CARBON TAX2

see older

beware lip service as cover for inaction

see mkt based solutions: recall montreal protocol bush reagan success half time and cost; Romneycare--> Obamacare

invisible hand of miracle free mkt only works if ppl have access to accurate info; ratings agencies do the analysis

but post trump earth2 we no longer believe in experts/facts

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dereg nat 719

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CARBON TAX? CANADA

MCKITRICK BS

COMMENTARY: Carney’s Industrial Carbon Tax Comes With Real Cost to Canadians

1 week ago

Ross McKitrick

EnergyNow

Carney’s industrial carbon tax comes with real cost to Canadians

2 weeks ago

Ross McKitrick

Fraser Institute

STUDY: Estimated Impacts of a $170 Industrial Carbon Price in Alberta and Canada

2 weeks ago

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alternet-no lnx

Home | Republicans have been lying to their voters for years — and now those same voters are dying

Thom Hartmann June 14, 2024

This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you didn’t know.

As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual it’s going to get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly they’ve been screwed by the unholy alliance between Republicans and oil barons.

Severe weather in the United States is not only getting worse, it’s moving.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

There’s a reason L. Frank Baum placed his 1901 novel The Wizard of Oz in Kansas: the worst and most frequent tornado activity in the world at that time was in the American Great Plains states — particularly Kansas.

Now that’s changing, as weather extremes are moving to the Midwest and the South. Recently, deadly tornadoes — some with wind velocities in excess of 200 mph — have ravaged Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana.

This new burst of unusually extreme weather is driven by global warming and its impact on the Arctic, our oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico.

And it’s going to be America’s new normal, although in all probability this is just the beginning and over time it will get a lot worse.

America has always had the most extreme weather of anyplace else on Earth, according to Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina.

China has more people and a larger landmass than we do, but, Cutter told ABC News, “they don't have the same kind of clash of air masses as much as you do in the U.S. that is producing a lot of the severe weather.”

The severity of America’s Great Plains states’ historically extreme weather was the result of geography.

While there’s a massive amount of land on either side of the European/Asian land mass, the United States is bracketed by two giant bodies of water, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. We also have a huge mountain range — the Rockies — that helps determine where turbulent air from the west ends up, particularly as it encounters colder air from the north and warmer air from over the Gulf of Mexico.

As North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello told ABC News, it’s because of “where we are on the globe,” adding, “It’s truly a little bit ... unlucky.”

But now, as the Gulf of Mexico is heating up faster than the oceans on either side of us, combined with “bomb cyclone” cold weather coming down from Canada because melting ice in the Arctic is making the Jet Stream less stable, that severe weather is moving to the Midwest and South.

This appears to be one of the most consequential outcomes of climate change, severe weather-wise, for the United States.

As Victor Gensini, associate professor in the Earth, Atmosphere and Environment Department at Northern Illinois University, told The Chicago Tribune, the Midwest and South are replacing the Plains states as the epicenter of severe weather.

“That’s a really, really big deal for human exposure and vulnerability,” Gensini told Ezra Maille. “A tornado that goes through a wheat field in Kansas is not a big deal, but a tornado that goes through southern Cook County is a huge deal.”

He added that the Great Plains will probably continue to experience more and more severe drought while tornado activity is shifting toward the East and South.

The fossil fuel industry has known with a high level of certainty how severe weather was a probable outcome of America’s dependence on their products ever since the 1970s.

Yet for the fifty years since then — and continuing to this day — they fund phony “science” and shills to deny climate change or try to spin it as a positive, all while pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers and personal bank accounts of mostly Republican politicians.

We’re at least 40 years behind where we should be in dealing with the fossil fuel/global warming crisis because giant oil companies have run massive disinformation campaigns while funding the political careers of hacks in Congress willing to lie to the public for them.

President Jimmy Carter declared a national crisis in 1979 and proposed legislation to create “this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.”

FDR had sold bonds to the public to fund a government corporation that would develop synthetic rubber for fighter plane tires back in the day, and Carter wanted to do the same to end our dependence on fossil fuels:

“Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II,” Carter said, “so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war.”

In that same July 15, 1979 speech, he proposed the government issue bonds that would fund:

“[T]he creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.”

But it all came crashing down 43 years ago when the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter, killed the solar bank and the bond program, and even took Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House.

The big question now is how long the GOP will be able to keep up their climate change denial in the Red states currently being hammered by extreme weather before their citizens catch on to what’s happening and demand action to reduce our carbon emissions.

As Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM), told me yesterday:

“It is rather ironic that many of the states that are seeing the worst climate change impacts—Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—are red states, with governors and legislatures that are far more interested in doing the bidding of polluters than representing the people they’re supposed to be representing.

“Unsurprisingly, these states are all among the lowest when it comes to per capita spending on public education. The alliance of rightwing politicians and polluters prefers a poorly educated electorate, ignorant of the environmental health damage being done to them.”

So, what can be done other than offering subsidies for electric cars?

Number one on the list is to put a price on carbon, which will bend market incentives toward green and renewable energy as a replacement for fossil fuels.

According to the World Bank, there are currently 70 carbon pricing programs in place around the world, covering a bit over 23 percent of all emissions. Some are outright carbon taxes, typically with a rebate program to low- and average-income consumers, and some are cap-and-trade type programs (like President George HW Bush put into place to deal with sulfur dioxide emissions).

Canada’s carbon tax, which they put into place in 2019, is working so well that they actually sped up the process of implementation this year.

The original plan called for the initial $10/ton carbon tax to go up $10 every year until it hit $170/ton. The money collected is then recycled back to low- and average-income consumers to compensate them for the extra costs they’ll incur driving and heating their homes. But the program has been such a success that Canada’s government announced this week they’re raising the carbon tax by a full $15 this year.

They can pull this off because the rebates represent, for most Canadians, far more money in their pockets than the cost of the carbon tax. The brunt of the tax is instead borne by Canadian businesses, which is the group that's been designed to push toward green -- and tax-free or even green-subsidized -- energy sources.

An average taxpayer in Alberta province, for example, now gets a $386 check or bank deposit from their government every three months. It’s $340 quarterly in Saskatchewan, $328 in Newfoundland, $248 in Nova Scotia, and $264 in Manitoba.

This is a system that could work very well here in the US, if only there was the political will to make it happen. And, as we cut emissions and figure out new and better ways to pull existing carbon out of the air and oceans, we may be able to dial back on the increasing severity of storms that are ravaging Red states.

The obstacle to pricing carbon in the US is widespread ignorance of how severe our problem is and its origins in fossil fuel emissions. Fully 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say climate change is “not an important concern” and a mere 17% believe human activities like burning fossil fuels “contribute a great deal to climate change.”

Hopefully the deadly disasters sweeping Red states now will wake up Republican voters and motivate them to demand their Republican politicians stop taking money from fossil fuel billionaires and do something now to stop climate change from getting any worse.

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we are against whatever you want to do, even if we used to favor it? -->

WE ARE FOR IT BUT WILL GIVE NO SPECIFICS, AND WILL NOT LOBBY FOR IT, ESP IF IT IS IN bbb THAT WILL ACTUALLY ADDRESS AGW:

no lnx

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/us-oil-lobby-endorses-carbon-pricing-to-counter-command-climate-policies

uS oil lobby endorses carbon pricing to counter 'command and control' climate policies

by Josh Siegel, Energy and Environment Reporter |

|March 25, 2021

American Petroleum Institute endorsed carbon pricing on Thursday, putting the weight of the largest U.S. oil and gas lobbying group behind what many economists consider to be the most efficient policy to combat climate change.

API’s support for the policy after years of resistance shows how pricing carbon, either through a tax or cap-and-trade program, has become the most palatable option for business groups despite its political unpopularity.

MITT ROMNEY LEANS IN ON CARBON TAX TO SPUR CLEAN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGHS] INNOVATION BS]

The oil and gas industry is looking to demonstrate commitment to fighting climate change whilefending off mandates and regulations that have become the preferred approaches of the Biden administration and most Democrats.

“The administration is talking about command and control approaches,” API CEO Mike Sommerstold the Washington Examiner. “We want to enter into this debate on one of biggest issues of the day to pursue a more market-based approach.”

API’s new position is a clear shift from its previous stance and follows similar positioning by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which recently endorsed a “market-based approach” to accelerate emissions reductions across the economy, a term that generally means a carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy.Economists have long contended that a carbon tax is the simplest and most efficient way to address greenhouse gas emissions, since it would reorient the market to support clean energy without mandating it.

A carbon tax would apply a per-ton fee for large emitters such as power plants and refineries that would encourage energy producers to switch to cleaner alternatives if doing so would cost less than paying the tax. A carbon price, at least initially, could benefit natural gas by pricing coal out of the market.

“There is a recognition [PASSIVE] that a price signal through a market-based mechanism is the best way to incentivize investments in technology to continue to lower emissions and to address climate change,” Sommers said.

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API has acknowledged in recent years that climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed. It has backed policies such as funding federal research and tax breaks forcarbon capture technologies that can enable fossil fuel operators to continue to operate as long as they prevent their emissions from reaching the atmosphere.

But Sommers said that API and its members are facing pressure from shareholders and investors, and its own workers, to do more, and he made clear the group now supports a comprehensive federal policy to address climate change across the economy, not just a series of one-offs.

“When I came into API two years ago, we did not have a climate policy,” said Sommers, who was the chief of staff to former GOP House Speaker John Boehner. “This change was really driven by the membership.”

Along with its support for carbon pricing, API released a broader "climate action framework"Thursday.

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The group said it will continue to advocate for funding to support clean energy technologies, includingcarbon capture and hydrogen, which is increasingly being viewed as a critical technology to curb emissions in the power and industrial sectors. Natural gas groups see an opportunity to use their pipeline infrastructure to transport hydrogen and generate electricity with it.

API also reiterated its shift announced in January to support the direct federal regulation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from new and existing oil and gas operations.

And it vowed to expand its guidance [EXPAMD FROM WHAT? WHAT EXPERTISE?] to member oil and gas companies on how to disclose their risks from climate change. The Biden administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission took a first step last week toward requiring public companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change and emissions reduction policies, so the oil and gas industry is looking to show that it is acting voluntarily.

But API’s shift on carbon pricing is the biggest development, although it remains to be seen whether the nod from the oil industry will persuade lawmakers to back the policy.

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API is not endorsing a specific carbon pricing policy, leaving unanswered critical questions about how high a tax on companies should be and how to handle the revenue raised by it.

That’s intentional, Sommers said, because API wants to “provide flexibility to lawmakers as they develop these policies.”

Sommers said API won’t be lobbying for a carbon tax to be included as part of the Biden administration’s forthcoming infrastructure package, which is expected to feature major spending on clean energy.

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“We would not support adding a price on carbon to abig infrastructure bill as a pay-for,” Sommers said. “We are not designing this to be some new flywheel for government spending. It is meant to address climate change.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Critics say the support of business groups for carbon pricing won’t spur a legislative breakthrough unless they pour lobbying money behind the policy.

“Time will tell if industry support is any more than the political theater of the moment,” said Ben Ratner, the senior director with the Environmental Defense Fund+Business. “It’s one thing to support a concept and quite another to support a bill.”

TAGS: News Energy and Environment Fossil Fuels Carbon Tax Climate Change American Petroleum Institute Chamber of CommercE

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/exxonmobil-climate-tax/

no lnx

The truth behind ExxonMobil’s claims to support a carbon tax

Elliott Negin and Independent Media Institute October 13, 2021

When then-ExxonMobil lobbyist Keith McCoy conceded in a secretly recorded video in May that the oil giant voiced support for a carbon tax only because it assumed it would never happen, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said the company was "shocked by these interviews" and stood by its "commitments to working on finding solutions to climate change."

Wood's reaction was reminiscent of Captain Louis Renault feigning surprise to discover gambling at Rick's Café in the 1942 film "Casablanca." After quietly pocketing his winnings, Renault justifies closing down the nightclub by exclaiming, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

Woods was shocked? Really? Just one look at his company's financial records would show that despite claiming to endorse a carbon tax—initially in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill that was under consideration in 2009—ExxonMobil has funneled millions of dollars over the last decade to lawmakers who staunchly oppose the idea.

Backing Climate Science Deniers

One tried-and-true way corporations ensure access to Congress is by making campaign contributions. Although there may not be a verifiable quid pro quo, donations guarantee access, and access guarantees influence.

So, given ExxonMobil's professed support for a carbon tax, one might reasonably assume that the company's political action committee (PAC) and employees would back lawmakers who sponsor such legislation and, over time, withdraw their funding for senators and representatives who stand in the way.

In fact, the opposite is true.

During the video interview, McCoy—who at the time was ExxonMobil's senior director of federal relations—compared lobbying Congress with fishing.

"When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress," he said, "I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out…. And… [then you start to] reel them in…. They're a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them."

The goal, he explained, is to develop a close relationship with legislative staff. "You want to be able to go to the chief… and say, look, we've got this issue, we need Congressman So-and-So to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter," he said. "You name it, we've asked for everything."

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Not quite everything. ExxonMobil apparently has not asked for a carbon tax, notwithstanding the fact that the company was one of the founding members of the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), a bipartisan, industry-supported group, which was formed in 2017 to promote a carbon tax, and a year later, the company pledged to give $1 million over a two-year period to Americans for Carbon Dividends(AFCD), the council's lobbying arm. Over the last decade, members of both houses have voted on a handful of carbon tax-related amendments and nonbinding resolutions. In every case, a sizable majority who received donations from ExxonMobil's PAC and employees rejected the idea. For example:

In March 2015, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010, including amendment sponsor Roy Blunt (R-MO), voted in favor of the prohibition.

In June 2016, the House passed a resolution introduced by Steve Scalise (R-LA) stating that a carbon tax "would be detrimental to American families and businesses" by a 237 to 163 margin. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution had received ExxonMobil political donationssince 2013. By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution—16 percent—had received ExxonMobil money.

