The Nation magazine this morning published my essay, The Case Against Closing Nuclear Power Plants. I’ve cross-posted it here to allow comments and offer context.

The piece had its genesis in a more expository post I published in 2020 in the NYC-based Gotham Gazette, Drones With Hacksaws: Climate Consequences of Shutting Indian Point Can’t Be Brushed Aside. In that essay, I dismantled the assurances of reactor-shutdown advocates that bountiful infusions of efficient and renewable energy will take the place of the nuclear-powered Indian Point plant’s carbon-free electricity. The problem wasn’t simply the slow rate at which new green energy is being added, but that when green energy sources must replace a standing power source that itself replaces fossil fuels, their effective climate value is zero. 

I believe my essay in The Nation is noteworthy on several grounds.

First, it adds the weight of my long experience questioning nuclear power’s economic viability to a Feb. 1 letter from climate pioneer Jim Hansen, Nobel laureate and former U.S. energy secretary Steve Chu, and 77 other distinguished personages to California Gov. Gavin Newsom that, in effect, urged the state to avoid duplicating, on the West Coast, the grievous error of shutting a similarly questionably-sited reactor complex (Indian Point) on the East.   

Second, the essay advances a more systemic view of the climate consequences of extinguishing extant zero- or low-carbon energy facilities whose operation is already keeping fossil fuels in the ground and carbon emissions out of earth’s atmosphere.

Third, it 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.

  — C.K., April 4, 2022

The Case Against Closing Nuclear Power Plants

On a bright spring day in 1979, before thousands who were propelled to Washington, D.C., by the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown, I pronounced nuclear power’s rapid expansion disastrously unaffordable. My remarks drew on years of work chronicling reactors’ skyrocketing capital costs.

Forty-three years later, in February, in the wake of the failed Glasgow climate summit, I wrote to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, urging him to defer the planned shutdown of the state’s last nuclear plant. Closing Diablo Canyon, a Reagan-era complex near San Luis Obispo, would damage the state’s climate leadership as it strives toward zero-carbon energy, I argued.

I sent my letter just days before Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine and thrust nuclear power back in the news, in typical ambiguity.

On one side are legitimate fears that Russia’s seizure of the giant Zaporizhzhia reactor complex in southern Ukraine, the largest in Europe, and the stricken Chernobyl plant in the north, near Belarus, could precipitate massive releases of radiation.

On the other is the stomach-churning awareness that Germany’s reactor closures over the past decade deepened its dependence on Russian gas, helping keep the Kremlin supplied with Western cash while slowing its own progress to climate-safe energy.

In America, meanwhile, the nearly one hundred nuclear plants that have ridden out the post-Three Mile Island cancellations and post-Fukushima shutdowns operate under the radar, their climate and pocketbook benefits taken for granted. It’s time we paid attention.

Electricity rates in New York City were jackknifing even before Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The blame is falling on spiking prices for fracked natural gas. Left unsaid is that, as in Germany, the closure last year of the area’s lone nuclear plant, Indian Point, is making utilities draw more heavily on the very gas-fired generators whose costs are spiraling. Also largely unremarked, amidst hosannas over wind and solar power’s falling costs, is the halting pace at which green power is actually filling the breach, belying promises by “safe energy” advocates who helped engineer Indian Point’s closure.

Worse, it is illusory to say that by ramping up renewable energy and energy-efficiency we can pick up the climate slack from closing Indian Point. Why? Because with climate chaos bearing down, every green-energy addition needs to bring about the demise of equivalent fossil fuels. If those additions replace a standing power source that itself replaces fossil fuels, their climate value is zero.

These considerations dim the glow from last month’s record leases for ocean wind farms off Long Island and New Jersey. The need to make up for Indian Point’s energy output will nullify half or more of the hoped-for 7,000 megawatts of offshore wind, badly undermining the legislative commitment to rid the New York grid of carbon emissions by 2040.

On the opposite coast, the twin Diablo Canyon reactors have for decades provided 2,200 megawatts worth of round-the-clock climate benefit by obviating the need to draw on fossil fuel generators. Shutting them down by 2025 will relegate California’s next 7,000 megawatts of renewables and efficiency (the higher figure is from differences in operability) to stand-ins for Diablo’s lost climate benefit.

The deficit won’t be transitory. Not until every kilowatt on the West Coast comes from zero- or ultra-low-carbon sources can Diablo’s canceled climate benefit be considered superfluous. Until then, the California grid will continuously emit more carbon than it would with Diablo operating.

That moment is approaching but it remains far away. According to data from the US Energy Information Administration, 50 percent of California’s electricity still comes from burning carbon fuels. Hearteningly, this share is 12 points less than it was in 2015, with most of the carbon shrinkage coming from increased solar-photovoltaic supply. But that solar rise, amounting to more than 15 billion kWh annually, is no greater than the amount of carbon-free electricity that shutting Diablo Canyon will take away (17 billion kWh a year, based on 2016-2020 production).

We cannot assume that California’s next solar wave will replace Diablo’s climate benefit, for the simple reason that those solar gains are counted on to push out fossil fuel-burning in buildings, vehicles, and the state’s power grid.

I can hear the objections. Diablo Canyon needs to run at full bore, whereas demand fluctuates. But any excess output can be put to use recharging the millions of batteries California is adding to anchor its grid. Diablo lies atop an earthquake fault. But much of its huge sunk cost went for unprecedented seismic protection that the plant’s owner, Pacific Gas & Electric, failed to budget. (I know this from serving as an expert witness for the California Public Utility Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates in the 1989 proceeding that barred the company from fully recovering its cost overruns.) Guarding Diablo against mishaps or malfeasance takes money. But going forward, the cost of staffing and fuel will be much less than the climate damage its operation prevents.

As an energy-policy analyst, advocate, and organizer for fifty years, I have fought for bicycle transportation, congestion pricing, wind farms, and carbon taxes, in large part to reduce the destructive imprints of coal, oil, and gas.

The climate crisis has exploded ahead of schedule, not as distant warnings but as actual fires, floods, and the global sea-level rise. Meanwhile, Diablo and other US nuclear plants long ago shed their teething problems to become solid climate benefactors, faithfully churning out electricity without combusting carbon fuels.

Others can debate whether to build new nuclear plants to combat the climate crisis. But no one can deny that letting existing reactors like Diablo Canyon remain in service keeps fossil fuels in the ground and their carbon emissions out of our atmosphere. We ignore that benefit at our peril.

Komanoff, author of the treatise Power Plant Cost Escalation, represented New York State and California consumer agencies in opposing rate hikes to pay for reactor cost overruns in the 1970s and 1980s.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Note: The day after posting this, I talked about my Nation article with Left Business Observer’s Doug Henwood on his weekly podcast. (My part starts at 30:18 and goes for a little over 20 minutes.) The conversation is lively and adds further context to the importance of and rationale for continuing to run functional U.S. nuclear power plants.

If Gov. Newsom is willing to just toss our emissions goals by rewarding car ownership and gas tax holidays for no reason other than to get re-elected in the safest blue state then it’s settled that California leaders were just virtue signaling about global warming the whole time.

— Darrell Owens (@IDoTheThinking) March 25, 2022

Of the myriad motorist giveaways now being rushed into place around the U.S., none sting like California’s. I share Darrell Owens’ tweeted dismay, not just because California is so reliably blue but because Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed car-cash payments point to a troubling fragility in the state’s clean-energy leadership.

The specifics of the so-called relief plan are still being worked on. But the basic shape is expected to hew to the contours posted by Newsom’s office this past week and shown further below: $9 billion in payments to households of $400 per registered car (limit of 2 per family) and just $2 billion to make transit cheaper.

While a per-vehicle stipend isn’t quite as environmentally  loathsome as the gas and diesel tax “holidays” already rolled out in Georgia and Maryland and being readied elsewhere (NPR has a useful digest), California’s nearly 50-year record at the forefront of cleaner energy might have suggested other, greener approaches.

I know that record well. Not long ago, I did a study comparing California’s rate of decarbonizing its economy to the rest of the country’s. I found that from the mid-1970s to 2016, California drove down its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic activity nearly 20 percent faster than the other 49 states. Had those states matched California’s pace, I calculated, the country would now, each year, be eliminating 1,200 megatonnes of CO2, an amount equivalent to the carbon emissions from our entire fleet of passenger cars.

Those findings became the basis of a 2019 report for the Natural Resources Defense Council, California Stars: Lighting the Way to a Clean Energy Future. My NRDC co-authors and I credited a host of actors: Gov. Jerry Brown (1974-82, 2010-18), for imbuing an energy-efficiency ethic throughout the machinery of state government; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (2003-10), who lent “Terminator” cred and financial support to solar power; and, above all, the thousands of resourceful and devoted state employees who developed and oversaw a kaleidoscope of performance standards that embedded energy efficiency into appliances, equipment and buildings.

Alas, California’s energy record also had an un-stellar part: automobiles. “Passenger vehicles continue to be a weak point,” we noted dryly in “California Stars,” as the state’s consumption of motor fuels grew faster than the rest of the country’s during 1975-2016 (albeit a tad more slowly per unit of GDP). We listed many factors but omitted the most fundamental: California’s vaunted green ethos didn’t include recognition of, and resistance to, car-dependent transportation.

