Carbon Tax

SEE CARBON TAX2 11/18

see cap and trade, hmmn this replaces?

2x?

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/2112**2015**/exxon-mobil-carbon-tax-rhetoric-or-reality-climate-change-rex-tillerson/

as Congress was gearing up to vote on major U.S. climate legislation, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson spoke up in favor of a carbon tax in a January 2009 speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.}:

“As a businessman it is hard to speak favorably about any new tax,” Tillerson said in a four-paragraph passage on page six of a seven-page speech. “But a carbon tax strikes me as a more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach” than the complex cap-and-trade bill that Congress was considering.

Exxon now says that speech was the beginning of its consistent stance in favor of a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels. Leading up to the United Nations climate talks in Paris this month, the company again said that if carbon regulations ever became necessary, a carbon tax would be the best approach, a position in line with that of mainstream economists.

But Exxon has never put its political muscle behind a carbon tax. It has not stepped up campaign contributions to lawmakers because they favor one. Nor has it lobbied for carbon tax bills in Congress, mounted any advertising campaigns in favor of the idea, or funded organizations that push for such laws at the federal or state level.

Exxon also refused to sign on to a letter from other international oil giants, including Royal Dutch Shell and BP, that strongly urged the Paris climate negotiators to push for a global price on carbon. The conference led to a treaty urging the phasing out of net carbon emissions from fossil fuels within the next several decades.

Instead, Exxon has channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American Legislative Exchange Council in recent years and sits on its corporate board. ALEC adopted a resolution in 2013 opposing “all federal and state efforts to establish a carbon tax on fuels for electricity and transportation.”

In June 2013, four years after his favorable comments on carbon taxes, Tillerson waffled.

“As to our advocacy around a carbon tax—I would not support putting a carbon tax in place today because I think we still have a lot of gains to be made through technology and other less intrusive policies on the economy which are showing results,” he said in a speech before The City Club of Cleveland. [vid

yet in a blog post written on Dec. 2, “ExxonMobil and the carbon tax,” company spokesman Ken Cohen wrote that company executives have echoed Tillerson’s 2009 message “in countless private briefings with members of congress on carbon tax policy options.”

In one meeting a few months ago with Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, Exxon officials voiced their support for “a price on carbon,” Lieu said in an interview. When Lieu asked what they would do if he drafted a carbon tax bill, the Exxon representatives said “they would take a look at it,” he told InsideClimate News.

“They didn’t say they wouldn’t support it, and they didn’t say they would,” said Lieu, who has called for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Exxon for possible climate deception. “It’s clear that they are not going around championing their position. If they actually believe this internally, then they ought to do so in a much louder way than just quietly sticking it on a website.”

In a 2012 Fox News interview, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said he met with Exxon officials and told them carbon taxes were a bad idea and were going nowhere in Congress.

“It’s not going to come from the Republicans,” Upton. “We’re going to do our very best to make sure this is not a mole that pops up again.” Upton also said he didn’t think Exxon’s support of a carbon tax was “a very serious effort on their part.”

“I would give them the benefit of the doubt for sincerity,” said Steve Valk, director of communications for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, an organization that marshals grassroots support for political climate policy. “From the company’s perspective, a carbon tax is the policy that gives them the most certainty in terms of future business decisions. They know something must be done and they consider the carbon tax the best and fairest option.”

Exxon declined a request by InsideClimate News to discuss its position.

“Based on past reporting by InsideClimate News, we do not believe our comments will be treated fairly and therefore have no response to your questions,” Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said in an email.

A day later, Cohen put up his blog post on the carbon tax. In it, he wrote that Exxon has “repeated our support for this policy option” with members of Congress, socially responsible investors and outside experts.

Greg Dotson, vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress, a public policy organization supporting a list of progressive issues, urges a close study of what Exxon is saying.The company isn’t explicitly saying it wants a carbon tax, but is saying it prefers a carbon tax to other options in the face of regulatory intervention.

“Are they saying this is the best of bad options, or are they saying we support a carbon tax?” Dotson said. “The full understanding of what they support has not come to light.”

Exxon’s renewed emphasis on its carbon tax posture comes in response to an investigation of its evolving climate policy positions by InsideClimate News, as well as by other news organizations. The investigation found that Exxon occupied a position at the forefront of climate science decades ago, until it pivoted toward emphasizing scientific uncertainty to forestall strong policy action to slow climate change.

Since the early 1990s, the idea of taxing energy to limit emissions has been at the center of a lively debate, including President Clinton’s failed attempt to impose a BTU tax.

The largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels, so many economists advocate an excise tax that puts a price on the carbon content of those fuels.

Carbon taxes wouldn’t set limits on emissions as other carbon pricing concepts do.

Rather, a carbon tax on fossil fuels discourages their use by making them more expensive and encourages the adoption of cleaner alternatives.

Since 2009, when Exxon said it began supporting the idea of a carbon tax, more than a dozen pieces of legislation have been proposed to institute various forms of a tax. Each proposal carried different provisions addressing the initial price on carbon, how quickly the tax would increase, and what the revenue would be used for.