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In July 2018, the House passed another Scalise-sponsored resolution asserting that "a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy," this time by a 229 to 180 vote. During the 2018 election cycle, 75 percent of the representatives who gave the resolution a thumbs up received ExxonMobil donations. Only 23 percent of the 180 who voted against it got ExxonMobil funding.

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The disparity between ExxonMobil's PAC donations to supporters of the July 2018 Scalise resolution and its opponents is even more telling, given that PACs—which can contribute as much as $10,000 to a candidate per two-year cycle—more accurately represent a company's agenda than that of individual employees. The ExxonMobil PAC contributed more than $935,000 to 74 percent of the resolution's supporters, but only $109,500 to opponents during the 2018 election cycle. Scalise, the resolution's sponsor, and 37 of his 48 resolution cosponsors received ExxonMobil PAC contributions.

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The most recent congressional carbon tax vote took place in the Senate in February during a round of votes on the pandemic relief bill. John Hoeven (R-ND) sponsored an amendment that would have prohibited such a tax. It was rejected on a strict party-line vote: All 50 Republican senators voted for the amendment; all 50 Democratic senators voted no.

ExxonMobil PAC donations to those senators are mostly party-line, too. Twenty-seven of the 50 Republicans collectively have received $233,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. Over that same time frame, the PAC contributed just $62,000 to 11 of the Democrats.

Snubbing Carbon Tax Proponents

In January 2018, ExxonMobil Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Suzanne McCarron reaffirmed the company's support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related climate policies in a blog post on the company's website. ExxonMobil, she maintained, is "committed to being part of the solution."

Nevertheless, during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, ExxonMobil employees and its PAC donated nearly $834,000 to 28 of the 30 senators and 90 of the 109 representatives currently in Congress who, according to the Center for American Progress, still reject the scientific consensus that global temperatures are rising and that burning fossil fuels is largely to blame. The company's PAC funded 16 of the climate science deniers in the Senate and 81 in the House.

Lawmakers sponsoring carbon tax legislation, meanwhile, have enjoyed considerably less support. Over the last two election cycles, climate science deniers in the 117th Congress received six and a half times more from ExxonMobil than carbon tax proponents.

Two carbon tax bills have been introduced in the Senate this session, both byDemocrats: one sponsored by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, which has nine cosponsors, the other by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin. Three carbon tax bills have been introduced in the House: one sponsored by Pennsylvania's Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick with one cosponsor, another by Connecticut's Democratic Rep. John Larson with two cosponsors, and a third by Florida's Democratic Rep. Theodore Deutch with 84 cosponsors.

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Since 2017, ExxonMobil employees and the company PAC have donated only $127,692 to these carbon tax proponents: $35,486 to eight of the 11 sponsors and cosponsors in the Senate and $92,206 to 33 of the 90 sponsors and cosponsors in the House. The PAC contributed to only three of the senators and 12 of the representatives.

Despite this decidedly lopsided funding pattern, McCoy insisted during the interview that ExxonMobil wants to work with lawmakers on carbon tax legislation. "Put forth a bill and we'll show you that we'll support that bill, we'll help you work on that bill," he said. But, he added, "Nobody wants to do that because it's not politically expedient to put forth a tax for people, it just isn't."

In fact, a number of lawmakers have "put forth a bill" to establish a carbon tax in successive congressional sessions, but the company has shown no support, and neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil's other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic with members of Congress since 2018—the same year it announced its $1 million donation to the Climate Leadership Council's lobbying arm, AFCD—according to ExxonMobil's quarterly lobbying reports.

Staffers working for Rep. Larson and Sen. Whitehouse, who both have been sponsoring carbon tax legislation for years, recently verified that ExxonMobil has not expressed support for their respective proposals. Larson introduced a bill in 2009, the same year that ExxonMobil announced that it favored the policy, while Whitehouse first sponsored one in 2014 and has reintroduced a version of it in every session since.

Out of frustration, Whitehouse and his fellow bill sponsor, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, sent a letter to ExxonMobil in August 2016 criticizing the company for its indifference.

"Regarding ExxonMobil's alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we've seen no meaningful evidence of that," the senators wrote. "None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil's management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation."

Five years later, nothing has changed on that front. A Whitehouse spokesperson says his office is not aware of ExxonMobil supporting any carbon pricing legislation, let alone the senator's.

But McCoy's revelations did have consequences: The Climate Leadership Council kicked ExxonMobil out of the organization in August; the Union of Concerned Scientists and other public interest groups cited McCoy's comments in a "friend of the court" brief filed in Minnesota's climate science deception lawsuit against ExxonMobil; and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform asked McCoy to testify about his company's campaign to mislead the public "about the dangers of fossil fuels and their role in causing global climate change."

As for McCoy's job status, an ExxonMobil spokesperson told E&E News in late September that "McCoy no longer works for the company."

If McCoy does wind up testifying before Congress, he would serve as the opening act for a hearing that the Oversight Committee plans to hold on October 28 featuring his former boss Darren Woods and top executives from other major oil and gas companies. Finally, under oath, Woods and his colleagues will have to answer questions about their decades-long effort to block government action on climate.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

McConnell 'prays' for Manchin and Sinema to help him defeat Biden ... ›

New report details a 'massive lobbying blitz' against Biden's agenda ... ›

'We've asked for everything': Top oil lobbyist caught on tape ... ›

‘Shadow groups’

Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hilland has represented the company in its liaison with the US Congress for the last eight years.

Greenpeace UK’s Unearthed platform posed as head-hunters looking to hire a Washington D.C. lobbyist for a major client. They approached Mr McCoy, who agreed to speak over Zoom.

During the covert recordings, which have been passed to Channel 4 News, Mr McCoy claims:

thecompany secretly fought against legislative action on climate change using third-party organisations
he lobbied key senators to remove and/or diminish climate change measures from President Biden’s US $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs bill as it proceeds through the legislative process
he regards trade bodies like theAmerican Petroleum Institute as “whipping boys” in order to avoid public scrutiny on Capitol Hill
BUFFER

During the virtual meeting held on 7 May, the investigators asked Mr McCoy questions about ExxonMobil’s current and historical lobbying on environmental issues.

In the excerpts from the footage to be broadcast on Channel 4 News tonight, Mr McCoy claims that ExxonMobil has aggressively fought science to deny climate change in order to maximise profit and shareholder return. He alleges that ExxonMobil joined “shadow groups” to pursue climate change denial.

Mr McCoy said: “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that.

“We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”

ExxonMobil told Channel 4 News that they “have supported climate science for decades.”

‘It’s like fishing’

Mr McCoy likens the approach to lobbying congressmen to the way fishermen target fish, claiming that ExxonMobil puts out “bait” and then “reels in” congressmen on issues like carbon tax, electric vehicles, chemicals, taxation and infrastructure.

Mr McCoy said: “When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: ‘Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah.’

“And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programmes, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax. You know, it’s all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in.”

He added: “I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They’re a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them.”

He says lobbyists aim to have a direct relationship with a member of congress, adding: “You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we’ve asked for everything.”

‘The Kingmaker’

Mr McCoy names 11 senators who he says are “crucial” to ExxonMobil: Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator KyrstenSinema,Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, dem Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio

We gave all these senators a chance to respond. All the senators declined to comment. There is no suggestion of illegality.

Channel 4 News has established, through Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, that all except two of these senators (Senators Maggie Hassan and Mark Kelly) have received financial contributions from ExxonMobil.

ExxonMobil insists “our lobbying efforts fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis”.

Mr McCoy described Senator Joe Manchin as “the Kingmaker” in the Senate and he says he spoke to his office on a weekly basis.

The FEC data shows Senator Manchin has received at least $12,500 from the ExxonMobil Political Action Committee in declared disbursements since the beginning of the 2011-12 election cycle.

Mr McCoy described how a “big piece of [his] job is education and advocacy” and says that in his work on behalf of ExxonMobil he argues that US government programmes to roll outelectric vehicles are unrealistic. [INVENTED PRIUS AND BATT THEN BAILLED]

He said: “The research and development conversation has taken us a long way because of climate change. And there is a struggle to find solutions and to get the reductions that they’re looking for. And you’re not going to be able to just switch to battery operated vehicles or wind for your electricity. And just having that conversation around why that’s not possible in the next 10 years is critically important to the work that we do.”

‘Whipping boy’

Mr McCoy described a lobbying strategy in which he claims ExxonMobil uses third parties to mask its interests from public view and accountability.

He said: “We don’t want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It’s getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress.”

He added: “There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?”

Mr McCoy claims that ExxonMobil lobbied Congress to dilute the climate provisions of President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill.

He said: “That’s a completely different conversation when you start to stick to roads and bridges.And instead of a $2 trillion bill, it’s an $800 billion dollar bill. If you lower that threshold, you stick to highways and bridges then a lot of the negative stuff starts to come out.”

“Why would you put in something on emissions reductions on climate change to oil refineries in a highway bill? So, people say yeah that doesn’t make any sense, so then you get to the germane of saying that shouldn’t be in this bill.”

ExxonMobil said: “Our discussion on the bill are not accurately portrayed. Our lobbying efforts are related to a tax burden that could disadvantage us businesses.”

Carbon tax

Mr McCoy appears to suggest that ExxonMobil’s public support for a carbon tax is underpinned by the conviction it will never happen, allowing the company to “support” it in order to appear green.

He said: “I will tell you there is not an appetite for a carbon tax. It is a non-starter. Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans. And the cynical side of me says yeah we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point. We can say well what is ExxonMobil for? Well we’re for a carbon tax.

“Carbon tax is not gonna happen. I have always said, and I’ve worked on climate change issues for twenty years. There’s a lot of talk around it and the bottom line is it’s going to take political courage, political will in order to get something done. And that just doesn’t exist in politics. It just doesn’t.

Purporting to speak on behalf of ExxonMobil, Mr McCoy also expressed a corporate view that, contrary to science,natural gas is a clean energy source.

He said: “On a clean electricity standard, we think natural gas will play a key role in anything. And not just as a bridge fuel. We think it is a low emission energy source and should be part of a clean electricity standard.”

ExxonMobil statement

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil told Channel 4 News: “Greenpeace has waged a multi-decade campaign against our company and industry, which has included false claims and unlawful actions at our facilities as well as those of other companies around the world.

“Our lobbying efforts are related to a tax burden that could disadvantage U.S. businesses, and we have made that position known publicly. ExxonMobil stands by our position thatincreased taxes on American businesses make the U.S. less competitive.

“We have been clear in supporting an efficient, economy-wide price on carbon as the best way to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.While there is not broad support for a tax, we are actively and publicly discussing other options, including lower-carbon fuels and other sector-based approaches that would place a uniform, predictable cost on carbon.

“We have supported climate science for decades.Greenpeace and others have distorted our position on climate science and our support for effective policy solutions.

”ExxonMobil transparently engages with a variety of trade associations, think tanks and coalitions in order to promote informed dialogue and sound public policy in areas pertinent to the Corporation’s interests.

“ExxonMobil exercises its right to engage in lobbying in the United States at both the Federal and State levels to advocate our positions on issues that affect our Corporation and the energy industry.

“We have a responsibility to our customers, employees, communities and shareholders to represent their interests in public policy discussions that impact our business.

“Our lobbying efforts fully comply with all laws and are publicly disclosed on a quarterly basis, including the issues we discuss.”

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see exxon lobby BS

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/fossil-fuels-and-climate-change/

American Petroleum Institute, a major fossil fuels lobby group that includes members of companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, has been opposed to setting a national price on carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. But this week, NBC News is reporting, API reversed that policy — and the group's CEO is acknowledging climate change as a reality.

NBC News' Josh Lederman reports that this change "follows a fierce internal debate within the organization over whether to embrace a carbon price, which several of the group's members had already publicly backed."

Many strident proponents of fossil fuels, from former President Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Fox News pundits like Sean Hannity, are climate change deniers. But API CEO Mike Sommers, in an interview with NBC News, acknowledged climate change as a reality.

Sommers, discussing API's change of policy on a national carbon emissions price, told NBC News, "It's a recognition of the situation that we're in today and the importance of dealing with this important issue. This is a top priority of the Biden Administration, and we also know that climate change is real and that we need to be part of the discussion on one of the marquee items of our time."

Lederman, however, notes that API "is not endorsing a specific approach to putting a price on carbon." But Sommers, during his interview with NBC News, called for "investments in clean technologies."

Lederman explains, "Although major business and industry groups long fiercely opposed making emitters pay for their emissions, that opposition has ebbed as (the) industry has seen major government action as inevitable and began coalescing around a market-based approach that avoids the federal government issuing mandates. In recent years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and other groups have voiced support for a carbon price."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

‘No-regret solutions’

At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing last week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the committee, laid out similar grounds for compromise.

“I have often spoken about clean energy innovation policies as ‘no-regret solutions,’” the Alaska Republican said. “But in reality, these are just those first steps.”

Deploying low-carbon energy infrastructure worldwide requires research and cost-cutting, she said, underscoring carbon capture technology, which is still in its infancy.

“It is time to push hard to bring down the cost of clean energy technologies like renewables, advanced nuclear, next-generation energy storage and carbon capture,” Murkowski said. “If we want credible technological solutions that are cost-effective and deployable globally and at-scale, we must ensure that the policies we put in place propel those efforts.”

Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Joe Manchin III said at that hearing that a comprehensive measure like the Green New Deal could be a way for lawmakers of both parties to “come together and understand that it’s a really lofty goal.”

“We get these divides where our caucuses, whether it be within the Democrat or Republican, or divide within the whole Senate or the whole Congress,” the West Virginia Democrat said. “We don’t want to drink dirty water. We don’t want to breathe dirty air. We want our kids to have a future. We really do. They also realize they have to have a job to sustain themselves.”

Shimkus agreed with the sentiment that Democrats’ Green New Deal created an opportunity to craft a more politically-moderate approach to addressing climate that could receive buy-in from his party.

“I think that’s helpful in getting us to look at something ... that we might be willing to consider,” he said.