Consider that the day before yesterday, in New York, a coalition of transit, environmental and economic-justice organizations declared their opposition to a possible statewide gas tax holiday “because it does little to help those New Yorkers most hurt by rising prices, takes revenue away from needed road and transit investments and completely contradicts New York’s climate goals.” The groups, who have long worked in concert for safe streets, congestion pricing and better transit, pointed to rising prices for energy (electricity and heating fuels, not just gasoline), food and housing and called for targeted state aid to lower-income households.

If similar noises are being made in Los Angeles or San Francisco, they aren’t yet audible in New York. Nor do we know what California’s iconically green ex-governors would have done in the face of $5 or $6 gasoline. (The state’s anti-smog rules and carbon cap-and-trade program lead to unusually pricey motor fuels.) I’d like to believe they would have used the gas-price “crisis” as an opportunity to speak inconvenient truths about driving, fossil fuels and climate stewardship. Perhaps Brown would have harkened back to his seventies self and encouraged Californians to voluntarily curtail the share of their driving that is particularly mindless and unnecessary. Schwarzenegger, who earlier this month made an extraordinarily empathic antiwar video appeal to Vladimir Putin’s subjects (“I love the Russian people. That is why I have to tell you the truth.”), might have connected less driving and fuel conservation to patriotism and manliness.

While Newsom lacks those predecessor’s strong personal stamps, he doesn’t lack for imaginative staff. Think of the good the state could do for economic justice and climate protection with the $9 billion he’s handing car-owners.

The most obvious scheme is to apply that money to reduce the state sales tax, a stunningly regressive tax. California’s 7.25% state sales tax brings in around $45 billion annually, according to Tax Foundation figures ($42.7 billion in FY 2020, the most recent figure available), suggesting that $9 billion worth of lower sales taxes would enable the state to cut the rate by one-fifth, to a little under 6%. That change would give relief to every Californian, and disproportionately to poor and working families, without rewarding automobile use and dependence. And it would align nicely with The Economist’s insistence yesterday that “Governments should support household incomes instead … of cutting fuel taxes.”

(Sales tax swaps aren’t exactly novel in environmental discourse. Washington state’s I-732 initiative would have used revenue from a $20/ton carbon tax to cut the state sales tax — the nation’s steepest — by one percent; it was defeated, in 2016, when some climate hawks derided it as, somehow, pro-corporate. Two decades earlier, I published an op-ed calling for a nickel-a-mile charge on driving in Long Island, NY, with the proceeds paying for a 3 percent cut in Nassau and Suffolk Counties’ sales tax.)

In a different vein, folks in the bicycling circles I inhabit are touting free e-bikes rather than car-based giveaways as a means to cushion the pain of high gas prices while helping spur people away from automobiles. The same $9 billion would allow Sacramento to issue e-bike rebates of $300 each to of the roughly 30 million Californians of bicycling age (say, 10 to 80). Making the rebates tradeable would bend to two realities: not everyone can or will use a bike — even one with electric assist — and supplies are constrained. The latter factor suggests that the rebates should remain valid for several years.

Doubtless, there are other productive ways California could distribute $9 billion in economic relief. What makes the planned automobile giveaway so dispiriting is that for half-a-century the state has done so much in green energy and electricity, outside of the transportation sector, that is pro-climate, pro-consumer and innovative. Gov. Newsom’s rush to invest $9 billion in a one-shot that pulls in the opposite direction is damaging in itself and also indicative of the fragility of California’s supposed green ethos.

Call me a neigh-sayer, but the pretty horses decorating yesterday’s NY Times story about Argo Blockchain, Inc.’s “Green Bitcoin” venture can’t hide the oxymoron that lies beneath: no matter how many wind turbines and solar panels Bitcoin miners build or buy to run their ravenous processors, crypto is fundamentally filthy.

The reason is straightforward: all the new green energy we can capture from the air and the sun needs to serve a higher purpose: replacing fossil fuels. Wind farms and photovoltaic arrays stop the combustion that’s causing climate change only when they take the place of coal- and gas-fired power plants. If they’re hooked up to Bitcoin computers, they can’t substitute for anything. The net gain for climate is zero.

To be sure, it’s better to run Bitcoin machines with renewables than with fossil fuels. But even 100%-renewable Bitcoin isn’t climate-positive, since the land supporting the new green stuff powering the Bitcoin mining is perforce unavailable to aid the climate. At some point — a year from now, five years on, ten — some other entrepreneur, one focused on renewables rather than crypto-currency, could have built the same arrays and dedicated their output to the grid. That would actually push out fossil fuel generation and achieve the carbon cuts the climate needs.

If it helps, think of the difference between the engineer’s perspective and the climate economist’s. The engineer counts X many kilowatt-hours of wind and solar feeding Bitcoin computers that draw the same X kWh’s and calls it a wash: “carbon-neutral.” The climate economist sees those figures but also debits the Bitcoin operation for the opportunity cost of its computer banks whose voracity renders the green kWh’s unable to take the place of fossil-fuel kWh’s. The “wash” that the engineer touts is actually the persistence of coal- and gas-fired electricity generation that will keep spewing carbon.

What I call the climate economist’s perspective is something I’ve cultivated lately, since I started rethinking the climate consequences of the closure of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, in New York City’s far-north suburbs. In 2020, in a post I called Drones With Hacksaws, I equated shutting a large source of essentially carbon-free electricity such as Indian Point to unleashing a swarm of hacksaw-wielding drones to lay waste to a hypothetical giant offshore wind farm by lopping off its thousand or more turbine blades. The climate consequences of the two acts were, I argued, identical, since both involved doing away with steadily-functioning zero-carbon power sources whose operation obviated the need to run carbon-fuel-burning power plants.

Applying this perspective to Argo Blockchain helps us see that from a climate perspective, its wind turbines (and promised solar arrays) add up to nada. The potential climate good from the company’s green power sources is squandered in powering an artificial and unnecessary service. From a climate standpoint, Argo’s wind and solar arrays at best break even, rather than provide a net benefit.

The Times story missed a lot of details: how much electricity Argo Blockchain’s Bitcoin mining facility outside Lubbock, in northwest Texas, will consume; how much of it will come from the row of wind turbines visible in the distance; how much of world Bitcoin “demand” the facility will satisfy. But it did include these helpful pointers:

Crypto mining does not involve any picks or shovels. Instead, the term refers to a verification and currency creation process that is essential to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Powerful computers race one another to process transactions, solving complex mathematical problems that require quintillions of numerical guesses a second. As a reward for this authentication service, miners receive new coins, providing a financial incentive to keep the computers running.

In Bitcoin’s early years, a crypto enthusiast could mine coins by running software on a laptop. But as digital assets have become more popular, the amount of power necessary to generate Bitcoin has soared. A single Bitcoin transaction now requires more than 2,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or enough energy to power the average American household for 73 days, researchers estimate.

Earlier this year, the New Yorker magazine writer David Owen used crypto mining as an object example in his Jan. 15 article, How The Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe. After citing a 2011 U.S. Energy Department (D.O.E.) study touting massive carbon reductions from federal regulations upgrading refrigeration efficiency, Owen trenchantly pointed out that “In 2011, the D.O.E.’s forecasters presumably didn’t anticipate that improvements in energy efficiency would make it increasingly economical to power and cool the server farms that mine and manage cryptocurrencies.”

Owen’s article, which is well worth reading for its narrative power and climate relevance as well as its iconoclasm, was his latest exposition of Jevon’s Paradox, the phenomenon by which increases in energy efficiency lower the price of “energy services” and thus lead to more use, undercutting the efficiency gain. The antidote, of course, is to ensure the energy services — cooling, travel, lighting, and so forth — don’t plunge in price by raising the price of energy provision, as I pointed out a decade ago in a post in Grist, If efficiency hasn’t cut energy use, then what?

We could do that, of course, with a carbon tax.

When it comes specifically to blunting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, there are three broad ways that carbon taxing could help.

Carbon taxing can at least nudge greenward the mix of power sources used by Bitcoin miners: less coal or gas firing, more wind and solar. That won’t make Bitcoin green, but it will lessen its climate-destructiveness.

Second, carbon taxing could cut into Bitcoin’s growth by increasing electricity distribution companies’ economic incentives to bid green power supplies away from cryptocurrency manufacturers, thus making Bitcoin mining cost more.

Last, carbon taxing could conceivably strengthen social-shaming of Bitcoin entrepreneurs and users by reframing crypto as a refuge for losers.

This notion, though admittedly speculative, would be the most enduring. There’s a range of consuming activities that need to be deemed off-limits on account of their unsustainability, destructiveness and uselessness: helicopter flights, driving giant SUV’s, monster-size homes. Crypto belongs on that list.

Prices of gasoline and other petroleum products as well as methane (“natural”) gas were already unusually high in the U.S. before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Less than two weeks on (March 9), they’re at levels not seen since 2008, prompting the usual motorist grumbling but also creating hardship for squeezed families. Here we shed light on four key questions:

1. Is the backlash against high pump prices an argument against pursuing carbon taxes?
2. How big a hit are U.S. consumers taking from the higher fuel prices?
3. Is demand for gasoline sensitive to the price at the pump? If so, how much?
4. How much could the U.S. cut oil demand, right away?

Q1: Is the backlash against high pump prices an argument against pursuing carbon taxes?

A1: No.

Joseph Majkut explains:

Things that are not the same:
A carbon price with transfers to households and oil price increases from supply shocks.

— Joseph Majkut (@JosephMajkut) March 8, 2022

Let’s unpack the tweet from Majkut, former Senate staffer and Niskanen Center climate specialist now with the national security think tank CSIS.

