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Another Carbon-Dividend Group. Will It Matter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A meeting of minds on carbon taxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NY Renews’ proposed state carbon tax allocations.

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

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

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

Carbon, Weed, and the Crisis of American Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Carbon Tax Center Last Year . . . and in 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTC’s program for 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Strong Thread Connects Congestion Pricing and Carbon Taxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Corker and the Climate Swerve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minnesota state auditor stakes campaign for governor on carbon dividend

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(This post was researched and co-authored by CTC volunteer Diane Englander.)

A prominent Minnesota politician is hitching her candidacy for governor to a carbon dividend plan designed to reduce climate-damaging emissions and create jobs in clean energy.

State Auditor Rebecca Otto unveiled her Minnesota-Powered Clean Energy Plan on Sept. 20. The landing page of her gubernatorial campaign website depicts her on a rooftop driving home a solar inverter with a socket wrench. “Rebecca Otto walks the talk,” the page proclaims, urging voters to elect “a Governor who will actually do something about climate change.”

State auditor Otto hopes that, as governor, she can solarize Minnesota more than one roof at a time.

Otto’s plan is centered on a carbon charge that would begin at $40 per metric ton of CO2 and increase by 10% each year — a trajectory steep enough to cut carbon emissions by almost 30 percent (below 2005 levels) within a decade if applied nationally, according to CTC’s carbon tax model (Excel file), though not as much if applied only in a single state.

Three-fourths of the carbon revenues from Otto’s proposal would fund “Quarterly Clean Energy Cash Dividends” that Otto estimates will pay $600 a year to every Minnesota resident, with the dividend growing in tandem with the rising carbon price. The remaining 25% of the new revenue would fund “Clean Energy Refundable Tax Credits” for up to 30% of the cost of household energy-efficiency investments including electric cars, solar panels, triple-pane windows and insulation, and heat pumps.

The tax credits will “create tens of thousands of good-paying new private-sector jobs — often paying more than $80,000 per year — in every community across Minnesota,” Otto says, with “the work able to be financed with no money down” in many cases.

The 54-year-old Otto is one of six aspirants to the nomination of the state Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Minnesota Democratic Party organization has been known since the 1940s. Others include a U.S. Representative and the Mayor of St. Paul. Local newspapers suggest as many as a dozen Republicans may also contend to replace Gov. Mark Dayton, the two-term incumbent who is not seeking re-election. The race is viewed as “wide open” by Carleton College political scientist Steven Schier.

An Illinois native who now lives in the small town of Marine on St. Croix, northeast of the Twin Cities, Otto is serving her third consecutive four-term as state auditor. In 2006 she handily defeated the incumbent Republican, then won by a squeaker in 2010, becoming the only Democrat ever re-elected to the office. In her 2014 re-election she won by her widest margin to date, outpacing Gov. Dayton by six percentage points.

Otto’s plan is a variant of the fee and dividend approach espoused by the non-partisan Citizens’ Climate Lobby and, more recently, the Republican-leaning Climate Leadership Council. It charges fossil fuel providers a fee pegged to their fuels’ carbon content and returns revenues to households as equal “dividends.” Her 25% allocation to clean energy tax credits can be seen as a pragmatic concession to business and job concerns that invariably arise in state-level carbon-pricing campaigning.

Otto is arguably the highest-profile U.S. political candidate to attach a campaign to an explicit and transparent price on carbon. She says that her 11 years as state auditor have taught her that Minnesotans want economic opportunity along with solutions to pressing problems such as climate change. She also views her program as a counterweight to “fossil fuel interests [that] spend billions to control our democracy and sow doubt and confusion [to] protect their profits at the expense of Americans.”

One of several tables from candidate Otto’s Web site deriving net benefits from her carbon dividend proposal.

Minnesota has a history of seeking to address climate change. In the 1990s, state activists including the St. Paul-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance mounted a campaign for a billion-dollar state “tax shift” to reduce income and property taxes by taxing energy and fuels. While their proposal didn’t make it into law, it laid the groundwork for later carbon tax efforts. Since 1993 the Minnesota legislature has required the state Public Utilities Commission to incorporate air pollution costs into decision-making on power plants. In July the PUC ordered this “shadow price” raised to a range of $9.05 to $43.06 per short ton of CO2 by 2020. (Utility Dive gives details and explains the wide range.)