In an interview, Rep. Paul Tonko, who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce’s Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee, lauded the Republicans’ willingness to address climate change but said their push for innovation falls short of what is needed to tackle such as sprawling threat.

"Innovation and research are important but again that's only picking two tools out of the kit,” the New York Democrat said. “And if we’re going to get to this very lofty ambitious goal with urgency, we’re going to need to have many more elements to be part of the equation for success.”

Tonko, whose subcommittee would be the first stop for legislation in the House to address climate change and energy issues, said there are opportunities to work out a deal between both chambers and parties.

He mentioned energy efficiency, weatherization, conservation, research and upgrading the electric grids as areas of collaboration — points Republicans have broadly said they would be open to.

“I applaud they're coming around,” Tonko said. “It appears as though the denial syndrome or the delay syndrome has been abandoned and that people are now talking solutions.”

Trump: Green New Deal sounds like a ‘high school term paper that got a low mark’]

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/exxonmobil-is-still-bankrolling-climate-science-deniers/

no lnx

ExxonMobil is still bankrolling climate science deniers

Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2019

ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions?

According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as theAmerican Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers.

Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

The shred of good news here is that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.

So what did ExxonMobil get for its money in 2018?

Underwriting Climate Denial at the U.S. Chamber

In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in $350,000 for the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to $365,000.

Two years ago, the Chamber sponsored a widely debunked report that wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S. economy. President Trump used that report as his primary rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.

Earlier this year, however, the Chamber posted a new statement on its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position. “We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international cooperation.”

Does that mean the Chamber has finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power plant carbon emissions, and supports the Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber spokesman told Politico in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken the U.S. commitment to it.

Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”

Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.

Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.

Zycher also posted a column belittling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22, alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that she filed the suit to advance her career.

Financing the Manhattan Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3 million.

Like the Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, alleges the international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.

Cass’s colleague, Senior Fellow Robert Bryce, has been bashing wind power for years and, like President Trump, he wildly overstates its threat to birds. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his bogus argument.

Still another Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in May titled “What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution. The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at least $85 billion in damages.

Aiding and Abetting Congressional Gridlock

On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67 percent of the $1.65 million it spent during the2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1 million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate science deniers. It then spent$11.15 million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more than any other oil and gas company.

One of the most talked-about climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at least five nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent, voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution, which passed by a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.

ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate lawsuits.

In a surprise move, however, the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends recently deleted the provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which are facing more than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol Hill.

Author’s note: Besides the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000) and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups: American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

icn 1019

Pennsylvania, one of the nation's largest coal and natural gas producing states, is moving to join the Northeast's carbon market. It would mark the largest expansion of the multistate initiative since its inception a decade ago and a milestone in the drive by states to counter the impact of the Trump administration's retreat from climate action.

Pennsylvania would become the largest member in terms of carbon emissions of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), now a nine-state compact to curb pollution from the electricity sector.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said Thursday that joining RGGI would be a necessary step for achieving the targets for cuts in greenhouse gas pollution he set earlier this year.

"If we want a Pennsylvania that is habitable for our children and grandchildren, where temperatures aren't in the 90s in October ... where flooding doesn't destroy homes and businesses over and over again, we need to get serious right now about addressing the climate crisis," Wolf said.

It is not clear how far Wolf can go to join RGGI without action by the Republican-controlled state legislature. As buzz grew in the state capital earlier this year on a possible RGGI move, the Wolf administrationreportedly floated a proposal that indicated legislative action would be needed to authorize spending the hundreds of millions of dollars per year in proceeds from carbon fees that the state stands to receive from its involvement in RGGI. But Wolf signed an order Thursday to begin the process of establishing the rules to govern the state's entry to the RGGI market without waiting for the legislature.

"This is the beginning of the process," he said. "I'm looking forward to a robust conversation with environmental advocates, the General Assembly, Pennsylvanians all across the state to figure out how we do this right."

Wolf said he expects Pennsylvania to be a RGGI member within the next two years.

New Jersey, an original RGGI member that dropped out under former Republican Gov. Chris Christie, is currently moving forward with establishing the rules to rejoin RGGI, a months-long process that it expects to have in place by Jan. 1, 2020. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, also a Democrat, tried to bring his state into RGGI but was blocked earlier this year by the state's Republican-controlled legislature.

no grafs

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10092019/big-oil-money-blocked-jay-inslee-climate-change-policy-carbon-fee-bp-washington

story was co-published with The Weather Channel as part of [Collateral, a series on climate, data and science. ]

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It was Valentine's Day 2018, and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee was about to be jilted.

Few outside Inslee's circle of advisers knew that one of the nation's most ardent advocates of climate action had been working for weeks to forge an alliance with one of the state's leading greenhouse gas polluters—the oil giant BP.

Now, on the day before a key hearing for Inslee's proposal to enact the nation's first carbon tax, the kind of comprehensive climate plan he had been talking about since taking office, BP was evasive.

"Will you be testifying tomorrow on behalf of BP?" Chris Davis, Inslee's senior climate advisor, wrotein an email to the company's Washington state lobbyist Denny Eliason. "Very needed right now."

Eliason put him off, indicating he'd know more after an upcoming call. But the next morning, Inslee's office still had no idea if his proposal would go before the state Senate's chief tax-writing committee that day with the influential backing of BP.The oil company was the best hope Inslee's team had for the endorsement of a big business directly affected by the policy—support that could win over conservative Democrats or even Republicans, whose votes Inslee needed for the measure to pass. "Any news?" Davis prodded in another email.

BP's lobbyist delivered the final brush-off two hours before that afternoon's hearing. Despite BP's public support for carbon pricing and the concessions Inslee and Democratic lawmakers had made to win the oil company's support for their carbon tax proposal, BP wasn't going along. Eliason said BP would take no position on the bill—a silence that might as well have been a death knell.

The bill failed. And later in the year, BP also played a decisive role in defeating a ballot initiative to adopt a carbon fee in Washington state.

Inslee did score a climate policy victory in April 2019—just as he was beginning his short-lived presidential campaign centered around action on global warming. Inslee signed what his office called "an unprecedented suite of clean energy legislation," including Washington's commitment to 100 percent carbon-free electricity. But a crucial piece was missing: the state's climate program does nothing to curb the fuel burned in cars, trucks, and other transport—BP's main products, and the state's largest source of greenhouse gas.

The emails between Davis and Eliason were part of hundreds of emails related to Washington state climate policy obtained by InsideClimate News through a public records request. The correspondence provides a revealing window into how oil companies wield their clout in the fight over climate change, even as they increasingly publicly support efforts to reduce carbon emissions. While BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips and others saythey favor a price on carbon, their tough stand on the policy details is one reason solutions remain so far out of reach.

Inslee's fight for climate action in Washington state is a case study of the monumental political challenge that the drive for climate policies faces, even with Democrats in control of both houses of the legislature, a chief executive who has made climate a priority, and a major player in the fossil fuel industry pledging to be a part of the solution.

It is also a cautionary tale and preview of the battle ahead for climate action on a national level, where BP and other big oil companies are staking out a position similar to the one they adopted in Washington state—portraying themselves as partners, not adversaries, in addressing global warming. Based on the record so far, some who have watched the process closely question whether the oil industry can be a trusted ally in enacting a policy that is ambitious enough to effect the rapid, deep economy-wide cuts in carbon emissions that the science demands.

"The oil industry has done this double-speak dance," said Kristin Eberhard, director of climate and democracy for the Seattle-based nonprofit Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank focused on the Pacific Northwest. "They realize that most Americans know that climate change is happening, and they would look self-serving and out of touch if they tried to deny climate change. So they've just turned around and said, 'We know climate change is happening, we want to take action on it. Oh, but not this action,' any time action comes up."

"The problem in Washington," Eberhard said, "seems to be that BP wasn't coming to the table to work it out. They were coming to block it."

BP spokesman Jason Ryan told InsideClimate News in an email that the company was working in earnest to forge an agreement for carbon pricing in Washington, but that it couldn't be accomplished in the state's brief 2018 legislative session.

"We are committed to playing our part in advancing the energy transition to a low-carbon future no matter how challenging it is," Ryan said, pointing to a recent op-ed by Helge Lund, who took over as BP's chairman last year. "Success will require new levels of collaboration across industry, consumers and governments, aided by technology improvements and well-designed government policies."

BP points out it was among the oil companies that worked with former California Gov. Jerry Brown on the deal that expanded that state's cap-and-trade carbon pricing system in 2017—a program that is ahead of its 2020 goals.

"Our position has been clear," Ryan said. "A well-designed price on carbon—either a tax or a cap-and-trade system—is the most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

'One of the Most Progressive Companies'

Eliason signaled that BP wanted to work with Inslee on a carbon tax in an email to the governor's chief of staff, David Postman, and his policy director, Keith Phillips, in December 2017. BP "has been one of the more progressive companies when it comes to public policy around carbon reduction," Eliason wrote.

It was a pivotal moment for Inslee's long-standing climate agenda.

Democrats had regained control of the state Senate for the first time in five years, although they enjoyed only a single-vote advantage. Inslee agreed with the argument of economists who say an escalating tax on carbon-based fuels like gasoline and coal would help address climate change more effectively and efficiently than government mandates alone.

BP owns the largest of the five oil refineries around Puget Sound—a hub that imports crude from Alaska and Canada, making Washington the nation's fifth largest oil refining state. On the issue of a carbon tax, its clout could be crucial.

"To be frank, we were looking to get any major business voice who was going to be covered by the program to speak on behalf of the proposal," Inslee's climate staffer, Davis, said in an interview. "BP, as a firm at the international level, has claimed it is supportive of carbon pricing and that it wants to go in this direction. It was an obvious target for us to reach out to" for support.

Democratic state Sen. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle, chair of the Washington Senate's environment committee who would sponsor the carbon tax legislation, also was urging Davis to meet with BP.

"BP is deeply involved in the policy and political exercise of trying to build a framework of carbon pricing that works for them," Carlyle said in an interview with InsideClimate News. "I think that policy position is sincere. That doesn't make it easy."

"I believe they are going through the long process of conversion from a pure fossil fuel company to an energy company," Carlyle said.

Inslee Compromised, but BP Wasn't Satisfied

When Davis reached out to the oil company in late 2017, Phil Cochrane, senior director of state and local affairs for BP's North American fuels division, responded enthusiastically. "As you may know, BP was one of the first oil and gas companies to recognize the urgency of the climate challenge and we intend to be part of the solution," Cochrane wrote in an email to Davis."We support a well designed price on carbon."

But BP's ideas of what made for a well-designed price included provisions to lessen the impact on BP.

In the final days of 2017, the oil company sent Inslee's office a 14-pointproposalfor ensuring the pain of a tax was spread throughout the economy and that costs were kept down. Importantly, it called for a rollback of other carbon regulations and a prohibition on any other new ones—especially by local governments, which were then eager to enact their own programs to reduce carbon emissions in several corners of Washington state.

The bargain BP was seeking was a miniature version of a proposal that BP and four other oil companies—ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Shell and Total—have endorsed for national action on climate by Congress. Several environmental groups have joined with the oil companies and other businesses in a coalition called the Climate Leadership Council,which is advocating for the approach on Capitol Hill.

Long-time advocates of carbon pricing have been cautiously hopeful about that development, glad for the oil industry's engagement but wary of the risk of giving too much away in return for its support.

"Anybody who wants to endorse a robustly rising carbon tax that sends a very powerful price signal ... would deserve support and praise for doing so," said Charles Komanoff, an economist who is director of the Carbon Tax Center in New York. But he argues that the carbon tax envisioned in the oil industry-endorsed Climate Leadership Council—starting at $40 per ton and increasing 2 to 5 percent a year—is too modest. "That trajectory is not going to be nearly enough to cut actual demand for petroleum products, or upend the culture of carbon," Komanoff said.

By February 2018, the governor's proposal was headed to the state Senate Ways and Means Committee with the vast majority of items on BP's wish list addressed—but not in ways entirely to BP's liking.In Washington state, Inslee and other advocates of carbon pricing came face-to-face with the question of how much to compromise when dealing with BP.

Lawmakers cut the proposed carbon tax nearly in half from Inslee's original proposal and set a cap to make sure the price would go no higher than $30 per ton—equivalent to 27 cents per gallon.

The bill contained at least some of the regulatory rollback BP sought, suspending enforcement of Washington's Clean Air Rule, an escalating cap on greenhouse gas emissions from the state's largest polluters which Inslee's administration had put into place in 2016, after his legislative efforts had failed. At that point, Inslee's Clean Air Rule was in litigation, and its future was uncertain. (A state judge has since put it on hold.)

Inslee's legislation also had several provisions to hold down costs to industry. It exempted fossil fuels used on-site for manufacturing processes by industries like aluminum and steel, which use large amounts of energy and are especially vulnerable to competition from across state borders. The tax would be levied at the "rack," or the wholesale terminals that receive gasoline and other fuels from refineries and dispense them to trucks for sale to gas stations and other retailers. That benefited refiners because any fossil fuels they used in their operations would not be taxed.

But BP wanted more. It wanted refineries to be able to reduce their taxes by investing in carbon reduction projects—an approach known as "offsets." For example, the company was getting credits in California's cap-and-trade program for investments it was making in forest preservation on Native American land in Washington state. "If we are engaging in projects that result in real carbon reduction. ... why should we not get credit against the tax on our products?" Eliason asked in an email.

Davis explained in an email: "Given the significant benefits the refineries gain from both the [energy-intensive, trade-exposed] status and the point of regulation at the rack, the offsets come at far too high a cost from our perspective."

The final sticking point for BP was over local governments. Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, Redmond and other Washington cities have been in the forefront of a national drive for local action on climate. Inslee's legislation would have preempted cities, counties or any local subdivision from enacting their own carbon taxes. But in BP's eyes, this was not enough.