Supply shocks, like today’s, exact monies from businesses and consumers and transfer it to the oil industry — extractors, refiners, traders, brokers, insurers.

Carbon pricing, in contrast, is imposed by governments. And though it leads, deliberately, to higher fuel prices, the tax monies are collected by government and become revenues that can be used for public purposes. The “canonical” outlet — the one increasingly urged by carbon-pricing advocates in NGO’s and government — is to distribute (“transfer,” in Majkut’s phrase) the revenues as equal “dividends” to households.

This fee-and-dividend approach, pioneered by Citizens Climate Lobby, is income-progressive because lower-income households spend fewer dollars on fuels (directly plus indirectly) than wealthier households. Fuel price shocks, on the other hand, are regressive because lower-income households spend a larger share of their budgets on fuel.

If these points appear contradictory, please study the donut chart at right, or consult our page, Ensuring Equity. It’s the dividend that makes carbon pricing progressive, and the lack of a dividend that makes oil shocks regressive.

Q2: How big a hit are U.S. consumers taking from the higher fuel prices?

A2: A pretty big one, though it’s probably transitory.

In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, the U.S. consumed 32.2 quads of methane (“natural”) gas and 43.5 quads of petroleum products. (A quad, or quadrillion Btu, is a standard metric for characterizing enormous energy quantities.)

Methane gas is used for power generation, heating of homes and commercial buildings, and as process heat for industry. Petroleum products encompass not just gasoline but home heating oil, diesel fuel burned by large trucks and machinery, kerosene for aircraft, residual oil for large commercial ships, propane for heating (largely in rural areas that aren’t connected to gas lines) and lubricants. Non-gasoline fuels typically account for a little over half of petroleum usage, with gasoline a bit less than half. (CTC’s carbon-tax model breaks down a lot of these uses.)

On a per-btu basis, i.e., for an equivalent amount of heat or energy, petroleum products are far more costly than methane gas. Gasoline at $4.00 a gallon, the approximate national average pump price in early March, equates to $32 per million Btu; whereas during 2016-2020 methane gas averaged only a little more than $2 per million Btu at the wellhead and $6 delivered to the average customer. (Yes, refining crude oil into petroleum products is really costly.)

We made a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what the disruption of global energy markets due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is costing U.S. consumers. We assumed a 15 percent rise in petroleum-product prices, along with a 50 percent rise in the wellhead price of methane gas as profit-maximizing owners diverted some supplies to LNG tankers bound for Europe. With these assumptions, the impacts on U.S. consumers — businesses along with households — are in the neighborhood of $400 million a day for higher petroleum fuels and $100 million a day for costlier methane gas. (Gasoline accounts for “only” $150 to $200 million of the $500 million total.)

Mathematically, the total, around $500 million a day, works out to around $4 a day in added costs for an average U.S. household. With a robust carbon tax in place, the supply shock would be far smaller. Households wouldn’t be consuming as much oil, and the increased slack in the world oil business would shrink the opportunities for profiteering by oil owners and traders.

Q3: Is gasoline use sensitive to the price at the pump?

A3: More than most people think, though less than we wish.

We examined the price-elasticity of gasoline in 2015, in a post, What an Energy-Efficiency Hero Gets Wrong about Carbon Taxes. The post presented a linear regression model that correlated year-to-year changes in U.S. gasoline consumption with changes in economic activity (GDP) and in the real (inflation-adjusted) price of gasoline. Here’s what we wrote then:

We “regressed” the annual percentage changes in U.S. gasoline consumption from 1960 through 2014 on three independent variables: (i) the same year’s percentage change in economic activity (GDP); (ii) the same year’s percentage change in the average real retail price of gasoline; and (iii) the average percentage change in that price over the 10 years prior to the current year. The third variable was intended to reflect lags inherent in Americans’ responses to changing gasoline prices, insofar as automobile purchases and location choices that affect usage tend to change over years rather than weeks or months. The parameters may be referred to as income-elasticity, immediate price-elasticity, and lagged price-elasticity, respectively.

This week we updated the model with gasoline consumption and price data through 2021. Here’s what we found:

• The  income-elasticity of gasoline consumption is a little over 0.5 (0.53, to be precise), meaning that a 1 percent rise in GDP is associated with a 0.5 percent rise in gas use.
• The immediate price-elasticity of gasoline consumption is (minus) 0.11, meaning that it takes nearly a 10 percent hike in the average price at the pump to bring about an immediate 1 percent drop in usage; this validates the perception that in the short run. gasoline use is only barely responsive to price changes.
• The lagged price-elasticity of gasoline consumption is (minus) 0.19. The sum of the immediate and lagged price-elasticities is (minus) 0.30, indicating modest sensitivity of usage to price over a longer time horizon. A sustained 10 percent hike in gasoline prices would tend to elicit a 3 percent drop in usage.

(Incidentally, this 3-variable model — actually, we used 5 variables, including “dummy” variables to isolate gas use in 2020 and 2021, the pandemic years — explains nearly 80 percent of the year-to-year variation in U.S. gasoline consumption.)

Here are four takeaways from our modeling:

1. Holding prices constant, gasoline usage in the U.S. has been partly decoupled from economic activity, since two units of economic growth lead to only one unit of growth in gasoline use.
2. U.S. gasoline demand isn’t entirely price-inelastic, though it is nearly so in the immediate (short) run.
3. Over a longer period, demand for gasoline displays some price-sensitivity, suggesting that by raising pump prices, carbon taxes can have some sway over usage.
4. Still, the relative price-inelasticity of gasoline indicates that even robust carbon taxes won’t have a big direct effect on usage; the bigger impacts will come from speeding the transition to electric vehicles and, we hope, fostering turns in the culture that promote and valorize reduced fuel use

Q4: How much could the U.S. cut oil demand, right away?

A4: By a lot. (But we won’t.)

In early 2002, not long after the Saudi-enabled attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, I published a blueprint for achieving an immediate (“overnight”) 5% cut in U.S. oil consumption, with the reductions reaching 10% within six months.

Given the reality that changes in capital stocks that underlie oil consumption — the cars people own, the cities and towns where they live — can’t change overnight, the booklet’s guiding idea was to “collectively change individual behaviors” that added up to the 19.3 million barrels of petroleum products being consumed daily in the U.S.

My thinking then was that behavior changes away from petroleum consumption could finally explode from niche to commonplace if the changes were hitched to a higher purpose — national security and patriotism, in this case. Bicycle commuting, carpooling, thermostat setbacks, electricity conservation would become widespread as their aura changed from fringe-y to patriotic.

Sadly, this never caught on. Our declaration “that we face a choice between love of oil and love of country” and our call to the Bush administration “to break with past policies of subsidizing oil consumption and treating every oil-consuming activity, no matter how discretionary or wasteful, as essential,” fell on deaf ears.

Today, U.S. oil consumption is greater than it was on 9/11. U.S. households, businesses and industry consumed an average of 20,540,000 barrels of petroleum products in 2021, around 5 percent more than the 19,700,000 barrels used daily in 2000.

If anything, calls to alter individual behavior to cut down on consumption of oil and other fossil fuels, whether for geopolitical purposes (to shrink Russian government and oligarch cash reserves) or for climate (to dial back carbon emissions), are frequently derided on the left as “lifestyle-shaming” and diversions from the “urgent task of system decarbonization.” In a New Yorker magazine profile of Sunrise Movement organizers earlier this month, for example, one activist dismissed Al Gore’s exhortation in 2006 to replace electricity-gulping lights because “even if you change all the light bulbs in the country, you don’t come close to preventing catastrophe.” In fact, multitudes of bulb swaps since then have helped flatten U.S. electricity demand, keeping hundreds of millions of tons of coal in the ground — this country’s biggest climate triumph to date.

We conclude this post with a screenshot of the opening pages of “Ending the Oil Age.” The full 44-page report may be downloaded here (pdf). Readers with an historical bent, take note: The report also proposed hefty taxes on gasoline and jet fuel that, in my telling, could replace the patriotic impulse to conserve petroleum as the murderous, petro-dollar-fueled attack on the World Trade Center began to recede into the past.

Someone chose an inopportune time to beat up on carbon taxing’s fee-and-dividend variant. Not U-C Santa Barbara political scientist Mitto Mildenberger, whose paper, Limited impacts of carbon tax rebate programmes on public support for carbon pricing, co-authored with scholars from Montreal, Vancouver and Bern (Switzerland), appeared this week in the prestigious journal, Nature Climate Change. No, I mean iconoclast blogger David Roberts, who used Mildenberger’s provocative paper as a launching pad to again dunk on carbon pricing and people who still hold out hope for it.

Roberts’ post, Do dividends make carbon taxes more popular? Apparently not., published on Monday on his Volts platform, gets off on the wrong foot right away, claiming:

Economists have long insisted that pricing carbon is the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gases. For years, they hijacked the climate discourse, with untold money and effort put behind proposals for various increasingly baroque pricing schemes, to very little effect. (emphasis added)

Roberts may be right about efficiency and economists, but his description doesn’t fit climate hawks like Citizens Climate Lobby and Carbon Tax Center. We place our chips on carbon taxes not on account of their economic efficiency but because of their unrivaled potential to slash carbon emissions quickly in the U.S. — and also their global portability.