Otto’s plan would go much further, of course, embedding actual carbon costs in fuel and electricity prices and perhaps igniting a spark among the other 49 states. In an article this week for Scientific American, States Can Lead the Way on Climate Change, Otto wrote that “If other state leaders adopt similar proposals, the 2018 midterm elections could become a watershed moment when America seizes on a new state-level approach to tackling climate change and finally begins to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg.”

At a minimum, Otto’s campaign ensures that not just climate change but the idea of actually charging for carbon emissions will be front and center in next year’s Minnesota gubernatorial race. If she wins, however, her proposal still faces two potential hurdles: the state legislature and the Minnesota state constitution, whose Article 14, Section 10 could be interpreted as requiring that “excise taxes” on gasoline be paid into the state’s highway distribution fund (see discussion in CTC’s report, Opportunities for Carbon Taxing at the State Level, pp 91-92). However, if the carbon price is construed otherwise, e.g., as a fee, Otto’s proposal could be in the clear.

What Hillary Clinton’s revelation about carbon dividends says about her campaign

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Carbon taxing isn’t something you expect to see mentioned in What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s memoir about losing the 2016 election to Donald Trump. But deep in the book’s weeds we find a telling new window into how Clinton “blew the biggest slam dunk in the history of American politics” (as one political pro vented to New Yorker editor David Remnick; expletive deleted here).

Around p. 240* Clinton brings up carbon dividends — a form of carbon taxes — as the type of “bold, creative ideas” she says Democrats must offer Americans. She generously name-checks Peter Barnes, an avatar of carbon dividends, and points to Alaska’s “Permanent Fund” that annually divvies up North Slope oil royalties equally to all state households. Then she writes:

[S]ome Republican elder statesmen such as former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson recently proposed a nationwide carbon dividend program that would tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American … Under such a plan, working families with small carbon footprints could end up with a big boost in their incomes. [Bill and I] spent weeks working with our policy team to see if it could be viable enough to include in my campaign … Unfortunately, we couldn’t make the math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families, which I had pledged not to do. (emphasis added)

Like so much with Clinton, this passage is strong on details and weak on vision.

Clinton name-checked this book in her memoir but wouldn’t campaign on its ideas.

Clinton is right that carbon dividend schemes will raise incomes of most working families. She is right that their gain will come at the expense of affluent families, whose carbon footprints are larger. Revenue distribution from a fixed revenue pie is, by its nature, zero-sum: what is disbursed to one class of recipients can’t be available to another.

Of course, any policy that transfers wealth from rich to poor is by definition income-progressive, which puts carbon dividends squarely in the Democratic Party tradition of Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson. Climate benefits aside, carbon dividends’ distributional benefits make the policy a natural for progressives, as we pointed out last week in our post, The climate solution that boosts income for over 60% of Americans — the ones who most need it.

But did Clinton’s policy team really “spend weeks” searching for the carbon-revenue equivalent of a perpetual motion machine — one that would diminish inequality without costing “affluent families” a dime? Doubtful. The impossibility would have been obvious in fifteen minutes, especially to her policy-smart husband. Besides, carbon dividends didn’t suddenly originate with James Baker et al.; they’ve been a staple of carbon tax advocacy for nearly a decade. Their distributional impacts are well-established.

What’s more likely, and as Clinton herself hints, is that her team spent weeks trying to find the messaging to sell carbon dividends to her upper-middle-class base. But that should have been easy as well; their message could have gone like this:

Carbon dividends are a policy we can put in place quickly to accelerate our country’s transition from climate-killing, health-killing fossil fuels, with no new administrative machinery, which the rest of the world can emulate. Those who are doing well will have to contribute more for the common good, but this is a way of making every American feel more connected to our country and to one another — part of something bigger than ourselves. (Bold section are Clinton’s own words, from the discussion of carbon dividends in her book; prior text is mine.)