Eliason explained the company wanted to see a ban on local governments enacting other climate policies, such as low-carbon fuel standards or renewable portfolio standards. "We see this as a potential threat in Whatcom County," Eliason wrote, referring to the home of BP's refinery on the state's northwestern coast, where the county council had set a 100 percent renewable energy goal several weeks earlier. "We think a carbon tax should be the controlling policy in this space," he said.

Neither BP nor the industry group of which it was a member, the Western States Petroleum Association, would take a position on Inslee's carbon tax bill before the Ways and Means Committee, Eliason said. That was meant to be a slight concession to Inslee, better than outright opposition. Eliason said BP would continue to be engaged and said it would send a letter to the members of the committee on "the importance of a legislative solution, the good progress that has occurred to date, and the ways the bill could be further improved."

"It's very difficult," Davis said in a recent interview "There is a 'go find me another rock' phenomenon with the major industries, who want to say publicly from their PR perspective that they also believe climate action is crucial, but not at this time, or not this particular proposal."

Many other Washington businesses, including in agriculture and the pulp and paper industry, actively opposed the legislation. The most important opponent among the legislators was the Democratic chair of the powerful Senate Transportation Committee, Sen. Steve Hobbs, who objected that none of the revenue from the carbon tax was being dedicated to fund transportation projects.

This was more than a mere turf battle. The largest source of money for highway projects in Washington is the state gasoline tax. If the carbon tax worked as expected, it would further put the brakes on already weak gasoline demand, gutting the state transportation budget at a time when Washington faces billions of dollars of projects—some of them court-ordered for protection of the state's prized salmon. It is just one of the ways dependence on oil is woven tightly into the economy—even in a state like Washington where leaders have tried to prioritize environmental protection.

Hobbs' defection was all it took to kill the legislation's chances, with the Democrats' thin 25-24 majority and no Republicans willing to break ranks with their party. As the legislative session came to a close at the start of March, Carlyle declared that the measure fell "a vote or two short" and it was never brought to the floor.

In 2018 Election, BP Flexed Its Muscle

The next chapter in Washington's climate policy saga, and BP's role, played out in the spotlight of the 2018 election. Environmentalists, weary of the legislative stalemate, petitioned successfully for a carbon fee voter initiative on the November ballot. It was a bold gambit, given that taxes are notoriously difficult to pass by voter initiative, and Washington voters already had turned down such a ballot measure only two years earlier.

But environmentalists thought they had a better chance since they were more united than in 2016, when many opposed the measure because it put all the revenue into tax breaks to cushion the blow of higher fuel prices. In 2018, environmentalists were united in a coalition with social justice activists and tribes in a carbon fee plan that would direct revenue into clean energy projects, environmental justice and community assistance—similar, though not identical, to the failed Inslee legislative plan.

That's when BP demonstrated what its full-force opposition could do.

The oil industry poured $31.2 million into a TV ad-heavy campaign to defeat the measure, more than had ever been spent to defeat a ballot initiative in state history. Theads said the proposal would force Washington consumers to pay billions more for energy, with no guarantee of reductions in greenhouse gases. BP's $13 million contribution to that effort was more than double the previous record for a single company's spending on a Washington state ballot initiative.

The carbon fee initiative failed, with57 percent of votersopposed."We made a difficult decision to oppose [the ballot initiative] because we believed that it would not achieve the economy-wide reductions necessary in Washington state and would set a bad precedent for other states considering such policies," said Ryan of BP. A key reason for BP's opposition was that the plan would have exempted several large industrial carbon emitters in the state.

The experience—not just the initiative, but the previous failed efforts at carbon pricing—were deeply sobering to many long-time Washington state environmental activists.

"There was a time when I thought the oil industry could be a partner and could navigate the transition to a clean energy future," said KC Golden, a former director of Washington state's Energy Policy Office who now serves as senior advisor to the Seattle-based advocacy group Climate Solutions. "But I think that time has passed. The logical fallacy is this: Any climate policy that effectively prevents catastrophic climate chaos would render a huge fraction of their assets—their booked reserves—worthless, and at this point that would have to happen quite quickly. So they may eventually feel compelled to get on board with 'a' climate policy, but not one that really does the job. It's us or them now."

But for Inslee and his allies in Washington's legislature, cutting BP out of the process was not an option. "We don't have the luxury of that kind of position," said Davis. "We've got to talk to everybody. We have to count votes, and we have to think of the perspectives of the people who are going to be hearing from these guys. That doesn't mean it's going to be so watered down to get BP's support it's not going to be effective. At the end of the day, there are certain things we will insist the policy does. If it doesn't meet the goals we're trying to meet, we will move on and wait for another session."

A Victory, and a Loss

The 2019 legislative session geared up as Inslee was exploring the possibility of a presidential run. Davis said the governor's team remained eager to enact climate policy, but made a "deliberate pivot" away from carbon pricing.

Davis circulated to his colleagues an article by a University of California, Berkeley environmental law professor, Eric Biber, which captured the rationale. Biber argued that while a price on carbon is needed to tackle climate change, it was a political non-starter. He said it was better to start with regulatory policies—clean energy mandates and the like—even though they were a more costly way of cutting carbon emissions. The hope is that the success of such policies will improve the political prospects for carbon pricing in the future.

Inslee's team prepared a push for a 100 percent clean electricity mandate, building efficiency standards, new controls on the use of the potent greenhouse gases used in refrigeration, and a low-carbon fuel standard to address the pollution from cars and trucks. This last item was particularly important because in Washington, transportation accounts for more than 40 percent of the state's carbon emissions.

But while Inslee's team was switching gears, one key Washington interest was still talking about carbon pricing: BP.

Just five days after the company helped bankroll the campaign to defeat carbon pricing at the ballot, BP lobbyist Eliason forwarded to Carlyle the company's own draft legislative proposal for carbon pricing in Washington state—this time, through a cap-and-trade program.

BP said it did so because the feedback it was getting from Washington lawmakers was that cap-and-trade might be a more acceptable path than a tax to achieve a price on carbon. At the time the company made a decision to oppose the ballot initiative, Ryan said, it pledged that it would work with the governor and Legislature to pass carbon pricing.

Inslee had tried a cap-and-trade proposal in 2015, and it had beenvigorously opposed by the Western States Petroleum Association, of which BP is a member.

Carlyle would introduce cap-and-trade legislation that adopted some—though not all—of BP's ideas; it sparked discussion, but not enough support to advance in the Washington legislature in 2019. By circulating the cap-and-trade proposal so soon after the defeat of the initiative, though, BP ensured itself a seat at the table as policymakers regrouped.

Carlyle sent an email in late November 2018 to a small circle of legislators and legislative staff, including Inslee's team, on the need for "a serious, thoughtful dialogue on 'what's possible' on a number of key climate policies." Just one lobbyist was invited to the meeting: Eliason of BP.

By April, six weeks after Inslee launched his presidential run, hesigned a law making Washington the fourth state—behind Hawaii, California, and New Mexico—to set a 100 percent carbon-free electricity goal. The legislature also passed the measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings and refrigeration, as well as incentives for electric vehicles, and steps to make it easier for utilities to expand EV infrastructure.

But one piece of Inslee's package stalled in the legislature: the Low Carbon Fuel Standard to curb pollution from the state's biggest greenhouse gas polluter—transportation—a sector almost entirely dependent on oil. BP was among the businesses opposing the standard.

Without a policy to curb gasoline and diesel emissions, Washington state is a long way from having the kind of comprehensive climate solution Inslee has been talking about since taking office six years ago.

Inslee did get his chance to draw up a blueprint for such a solution—the six-part climate plan he released over the course of his five-month presidential run. It includes a timeline for 100 percent clean electricity, like the program that has been adopted in Washington. But it also includes measures he has not yet been able to enact, like carbon pricing. Some of the remaining candidates, including Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro, are openly adopting parts of his platform as a template for their own climate plans.

Having dropped out of the presidential race, Inslee is turning his attention back to Washington state, where he is running for a third term as governor. He acknowledges that he has more work to do there on climate policy.

"The science is clear—we have to transition away from fossil fuels and we have to do it soon," Inslee said in an email. "Every sector of our economy and every level of government plays a role in that transition. Our state is striding forward, and we will not be daunted or deterred from pursuing the policies necessary to protect Washingtonians and our planet from the ravages of climate change."

InsideClimate News reporter Phil McKenna contributed to this report.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/economist-james-k-boyce-explains-how-to-fight-climate-change-and-rising-income-inequality-in-one-shot/

no lnx

Economist James K. Boyce explains how to fight climate change and rising income inequality in one shot

Written by Lynn Parramore July 31, 2019

Every day it becomes clearer that we have to break our addiction to extracting dirty stuff from the ground to burn for energy. But how to pull it off without triggering political and economic chaos? Economist James K. Boyce, a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the author of a new book exploring that question, The Case for Carbon Dividends. In a conversation with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, he outlines a plan that could not only reduce carbon emissions, but help bridge the gap between the rich and the rest. And it might even survive the political system.

Lynn Parramore: You take it as a given that the key to reducing fossil fuel use is to put a price on carbon emissions. But some say that it won’t really impact climate change or that it will hurt the economy in various ways. How do you respond?

James K. Boyce: A price on carbon emissions is one key piece of the solution. But it can’t be just any price: it has to be anchored to an emissions-reduction trajectory that is consistent with climate objectives, such as the Paris target of limiting the increase in average global temperatures to 1.5-2 °C.

There are a several options for doing that. One is putting a cap on the total amount of fossil fuels allowed to enter the economy, a cap that would get lower over time. Then, we could auction allowances (also called permits) up to the limit set by the cap. Another option is a tax that is indexed to emission targets, so that the rate adjusts automatically as needed, sort of like an adjustable-rate mortgage. Or we could have a combination of the two, in which the tax is the floor price for permit auctions.

Arbitrarily setting a price and hoping it will do the job is a recipe for uncertainty at best and failure at worst. It’s true that most carbon prices across the world today are too low to have had a substantial impact on emissions. But that’s an argument for a more robust price, not for a price of zero. Just because you’ve tasted weak coffee doesn’t mean you should never drink coffee again.

Would a carbon price that is robust enough to do the job “hurt the economy”? Quite the contrary. What will really hurt the economy is failure to stabilize the Earth’s climate. A carbon price firmly anchored to emissions-reduction goals will reorient the economy towards greater energy efficiency and cleaner energy. The resulting innovation and investment will grow the economy, but grow it in a new direction, leaving behind the fossil-fueled era.

LP: What exactly are carbon dividends?

JB: Carbon dividends are equal payments to every resident funded with the revenue from putting a price on carbon.

LP: So that means once these revenues start rolling in, everybody gets checks in the mail?

JB: That’s the idea. Dividends can be disbursed monthly, quarterly, or annually. It’s not rocket science to do this. Alaska already pays dividends to all state residents with revenue from oil extraction. One could even front-load the payments, so that the first dividend arrives as soon as fuel prices go up.

The economic principle behind carbon dividends is called a “feebate”: individuals pay fees according to their use of a shared resource, and receive rebates by virtue of their common ownership of the resource. The idea can be illustrated by an analogy.

Suppose that 1,000 people work in an office building whose parking lot has only a few hundred spaces. If everyone could park free of charge, there would be chronic excess demand. To avert the resulting congestion, a fee is charged to limit demand for parking spaces to the lot’s capacity. Every month the money that is collected in parking fees is paid out as equal rebates to everyone who works in the building. Those who bicycle to work or take public transport come out ahead: they pay nothing to park and still get their share of the revenue. Those who carpool more or less break even. Those who commute every day in a single-occupancy vehicle pay more in fees than they get back.

Carbon dividends apply this idea to parking emissions in the atmosphere.

LP: How does your proposal fit into the idea of a Green New Deal?

JB: The centerpiece of the Green New Deal is investment and innovation in a clean energy economy that works for everyone, not just for the richest one percent. Carbon dividends fit perfectly with this idea.

Placing a strict limit on how much fossil fuel we burn – which increases their price – strengthens the incentives for individuals, firms, and governments to invest in the clean energy economy of the future. And dividends are paid to everyone, so the revenue from higher fuel prices, the carbon price, is not pocketed by the wealthy and powerful few. Carbon dividends are based on the principle that we all own the atmospheric parking lot in common and equal measure.

The net impact of the price-and-dividend policy on any household’s income depends on the size of its carbon footprint. Most low-income households come out ahead, since they consume less-than-average amounts of just about everything, including fossil fuels. Most middle-class households break even or come out a bit ahead. Upper-income households generally pay more in higher fuel prices than they get back in dividends, because of their higher consumption of just about everything, including fossil fuels.

LP: So that keeps carbon taxes or prices from hurting people who can least afford it, like truck drivers or ordinary commuters.

JB: Right. In industrialized countries like the U.S., fuels are more of a necessity than a luxury. As a percentage of their incomes – although not in terms of absolute dollars – the poor spend more on fossil fuel than the middle class, and the middle class spends more than the rich. In the absence of dividends, in other words, carbon prices are tantamount to a regressive tax.

One possible alternative use for carbon revenue is to fund public investment, including investments in a Green New Deal. It would be possible to use some revenue for this purpose and some for dividends. Back in 2009, for example, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced a bill that would have capped emissions, auctioned permits, returned 75% of the revenue to the people as dividends, and devoted the remaining 25% to public investment. But it would be an irony – and a serious political liability – if the Green New Deal were funded mainly by a regressive tax.

LP: How would the carbon dividends plan be implemented?

JB: It’s pretty straightforward. We know how to auction carbon permits. The northeastern states, for example, have been doing it four times a year for the past decade in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for curbing power plant emissions. We know how to pay dividends. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been doing it for more than 30 years.

The easiest way to disburse dividends is via electronic payments. Just like Social Security and veterans’ benefits. Those who prefer them can get checks in the mail. A compelling advantage of disbursing dividends as stand-alone payments, rather than in the form of income tax credits or by some other indirect route, is to ensure that they are completely visible to the public. This visibility is crucial for the political durability of carbon pricing. People will see fuel prices rising at the pump. At the same time, they need to see the revenue coming back to them in a fair and transparent manner.