The meat of Mildenberger’s paper and Roberts’ post, distilled in their respective titles, is that in the only two countries with some form of fee-and-dividend carbon pricing, not just public support but basic awareness of the programs, particularly the dividends themselves, is middling at best.

We think this “finding” is both questionable and beside the point. Let’s take a close look at each of those countries: Switzerland and Canada.

Switzerland

Switzerland’s carbon tax began in 2008 and reached its current level of 96 Swiss francs per metric ton in 2018. Converting metrics and currencies, that equates to $95 per ton of CO2, the kind of level that carbon taxers dream about. According to CTC’s carbon tax model, if the U.S. next year started a $15/ton carbon tax and ramped it up to reach $95 in 2030, emissions in that year would be 33% less than in 2005, taking us 2/3 of the way to the Biden target of halving 2005 emissions in 2030.

Not only that, a U.S. carbon tax at the Swiss level of $95 a ton would generate a carbon dividend in 2030 of $1,500 per person, even allowing for reduced emissions and a larger population and equal shares for children. Surely, a $1,500 carbon check — or, if you prefer (and we do) 12 monthly carbon dividends of $125 per person — would translate into strong and rising popularity, especially considering that a majority of people and households would be expending less than those amounts in increased direct and indirect energy costs.

That’s the straw man. The reality is that Switzerland’s $95/ton (U.S.) carbon tax will deliver only $96 in per-person dividends for the entire year. (See document at left, downloadable here.) That’s less than one month’s worth of what U.S. residents would receive under a full fee-and-dividend scheme for a Swiss-level $95 carbon tax. In that light, it should be no surprise that Mildenberger and his co-authors didn’t find residents of Geneva or Zurich dancing in the streets over their carbon dividends. In U.S. terms, Swiss residents’ 2022 carbon tax dividend is what Americans would get in 2030 from a piddling carbon tax of $5.50 per ton of CO2. 

Why the discrepancy? Why is Switzerland’s carbon dividend only 1/15 as great as what a U.S. dividend would be from a carbon fee of the same level?

There are four big reasons. First, Switzerland’s energy consumption is far less per capita than that of the United States. Second, hydro-electricity rather than carbon-based fuels like coal and methane powers the country’s grid. Third, the Swiss carbon tax exempts transport and agriculture and more than half of Swiss industry (see graphic at right; full document here). Fourth, part of the tax revenue is siphoned off by businesses before the dividends get calculated.

No wonder, then, that Switzerland’s carbon dividend is so meager. Consider further that, as Mildenberger et al. point out, “Citizens receive their rebates as a discount on their health insurance premiums, with annual notifications about this monthly benefit through health insurance forms.”

Annual notifications through health insurance forms. This is reasonable, even enlightened, public policy. It’s also almost diabolically designed to obfuscate the dividend side of the carbon fee coin.

Canada

Canada’s carbon tax is far more complicated than Switzerland’s. When we last updated CTC’s Canada page, in March 2011, we characterized carbon pricing in the country’s 13 provinces as follows:

• Six provinces, including Ontario and Alberta, were covered by the federal pricing scheme that would reach $50/tonne in 2023 — around $36/ton in U.S. terms — and then ramp up sharply to $170/tonne by 2030.
• Four were deploying their own carbon tax, led by British Columbia, which inaugurated the Western Hemisphere’s first meaningful carbon tax in 2008.
• Quebec and Nova Scotia were part of a two-country carbon cap-and-trade program that is anchored by California.
• New Brunswick employed an output-based carbon pricing system.

Given this patch-quilt, as well as the novelty of carbon pricing in most of Canada, it seems to us unsurprising that polling that commenced in February 2019 (and extended through May 2020, with five “waves” in all) would yield the mixed results reported in the Midenberger paper: upticks in two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, and downturns in the other three, Quebec, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The “core question” asked in the Canada polling, as described by lead author Mildenberger, who graciously shared it with us yesterday via email, is shown at left. The language is neutral, perhaps to a fault. It offered no affirmative spin, such as “Canada recently began taxing fossil fuels in order to protect the climate, with the money rebated in ways that will help households get ahead financially.” That kind of favorable tilt could perhaps be justified as necessary to counter the negative vibe surrounding taxation generally.

To be sure, that negative vibe is precisely what drives pundits like Roberts to deride carbon taxing, as he did in the second and third paragraphs of his post:

Over time, political experience with carbon taxes has highlighted a truth that should have been obvious long ago: carbon taxes are taxes, and people don’t like taxes. People don’t like paying more money for stuff.

More broadly, carbon taxes are an almost perfectly terrible policy from the perspective of political economy. They make costs visible to everyone, while the benefits are diffuse and indirect. They create many enemies, but have almost no support outside the climate movement itself. All the political intensity is with opponents.

We get it. We know full well the albatross that taxation always bears. But we also know that taxes on “bads” have been enacted into law. The U.S. government taxes cigarettes, as does every state. New York City taxes grocery bags, and Philadelphia and Berkeley, CA tax sugary soft drinks.

Obviously, taxing something as supercharged financially and culturally as fossil fuels is a much heavier lift, as evidenced by the absence of explicit carbon taxing anywhere in the fifty states. (We exclude federal and state motor fuel taxes, due to their tie-in to roads rather than health or climate; we also exclude New York State’s Petroleum Business Tax, though its support of NYC metro-area transit perhaps merits an honorable mention; conversely, New York City’s congestion pricing program, now scheduled to begin in 2023, will create a strong template for carbon taxing, as we’ve pointed out many times, including in The Nation magazine in 2019.)

So yes, carbon taxing — not fig-leaf $20/ton-and-no-higher carbon taxing a la Exxon or the occasional Republican, but a levy rising steadily to triple digits before 2030 — is hard stuff. But so is just about every other decarbonization policy or program, especially if done at scale.

Well-heeled NIMBY’s have whittled down wind projects for years; now, so too may supply-chain problems. Rooftop solar endures pushback not just from utilities and their high-wage unions but also from concerns that lower-income residents could gett stuck with higher utility bills. Only splinters of President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which wasn’t going to be able to deliver its promised 50% cut in emission by 2030 anyway, will pass, thanks to one or two Democratic senators and 50 Republicans. Even the push to electrify everything may find its vaunted carbon benefits a good deal less potent than advocates imagine, an issue we intend to explore in a future post.

Still, though, the biggest misdirection in the Mildenberger et al. paper and the Roberts post may be their fretting over public opinion in the first place. The public doesn’t have to love carbon fee-and-dividend. It simply needs to embolden political leadership that will enact it (and the raft of complementary policies) into law and ensure that the fee, which shouldn’t be set too high to start, can keep rising over time.

Public opinion increasingly supports climate action, not tepidly but “with alarm,” as the latest Yale – George Mason opinion survey of “Global Warming’s Six Americas” attests (see graphic at right, and more detailed treatment with link here). It’s past time for carbon pricing naysayers to throw off their ideological blinders and get behind policies that can pass and deliver.

PS to David Roberts: Contrary to your Volts post, fee-and-dividend did not “los[e] badly in a public referendum in 2016.” What went down to defeat in Washington state was a sales tax swap of the carbon revenues, necessitated by the state’s constitutional prohibition against dividend-type state tax treatments. And what doomed the proposal was opposition from climate hawks who took umbrage at being leapfrogged politically, and in revenge brought in lefty heavy hitters to slime the measure. But that’s another story.

Huge hat tip to friend of CTC Drew Keeling for Swiss materials and perspective. Drew’s most recent Carbon Tax Center post, Rural disgruntlement, pro-climate complacency sink expansion of Swiss carbon tax, appeared in June 2021.

Our post last Friday about Build Back Better was already pushing the boundaries by contending that the Biden infra plan won’t actually cut CO2 50% by 2030, when we added this at the end:

We suspect that even a starter, “proof of concept” carbon tax at this time will prove to be a poor idea. Passing a carbon tax in lieu of aggressively raising taxes on high income and instituting taxes on great wealth, as several Senate Democratic climate hawks floated today, amounts to budget-balancing on the backs of both the working poor and the beleaguered middle class. It’s inequitable and a terrible template for the really large carbon taxes that progressive Democrats must eventually enact, in the event they ever reach centrist-proof majorities.

But wait: CTC is supposed to be supporting efforts to pass a U.S. carbon tax. Why, then, were we throwing darts at the Senate Democrats’ trial balloon that was aimed at doing just that?

We have four reasons:

1. We don’t think Congress can pass a carbon tax in 2021 anyway.
2. We believe the carbon tax under discussion won’t offer sufficient protection to ordinary Americans.
3. We doubt that any carbon tax under discussion can generate big enough emission cuts.
4. We fear that Democratic backing for a carbon tax at this time will make it harder to defeat the climate-denying G.O.P. in the 2022 midterms.

Things were moving fast last Friday afternoon and we weren’t able to polish our remarks. Now, with a bit more time, let’s unpack these points.

1. Congress can’t pass a carbon tax in 2021 anyway.

The make-or-break Senate votes aren’t there. Manchin of West Virginia won’t vote for a carbon tax, Sinema of Arizona can’t be counted on, and it wouldn’t be surprising if a few Senate or House Democrats facing tough re-elections defected as well. And no Republicans will come on board. Carbon-tax proponents and other climate hawks have waited in vain for over a decade for a single sitting Republican member of the Senate to stand up for strong climate action just once. There’s no reason to think our prayers are about to be answered.