Yes, Trump and his backers would have pilloried Clinton for backing a carbon tax. But she was being hounded anyway for a hundred other reasons, both real and ginned up. Why not take a stand? Indeed, why not take a page from Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign playbook? In his April 14, 2016 debate with Clinton, for example, Sen. Sanders unapologetically supported “a tax on carbon so that we can transit away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy at the level and speed we need to do.”

Watching that debate, I imagined Americans who were tepid or worse on carbon taxing nonetheless admiring Sanders’ forthrightness. Some might even have been swept up with a new openness to the idea of carbon taxing.

To be clear, failure to back carbon taxing isn’t why Hillary Clinton lost last November. But her inability to stand for something bold like carbon dividends was indicative of her incapacity to transcend policy details and connect them to a larger vision. And that arguably cost her the election every bit as much as  Comey, Russia and the other usual suspects.

* Page number from “What Happened” is approximate, as viewed on a Kindle. The conception and shape of this post benefited greatly from CTC supporter and blog contributor Rachael Sotos. Note that our original headline, “Hillary Clinton and the Missing Carbon Dividends,” has been changed.

The climate solution that boosts income for over 60% of Americans – the ones who most need it

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To view the latest census data on U.S. household incomes is to marvel at — and be appalled by — the unequal distribution of income in America.

In 2016, according to official data released last month, the lowest-earning one-third of U.S. households received just one-twelfth of total money income, which the Census Bureau defines as “the arithmetic sum of money wages and salaries, net income from self-employment, and income other than earnings.”

At the other end of the scale, the top 7 percent earning households — those with incomes of at least $200,000 — pulled in 27 percent of U.S. income last year. Note the symmetry: those at the top earn four times their pro rata share, while those in the broad bottom earn only one-fourth of theirs.

Stark as these figures are, they don’t capture the full extent of the wealth gaps — the one between the rich and the middle class, and the other between the middle and the poor. These gaps accumulate over generations, as the New York Times noted this week in its trenchant dive into the data, Bump in U.S. Incomes Doesn’t Erase 50 Years of Pain.

These disparities underlay Bernie Sanders’ “political revolution” campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination last year. And they added fuel to the sense of white grievance that energized Donald Trump’s successful run for the presidency. They also bolster the case for “carbon dividends” — the idea of distributing all or nearly all carbon tax revenues equally to U.S. households popularized as carbon fee and dividend by the non-partisan Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), and more recently advanced by the Republican-led Climate Leadership Council (CLC) under the rubric of carbon dividends.

Using incomes as a proxy for carbon emissions — a rough approximation but a reasonable one, given income-based differences not only in using electricity, gasoline and heating and aviation fuels but also carbon embodied in making and shipping consumer goods — we’ve used the census data to estimate that if all carbon revenues are returned to the public, nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of U.S. households will take in as much or more money in the form of carbon dividends as they would pay out in higher fuel and goods prices due to carbon taxes.

Our figure jibes with the U.S. Treasury Department’s finding in its Jan. 2017 report, Methodology for Analyzing a Carbon Tax, that the lowest seven income deciles will be net beneficiaries of a carbon dividends plan (see Table 6) . Our estimate of the share of U.S. households that will be net beneficiaries under carbon diviends, 65.9 percent before rounding, is up slightly from our prior 65.1 percent “better off” finding based on 2012 incomes. Among those 65.9 percent, which encompass 83 million households, the average gain (carbon dividend netted by carbon tax expense) per $100 billion in total carbon revenue is $415 per year.

While that net gain may seem small — just $8 per week — the revenue amount on which it’s based corresponds to a very modest carbon tax, around $23 per ton of CO2. A robust carbon tax that climbed to a level several times higher would generate correspondingly larger net dividends for the benefiting households. Moreover, the more indigent the household, the greater its estimated net gain.

The breakeven household income point is a shade over $85,000, a level 45 percent greater than the 2016 median household income of $59.000; “typical” households will be net gainers if their income is less, and losers if more. Of course, if the share of carbon revenues dedicated to revenue return is reduced, the percentage of households kept whole under carbon fee and dividend shrinks as well. Our calculations suggest that around two-thirds of carbon revenues must be returned as dividends in order for half of households to have their carbon tax fully offset. (See line chart below.)

