenth of worldwide petroleum consumption. Yet challenges to American motordom come mostly from outgunned cycling and transit campaigners, not the climate movement.

Now, with most federal action blocked, climate activists sought and won a ban on gas heat in new buildings in New York City, though they failed in their first push for a statewide ban.

The drive to “electrify everything” is laudable, given that electricity can be decarbonized whereas gas furnaces and stoves cannot. Yet trying to take the ban statewide elbowed aside bolder ideas, such as legalizing accessory dwelling units and stopping highway widenings.

To be sure, not everyone is ready to admit that fatter highways and pastoral, exclusive suburbs are carbon disasters. But only broader campaigns can link climate to other pressing concerns like homelessness, housing unaffordability, costly gasoline, and traffic violence.

The granddaddy of US climate failures, of course, is the absence of the one policy that economists believe could unlock the vast emissions reductions needed to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius: national carbon taxation.

A straightforward “price on carbon” — administered not via easily gamed cap-and-trade schemes but through “upstream” levies on the carbon content of fuels — was once thought appealing to left and right alike. It is now abjured by both.

The right, of course, is both repellently all-in on fossil fuels and hyper-aware that its wealthy base of profligate carbon consumers would pay the most through a carbon tax. Which makes the left’s antipathy to carbon taxes not just surprising but downright bizarre.

This hesitation has multiple strands: seeing carbon pricing as another contrivance of the predatory capitalism that built white wealth off the land and labor of Indigenous and African-descended peoples; suspicion that carbon pricing lets polluters avoid reducing local emissions by purchasing “offsets”; a misplaced conviction that carbon pricing in California has worsened disproportionate pollution burdens on disadvantaged communities; and excessive faith that a regulatory approach can untangle the multiple strands that enforce fossil-fuel dependence.

Economic models abound to show how fast carbon taxes will shrink the use of fossil fuels. Models aren’t life, but they agree broadly that a robustly rising federal tax could, within a decade, dial back US emissions by about a third.

To turn our backs on carbon reductions on that scale is, I believe, suicidal.

Our worsening climate stalemate led me to abandon my silence as existing nuclear power plants were extinguished. A similar rethink on carbon taxes by progressives won’t win over climate denialists. In time, though, with a more far-sighted left ascendant, it could become a stepping stone to climate progress.

Charles Komanoff, a longtime environmental activist and expert on nuclear power economics, directs the Carbon Tax Center.

The campaign to combat climate change by inducing pension funds, universities and other prominent fiduciaries to dump their fossil-fuel holdings has failed. Ten years into the divestment project, it’s time to move on.

When the writer and climate activist Bill McKibben kicked off the 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.

How’s it going, ten years on? Not well. The clearest indication is Exxon-Mobil stock’s new-found attractiveness to investors. From Feb. 1, 2020 to Feb. 1, 2022, a two-year period that predates Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and brackets the Covid-19 pandemic, Exxon’s stock price climbed 75 percent, outpacing the 55 percent rise in the S&P 500 index.

While non-U.S. oil giants Saudi Aramco and BP have appreciated less than the S&P benchmark, the #2 and #3 U.S. oil companies, Marathon Oil and Valero Energy, have matched Exxon’s faster-than-average share price rise. Unsurprisingly, Exxon’s market-beating performance accelerated since Feb. 1, as the oil industry reaps the fruit of high prices without yet suffering much contraction in demand.

It is true that Exxon and other oil majors under-performed the market from 2012 to 2020. So why are oil stocks now so buoyant? The answer lies in robust demand for petroleum products, both in the U.S. (about a fifth of world usage, with half of that in motor fuels) and globally. Until Russia attacked Ukraine, disrupting trade and dampening near-term economic expectations, world petroleum consumption this year was headed to near-record levels.

More importantly, considering that stock prices essentially embody investors’ expectations of future earnings streams, the lords of capital are betting on the oil and gas business to stay profitable for some time.

Reserves will not stay in the ground, in other words, unless and until consumption shrinks. It ought to be obvious that oil consumption drives production, not the other way around. The same “whack-a-mole” syndrome that made “keep it in the ground” campaigns ineffectual from a climate standpoint (as I lamented in this 2016 post) also afflicts efforts by socially responsible investors to starve capital flows to fossil fuel corporations.