To protect energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, most carbon pricing proposals include border adjustments like carbon tariffs on imports and rebates to exporters. That way, companies can maintain their competitiveness vis-à-vis producers in locations without a comparable carbon price.

The price-and-dividend plan could be implemented by individual states, too. One way to tackle the competitiveness issue at the state level is to set aside a share of the total carbon revenue equal to what is paid by businesses, and to rebate this to firms in equal amounts per employee. A side-benefit of this would be to strengthen incentives for job creation. The same can be done for local governments. This has been proposed in Massachusetts.

LP: How does this idea win support across the political spectrum?

JB: I use the term “libertarian socialism” to describe the underlying philosophy behind carbon dividends. The concept is libertarian in its respect for the individual, and socialist in its commitment to equality. Today the labels “libertarian” and “socialist” are usually affixed to opposite ends of the political spectrum. But there is a strong connection between the egalitarian distribution of power and the egalitarian distribution of wealth, central tenets of liberty and socialism, respectively. Carbon dividends are consistent with both.

In the U.S., carbon dividends have gained support on both sides of the political aisle. The Cantwell-Collins bill was the last bipartisan climate legislation proposed in the Senate. A new House bill called the Energy Dividend and Carbon Dividend Act is co-sponsored by a Democrat and a Republican. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who championed carbon dividends as a Congressman, has proposed a new bill in the Senate. Republican elder statesmen George Shultz and James Baker are among the co-authors of “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” a proposal advanced two years ago by the Climate Leadership Council (CLC). The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a non-partisan advocacy group, has been working to build grassroots support for carbon dividends around the country.

In my view, bipartisan support is essential if climate policy is to be politically durable. An effective climate policy cannot be a one-off victory: it must endure long enough to see the clean energy transition to its conclusion. A policy that is vulnerable to being scrapped when there is a change of power in Washington won’t cut it.

The Yellow Vest movement that broke out in France last November was sparked by the Macron government’s announcement of a fairly modest increase in fuel taxes. The reaction is a loud and clear warning of the dangers in any policy that combats climate change at the expense of working people. Political leaders and clean energy advocates around the world have taken notice. German Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock recently said, “the lesson from France is that we cannot save the climate at the expense of social justice.” I think that is absolutely right. Carbon dividends are a way to combine the two.

LP: How do we overcome the big-money influence of those invested in the fossil-fuel economy? Who is currently supporting carbon dividends and who is opposed?

JB: Good question. For starters, it’s important to distinguish between capital and labor. Fossil capital faces losses in the form of stranded assets: plant and equipment, and reserves in the ground, whose market value will fall in some cases to zero in the clean energy transition. I don’t feel overly sorry about this. It’s what happens to firms in a market economy when they make bad investment decisions. I hope that betting on continued use of dirty energy will turn out to be a really, really bad decision.

In the meantime, these firms had a pretty good run for their money.

Labor – and here I mean not only workers in the fossil-fuel sector but also communities that depend on them – is a different matter. The workers and communities that provided our energy in the past performed a great service. They need and deserve assistance as we shift to the clean energy economy. A just transition is a key component of the Green New Deal.

Fossil capital is likely to oppose any policies that would sweep its assets into the dustbin of history. The only way to overcome this opposition is to build a broad and deep alliance among everyone who puts the long-term well-being of our children, our grandchildren, and humankind ahead of the short-term greed of those who profit in the fossil-fuel status quo.

But it’s been interesting to see that some energy firms, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, came out in support of theClimate Leadership Council’s (CLC) “conservative case” for carbon dividends.

LP: Is that kind of support a sign that there’s something wrong with the idea of carbon dividends?

JB: It’s important to distinguish the baby from the bathwater. I think there are two specific features of the CLC plan that made it palatable to some oil-and-gas firms. The first is the initial carbon price: $40 per ton of carbon dioxide. This would be enough to spur the shutdown of coal-burning power plants in favor of natural gas-fired plants, expanding the market for gas producers, while not being high enough to make a serious dent in demand for transportation fuels. The plan was vague on how the price would increase over time, but for Big Oil $40 may be just about the sweet spot.

The second inducement was a curious line of legalese inserted in the CLC plan saying that carbon taxes “would make possible an end to federal and state tort liability for emitters.” There is no intrinsic connection whatsoever between a liability waiver and carbon dividends. I can only surmise that this was put in as a carrot for the corporations. If so, and if this was enough to get them to sign on, it reveals just how deep the anxiety runs in boardrooms about the prospect of being held to account for the colossal harm that fossil fuel corporations have inflicted on people and the planet. The precedents of Big Tobacco, the demise of Union Carbide after the Bhopal chemical disaster, and the bankruptcy of Johns-Manville Corporation due to asbestos liability are instructive here. I regard corporate liability as a valuable bargaining tool that should not be relinquished lightly.

In speaking to diverse audiences about carbon dividends, I’ve often been asked, “This seems like a great idea – why haven’t I heard of it before?” I explain that it’s because no one stands to get rich from carbon dividends. No big-money interests are paying anyone to publicize the idea. The only way we will get carbon dividends – and the only way we will see effective solutions to the climate crisis – is for the people to join together and demand them. That is the bottom-line message of the book.

https://time.com/5613542/green-new-deal-carbon-tax/

better: Congress is debating dueling climate action plans, a carbon tax, and more

A bloc of moderate House Democrats has proposed that the nation set a 2050 deadline for eliminating carbon pollution.

It’s two decades later than the more ambitious deadline proposed in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, but “more ambitious than seen in past proposals from Democratic leadership in Congress,” reports the Washington Post.

“The same goal has been established by states and territories including Maine, Nevada and Puerto Rico, as well has nations including Germany, Japan and Spain,” notes Roll Call, which adds that the bill’s sponsors plan “to court Republican lawmakers and voters for their support. “

Two Senate Democrats have introduced the “Climate Action Rebate Act,” a carbon tax that “aims to generate $2.5 trillion in revenues over 10 years starting in 2020,” reports Reuters. “It would rebate about 70 percent of the money to families that make less than $130,000 per year, and use the rest for energy infrastructure, job retraining for fossil fuel workers, and research and development.”

A House committee this week passed the “Climate Risk Disclosure Act,” a bill that would require publicly-traded companies to disclose their exposure to climate risk as well as their load of greenhouse gas pollution.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a companion bill in the Senate earlier this month, as CNBC reports.

719

Hundreds of U.S. Mayors Urge Congress: Put a Price on Carbon

BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE

The U.S. Conference of Mayors also opposed any limits on suing fossil fuel companies over climate change, which rules out one carbon pricing proposal.Read More

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23052019/carbon-pricing-microsoft-pepsi-stonyfield-corporate-lobbying-congress-climate-change-solutions

An epic quest loomed Wednesday before the largest gathering of business leaders in a decade to advocate for climate action on Capitol Hill.

Could they find a single Republican in the U.S. Senate to take up the cause of carbon pricing?

The answer appeared to be: "Not yet."

Officials from Microsoft, Nike, Pepsi, eBay, Exelon, Gap, Levi's, Mars and Tesla were among more than 75 business leaders making the case for a national price on carbon. They scheduled 80 meetings with lawmakers and staff, half of them with Republicans. Lawmakers and their aides ducked behind closed doors to confer with members of the delegation throughout the day.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who introduced bipartisan carbon tax legislation in the last Congress and would like to do so again, set up one roundtable meeting between his colleagues and six CEOs with a ground rule that he wouldn't name which members of Congress came to hear the pitch. (The bill he introduced last session put a fee on emissions of greenhouse gases and paid the revenues back to the public as a so-called "dividend.")

"By offering an invitation to come have an off-the-record conversation with CEOs, I was partly recognizing that it is politically challenging or sensitive to have conservative Republicans in a room talking about a price on carbon," Coons said. "And I'm trying to find a way to move that conversation forward."

One Republican who is seen by some as a hope for GOP climate leadership did stop and speak briefly with a reporter outside the door on his way out of a half-hour session with CEOs.

"I think we're a long way from legislation of that character at this stage," said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) of their plea for congressional action.

Although Romney maintained a skeptical stance on climate during his 2012 presidential run, his more recent statements show openness to addressing climate change—including a 2017 Tweetpraising the carbon fee-and-dividend proposal by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of businesses and environmental groups. But Romney, who represents astate where coal is the state rock,was not ready to commit to any view on what Congress should be doing.

"They made a number of important points about creating incentives for the various industries to consider a carbon-friendly approach as opposed to a less carbon-friendly approach, and creating pricing mechanisms that would encourage them to emit less carbon," Romney said.

Climate Reports, Polls and a Republican Shift

The companies lobbying for carbon pricing together represented combined annual revenues of more than $2.5 trillion, according to the sustainability nonprofit group Ceres, which helped organizing the lobbying effort. Boston-based Ceres works with investors and companies to build networks of leaders on climate issues.

Dawn Martin, executive vice president of Ceres, said the business members of its policy network began pushing for the idea of a group lobbying effort on Capitol Hill after back-to-back climate science reports last fall—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 1.5 degrees report and the Fourth National Climate Assessment—issued stark warnings about the need to rein in greenhouse gases quickly.

"It's been a game-changer for people," said Martin. And while there isn't a GOP standard-bearer in Congress on carbon pricing, Martin said she has seen a shift.

"To have Republicans saying, 'We get it, but it's the wrong solution'—at least they get it now," she said. "And that has happened relatively overnight."

That was also the finding of a national survey released earlier this week by the GOP polling firm Luntz Global. The surveyfound that by a margin of 8 to 1, U.S. voters are more worried about climate today than they were a year ago. Luntz found majority support across party lines for the carbon fee-and-dividend proposal of the Climate Leadership Council, which commissioned the survey. Among Republicans under age 40, 75 percent supported the idea of pricing carbon and returning all revenue to households.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are acting as though they've seen similar polling. Fewer are now openly questioning the core science of climate change, but many are still steering clear of the idea of strong government action.

The Republican-controlled Senate Agriculture Committee, stacked with farm state lawmakers who have largely ignored the topic, held a hearing Tuesday focused on climate change in which several senators and witnesses raised the prospect of carbon markets. With the farm sector battered by a series of natural disasters and suffering under President Donald Trump's trade policies, the idea of possible farm revenue from carbon markets has appeal, and evenAgriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue voiced support for the idea.But Republican lawmakers, who have long fought anything that remotely hints of regulation on American farms, were wary.

"What I would hate to see is heavy handed government regulation," said Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. "I think we can do this on our own."

What Business Leaders Are Saying

Many Republicans are touting technology subsidies—not taxes—as the solution. At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last week, several Republicans voiced support for increased incentives to spur innovation.

Hugh Welsh, president of DSM North America, a nutrition and health company, said he was telling lawmakers that government incentives are fine for sparking innovation, but not for scaling them up enough to make a difference on climate change. For example, DSM has developed a feed additive that the company says would reduce methane emissions from cows by 30 percent, but he said there's not enough incentive for farms to buy the product unless there is a market imperative to reduce greenhouse gases.

Jeff Eckel, CEO of the Annapolis, Md.-based clean investment firm Hannon Armstrong, is convinced he can make a business case for carbon pricing that should appeal to Republicans. To rely on subsidies and incentives alone, he said, "is a distinctly non-conservative economic position. If you want to go back to free market principles, you put a price on carbon and you stop socializing the cost" of climate change.

The business leaders said they understood, however, that no matter how much progress they made in their lobbying day on Capitol Hill, they were not likely to see legislation in the short-term with the Trump administration maintaining its stance of climate denial.

"We know where this administration is. It's living in a fact-free fantasy," said Gary Hirshberg, chairman of theorganic yogurt company Stonyfield Farm."But this is a matter of enormous urgency. What we need to help our colleagues and representatives understand is that this is not a partisan issue."

Said Welsh, "I think everybody understands that not much is going to get done in this Congress, in the polarized, divisive state we're in. But that's not a deterrent. That does not discourage us. It may be the first time we're up on the Hill, but it won't be the last time."

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07032019/carbon-tax-proposals-compare-baker-shultz-exxon-conocophillips-ccl-congress

Not long ago, a carbon tax was the untouchable third rail of climate politics.

"We have done extensive polling on carbon tax. It all sucks," John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, wrote to another adviser in a memorable January 2015 email from the Wikileaks stash.

But four years later, amid the political upheaval wrought by President Donald Trump, several carbon tax proposals are getting a serious look on Capitol Hill. Ironically, the president's rejection of climate science and his fossil fuel-focused agenda may have helped usher in an era when carbon taxation is politically thinkable.

One carbon fee-and-dividend plan has already been introduced in Congress and more are expected. Editorial pages and conservative pundits are talking about carbon taxes as a pragmatic way to achieve the goals of the Green New Deal. And the opinion polls look a lot different than the ones that caused Podesta to recoil.

A plurality of Americans—44 percent—say they support a policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by taxing carbon-based fuels, according to a poll conducted last November by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and the Associated Press. (Only 29 percent said they were opposed, while 25 percent were neutral.) A surveyof registered voters by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that 58 percent said they would favor a Republican-proposed carbon tax that would return all revenue to households in the form of monthly rebate checks.

More and more states and local governments are jumping in with carbon pricing plans of their own to fill the climate leadership void that Trump has created.Energy companies face the prospect of 50 different regulatory approaches on greenhouse gases in the United States—a powerful incentive for them to seek one uniform, predictable, national approach. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are among the oil companies backing a campaign to get their favored version of a carbon tax introduced in the Senate this year, one that would also protect them from other climate regulations and lawsuits.

There are significant differences between the carbon tax proposal backed by Big Oil and the approaches backed by environmental activists. And while carbon pricing could help put the U.S. on track to zero emissions by mid-century, experts warn that a poorly designed plan could be too weak to get the job done.