2. The carbon tax under discussion won’t protect enough ordinary Americans.

President Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year. A straight-up fee-and-dividend, which is the type of carbon tax CTC most strongly favors, would violate that en masse, despite being strongly income-progressive.. The reason: most six-figure households are high-carbon consumers and thus would be carbon-taxed more than they would be dividended.

If you’re unsure about that, consider the main finding of Anders Fremsted and Mark Paul’s superb 2017 paper for U-Mass’s Political Economy Research Institute, A Short-Run Distributional Analysis of a Carbon Tax in the United States: While 84 percent of households in the bottom income half would be made better off with carbon dividends, only 55 percent of all households would be beneficiaries. Simple arithmetic on those two propositions indicates that only 26 percent of the more affluent households would benefit. (The calculation: 84% of the bottom half equals 42% of all households. The remaining 13 percentage points of beneficiaries constitute just 13%/50%, or 26%, of the top half.) The optics of squaring such a carbon tax or fee with the pledge aren’t promising.

(If Fremsted and Paul’s finding seems too pessimistic, consider this alternative scenario: if 90 percent of bottom-half households were posited as better off, and same for 65 percent of all households, then the share of upper-half households being made better off would come to 40 percent — higher than the 26 percent above, but still a minority of that group.)

To be clear, CTC has no qualms about raising taxes on the very-affluent as well as the super-rich to make a better society. But raising taxes on the working poor and the beleaguered middle class is another matter entirely. And to the extent that the carbon tax under discussion is meant as a pay-for — literally, to pay for improving America’s physical and social infrastructure — less money will be available for dividends. It’s one thing to set aside a few percent of carbon fee revenues to pay for worker and community transitions, as outspoken climate hawk Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) proposed this summer; but it’s another thing altogether to set aside, say, 25 percent for pay-for’s. Having only 75 percent of carbon revenues available for dividends will consign millions of non-affluent households to paying more for energy and energy-intensive goods than they receive as dividends.

3. The carbon tax under discussion won’t generate big emission cuts.

This objection is somewhat speculative because, perhaps understandably, no Senate Democrat has yet attached a level to their carbon tax trial-balloon. But there’s a tendency to overstate what a modestly-sized carbon tax can accomplish.

For example, Resources for the Future, the influential environmental think-tank cited in last Friday’s New York Times story that touched off the latest carbon tax discussion, projects that a carbon tax that starts in 2023 at $15 per metric ton, rises slowly to $30 in 2028 and then jumps to $50 in 2030, will cut CO2 emissions in that year by 44 percent from 2005 levels. That would represent an 1,850 megatonne drop in emissions from 2019. But plugged into our carbon tax model, those inputs yield only a 775 megatonne drop, or much less than half as much. To be sure, RFF’s modeling also includes a clean electricity standard (a close cousin of the Clean Electricity Performance Program in the Biden package that we discussed in our earlier post), but the CEPP would be partly duplicated by the carbon tax and thus wouldn’t account for the bulk of the difference between our respective model results.

Would we support the more modest RFF carbon tax nonetheless if it could be guaranteed to be economically progressive in the aggregate? You bet we would. Our concern on this score is what we telegraphed in our Sept 27 post: the need to neutralize undeserved hype being vested in any climate policies, including carbon taxes.

4. Democratic backing for a carbon tax now will make it harder to defeat the climate-denying G.O.P. in the 2022 midterms.

We won’t belabor this point. Too much depends on the Democrats’ retaining full control of Congress in next year’s midterms and having a good shot at holding on to the White House in 2024. We believe a lot more organizing, educating and communicating about the power, fairness and benefits of carbon taxes remains to be done before the party is somewhat safely inoculated against the inevitable blowback against even an economically progressive carbon tax. Much of that effort will need to go into bringing environmental justice and other progressive activists into the fold.

What kind of carbon tax does the Carbon Tax Center want?

CTC wants a carbon tax that can pass, that’s certifiably progressive (economically), that is robust enough in its per-ton rate to be able to help eliminate game-changing amounts of CO2 and fossil fuels, and that won’t cause gross damage to the Democratic Party’s brand and thus make it easier for the Trumpian right to regain power.

Translated: We want a fee-and-dividend carbon tax, i.e., a carbon fee whose revenues are returned to U.S. households as equal, pro rata dividends and not used as pay-for’s. The enormous sums needed for climate and a broad array of other infrastructure — amounts that will rise over time as institutions and industries are mobilized to deliver the goods — can and should come from rising taxes on undertaxed forms of wealth: very high incomes, ultra-large fortunes, great inheritances, corporate earnings, and offshored and other avoided taxes.

This structure will let the carbon tax rise steadily over time and perform the function it does best: instill the price incentives and social signals to steer U.S. households, businesses, habits and norms away from fossil fuels and into the broad array of alternatives — everything from bicycles and denser living patterns to wind turbines and solar roofs — that won’t heat our climate beyond repair.

Since April, when President Biden committed the United States to sweeping cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate advocates have tried to figure out how he could fulfill his goal of a 50 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.

Their talk is not of a government-led Green New Deal — too hot for a skittish Congress — but of a tapestry of GND-ish policies, many of them wonky. Heading the list are schemes to shovel government cash to utilities that shut down coal- and gas-fired power plants, and to motorists who go electric.

There’s sense in these and the other policy pieces, just as 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 is more palatable, though less potent, than charging them for burning carbon.

But it’s fair —imperative, actually — to ask if the numerical cuts being attached to those programs actually add up to 50 percent. We don’t think they do; the hill is too steep. Compared to pre-pandemic (2019) carbon emissions, Biden’s goal entails a massive cut, 42 percent, in under a dozen years.

Decarbonizing on that kind of scale falls outside the bounds of the possible without a stiff carbon emissions price. Our purpose here is to show why, and also point a way around.

1.

To kick off this discussion, consider Robinson Meyer’s June 2021 Atlantic article, A “green vortex” is saving America’s climate future. Its big idea was that “decarbonization by doing” — deploying more electric cars and more grid storage systems and more solar panels — is driving down these low-carbon technologies’ costs, naturally leading to more deployment and increasingly kicking fossil-fueled cars and power plants to the curb.

It’s an attractive if familiar notion, this “green vortex.” Sit back, let green energy grow cheaper and bigger, and watch carbon emitters fade to black. But Meyer overhypes it. After outlining the high points of U.S. carbon reductions over the past decade, he states:

Under America’s new Paris Agreement pledge, the country will need to double the pace of its emissions decline over the next decade. Whatever we’re doing right, we’re soon going to have to do it twice as fast. So we’d better figure out what it is. (emphasis added)

We posed these questions to Meyer, after running calculations on U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning. By our count, which is fully detailed in our carbon-tax spreadsheet (see link, three paragraphs below), those emissions totaled 6,070 megatonnes (million metric tons) in 2005 and 5,250 megatonnes in 2019. That computes to 60 fewer megatonnes each year. The task ahead — dropping another 2,215 megatonnes to slim down to 3,035 (half of the 6,070 benchmark) — requires that from 2019 to 2030 we purge 200 megatonnes each year —3.4 times the annual rate of shrinkage from 2005 to 2019.

In Meyer’s telling, thanks to the green vortex we’ll manage to double our established pace of decarbonization. He might be right. But what if doubling our average annual decline in emissions from 2005-2019 won’t fulfill Biden’s pledged 50 percent cut by 2030? What if it only yields a 35 percent reduction from 2005 emissions, the standard benchmark? What if cutting emissions 50 percent requires that from now to 2030 future U.S. emissions must come down three to four times faster than they did in 2005-2019?

(Perhaps Meyer, who didn’t reply to our email, used 2020 rather than 2019 as his goalpost. That would give him his “doubling,” but meaninglessly. A year that completely upended energy commerce — in which U.S. air travel fell by a third, for example — might be defensible as a new goal post, but not as a basis for computing a new downward trend.)

2.

To grasp how hard it will be for the Biden administration to bend the emissions curve sharply downward without a carbon tax, let’s look at key sectors. A good tool for that is the national carbon-calculator spreadsheet maintained by the Carbon Tax Center (downloadable 3 MB xls).

The Biden plan’s centerpiece is an idea that has become a darling of climate hawks, the Clean Electricity Performance Program. It’s a $150 billion scheme to decarbonize U.S. electricity generation by paying utility companies to replace coal- and gas-fired plants with carbon-free power from wind, solar, biomass or nuclear sources.

Just over 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions came from the power sector in 2019, down from 40 percent in 2005, a noteworthy drop that accounted for most of the reductions that Meyer touted in The Atlantic. Let’s assume, as do the White House and its climate allies, that the CEPP’s cash incentives leverage falling prices of solar and wind electricity to achieve the canonical goal of eliminating 80 percent of 2019 power sector carbon emissions by 2030.

The complementary, longer-standing climate policy cornerstone, to “electrify everything,” rests on the eminently reasonable premise that decarbonizing electricity is simpler than mass-producing low-carbon versions of gasoline, natural gas and other carbon fuels. Our calculations optimistically accelerate the uptake of electrified transportation by five years by having the electric shares of cars, trucks and planes in use in 2030 reach levels that in our opinion otherwise aren’t likely until 2035: 20-25 percent for autos, 11-12 percent for trucks and 4 percent for airliners. Those shares are pretty aggressive for 2030, considering that vehicle fleets turn over relatively slowly.