A conundrum for the climate movement

The ability of carbon dividends to lift incomes of the bottom half or more of U.S. households creates a conundrum for the climate movement, especially now that Republicans, who traditionally align with capital and wealth, are beginning to sign up for carbon dividend proposals.

The progenitors of CLC’s carbon dividend plan, James Baker and George Shultz, are “exemplars of the outcast center-right GOP establishment,” as I described them recently in the Washington Spectator. At least as impressively, 28 current GOP U.S. House members have joined CCL’s Climate Solutions Caucus and thus signaled their possible openness to a carbon fee that reserves carbon revenues for dividends instead of applying them to cut corporate income taxes.

Yet many on the left are insisting that carbon revenues, or at least a large share of them, be invested in government-administered or financed clean-energy development and transportation infrastructure, especially in so-called frontline communities. Because each dollar of carbon revenue can’t be spent twice, the competing demands of carbon dividends vs. “just transition” proposals threaten to divide the climate movement — as they already did in last fall’s divisive I-732 carbon-tax referendum in Washington state, which I reported this past winter in The Nation magazine.

Ironically, it’s possible (indeed, I believe it’s likely) that allocating carbon revenues to dividends would more reliably benefit low-income families more than would spending the revenues on sustainable energy and transportation. Considering further that revenue-neutral dividend approaches might eventually garner meaningful support from some Republicans, it seems self-defeating for left-leaning or other climate advocates to reject them out of hand.

For our part, CTC supports any viable carbon tax proposal, revenue-neutral or not, provided it would not demonstrably exacerbate economic inequality or other social injustice. Thus far we have refrained from endorsing the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act introduced in July by U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), pending analysis of the regressive aspects of its proposed tax swap to reduce the corporate tax rate to 29 percent, from 35 percent, among other provisions.

That said, crunch time is coming for carbon dividend apostles. If the late summer hurricanes that have ravaged southeast Texas, Caribbean nations and much of Florida won’t induce Republican office-holders to spurn their party’s denialist orthodoxy and embrace revenue-neutral carbon taxing, it’s fair to ask if they’ll ever push for genuine climate solutions.

Note: This post was originally headlined “Worsening Economic Inequality Should Broaden Support for Carbon Dividends.”

 

 

 

 

The Law of One Price: Remedy for Hobbes’ State of Nature

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This guest post is by Rachael Sotos, an aspiring political theorist and long-time CTC supporter who lives in Santa Cruz, CA.

The gaping flaw in the Paris Climate Agreement was hidden in plain sight even before Trump repudiated the 190-nation compact this year. Notwithstanding the precedent-shattering achievement — an agreement signed by virtually all of the world’s sovereign nations — Paris comprised an unenforceable system of pledges, aptly named Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

True, the first step in any long journey is often the hardest, and the Paris agreement includes a five-year time frame to review and hopefully strengthen the pledges made in late 2015. But let’s be clear: neither the INDCs nor the brave pledges of some U.S. governors and mayors since “Trexit” will radically curb emissions. The world needs a binding agreement with coercive mechanisms to meaningfully address climate change.

Throughout the climate crisis we have been living in a “state of nature” famously described by the 17th century British political theorist Thomas Hobbes. Which makes this a good time to consider Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s essentially Hobbesian allegory: a World Climate Assembly (WCA) “that votes for a single worldwide price on carbon emissions via the basic democratic principle of one-person one vote majority rule.”

Detail from frontispiece of ‘Leviathan.’ Credit: Getty Images.

Though Hobbes is reviled by some for advocating absolutist politics, he is also credited with discovering modern political economy and laying the foundations for both modern tax law and rational choice theory. One could even say that Hobbes employed allegories of extreme negative externality to legitimize top-down modes of political authority.

In Leviathan (1651) Hobbes asked his readers to abstract from all familiar, inherited and trusted modes of collaboration, to imagine themselves in a “war of all against all,” bellum omnium contra alles. Rather than a literal prehistorical period, his “state of nature” is the ever-present possibility of market failure in extremis. Absent coercive administrative power, Hobbes argued, there could be no property rights, secure contracts or absolute moral duties apart from self-preservation. Each person is a covetous judge of his or her own situation, and every defensive acquisition is justified.