No matter how far divestment penetrates bank boardrooms or Ivy League endowments, a world intent on using fossil fuels can always count on a vast array of wealth holders to finance their resupply.

McKibben admitted as much last fall, shortly after the New York Times reported on meticulous research by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project that found that private equity funds for a decade had been investing $100 billion a year in fossil fuel energy. In an October 2021 Times op-ed (see headline above), he admitted the real purpose of divestment campaigns: to build the climate movement and erode the social and political standing of the fossil fuel industry (what I earlier called aims #2 and #3):

Since most people don’t have oil wells or coal mines in their backyards, divestment is a way to let a lot of people in on the climate fight, because they have a link to a pension fund, mutual fund, endowment or other pot of money. When we began the divestment campaign, our immediate goal was, as we put it, to “take away the social license” of Big Oil. (emphasis added)

Movement-building is vital. Eroding the social standing of fossil-fuel extractors and purveyors is overdue. But what happens when divestment activists discover that moving their college or municipal pension fund out of fossil fuels hasn’t visibly changed the material world of energy production and consumption?

In the 2021 op-ed, McKibben added that divestment campaigning “was a vehicle to let people know the essential truth about the fossil fuel industry, which is that its oil, gas and coal reserves held five times as much carbon as scientists said we could safely burn.” That 5-fold incongruity, in fact, was the titular “new math” in his archetypal 2012 Rolling Stone article.

The math is unassailable. McKibben’s new metric demonstrated, ingeniously and incontrovertibly, the incompatibility between oil industry health and planetary health. Yet divestment, as a tactic, hasn’t delivered.

Divestment campaigners have a world of actions and organizing to do instead. For the next six months, though, they need to focus on political action. Electoral action.

Odds be damned, the Democrats have got to hold onto Congress this November. Political commentator Jamelle Bouie reminded us why recently when he was asked why “the Democrats can’t seem to get traction on [climate and other progressive policies] that enjoy broad support”:

In terms of getting policies through Congress, they just don’t have the votes. [But] I think this picture would look very different if there was one more or two more [Democratic] senators. If Cal Cunningham in North Carolina had won [in 2020], if Susan Collins’s opponent in Maine [Susan Gideon] had won, we’d be looking at a very different situation.

Needless to say, a very different situation, of the opposite sort, is what we’ll be looking at if the other, climate-denying, democracy-wrecking party prevails in the midterms. Between now and Tuesday, Nov. 8, not just divestment but probably all climate-focused organizing needs to yield to, or at least be subsumed by, electoral campaigning.

If your state or district is competitive, start electoral organizing now. If not, these resources can plug you in:

• People’s Action has both electoral and non-electoral volunteering.
• Swing Left has local chapters to connect you for phone-calling, post-carding, donating, etc.
• For down-ballot electioneering (which also brings people to vote for up-ballot races): Sister District.
• For Spanish-speaking calling in AZ, connect to Mision por Arizona via Mission for Arizona.
• To donate $$ to grassroots rather than party organizations: Movement Voter Project.

Last weekend I bicycled to Long Beach, the Long Island town where I grew up. From the boardwalk, squinting into the sun, my riding partner Dave and I could make out a dozen freighters strung in a long line in the Atlantic Ocean, stacked up like aircraft waiting to land.

Giant ships offshore weren’t something you saw often from Long Beach in the last century. A solitary ordinary freighter was noteworthy. The dozen big ships last Saturday doubtless were a symptom of some downstream jam-up in the supply chain. But they were also a telltale of the vast expansion of global trade since globalization took rise several decades ago and made Asian factories the prime U.S. source of consumer goods.

As coincidence would have it, both Dave and I had read Paul Krugman’s day-before NY Times column, Putin May Kill the Global Economy. “There are good reasons to worry that we’re seeing an economic replay of 1914,” Krugman wrote, referring to “the year that ended what some economists call the first wave of globalization, a vast expansion of world trade made possible by railroads, steamships and telegraph cables.”