A close look at two economy-wide carbon tax proposals—the oil industry-backed plan, developed by former Republican Secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz, and legislation backed by a grassroots environmental group, Citizens' Climate Lobby—highlights some of the key questions that policymakers will face as they weigh competing carbon tax plans.

How High a Carbon Tax?

Baker-Shultz proposal:Although its plan has not been formally introduced yet, the framework laid out by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of industry and environmental groups that support the Baker-Shultz proposal, would start a carbon tax at about $40 per ton, escalating by 2 to 5 percent annually, and reaching as high as $65 per ton by 2030.

Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act:The bipartisan measure sponsored by Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.) would levy a carbon tax beginning at $15 per ton, escalating by $10 annually, and reaching $115 a ton by 2030. That averages out to a 24 percent annual increase—higher than any other recent climate proposal.

Why it matters:Cutting carbon emissions rapidly and deeply will be costly but necessary if the world aims to keep the global temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. No one knows how high the carbon price will have to be to meet that goal, but it will depend on the pace of technological advances and other policies to encourage investors and consumers to choose clean energy, said Noah Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, who has studied the current carbon pricing proposals.

"The more complementary policies you have, the lower the carbon price you need," he said.

In a recent report on the challenge of the 1.5 degree Celsius goal, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change closely studied the economic calculations of many peer-reviewed studies. It concluded that taxing emissions was part of the answer, but that a moderate tax couldn't solve the problem alone. Other policies, like energy efficiency standards and support for deployment of clean technology, are also needed. "There is no silver bullet for this deep decarbonization," the report said.

David Doniger, senior strategic director of the Climate and Clean Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the need for deep decarbonization is what guides his group's thinking about carbon tax proposals. "The atmosphere is a physical system that cares about the quantity of pollution, not an economic system that cares about price," he said. "We're looking for a limit to pollution, rather than price, even in a market-based system."

How Much Regulatory Rollback?

Baker-Shultz proposal:Streamlining regulations and curbing state authority over climate policy are among the goals of the industry-backed Americans for Carbon Dividends, the political action group backing the Baker-Shultz plan. Its managing director, Ryan Costello, says the group has not yet decided on how broad a regulatory rollback it would seek. Exxon, in backing the proposal, has said existing carbon regulations would be made "superfluous" by a carbon tax.

Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act:The Deutch bill would pause the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act for 10 years. If national climate goals remain unmet at that point, EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act would be restored. (The Trump administration has proposed revoking and replacing the EPA regulations.) The bill would leave in place limits on emissions from vehicles, including California's authority to apply more stringent emission standards. The bill also specifies that it would not preempt or supersede any state law or regulation, protecting renewable energy and clean fuel standards, the Northeast's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and other steps that states have taken on climate change.

Why it matters: Any rollback of EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases would mean the demise of the Obama administration's dormant Clean Power Plan, but economists agree that either of the carbon tax plans would drive down the use of coal for electricity, cutting emissions in that sector just as quickly as President Barack Obama's regulatory approach.

But other sources of emissions are more difficult to tackle with a tax—especially those from transportation, where petroleum is the primary fuel. A $50 per ton carbon tax, for example, would translate to 44 cents a gallon of gasoline, not enough to drive large changes in behavior when there are few alternatives available to drivers.

The research firm Rhodium Group, in a report for Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, found that petroleum consumption would barely be affected under carbon tax levels that drive coal consumption down sharply. Although a carbon tax that starts at $50 per ton would certainly be more effective than current policy and would help the U.S. meet its short-term goal under the Paris accord, the benefits would wear thin in the long-run. Instead of trending toward zero by mid-century, carbon emissions would flatten out after 2030, the Rhodium analysts found. "Unless there is a dramatic acceleration in the decarbonization of buildings, transportation, and industry, it may fall far short of delivering long-term U.S. emission goals," they wrote.

That's why many environmentalists are wary of too broad a regulatory rollback.

"We should be adding tools to the tool box" of laws and policies to address climate change, Doniger said. "We shouldn't be preempting or removing any of the existing tools. You could end up with a watered-down token carbon tax and gutting the existing tools, putting us in worse shape than we were before."

But elimination of some regulations likely would be key to gaining Republican and industry support.

Should Industry Get Protection?

Baker-Shultz proposal:Part of the package that is especially important to the proposal's industry supporters is curbing lawsuits against energy companies involving climate change—"once and for all, putting a can on that ... so that we have a comprehensive climate solution," said Costello.

Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act:The right to sue would be protected by the Deutch bill's provision that it would not preempt or supersede any state law or regulation.

Why it matters:The oil and gas industry currently is embroiled in legal disputes brought by states, cities and children over the industry's role in global warming. The companies have won some opening rounds of this litigation, but that doesn't diminish the liability peril they face.

"They are in the position where they have to win everything," said David Bookbinder, chief counsel of the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center, who is representing Boulder and other local governments in Colorado that are suing oil companies for climate damages, "Because as soon as they lose one case, things are going to go very bad for them very quickly." Any defeat for fossil fuel companies would trigger more lawsuits against them.

Big Oil would not be the first industry to seek protection from lawsuits in a federal law that has a larger public health and welfare purpose. Food and drug industry companies routinely argue that federal food and drug safety laws protect them from lawsuits—courts sometimes have agreedand sometimes have disagreed.The tobacco industry in the 1960s lobbied for "preemption" language in the laws that required them to put a Surgeon General's warning on their products and banned them from TV advertising. Those laws helped tobacco companies fend off lawsuits for the next 25 years.

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Costello argues that the transition to cleaner energy will be stymied if the industry is tied up in lawsuits. "We're asking energy companies moving forward to pay a price, and frankly start to make substantial capital investments in their existing fleet, as well as in new technologies and research and development," he said. "The more contingent liabilities you have to list to your shareholders, the less you're going to be able to invest in 'R and D' to really drive and accelerate lower- or zero-carbon technologies."

But James May, co-director of the Environmental Law Center at Widener University, who has written widely on climate damages cases, argues that fossil fuel companies already have access to ample legal defenses. "There are actions and inactions that haven't yet seen the light of day because the oil industry has been fighting the ability of people in towns, cities and states to sue them on every single ground possible," he said. "The oil industry does not believe they should ever have to walk into a courtroom to defend themselves on climate change." But they already have protections in corporate law, Constitutional law, various statutes, "and of course, the power of the purse," May said. "I think that's enough."

Bookbinder said he would not be averse to some litigation protection for the energy companies being included in a carbon tax program—if the legislation addresses the costs communities face due to climate change.

"If Congress were to say 'we will give immunity, but we will use all of this money to address adaptation and public infrastructure—we will fund the things that otherwise state and local governments would have to fund'—that would make sense from a policy perspective," Bookbinder said. "As far as I know, no one's [carbon tax] bill has ever come close to talking about using the money for climate adaptation. It's an afterthought in people's climate policy thinking."

Where Should the Money Go?

Both the Baker-Shultz proposaland the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Actwould return all of the tax revenue to American households in the form of monthly rebate checks. For most households, the rebates would exceed the increased costs they would pay for fuel.

Not all carbon tax proposals have taken this approach, however.

Last fall, Washington state voters rejected a carbon tax that would have spent the revenue on clean energy and water initiatives and adaptation. In France, massive protests forced President Emmanuel Macron to back down from an environmental fuel tax that would have used all the revenue to reduce the national budget deficit.

"One lesson from Washington State and France is that proceeds must be returned to the people in order to be politically viable and popular," argued Carlton Carroll, a spokesman for Americans for Carbon Dividends, the political action group backing the Baker-Shultz plan. The rebate "is a big reason why it is so popular with voters from both parties," he said. In fact, the Yale-GMU survey found that Trump supporters favor a carbon dividend more strongly than any other political grouping, with 63 percent in favor.

But making the carbon tax revenue neutral would rule out using any of the money for projects to hasten a clean energy transition—the kind of strong government action that the IPCC said will be needed.

There is some evidence that the public would support using carbon tax revenue to help tackle the climate crisis. In the AP survey, the number who supported a carbon tax grew from 44 percent to 66 percent when asked how they would feel if the proceeds were used for environmental restoration. More than half would support a carbon tax if the funds were used toward research and development for renewable energy programs and public transportation.

Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who represented the heavily Democratic southern tip of Florida and lost his congressional seat in the November election, thinks that policy makers should not rule out potentially politically popular ways of spending the revenue of a carbon tax that are in sync with the purpose of addressing climate change. As an example, he notes Miami residents' vote in 2017 to tax themselves to fund $200 billion in government spending to help quell tidal flooding, among other projects. In his final weeks in office, Curbelo introduced a carbon tax bill that would have devoted the revenue to infrastructure. He believed there was bipartisan support (the need to address infrastructure was just about the only thing Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton agreed on in 2016), and there were strong stakeholders—local governments, builders, workers—around whom he could build a coalition.

"I believe the key to passing this kind of revenue-generating legislation is for people to be able to enthusiastically embrace the expenditure side," Curbelo said. "We know that they're not going to enthusiastically embrace the tax side. As long as the investment is perceived to be valuable and is going to be executed with integrity, I think that makes carbon pricing legislation viable. The expenditure side—I think that's where the magic happens."

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) as a co-sponsor of the current Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. He co-sponsored a version of the same bill in November 2018 but did not sign on as a sponsor this year.

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REGULATION

GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY

BUSINESS AND ACCOUNTABILITY

CLIMATE POLICY

CLIMATE CHANGE

PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/from-greenspan-to-yellen-economic-brain-trust-backs-carbon-tax

An all-star lineup of economists, from Alan Greenspan to Paul Volcker, is endorsing a plan to combat climate change by slapping a tax on greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing the revenue to American households.

All living former Federal Reserve chairs, several Nobel Prize winners and previous leaders of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers have signed on to a statement asserting that a robust, gradually rising carbon tax is “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”

“A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future,” the 45 economists say in the opinion piece, published by the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday.

The missive is a rare case of the economic establishment speaking with a single voice on a pressing social issue, albeit one that faces political challenges from conservatives, Republicans and the current White House. The signers include economists who have served every president going back to Jimmy Carter.

“This is one of the few ideas of economic policy that commands broad, bipartisan support,” former Harvard University President and U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an interview. “Nowadays on economic policy, we don’t see much of that.”

Other signers include former Fed Chairmen Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke as well as former White House economic advisers Austan Goolsbee and Christina Romer.

The economists’ endorsement could deliver momentum to a carbon tax-and-dividend plan devised by two former secretaries of state -- James Baker and George P. Shultz -- that has already drawn financial support from Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Exelon Corp.

Pressure is already mounting in Congress to take aim at climate change, following dire warnings about the growing consequences from a United Nations panel and the U.S. government. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, has promised the chamber will take up climate legislation. And some Democrats, led by freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are advancing a so-called Green New Deal that calls for phasing out fossil fuels by 2030.

That effort may not get far in the current political dynamic, with Republicans controlling the Senate and the White House. President Donald Trump said he opposed taxing greenhouse gas emissions while campaigning for the White House.And House Republicans voted in July to condemn the very idea of a carbon tax as “detrimental” to the U.S. economy, with only six Republicans breaking ranks to vote against the measure.

Advocates of the proposal say they are trying to build momentum for action two years from now.

The economists’ statement includes proclamations that could have broad appeal to Republicans. For instance, the group highlights the importance of keeping the tax “revenue neutral” by giving rebates to all Americans, a tactic the economists say will “avoid debates over the size of government.” They also tout the promise that by replacing inefficient “cumbersome regulations” with a carbon tax, the government can “promote economic growth and provide the regulatory certainty companies need for long-term investment in clean-energy alternatives.”

“This is a turning point in Republican climate policy, where the GOP economic brain trust unites behind the Baker-Shultz carbon dividends plan,” said Republican Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader helping push the proposal.

Many economists have favored a carbon tax as the most effective strategy for discouraging greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change. But the economists now are going further by stressing that the revenue should be rebated to citizens, instead of being used to reduce the deficit, fund government or pare income taxes.

“For the first time, there’s consensus among economists on what to do with the money, and the answer is to give it back to the American people,” said Ted Halstead, head of the Climate Leadership Council backing the plan.

That approach is key to ensuring it is a progressive tax that ends up helping the poor, instead of just hiking their energy bills. The premise is that periodic dividend checks could more than make up for the hike in costs for poor- and middle-income Americans.

https://www.alternet.org/environment/want-citizens-care-about-climate-change-pay-them

Climate scientists insist in a recent report that fundamental changes in how energy is consumed and supplied are urgently required to avoid serious damage to life and property from rising temperatures, rising sea levels and greater frequency of extreme weather events (hurricanes, drought-induced wildfires, etc.).

Governments worldwide have barely managed to work towards the modest commitments under the Paris climate accord, and it’s not enough to address the problem.

Climate initiatives are currently under siege from major polluters. The United States and Australia have organized pro-coal events amid climate talks, carbon emissions are increasing again while new political regimes in Brazil and Saudi Arabia have shown worrying signs of climate skepticism. Why is it so difficult for politicians around the world to take the necessary steps to deal with the climate crisis?

Experts commonly offer two options to address climate change: Flexible regulations on polluting sectors like electricity and transportation, and carbon pricing that reflects the indirect cost of pollution.

These are justified economically, since mitigating climate change can result in popular sustainable development opportunities, create new jobs, prevent loss in professions that depend on healthy ecosystems and improve health outcomes at a lower cost. But that may not be enough — there is no bold Green New Deal that is even being contemplated in places like Russia or China at this time.

Political leaders need to care about climate enough to take on polluting entities like fossil fuel companies that supply or generate the vast majority of energy, provide millions of jobs and make political contributions.

Behavioural psychology suggests that politicians are resistant to measures that aren’t popular with voters or donors.

Even moderate efforts to price carbon have sometimes faced political backlash. A prime example is the domestic unrest in France where carbon pricing on top of economic measures exacerbated economic insecurity within society.

As politicians delay decisive action, what could be realistically and quickly done within political systems as diverse as those of the U.S., China, India and Russia? Together, they are the top four polluters, contributing 53 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2017.