Enter Prof. Weitzman amid growing recognition that global warming is history’s greatest market failure. Weitzman postulates that when the “impending climate catastrophe … is felt on a worldwide grassroots level,” there will be pressure for top-down solutions, and nations will be “ready to forfeit their free-rider rights to pollute.” The time will come, he argues, when “world public opinion is ready to consider novel governance structures that involve relinquishing some national sovereignty in favor of the greater good.” One such structure is Weitzman’s imagined World Climate Assembly (WCA) — a global plebiscite via which people of all nations contract with each other to jointly create “an overarching global governance mechanism” with sufficient awe-inspiring “countervailing force” to eradicate that Achilles Heel of climate agreements: free-riding. (Weitzman’s paper is available here.)

Hobbes was a master of “novel governance structures.” Sweeping aside the hierarchical hodgepodge of inherited feudal allegiances, he envisioned formally equal individuals (for “the weakest can kill the strongest”) renouncing their unfettered “natural rights” in favor of the coercive power of a national sovereign (technically parliamentary or monarchical). This was his “awe” inspiring, man-made Leviathan — the social contract that people voluntarily enter as self-interested modern individuals, thus ensuring safety and well-being, salus populi.

To be clear: Weitzman’s World Climate Assembly is a mechanism, not global government. What is to be voted-upon at the WCA is an internationally harmonized but nationally retained minimum carbon price. Nations, states within nations, or regions such as the European Union can all chart their own path toward climate commitment. While a system of uniform emissions taxes is easiest to conceive, national or regional cap-and-trade regimes with price floors and hybrids approaches are also possible. Nations or regions will retain and distribute collected carbon revenues as they see fit. Green fund transfers are permissible, but the primary coercive mechanism is “law of the single price.”

Harvard economics professor Martin Weitzman delivering the Max Weber lecture (and striking a Leviathan-like pose) in Florence, Italy, Oct. 2015.

WCA representatives will “vote along a single price dimension for their desired level of emissions stringency on behalf of their citizen constituents,” Weitzman envisions, with the votes “weighted by each nation’s population.” Weitzman presents extensive calculations suggesting that the global majority would likely vote for a uniform minimum emission price “tolerably close to the world Social Cost of Carbon.”

In the end, he postulates, the “median” voter-nation would find its emissions abatement costs exactly offset by the benefit of having all other nations reduce their emissions. Half of the world’s population would likely prefer a lower minimum price, with the other half preferring higher; but all will prefer democratically legitimized coercion to the inadequacy and uncertainty of the INDCs. Under Weitzman’s Leviathan, no rich and powerful nation, not even the United States, will be able to trump the greater good.

And if Hobbesian “absoluteness” includes hostility toward institutional division of powers, it nonetheless has attractive features for confronting the climate crisis. According to Hobbes, people willingly renounce their “natural” rights to violence and unlimited acquisition only when their political world allows reasonable certainty of the actions of others.

In the language of game theory, the “state of nature” is the original “assurance” or “coordination” problem. Weitzman plays along, characterizing his WCA as “automatically incentivizing all negotiating parties to internalize, at least approximately, the global warming externality.” Certainty regarding the likely behavior of others is bolstered by the knowledge that the international trading system overseen by the World Trade Organization can be marshalled to impose punitive tariffs on non-complying nations.

Still, the most important feature of a uniform emissions price is its acting as an automatic “countervailing force” that can counter “narrow self-interested free-riding . . . via a simple, familiar, transparent formula that, in Weitzman’s words, embodies a common climate commitment based on principles of reciprocity, quid-pro-quo, and I-will-if-you-will.”

This is Hobbesian “absoluteness”: when we are all in it together and know that we will all be subjected to the same regime, e.g., the law of the single price, we are much more likely to renounce convention and shoot for the moon. In the language of game theory: cooperation is also a stable outcome.

What is being agreed upon, then, is a thoroughly modern Hobbesian social contract centered in transparently assured fossil fuel demand destruction. And while there will be difficulties along the way, Weitzman reminds us that “even just negotiating” within the majoritarian framework bolstered by a coercive countervailing mechanism is a step out of the state of nature.