The carbon reductions from this scenario are creditable. With electricity 80% decarbonized and electric vehicles advanced by five years, U.S. CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels would be 35 to 40 percent less in 2030 than they were in 2005. The reduction, more than two million metric tons of CO2 a year, would qualify as by far the greatest extinction of carbon pollution in history.

But why isn’t the reduction 50 percent? Reason #1 is ever-burgeoning travel. Unless policy interventions like road pricing, public transit and density-friendly upzoning can take root on a grand scale — unlikely in just a decade — the emission reductions from hastening electric transportation will largely be offset by more travel, especially as vehicles on our roads grow ever bigger and more power-demanding.[1]

To be sure, our calculations omit other wonky but potentially potent forms of decarbonization such as widespread replacement of gas furnaces by electric heat pumps. Nor do they incorporate low-hanging fruit from reducing the number two greenhouse gas, methane, both via process capture and as a concomitant to phasing out this fossil fuel altogether.

But we should also be mindful that our most crucial assumption — that we’ll double electricity generation’s carbon-free share from 40 percent today to 80 percent by 2030 — is far from assured. Assume that our aspirational 80 percent carbon-free 2030 electricity comes as 24 percent solar photovoltaics, 32 percent wind, and 24 percent combined from nuclear, hydro-electricity and biomass.[2] Getting to 24 percent solar demands that between now and 2030 we install solar cells three-and-a-half times as fast as we have in any three-month period to date,[3] a task that could easily be sidelined by any number of issues involving supply bottlenecks, permits and certifications.

And if that’s not daunting enough, consider that for wind power to contribute its assigned 32 percent, we’ll need to add the equivalent of 75,000 giant wind turbines rated at 5 MW each[4] to America’s landscapes. Numerically, that equates to 25 turbines per county in the U.S. — a formidable task even if America’s NIMBY culture could somehow be conquered. And all of these targets will be even larger if, as seems likely, the CEPP holds down electricity prices, neutralizing what would otherwise be a helpful brake on demand for power.

3.

Since April, we’ve combed policy papers and journalism about fossil fuel emissions for an accounting of cuts that together might meet the Biden 50% target, or at least come close.

The best compilation we found is a policy brief signed by 20 mainstream and environmental justice organizations and released earlier this month by the Center for American Progress.[5] It’s crisp and precise, as is the Sept. 17 write-up, In the Democrats’ Budget Package, a Billion Tons of Carbon Cuts at Stake, by Inside Climate News journalist Marianne Lavelle, that linked to it.

The above graphic from the CAP brief (downloadable pdf) gives a good overview. Since it’s a lot to take in, we’ve broken it into three pieces.

• Fourteen policies included in Biden’s Build Back Better Act, summing to reductions of 22%. We’ve already covered the three largest, pertaining to clean electricity and electric vehicles. They sum to a 22% reduction from 2005 emissions. We haven’t checked the individual numbers, but the overall figure appears solid.
• “Additional Regulatory and State Action,” assigned a reduction range of 5%-7%.
• Two ongoing trends summing to reductions of 23%. The item at far left, 19%: Progress from 2005 to 2021, is supposed to denote the fall in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the 2005 baseline. The companion entry at the top, 4%: Current Trends Through 2030, applies forward from 2021. Together, these items purport to deliver large emission reductions without any new policies — along the lines of Rob Meyer’s “green vortex.”

The percentages credited to the three pieces would indeed carry the Biden plan across the 50 percent reduction threshold. But item #2, unspecified regulatory and state action, is vague and squishy. Worse, #3, “ongoing trends,” is numerically questionable. The CAP policy brief projects that 2030 emissions will be 23 percent below 2005 levels with no further policy actions (known as “business as usual”). Yet our modeling says that 2030 business-as-usual emissions will be just 13 percent under 2005 — a 10 point difference from CAP.

That’s no petty discrepancy. It’s also hard to parse in a blog setting. In addition, we don’t know how CAP and its partners derived their figures (ours are shown in the carbon-calculator spreadsheet we linked to earlier). All the same, here are our hunches as to why CAP’s forecasted emissions trajectory is much lower than ours:

1. Like Meyer in The Atlantic, CAP could be projecting future emissions from pandemic-depressed 2020 emission levels. In contrast, we think this year and next will bring big rebounds.
2. CAP may not be accounting for “natural” emissions growth accompanying increased economic activity. Our modeling of business-as-usual emissions has 2030 matching 2019, as decarbonization of electricity is offset by emissions caused by increased travel and industrial activity.
3. CAP’s figures cover all greenhouse gases, including methane, forest sequestration of carbon, and other activities, whereas ours only cover carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, which tend to be less amenable to change.

Our takeaway is that CAP and its partners are straining to be able to validate the ambition in Biden’s Build Back Better Act to cut emissions by 50 percent.

As noted earlier, a 35-40 percent cut from 2005 to 2030 would still be praiseworthy, even monumental. We would take it in a heartbeat, given the parlous state of American politics and governance. Nevertheless, we ought to be candid about what our policy tools can, and can’t, accomplish.

4.

The point of this post isn’t to weaken support for the Biden package. Monumental cuts are absolutely worth legislating. Nor are we seeking to beat the drum for a carbon tax at this juncture. As CTC has stated repeatedly this year, as early as in this April 2 post, the kind of carbon tax needed to embellish those cuts can’t possibly pass Congress in 2021.

We also suspect that even a starter, “proof of concept” carbon tax at this time will prove to be a poor idea. Passing a carbon tax in lieu of aggressively raising taxes on high income and instituting taxes on great wealth, as several Senate Democratic climate hawks floated today, amounts to budget-balancing on the backs of both the working poor and the beleaguered middle class. It’s inequitable and a terrible template for the really large carbon taxes that progressive Democrats must eventually enact, in the event they ever reach centrist-proof majorities.

Rather, our intent is to try to neutralize the unattainable hype around Build Back Better or other laudable efforts that can’t or don’t include robust carbon pricing.

In case you’re curious, however — we certainly were — we ran our model numbers to see how big a carbon tax would be needed to meet the Biden goal and cut 2005 U.S. CO2 emissions by 50 percent in 2030. Here’s our answer: combined with the CEPP or other measures to ensure 80% decarbonization of electricity (vis-a-vis 2019), along with the same 5-year acceleration of electric cars, trucks and planes we assumed earlier, an economy-wide carbon tax taking effect on Jan. 1, 2022 at a level of $20 per ton (short, not metric) of CO2 and rising each year at $15/ton to reach $140/ton in 2030, would do the trick.

Addendum, Sept 27: Our brand-new follow-on post, Why the Carbon Tax Center Questions the Latest Carbon Tax Talk, elaborates on our critique of the current carbon-tax trial balloon discussed directly above.

[1] Compared to 2005, CO2 emissions in 2030 in this scenario will have fallen by only 23 percent for cars and 9 percent for trucks while increasing by 18 percent for planes, even with accelerated electrification. Another factor holding back emissions progress is increased use of natural gas, as cheap fracked gas finds abundant uses in industry and heating.
[2] The 24 percent combined electricity share for nuclear, hydro and biomass assumes that 2030 generation from those sources remains at current levels. (Their share shrinks slightly because total electricity production rises somewhat; see next footnote.)
[3] Our modeling projects that without a carbon tax, U.S. electricity generation will rise from 4,160 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2019 to 4,800 TWh in 2030, with around a fourth of the increase attributable to electrified transport. Solar’s 24% share of that, 1,153 GWh, requires nearly 900 GW of installed solar capacity, assuming that a GW of solar produces around 1.3 TWh of electricity in a year, for an average capacity factor of 15%. From several sources, including this recent report by the Solar Energy Industries Association, U.S. installed solar at the end of 2020 was around 100 GW. To grow to 900 GW by the end of 2030, the U.S. solar sector would have to add 800 GW over 10 years, or 80 GW a year. From this report by Wood-McKenzie, the U.S. installed 5.7 GW in 1Q 2021 — a 1Q record — which implies an annual rate of 23 GW.
[4] Assuming an average capacity factor of 35%, wind power’s assumed 32% share of U.S. 2030 generation, 1,537 TWh, requires 500 GW of installed capacity, for a roughly 380 GW increment over end-of-2020 capacity of 122 GW, per U.S. DOE. We optimistically assume an average new-turbine size of 5 MW, although an Internet check on Sept 16, 2021 suggests that the U.S. has no operating wind turbine as large as 5 megawatts (see Windpower Monthly’s Ten of the Biggest Turbines). The U.S. has 3,006 counties.
[5] “The Climate Test: The Build Back Better Act Must Put Us on a clear path to cutting climate pollution 50% by 2030.” Statement, “20 Groups Call on Congress To Pass the ‘Climate Test.’” 4-page policy brief (pdf).

What drew me to pick up Andreas Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” and read it straight through over the July 4^th weekend? Sure, the title was intriguing, but why exactly this book now?

It wasn’t July’s climate chaos outbreaks — Oregon’s Bootleg fire, New York’s submerged subways, floods sweeping away picturesque German villages. Those came after July 4^th.

Believe it or not, helicopters may have been a factor. The incessant thwack-thwack of tourist and “commuter” heli flights pervades every lower Manhattan sanctum — Governors Island, the Hudson River piers, even my apartment rooftop. The noise is universally loathed, yet, unsurprisingly, earnest entreaties by local anti-heli advocates haven’t moved the needle. With luxury helicopter pollution impervious to public outcry, might it be time to move to direct action? Malm’s book, I thought, might be instructive.

Meanwhile, policies for turning back the climate crisis are stalling out.