Citizens are apathetic, too

We argue that the apathy of political leaders reflects the apathy of their citizens. Many politicians, and the people they represent around the world, simply do not view climate change as a crisis. Even when mainstream cable channels are covering it (a rarity in itself), people seem to care more about the next sports showdown or celebrity gossip for entertainment in their daily lives.

Some are also distrustful of the science (an effect of the recent fad of “resistance to intellectual authority,” including climate scientists).

At the extreme are those who associate climate change and carbon pricing with various conspiracy theories. This includes everything from the supposed financial gain of climate scientists to socialist schemes to create a world government to destroy capitalism, and a Chinese plotagainst Western economies.

Arguably, discussions on climate change under these conditions can sometimes deepen the political divide given proponents of such conspiracy theories are largely immune to evidence and reason.

So how do we get citizens to care about climate?

Any energy transition will need to be preceded by a transition of vocal and influential citizens, or swing voters, away from an anti-climate position. We don’t necessarily need all citizens of diverse socioeconomic and educational backgrounds to understand climate science or proactively support it (though that would be highly desirable), we just need a politically influential section of citizens to not oppose bold climate action.

Presenting the case for climate action on CNN, BBC or CBC is important but leaves out the billions of people across China, Russia, India and a host of other countries with divergent political systems and their own media landscape.

They must also be concurrently convinced to take action. How?

Appealing to citizens via their wallets

If carbon pricing is going to be a significant vehicle for climate action, then the key to securing broader support is through people’s wallets.

We should take advantage of human nature. People care about personal gains like well-paying jobs and pay raises. And they instinctively oppose taxes. But would they oppose a tax if they directly profit from it?

The ideal approach would be to distribute a large portion of the carbon tax revenues back to the working class families to compensate for the higher costs of energy products and services.

This would address real concerns that carbon pricing can disproportionately affect the economically marginalized (as seen in France). But it also dangles a real incentive for citizens to actually demand a carbon tax.

Higher energy prices would still encourage a shift to renewables, and any energy conservation by consumers would financially benefit them even more. This is the core of the “Canadian backstop” proposal.

Carbon taxes could yield cash immediately — and loads of it. An estimated carbon price of US$40 to US$80 per tonne of carbon dioxideis needed by 2020 to achieve the Paris accord goals. Yet, in the 48 OECD and G20 countries (accounting for 80 per cent of global carbon emissions), 46 per cent of emissions are not taxed, while another 13 per cent was charged less than US$6 in 2018.

Science academies should take the lead

If governments are unwilling to convince the public of the personal benefits, the respective national academies of sciences should use their expertise on science and economics to take the lead. Citizens around the world should know how much “carbon dividend” a working family could earn every month if carbon revenues are returned as a dividend.

Even with a modest tax of $20 a tonne, the Canadian federal backstop would return $300 a year more to 70 per cent of the households affected. A more ambitious tax, say $60 per tonne, could be combined with explicit policies to return nearly all the revenue to households with the amount depending on their income levels.

A modest portion from the world’s biggest economies could be earmarked for climate adaptation in the most vulnerable developing countries. At minimum, this might ensure agreement with, or even widespread demands, for a carbon tax.

The best-case scenario is that a critical mass of citizens then starts showing interest in this extra income, and politicians respond with pragmatic carbon pricing design without alienating their core support base. If the estimated carbon dividend could be paid a year in advance, it would only sweeten the deal.

So let’s pressure the politicians across different political systems to act, or they risk alienating citizens who are waiting for their carbon dividend cheques.

France Suspends Gas Tax as Trump Falsely Blames Paris Agreement for Riots

French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans Tuesday to suspend an increase in fuel tax in response to growing pressure from protestors. Over the weekend, Macron canceled plans to attend COP24 amidst increasing tension in France.

President Emmanuel Macron announced plans Tuesday to suspend an increase in fuel tax in response to growing pressure from protestors. Over the weekend, Macron canceled plans to attend COP24 amidst increasing tension in France.

President Donald Trump on Twitter Tuesday evening conflated Macron's decision with a rejection of the Paris agreement, calling the accord "fatally flawed" while also retweeting a demonstrably false tweet from a right-wing pundit claiming that "radical leftist fuel taxes" are prompting the French to chant "'we want Trump'... through the streets of Paris."

"There's no viable solution to reducing emissions on the scale needed in France without a price on carbon pollutionas well as complementary policies, but a process that is not developed in an inclusive manner is destined to fail," said Pierre Cannet, head of climate and energy at WWF-France. "[The] announcement that the French government is freezing carbon tax shows that they put the cart before the horse by not addressing the social measures necessary for a just transition."

As reported by Vox:

While the protests may have started over the fuel tax, they have since morphed into a broader indictment of Macron's handling of the French economy and hisperceived elitist disregard for the effects his policies are having on France's working class.

...

Trump's disregard for the truth and active attempts to create his own reality—and to convince his supporters of that imagined reality—are nothing new.

But the fact that the sitting president of the United States either does not understand or is deliberately misrepresenting the basic dynamics of a massive political crisis roiling one of America's closest allies is deeply disturbing.

...

deeper dive:

Fuel tax: Bloomberg, BBC, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR. Trump: Vox, Reuters, Washington Examiner, Al Jazeera

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28112018/state-carbon-pricing-tax-fee-climate-change-washington-oregon-new-jersey-virginia-hawaii-massachusetts-new-york

no lnx many

Carbon Tax Wave? 7 States Considering Carbon Pricing to Fight Climate Change

Democratic election victories raised the odds of climate change policies succeeding, activists and analysts say. A national plan was also just floated in Congress.

Marianne Lavelle

BY MARIANNE LAVELLE

NOV 29, 2018

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee co-chairs the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 17 governors committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He is expected to announce a new state carbon pricing plan despite the defeat of a carbon fee ballot initiative this year. Credit: David Ryder/Getty Images

At least seven state governments are poised at the brink of putting a price on climate-warming carbon emissions within the next year. Some are considering new carbon taxes or fees. Others are making plans to join regional carbon markets.

The situation runs counter to the instant analysis of the November election, which focused on a defeat for carbon pricing in Washington state and discounted incremental progress across the board.

Overall, the midterm election results increased their odds for success, say activists and analysts who are watching for the next step in a policy realm where proposals have been many but commitments to act have been weak.

Carbon price proponents are encouraged as Democrats expanded their legislative majorities in key states, and supporters of climate action displaced foes. But advocates are still painfully aware of remaining obstacles, and some expect a prolonged campaign.

At the federal level, Congress also faces a new carbon pricing proposal, a bill introduced on Tuesday by a bipartisan group of House members. But in the current political climate—with a president who rejects science and promotes fossil fuels, and a Republican majority in the Senate blocking the path—short term progress may be limited to a select few green-leaning states.

"As more states experiment, we'll get more information, and you expand the market size for cleaner energy that's going to create incentives for more market to sell to," said Marc Hafstead, director of the Carbon Pricing Initiative at Resources for the Future, a think tank focused on environmental economics. "There's a fundamental issue, though, in that the states that are ready to move don't represent a lot of the emissions in the U.S. I think, at the end of the day, federal action is going to be required."

Map: Carbon Pricing in the States

All of the states that are now considering a price on carbon share two common traits.

As Hafstead noted, they have relatively low-carbon economies. Adding the states considering new carbon prices to those that already have some sort of carbon pricing—California with its pathbreaking cap-and-trade regime and the northeastern states via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI)—15 states, most of them among the least carbon-intensive in the nation, will have adopted fossil fuel surcharges of some kind. Together, they would account for 22 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, 34 percent of the U.S. population, and 41 percent of U.S. GDP.

They also face clear, pressing economic and human risks from climate change. On the West Coast, ocean warming and acidification is damaging the fishing industry and wildfires have menaced whole towns on the heels of drought. In the Northeast, storms and coastal flooding are wreaking havoc and raising costs as the seas relentlessly rise.

If More States Act, Congress May Step Up

Economists have long argued that the most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to put a price on fossil fuels. It drives innovation across the board, from conservation to new, green technology, and rewards the lowest-cost approach.

Policymakers often call the states laboratories of inventive policy, especially with federal action on the back burner.

"Anything that's working to reduce emissions is helpful when the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says we don't have a ton of time," said Mark Reynolds, executive director of the Citizens Climate Lobby, a carbon pricing advocacy group. "But in addition, it's always been our belief that the real potential benefit is that Congress sees that multiple states are acting and business starts saying, 'We can't function under 10 or 20 sets of rules.'"

That's why carbon pricing advocates in Congress are getting positioned to take advantage of any momentum. Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), cofounder of the Climate Solutions Caucus, introduced a fee-and-dividend bill on Tuesday with two other Democrats and two Republican members of the caucus—Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Francis Rooney of Florida. Their Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act of 2018, with an escalating fee on carbon emissions starting at $15 per ton with all revenue returned to households, has little chance of making it to the floor while the GOP still controls the House this year.

But the sponsors wanted to move quickly. "We thought it was important to introduce this now to show that as we prepare to head into a more bipartisan Congress that there is a bipartisan way forward on this issue," Deutch said. "It's the only way we can get anything done."

Here is a rundown of state carbon pricing initiatives currently in motion:

Oregon

The midterm election significantly boosted the prospects for a "cap-and-invest" program, which Gov. Kate Brown and Oregon's House and Senate leaders—all Democrats—have agreed is a top priority for the 2019 legislative session.

Not only did Brown win reelection, but Democrats also expanded control of the state legislature to a supermajority in each chamber—the three-fifths of seats required to raise taxes under the state's constitution. The legislature's Joint Interim Committee on Carbon Reduction has met six times since May to hear from experts and key stakeholders, like the state's forestry industry.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has flagged a carbon cap-and-invest program as a priority. Credit: Oregon Department of Transportation

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and state House and Senate leaders have flagged a carbon cap-and-invest program as a priority. Credit: Oregon Department of Transportation

Another election result added to the momentum in Oregon: 65 percent of voters in the state's largest city, Portland, approved a ballot initiative to raise $30 million a year through a tax on large businesses to help support the city's goal to achieve to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

"Oregonians know we need leadership to turbocharge our clean energy economy and reduce climate pollution in our state," said Tera Hurst, executive director of Renew Oregon.

Washington

In Washington state, legislative action on climate change remains a possibility, despite the rejection of a carbon fee by 57 percent of the state's voters in a ballot initiative—the second defeat for fossil fuel pricing in the state in two years.

Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who co-chairs the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 17 governors committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with the goals of the Paris agreement, has long called for a state carbon tax. Inslee's office said that the governor will make an announcement in early December on next steps in the wake of defeat of the ballot initiative he supported.

"Combating climate change remains a high priority for the Gov. Inslee," said Sharlett Mena, deputy director of the governor's Washington, D.C., office. "He and our team are in ongoing discussions about what his proposal for the upcoming state legislative session will look like."

Inslee had pushed for a carbon tax in the legislature last spring, but he dropped his proposal when, he said at the time, it fell "one or two votes shy" of the support he needed. His position may be stronger now since Democrats, who already held the majority in both chambers in Olympia, gained two Senate seats and six in the House in the midterms.

The shape of the new legislature is giving proponents hope for action despite the defeat of Initiative 1631, the carbon fee proposal, which would have put the revenue into clean energy and community and worker assistance. It fell under the weight of overwhelming spending on opposition advertising, mostly from fossil fuel interests.

"We are all recovering from a hard outcome with I-1631," Vlad Gutman-Britten, Washington director of the advocacy group Climate Solutions, wrote in a blog post. But he said carbon pricing opponents have new opportunities for action in the legislature. "I'm not sure we've ever had such an enthusiastic class of newly-minted leaders, including Democrats and Republicans across the state that are replacing retiring incumbents, as well as those filling ... positions that are changing party hands."

But others argue that Democratic lawmakers, with under 60 percent of the seats in both chambers, may be wary of revisiting carbon pricing so soon.

"The voters in Washington state just went through a hard-fought ballot initiative on the carbon tax," said Scott Segal, partner with the law and lobbying firm Bracewell LLP, which represents energy industry clients. "The two houses of the Washington State Legislature are fairly evenly divided, and the November election results are a very recent and very conclusive taking of the electorate's temperature on carbon taxes. If I were in the legislature, I'd be a little nervous about trying to overturn a statewide vote so recently taken."

Some analysts argue that carbon pricing is a policy better suited to the legislative process than to a ballot verdict by citizens.

"You really need to legislate a policy that's this complicated, and have a process that allows for changes to be made," said Hafstead. "The thing with a ballot initiative—the policy is kind of locked in place. You don't have the give and take."

Massachusetts

Massachusetts is already a RGGI member, but activists and some lawmakers have been pushing for more.

Climate campaigners fought to change the face of the Massachusetts legislature this year after House lawmakers backpedaled on a revenue-neutral carbon tax that the Senate had unanimously passed.

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups launched a campaign to defeat the party leaders they blamed for capitulating to fossil fuel interests. Two veteran Democratic House members—Jeffrey Sanchez, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Byron Rushing, the assistant majority leader—were ousted in the primary.

They fell to lawyer and activist Nika Elugardo and emergency room physician Jon Santiago, who made climate change key parts of their platforms. Both political novices, they won the general election. And two Republican House seats also flipped in upset victories by Sierra Club-endorsed Democrats: lawyers and activists Tram Nguyen and Becca Rausch, also electoral newcomers.

Massachusetts still has a divided government, with Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, who won reelection, saying he prefers to continue to work to reduce greenhouse gases within the RGGI nine-state compact. (A cap-and-trade system, it puts a price only on electric utility emissions.) Environmental groups argue that while RGGI has been successful, it is not cutting emissions fast enough. If Democrats choose to expand carbon pricing, they hold the two-thirds of votes necessary in both the House and Senate to override a veto.

New York

The governing board of the independent electric grid operator in New York, also a RGGI state, expects to vote next year on a proposal to use its authority to incorporate the social costs of carbon—a measure of the future damages from pollution expressed in today's dollars—into the state's wholesale electricity market.

ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm that advises investors, said it has "high expectations" that some sort of carbon pricing will be implemented in New York by 2021.

ClearView has been tracking for its clients what it calls a "second wave" of greenhouse gas pricing initiatives. (RGGI and California's programs marked the "first wave.") Although ClearView sees little sign that carbon pricing is moving beyond the states that have relatively low-carbon economies, it has told its clients that increased ambition in states like New York and Massachusetts could mark "an inflection point towards a nation of bottom-up carbon prices in the absence of a top-down, federal program."

Officials of the New York Independent System Operator have said they will abandon the effort if a carbon price proves significantly more expensive to consumers than current state policies. But so far, studies the NYISO has commissioned have shown a carbon pricing approach in the wholesale market could result in lower costs for consumers instead.

New Jersey and Virginia

Regulators are moving forward in both New Jersey and Virginia for the states to join RGGI, following the directives of Democratic governors elected in 2017.

For New Jersey, it would be a return to the regional carbon market. One analysis released earlier this year found that the state forfeited tens of millions of dollars in revenue because of Republican Gov. Chris Christie's decision to exit RGGI in 2011—two years after New Jersey helped found the initiative.

Under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy's directive,the state's Department of Environmental Protection is expected to finalize its proposed cap on carbon emissions by the end of this year, with an eye to approving it in the spring.

Virginia's air pollution control board approved the regulations to implement RGGI for public comment on Oct. 29. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality is expected to have a public comment period early next year with the rules to be finalized in the spring.

Hawaii

Hawaii's Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission, established by the state legislature last year to come up with a greenhouse gas reduction plan, met this week and recommended that lawmakers enact carbon pricing.

"The Commission believes that putting a price on carbon is the most effective single action that will achieve Hawaii's ambitious and necessary emissions reduction goals," a release from the commission said. It didn't outline a specific mechanism, but it focused on transportation emissions and said carbon pricing must be both equitable and adequate to change behavior.

Hawi Wind Farm on the Big Island of Hawaii. Credit: John S. Lander/LightRocket via Getty Images

Hawaii has a goal of getting 100 percent of its power from renewable energy by 2045. Credit: John S. Lander/LightRocket via Getty Images

Democrats maintained their overwhelming majorities in the Hawaii House and Senate in the midterm elections, and legislative leaders are united with Hawaii Gov. David Ige in favoring strong climate action.

In June, Ige signed into law a bill making Hawaii the first state in the country to legally commit to a zero-emissions, carbon-neutral economy by 2045. That would build on the pioneering step Hawaii took in 2015 as the first state to set a deadline (also 2045) for generating 100 percent of its power from renewable sources.

Renewable energy has been growing rapidly in Hawaii, now accounting for more than 15 percent of power generated in the state. Hawaii has an economic impetus to move to clean energy—it long has been the state with the highest electricity prices because of its heavy dependence on imported petroleum (and some coal) to power its isolated island electricity grids.

Other States and Washington, D.C.

The list is not exhaustive. Lawmakers from nine states have joined in a Carbon Costs Coalition to work together on ideas for design of pricing proposals. The election increased the odds for action in several of those states, including in Vermont, where Democrats built a strong enough majority in the state House to override a veto. That could give climate advocates leverage over Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican who has resisted calls for a carbon pricing study. But even Democrats are divided on what course to follow, and for now the pending study is all they have pushed through.

In Pennsylvania,a coalition of more than 60 environmental, health and religious groups, businesses and communities were set to file a petition Wednesday asking the state's environmental regulators to create an economy-wide greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program. The proposal is based on California's program to rein in emissions, but it takes advantage of a quirk in Pennsylvania law—an environmental rights amendment that was adopted in the state's constitution in the 1970s. The state Supreme Court has recently interpreted that provision broadly to control certain fracking activities in Pennsylvania, which has become the No. 3 state behind California and Texas in production of carbon emissions due to the natural gas boom.

"This is the right time and the right place" for the carbon pricing proposal, said Joe Minott, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council.

Also, the city council of the District of Columbia on Tuesday voted to commit the nation's capital to 100 percent clean energy by 2032. The council included a provision authorizing carbon pricing of transportation emissions if similar policy is adopted in the two states where most of its commuters reside: Maryland and Virginia.

Carbon Pricing Is Politically Tricky

Piecing together a carbon pricing policy state-by-state is not an easy undertaking, even in blue states.

Charles Komanoff, an energy policy analyst who directs the Carbon Tax Center in New York and has long pushed for state carbon pricing, said he has come to believe that it is "intrinsically tricky" politically. The ballot initiative that Washington voters rejected, for instance, would have exempted from the carbon fee a number of "energy-intensive trade-exposed" industries, like aluminum, because of the risk they would simply move to another state instead of cutting emissions. Opponents of the ballot initiative seized on the exemptions to argue it was unfair to businesses that weren't able to cut such deals.

"The idea of being the first state, and how neighboring states might capture an advantage, and how do you handle fuel imports and trade—it feels more complex to do it in one state than in an entire country," said Komanoff. "Maybe we're back to the long game of Washington, D.C., and basically overwhelming the Republican Party in the next one or two election cycles. In a way, that's like going back to 2008 or 2009, which is depressing, considering we've lost a decade or more which we couldn't afford."

George Frampton, co-founder of the Partnership for Responsible Growth, a nonprofit bipartisan coalition working to build support for carbon pricing, believes climate action advocates have more work to do in educating the public on why putting a price on carbon makes sense for households and the economy, as well as for the planet.

"People are beginning to realize if we are going to have a meaningful national climate policy it is going to have to be some kind of carbon fee," said Frampton, a former Clinton administration wildlife official and longtime conservation leader. "It's the only thing that has a chance of getting bipartisan support, it is economically positive, and it produces huge amounts of revenue."

"The question is how can we educate people to see that there are ways of doing this that are deserving of very broad support?"

Editor's Note: This story was corrected to add Maine to the list of RGGI states.

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POLITICS REGULATION BUSINESS AND ACCOUNTABILITY

CLIMATE CHANGE CARBON PRICING

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desmog

Washington

In Washington state, Initiative 1631 was a high-stakes ballot measure proposing a first-in-the-nation fee on the state's major carbon polluters, including its oil refineries. Based on mail-in ballots counted so far, the measure appears to have been voted down by over 56 percent of voters.

The No on 1631 campaign, primarily financed by the oil and gas industry, including BP and Koch Industries, spent a record $31 million to oppose Initiative 1631. The measure's proponents also accused the No campaign of misleading Latino voters in the state with Spanish-language flyers that listed endorsements from a dozen Latino businesses that later said they did not understand or approve being listed.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fliers-citing-latino-businesses-opposition-to-carbon-fee-ignites-campaign-controversy/

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Flyer citing Latino businesses’ opposition to carbon fee ignites campaign controversy

Originally published October 31, 2018 at 6:00 am Updated October 31, 2018 at 11:01 am

Javier Torres Jimenez, left, speaks inside his store, Mi Ranchito, during a Tuesday news conference in Seattle. Jimenez said he didn’t know the name of his business would be included in a No on 1631 mailer.

From left Jimenez, his daughter Andrea Gutierrez and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

A flyer mailed out by the No-on-1631 that businesses that the opposition campaign says are against the carbon-fee initiative. (Courtesy of No on 1631)

A flyer mailed out by the No on 1631 campaign, written in Spanish and English, urges voters to join a coalition opposing the measure. (Courtesy of No on 1631 )

Javier Torres Jimenez’s store was the site of a news conference Tuesday, (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)

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Proponents of Initiative 1631, on the Nov. 6 statewide ballot, allege misleading tactics, and some business owners say they did not expect their enterprises to be listed on the flyer. No on 1631 says it got signed consents for the endorsements.

By Hal Bernton and Agueda Pacheco-Flores

Seattle Times staff reporters

A Spanish-language flyer mailed by the No on 1631 campaign urges voters to “join our coalition and more than a hundred Latino owned businesses” to defeat the statewide November ballot measure that would put a carbon fee on fossil fuels.

But the legitimacy of those endorsements erupted Tuesday into a volatile campaign controversy, as I-1631 proponents accused the opposition campaign of misleading tactics, while some business owners said they did not expect their enterprises to be listed on the flyer.

Cesar Lara, owner of Seattle’s Taqueria las Delicias, told The Seattle Times, “I don’t have any knowledge that they were using the name of my company … We need to put a stop to this.”

Here’s a guide to learn more about what’s on the ballot »

“We don’t know about those politics. We don’t do any of that,” said Carlos Vasquez, co-owner of La Conasupo Restaurant and Market in Seattle. “People are free to vote for what they want.”

Dana Bieber, spokeswoman for No on 1631, said owners of all businesses listed on the flyer signed consent forms. Those forms, copies of which were reviewed by The Seattle Times, laid out a case against the initiative and asked permission to publicly identify the businesses as opposing the ballot measure.

I-1631 proponents said they learned late last week about the flyer. They said they contacted business owners and about a dozen told them they did not expect the names to appear on a flyer.

“They were upset their names were included in the flyer,” said Nick Abraham, a spokesman for Yes on 1631. “They were trying to rush and grab folks without properly explaining what they were doing.”

The campaign held a Tuesday news conference where Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who has appeared in a TV ad endorsing the initiative, made an appearance.

How much would I-1631’s carbon fee cost you at the gas pump and to heat your home?

Oil refiners invest millions to fight carbon-fee initiative — and would see big payoff if their campaign wins

If Washington voters OK a carbon-pollution fee, who decides how to spend all that money?

“I am not sure how low a campaign can go but this is pretty low,” Ferguson said. He urged the Washington Public Disclosure Commission to investigate for possible violations of campaign rules that regulate the use of endorsements.

The campaign mailer listing the Latino businesses against the initiative described how I-1631 would be a new energy tax that would be paid by families and workers in agriculture.

The news conference was held at Mi Ranchito, a South Seattle market that was one of the businesses listed on the No on 1631 flyer.

After the news conference, Bieber sent The Seattle Times a copy of a consent form signed by Mi Ranchito owner Javier Torres Jimenez. The consent form called the measure a “deeply flawed unfair energy tax” and included this line: “You may publicly list our organization as a member of No on 1631.”

The No on 1631 campaign later on Tuesday allowed The Seattle Times to view consent forms for the 96 businesses named in the flyer.

“Mr. Jimenez — like each and every business listed on our flyer — signed a form joining our coalition,” Bieber said in a statement. “We are appalled the Yes campaign has chosen to harass and vilify businesses and individuals who have spoken out against I-1631.”

Jimenez said a representative of the opposition campaign telephoned him Tuesday morning, and told him not to hold the news conference and not to “believe anything he was being told.”

He said an opposition representative then came to his business before the news conference and showed him the document he had signed.

Jimenez told a reporter he thought it was about a tax on sugar and other food, and would not have signed it if he understood better.

The Seattle Times also reviewed a copy of a consent form signed by a co-owner of La Conasupo. Co-owner Pablo de Vesos Doroteo told The Seattle Times he thought the measure was about a sugar-drink tax and he didn’t realize the business would be listed as part of the opposition campaign.

Lara, owner of Seattle’s Taqueria Las Delicias, said he remembered someone coming to his business to get his signature on a form. But he thought the document he signed was against sugar, rent and city taxes.

Lara said his business is open six days a week, 12 hours a day, and he hasn’t had much time to pay attention to initiatives.

“Sincerely, we aren’t very aware of the news and the taxes and the laws that are on the way,” Lara said.

I-1631 has emerged as the costliest ballot measure in state history, with the oil industry accounting for most of the more than $31 million that has been raised by the No on 1631 campaign.

The ballot measure would put an escalating pollution fee on most state fossil-fuel emissions, and use the money to invest in programs and projects to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists say are driving climate change. Some of the money would be set aside to try to reduce the effects of rising fossil-fuel costs on low-income Washington residents.

Opponents have labeled the carbon fee a regressive tax that would hit hard at low-wage workers who have to drive long distances to work.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @hbernton.

Agueda Pacheco-Flores: apacheco@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @AguedaPachecOh.

https://www.ecowatch.com/washington-carbon-tax-big-oil-2616808725.html

Oil Pours Record $30M to Sway Voters Against Nation's First Carbon Tax

If voters approve Initiative 1631 on Nov. 6, Washington state will take a significant step in climate action by becoming the first state in the nation to enact a fee on carbon emissions. That is, unless Big Oil can stop it.

The U.S. oil industry has pumped a record $30 million to stop the carbon tax, which environmentalists have tried to enact for years, Reuters reported, citing state data. Meanwhile, proponents—including green groups and climate activist billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs—have spent $15.2 million.

"With Big Oil spending $30 million, that makes it a real fight," Bill Holland, state policy director for the League of Conservation Voters, told Reuters. "It has been a frightening amount of money."

Washington ranks fifth in the nation in crude oil refining capacity for making gasoline and other petroleum products, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Initiative 1631 imposes a starting fee of $15 per metric ton on carbon emissions, beginning in 2020. This fee rises $2 every year until the state hits its 2035 emissions reductions goals and is on track to meet its 2050 goals. If passed, the tax is expected to generate $2.3 billion in revenue for green infrastructure, clean transportation and help communities most impacted by pollution.

A recent statewide Crosscut/Elway Poll among registered voters shows 50 percent approval of the measure, 36 percent opposed and 14 percent undecided, The opposition is led by the Western States Petroleum Association, a trade organization that has raised $31.2 million from energy companies and business groups for the "No on 1631" campaign—the most money ever spent in Washington state history to defeat a ballot initiative.

BP America contributed the most with $11.5 million, followed by $7.2 million from Phillips 66 and Andeavor with $4.4 million, Reuters said. The three energy companies have refineries in the state. American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers and Valero Energy Corporation also donated funds.

The money has been spent on digital ads, flyers, mailers and television ads aired during this month's Major League Baseball World Series. Opponents say the tax will "be paid by Washington families and small businesses."