Krugman envisages Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggering a replay of 1914. Not just the withdrawal from trade of Russian hydrocarbons and Ukrainian wheat but a “partial retreat from globalization,” i.e., a shrinkage in the “world-spanning supply chains” that now constitute global manufacture.

“What Putin has taught us is that countries run by strongmen who surround themselves with yes-men aren’t reliable business partners,” Krugman says, eyeing China above all. “So if you’re a business leader right now,” he writes, “surely you’re wondering whether it’s smart to stake your company’s future on the assumption that you’ll keep being able to buy what you need from authoritarian regimes. Bringing production back to nations that believe in the rule of law may raise your costs by a few percent, but the price may be worth it for the stability it buys.”

Who can disagree? What Krugman didn’t consider, though, is that the simplification and shortening of global supply chains as an antidote to irrational autocracy could become the political equivalent of carbon taxes on international shipping.

I’ve long harbored the notion that a sufficiently airtight regime of global carbon taxes might put a damper on world trade by making ocean-going shipping more expensive. Much trade would remain, of course, although the extent would depend on the magnitude of the tax. At the margin, though, the enormous movement of raw materials and goods across thousands of miles of ocean (or, more expensively, via air freight) would slow and perhaps even decline.

The resulting cut in global carbon emissions would be no small thing. Global shipping accounts for 2.2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, Time magazine reported recently, a figure that encompasses methane and other GHG’s and thus probably equates to 3 percent of worldwide CO2.

Deglobalization’s salutary effect on domestic manufacture might ripple even wider. Automation notwithstanding, relocating the making of goods for the U.S. market to the United States would raise factory employment and the number of stable, high-wage jobs. That in turn might restore a semblance of cohesiveness and meaning to the vast hollowed-out regions of middle America that since the Great Recession have turned in despair to opiates — pharmaceutical and political.

To be sure, this can sound very pie-in-the-sky, until you remember the pre-eminent role that dignified, well-paying manufacturing jobs played in U.S. progressive politics in the last century. Starting with Franklin Roosevelt and continuing until Reagan, labor and political organizing in America’s industrial unions played a vital part in furthering racial and economic equality through policies like progressive taxation and civil rights legislation, as historian Michael Kazin recounts in his latest book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.

It’s not a huge stretch to triangulate from Kazin’s history of mid-century democratic capitalism and Krugman’s prognosis of deglobalization to imagine a resurgence in the kind of working-class progressivism that has largely been missing from the push for a Green New Deal. The victory last week through nontraditional, grassroots organizing by the worker-led Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, NY, points in this direction. Over time, rising labor power accompanying renascent domestic manufacturing could help deliver the electoral wins and legislative energies needed to help the U.S. transit from fossil fuels to green energy.

Of course this is my take, not Krugman’s. What worries him about deglobalization isn’t the prospect that “wealthy, advanced economies will end up slightly poorer” as cheap imports recede. It’s the possible brake on economic advancement in “nations like Bangladesh that have made progress in recent decades [due to] access to world markets.”

Curiously for a columnist who frequently invokes climate change, Krugman didn’t mention the other, more dire prospect facing Bangladeshis: that continued “progress” in the form of fossil-fueled growth will lead to massive destruction of their country as the sea overwhelms it, monsoons fail, crops collapse, and desperate migrations of biblical numbers ravage the inland. Unless some thing or combination of things creates a different future.

In his 2020 novel, The Ministry For The Future, the “speculative fiction” writer Kim Stanley Robinson conjured a distinctive deus ex machina: “crash day” — an anonymous worldwide action causing jetliners to fall from the sky, killing passengers and crews but bringing down the curtain on hydrocarbon-fueled, climate-damaging aviation (zero-carbon airships take their place) and catalyzing, finally, a rapid global turning from fossil fuels.

After a decade of pining for a global carbon tax to reverse American deindustrialization, constrain global shipping, and then some, Krugman’s forecast of an autocrat-driven but nonviolent trade slowdown can look mighty attractive.

Addendum, May 9: A May 4 NY Times story, The Era of Cheap and Plenty May Be Ending, about the new logistical fragility of global supply chains, noted: “More firms reported moving their supply chains out of China to other countries, and American executives were more positive about bringing more manufacturing to the United States.”