June, after all, was when milquetoast moderates Manchin and Sinema gave Senate Republicans carte blanche to filibuster away President Biden’s climate infrastructure bill, thus blocking what might have been a path to carbon-pricing legislation after the 2022 midterms — an idea we spelled out in April.

Closer to home, evidence was mounting that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was turning skittish on the plan I had helped design to dial back automobile gridlock in Manhattan by charging drivers for causing traffic congestion — a scheme he shepherded through the state legislature in 2019.

Bright hopes, dwindling. So why not see what Malm had to say? Though I was ambivalent about the title — not just the “blow up” part, but “pipeline.”

Here’s why. The Carbon Tax Center largely leaves disrupting the fossil fuels supply chain to others. We fight for demand destruction: crushing the “need” for carbon energy with carbon taxes. Outside of CTC I work for urban transit and practice culture change like redefining my travel wants so I can get to most places I need to reach by bicycle.

The surest way to starve and slay the carbon beast is demand destruction. If you stop a gas well or oil pipeline, another will come into being somewhere else to meet the demand. So go after the demand instead.

Malm’s book really catches fire when he addresses carbon consumption:

Why go after private consumption? Hasn’t the [climate] movement worked hard to shift attention away from consumers — the favored subjects of liberal discourse — to the production of fossil fuels? Wouldn’t pointing to the former represent a slide backwards? But consumption is part of the problem, and most particularly the consumption of the rich. [emphasis added]

At last: a voice on the left not just willing but eager to address the demand for fuels!

In his post here last week, Let’s Blow Up Luxury Carbon, journalist Christopher Ketcham offered up a few of Malm’s striking stats on luxury consumption. The visual at left, taken from a 2019 report in the Guardian, underlies another from Malm: “There are 56 countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York.”

To be sure, repugnant statistics such as these are by now deadeningly familiar. What I found novel in Pipeline is Malm’s way of articulating the “wanton criminality” of luxury consumption:

When the atmosphere is already glutted with CO2, extravagant excesses have directly injurious effects, which means, to skip the euphemisms, that they send projectiles flying towards randomly chosen poor people. The rich could claim ignorance in 1913. Not so now…  The main source of luxury emissions — the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving — is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations.

Malm goes on to contrast luxury carbon with the “subsistence emissions” of the poor:

Subsistence emissions must be overcome just as much as any other, but they have none of these features of luxury in a CO2-saturated world: wanton criminality, insulation from the fallout, waste promotion, withholding of resources for adaptation, persisting in the most odious variants and ostentatiously negating the very notion of cuts… It follows that states should attack luxury emissions with axes — not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold. [emphasis added]

No such state attacks are happening, of course. If anything, the opposite is true, as Malm observes. France cut back taxes on aviation at the same time that president Emmanuel Macron, “king of climate diplomacy and private luxury … targeted the cars of the popular classes,” triggering the Gilets Jaunes uprising — a point Ketcham made as well in 2019 in Harper’s magazine.

“Luxury emissions,” Malm writes, “are left dangling, heavy and rotten, without any state daring to touch them. Time to pick up some sticks and knock the fruit down.”

It might take attacks on luxury-emitting devices to break the spell cast in the sphere of consumption. Much like divestment has strived to remove the license from fossil fuel dividends and replace it with a stigma, the purpose here would be to hammer home another ethics: rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death. [emphasis added]

But how exactly to break the spell? We at CTC aren’t prepared to participate in or urge others to destroy property. The risks are too great, as Ketcham pointed out.

Today marks two years since Ketcham and I gathered on my Manhattan roof and, amid the din of the helicopters, understood that “the power to lord and the power to pollute are one and the same.”

Out of that came CTC’s three-pronged plan to Tax Carbon and Economic Inequality for a Green New Deal — all three elements of which the minority, Republican-controlled Senate now blocks. (Within a day of posting this, we learned that the price of G.O.P. votes for an infrastructure bill that is more highway than climate was to strike funding for new IRS capability to go after billionaire tax cheats.)

Something has to give. We don’t know what. Neither, for that matter, does New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who, like me, this month devoted a weekend to reading Malm’s book:

To the immediate question — how to force the political system to do enough, fast enough, to avert mass [climate] suffering — I don’t know the answer, or even if there is an answer. Legislative politics is unlikely to suffice under any near-term alignment of power I can foresee.

It’s not often you hear the New York Times opining on the value of industrial sabotage, yet columnist Ezra Klein last week did just that, posting a column that began: “I spent the weekend reading a book I wasn’t entirely comfortable being seen with in public. Andreas Malm’s ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ is only slightly inaptly named. You won’t find, anywhere inside, instructions on sabotaging energy infrastructure. A truer title would be ‘Why to Blow Up a Pipeline.’ On this, Malm’s case is straightforward: Because nothing else has worked.”

Malm makes the case for grassroots-organized destruction of the property of energy companies to raise the cost of their doing business and to punish fossil investors. More importantly, he advocates also for sabotage of the property of the very wealthy, whose outsize carbon footprint adds extra layers of class-based culpability in the unfolding crimes against humanity which climate change already constitutes, not in some hazy future but today.

Klein, however, cannot abide property destruction, and therefore Malm is dismissed, from the pulpit of the Times to all the listening world, as “trying to make eco-terrorism a thing.”

So what’s the news here? New York Times opinion columnist not comfortable being seen with book that advocates blowing sh** up? Klein is only comfortable enough to make sure the book is shrugged off and no one bothers to read it. That’s a grave public disservice at a time when the status quo is untenable, when business-as-usual -– a heedless headlong plunge toward catastrophe -– demands demolition.

To his credit, Malm, an author and professor at Lund University in Sweden, recognizes the limits but also the absolute need of radicalism to meet an ecological crisis that over the long term will likely be an existential one for industrial Homo sapiens: “The question is not if sabotage from a militant wing of the climate movement will solve the crisis on its own –- clearly a pipe dream –- but if the disruptive commotion necessary for shaking business-as-usual out of the ruts can come about without it. It would seem foolhardy to trust in its absence and stick to tactics for normal times.”

Look again at the history of well-intentioned, sometimes visionary people sticking to tactics for normal times and having no effect on carbon emissions. It is indeed distressingly accurate that nothing has worked: Not endless meetings at COPs 1 through 25 (maybe something will happen at meetings 26 through 50); not the IPCC’s increasingly panicked reports of warming to come and warming already here; not Greta Thunberg’s agonized despair, and not the schoolchildren by the millions abandoning class to follow her lead; not Bill McKibben’s earnest plodding entreaties; not the shutdowns of London by the massed peaceful disrupters of Extinction Rebellion (XR); not the broader peaceful protests inspired by XR and others during 2019, before COVID cancelled crowds everywhere; not endless entreaties to a swing-vote U.S. senator who, The Guardian revealed the other day, owns millions in coal stocks; not the known and accepted fact that we are now headed for a 3ᵒC-degree warmed world, which will produce terrestrial hellscapes with dire consequences for global society, starting with mass migrations and moving into mass die-offs.

No, emissions continue to rise, the climate continues to fracture, while ecosystems, whose pillage is separate but related to the saturation of the carbon sink, spiral into chaotic dissolution and the silences of extirpated and probably soon to be extinguished species.

The hour is late, the window for action is closing. What’s needed is widespread disruption of the intolerable status quo. So what kind and how much?

For Malm, nothing is off the table.

It is a “virtue,” he writes, that groups like XR and others such as Germany-based Ende Gelände (“This far and no further”) commit to non-violent civil disobedience to challenge business-as-usual “by means of ever bigger, bolder mass actions.”

“Let a hundred Ende Gelände camps bloom and fossil capital might find itself under some real pressure,” Malm enthuses. But his interrogation of the climate movement asks us to go beyond absolute nonviolence as “forever the sole admissible tactic in the struggle to abolish fossil fuels.”

In marshaling the argument for ecosabotage in defense of a ecologically healthy liveable earth, Malm quotes British novelist and essayist John Lanchester on the matter of defacing automotive grotesqueries:

In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen?

Lanchester wondered then, in 2007, if it was because “people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort.” And then circles the target, asking if it’s because “even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it.”  To which we can add that in a society in which the dominant mindset declares inanimate objects to be sacred totems, you face a lot of trouble when you dare to deface them.

**

Consider the example of the strong feelings of the suffragettes of England, whose ferocity against inanimate objects is inspiration to Malm. “Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity,” he writes, and at the core of militancy was property destruction. Emmeline Pankhurst, co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, specialized in the “argument of the broken pane,” sending her enraged crews of well-dressed women into central London, bringing it to a standstill as they shattered the storefronts of dozens of businesses – jewelers, silversmiths, toy shops – and elsewhere attacked statues and paintings with hammers and axes. They planted bombs, fought policemen in street melees.

“Such deeds,” observes Malm, “went hand in hand with mass mobilization… The suffragettes [deployed] the gamut of non-violent and militant action.” After 1913, following defeat of legislation in England to give them the vote, they engaged in “a systematic campaign of arson,” burning or blowing up “villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres…” They burned cars and sank yachts. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU lay claim to at least 337 attacks.

According to Malm, no lives were lost, as the suffragettes “took great pains to avoid injuring people.” Pankhurst considered the situation so urgent – the need for women to have the vote so important – that “we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property… upset the whole orderly conduct of life.”

A problem with upsetting the orderly conduct of life with attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure in the developed world – one of the two prongs of sabotage that Malm advocates – is that it threatens to disproportionately punish those who can least afford it: poor and middle class fuel oil and gasoline consumers.

This was one of the main objections from Ezra Klein, who noted, not incorrectly, that “the consequence of a wave of bombings to obliterate energy infrastructure would be to raise the price on energy immediately [and] the burdens would fall heaviest on the poor.” (Higher energy prices from a carbon tax whose revenues are returned to the neediest and hardest hit as a dividend is a different story -– the telling of which is a raison d’être of the Carbon Tax Center.)

I suggest that Malm’s more tantalizing project, because politically it is more feasible, is for saboteurs to strike at the absurd, obscene carbon gorging of elites -– to disrupt unnecessary luxury demand that could be cut off with no pain to people who already have too much. “If we have to cut emissions now,” he argues, “we have to start with the rich.”

Malm cites the pivotal distinction, formulated by philosopher Henry Shue, between luxury and subsistence emissions: “The former happen because rich people like to wallow in the pleasure of their rank, the latter because poor people try to survive.” Peasants in India using coal to cook bread or at night getting the dim light from a dying bulb fed by a coal-fired power plant are confined in their choices because the alternative for poor people locked in the fossil economy, as Malm bluntly explains, “might be no stove and no lamp.”

The rich man on his yacht, on the other hand, has the opportunity to scrap the yacht and cease his profligacy and waste, but chooses not to. This wanton disregard is aggravated by the fact that the hypermobility of the rich “is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations. To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400 ppm,” Malm notes, “is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke.”

As it happens, we have data on the carbon footprint of the global fleet of 300 superyachts, defined as boats longer than 24 metres and affordable only to an estimated 0.0027 percent of humanity. In a single year, the fleet generates as much CO2 as the ten million inhabitants of Burundi.

Somewhat more broadly, the richest one percent of the world’s people were responsible for 15 percent of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015, according to Oxfam’s Confronting Carbon Inequality report released last year. To be superrich is to have the yacht, of course, and luxury cars with gas-guzzling engines, and multiple SUVs, and mansions in multiple countries, and jets, helicopters, sometimes private airports, sometimes private submarines. Malm declares them all targets ripe for sabotage. And because of their outsize footprint, destruction of rich people’s property isn’t just symbolic – though symbolism matters, of course. (Add to the target list, for example, the space vehicles of Bezos-Branson-Musk that merely announce how wondrous it is that elites are capable of wallowing in rank outside our atmosphere as much as in it.)

The most important symbolism in attacking carbon entitlement is in the context of any attempt by the rest of society at decarbonization. Luxury emissions, writes Malm, “represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual, not only maintaining but actively championing the most unsustainable kinds of consumption….Consumption in middling strata is patterned on it, the nouveau riche across the world scrambling to join the 0.0027 per cent.” It’s Thorstein Veblen’s dynamic of pecuniary emulation -– conspicuous display of luxury emissions leads to more emissions by others as display –- but writ on a global scale with the ultimate cost that the poorest members of humanity are flooded, drowned, starved, or burned out. Luxury emissions conspicuously displayed are at the same time “supremely demoralizing for mitigation  efforts.” Here’s Malm:

Merely catching sight of a superyacht gliding through the estuary, or hearing about the latest record in private tower construction, or reading about the still-soaring sales figures for the most gas-guzzling cars on the market is enough to break anyone’s hope that we will ever bend the curve. If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero? [emphasis original]

But then there’s the question of who is best situated to commit acts of property destruction?  As a journalist, I’ve gotten to know a number of ecosaboteurs. I count them among my heroes because they had guts and daring, went out mostly alone into situations of terrible precarity, acted as their conscience directed them, hurt no living beings but wrecked a lot of property and cost millions to the corporations who owned the property.

They believed that as they acted, others would be inspired to join them. But this didn’t happen. Every one of these people ended up caught by authorities hell-bent on punishing the heinous offenders against the inanimate objects called property. They did time in state and federal cages. As of this writing, one of them sits in his cage at the tail end of nine years in the federal prison system for attempting, as he put it, to “end global warming” by attacking the “fossil fuel infrastructure system.”

As Lanchester described, the need is for a critical mass of saboteurs willing to take the risk. Malm’s book is a first attempt (there will be more soon, I expect) to rally citizens to that end. The key is that lots of people have to do it, at the same time, in numbers such as have never been seen. But let’s not soft-pedal, as I think Malm does, the crushing consequences of getting caught in acts of sabotage, the weight of the carceral state as it comes down on your head in a manner outrageously disproportionate to the damage you inflict on the system of protecting inanimate objects.

Things are worse today than in the age of the suffragettes –- property is more sacrosanct than ever. Your own life will be ruined if you even moderately violate that sacred realm. You will go to jail. You will be bankrupted with court costs and fees and fines of restitution. Your children will suffer, as they effectively lose a parent. Such heroism and sacrifice has to be mean something, and it won’t mean a thing if it’s not widely supported and emulated.

Christopher Ketcham is a free-lance journalist and author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West (Penguin Random House). He may be reached at christopher.ketcham99@gmail.com.

Patience, reader, we’ll get to Atlantic climate columnist Robinson Meyer’s carbon tax obituary soon enough. First, let’s take a look at how the Guardian botched its coverage of a big new report on fossil fuel subsidies from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The Guardian and Atlantic pieces are connected, and not just because both of them ran today. There’s also a through-line from the first to the second, as we show here.

The Guardian piece, by environment editor Damien Carrington, carried the aggro headline, “‘Reckless’: G20 states subsidised fossil fuels by $3tn since 2015, says report.” And it led with the dramatic graphic at left.

The two bars of shame at the top belong to Australia, which increased its fossil fuel subsidies by 48 percent in 2019 over 2015, and the U.S., with a nearly 37 percent boost. Cue the breast-beating that the world might make real headway on solving the climate crisis if rich nations would simply pull their bloody fossil-fuel subsidies.

But what if we told you that in the terms that really count — dollars — those whopping percentage increases in FF subsidies amounted to a mere several billion: $2.4 billion for Australia (from $5.0 bn in 2015 to $7.4 bn in 2019 — that’s the 48 percent bump), and $4.0 billion for the U.S. (from $11.0 bn to $15.0 bn), according to the country-by-country subsidy figures in the new Bloomberg-NEF Climate Policy Factbook that prompted the Guardian story?

Here’s the context: the real fossil fuel subsidy — the failure to price carbon emissions to capture even a small portion of their climate and health damages — amounts to around $40 billion a year for Australia and $500 billion for the U.S. Those figures, computed on a conservative carbon price of $100 per metric ton, dwarf the respective governments’ “fossil fuel support” by factors of more than 5 (Australia) and more than 30 (U.S.).

To be sure, government supports for fossil fuel development, in the form of grants, targeted tax abatements, loan guarantees and the like, are destructive to both economic fairness and climate protection and should be zeroed out at once. The 10 percent drop since 2015 in such subsidies by the G-20 countries, which together account for nearly three-fourths of global carbon emissions, according to the Guardian, isn’t remotely steep enough.

But to act as if these supports are the root cause of the world’s emissions profligacy is to badly misread the facts. The G-20 nations pump out around 24 billion metric tons of CO2 annually while pricing this pollution at an aggregate average carbon price of just a few dollars a ton. The absence of a $100 per metric ton carbon price thus constitutes a “subsidy” of $2.4 trillion a year, nearly quadruple the $636 billion in G-20 governmental support for fossil fuels in 2019 shown in the graph directly above.

“Carbon Tax, Beloved Policy to Fix Climate Change, Is Dead at 47”

The heading above is what led Robinson Meyer’s Atlantic column today, pegged, as Morrissey might have sung, to nothing in particular, except, perhaps Meyer’s interest in clicks. (I can confirm receiving a bunch of notices from CTC supporters.)

“The [carbon tax] death,” Meyer intoned with mock gravitas, “was confirmed by President Joe Biden’s utter lack of interest in passing it.” Leave aside that the Biden White House would have to be certified insane to pursue a carbon tax in 2021, with paper-thin House and Senate majorities and an overriding need to cultivate popular support to ward off the usual midterm attrition.

Indeed, we said as much in our post Playing the Long Game for Carbon Fee-and-Dividend back on April 2, in which we applauded Biden and Co. for steering clear of a carbon tax in order to build legislative accomplishments that could grow the Democrats’ congressional majorities and possibly enable a carbon tax in 2023. We were followed a week later by Ezra Klein in the New York Times (“Biden and his team view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous.”)

Meyer is right, however, that carbon taxing “won few friends on the right or left” — for reasons we’ve lamented and detailed in separate, comprehensive write-ups in the “Politics” section of our website, having to do with Conservatives, Progressives, and pursuit of Environmental Justice.

Meyer was gracious, at least, to refer in his headline to carbon taxing as a “beloved policy.” Though what should make it beloved to climate advocates of all stripes isn’t its vaunted economic efficiency but its unique capacity to make huge dents in fossil fuel use in a short period of time. The efficiency of carbon pricing, though an aspect of that, isn’t the point.

And more helpful would have been for Meyer and other climate pundits to do what we’ve attempted here: to put the lie to the idea that removing fossil-fuel subsidies would go a long way to reducing carbon emissions and slowing the climate crisis. That could have — and might still — help climate campaigners focus on the true subsidies solution: to directly, massively and equitably tax carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.