Earlier this year, for example, Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii introduced legislation that would tax carbon at an initial $42 a ton, rising every year by 2 percent more than the inflation rate. The revenue would be designated for a variety of goals, such as a corporate tax reduction, deficit reduction, payroll tax refunds and Social Security and disability programs.

Other legislation included a 2013 proposal by Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, now running for president as a Democrat, and Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, that would have imposed a $20-a-ton carbon pollution fee at first, with increases of 5.6 percent a year over 10 years. Sixty percent of revenue would have gone back to consumers through a rebate, and the rest would have been invested in renewable energy, such as solar, wind and geothermal.

A 2009 proposal by Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), would have established a $10-a-metric ton tax with a $10-a-year increase. The revenue would have been used to assist industries affected by the tax; to fill the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund; and to give taxpayers a payroll tax credit.

Exxon hasn’t issued a detailed policy position addressing these proposals or outlining how high such a tax should be to slow or halt global warming, how the tax should be structured, or what the revenue would be used for. The company has said only that it favors a revenue-neutral tax, meaning revenue from the tax would be returned to the public or businesses through tax cuts or some sort of rebate.

The company does make clear that a carbon tax should supplant many kinds of emission controls. Exxon describes a carbon tax as “a more effective policy option than cap-and-trade schemes, regulations, mandates, or standards.”

In his blog post, Cohen wrote that Exxon “has included a proxy price on carbon in our business planning since 2007” to “analyze the impact of a price on carbon.” The “proxy cost” approaches $80 a ton in some regions and is intended to reflect “all types of actions and policies that governments may take.”

However, Exxon says this “proxy” cost is not a recommendation.

“It is simply our effort to quantify what we believe government policies…could cost to our investment opportunities,” the company says.

Kert Davies, founder of the Virginia-based Climate Investigations Center, an environmental advocacy organization, says he is skeptical of Exxon’s carbon tax position.

“It seems like Exxon favors a carbon tax when and if their arms are twisted behind their backs, but until that time, they only like the theory of a carbon tax when it gives them something to be ‘for,'” he said. “When Tillerson blurted out his personal predisposition against a carbon tax in 2013, it was probably a clue to the real conversation going on inside the company.”

At the time Tillerson made his comment in support of a carbon tax back in 2009, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill posed a potential threat to Exxon’s business. The measure was laden with loopholes and subsidies that would have kept coal competitive with lower-carbon natural gas, one of Exxon’s biggest products. The legislation passed the House by a vote of 219-212 but was never taken up by the Senate.

In a potent bit of rhetoric, opponents of that bill often re-labeled it “cap and tax,” asserting that it was essentially the same thing as a carbon tax.

Bringing up a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade made sense for Exxon, business and political analysts wrote at the time. For one thing, each time the carbon tax idea has come up in Congress, it has been met with resistance by large numbers of lawmakers, as well as much of the domestic fossil fuel industry—especially the coal business—and politically influential organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute.

Exxon’s business would benefit from a carbon tax, said Bob Inglis, who introduced a bill in 2008 proposing a carbon tax while he was a Republican U.S. representative from South Carolina. Inglis said it would shrink the market for high-carbon fuels, especially coal, and increase demand for cleaner-burning fuels including natural gas. Because of this, the European energy giants wanted Paris negotiators to consider a price on carbon.

“Anybody who sells natural gas would do better if CO2 were taxed,” Inglis said. “Natural gas beats coal in the amount of CO2 emissions. So if you make the dirtier burning fuels accountable for their emissions, it makes natural gas more attractive.” Inglis, who lost his seat in 2010 to a Tea Party-backed challenger largely because of his climate views, is now executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a Virginia-based conservative think tank that addresses energy and climate issues.

Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center, a self-described libertarian think tank, said Exxon may be embracing strategic reasons for supporting a carbon tax without pressing for one.

“Lobbying for a carbon tax may not be the best way the company sees of spending its political capital,” he said. Exxon may prefer to use its influence to advance oil and gas exploration on federal lands or to help lift the ban on exporting U.S. oil, which passed Congress last week, he said. Also, voicing support for a carbon tax is relatively safe because it isn’t likely to become a reality soon, Taylor said.

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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."

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Supporters

Organizations That Raise Concerns About Cap-and-Trade with Offsets and Point to Simpler, More Direct CO2 Pricing Mechanisms

:{:{Carbon Tax Center}:

11 Hanover Square, 21st Floor

New York, NY 10005}:

quite long detailled2017?

https://www.carbontax.org/conservatives/

no lnx many, some charts

ome conservatives have been willing to discuss and even endorse carbon taxes as the cornerstone of climate policy that fits within their principles of free markets and individual choice, though in many instances this support comes heavily hedged. At this writing (May 2017), there are three prominent loci of support for — or, at least, openness to — carbon taxing among U.S. conservatives:

A March 2017 resolution “expressing the commitment of the House of Representatives to conservative environmental stewardship,” signed by 20 House Republicans.

The Climate Leadership Council, which in Feb. 2017 issued “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends,” a policy brief signed by Republican senior statesmen George Shultz and James Baker, among others.

The Niskanen Center, a libertarian think-tank headed by one-time climate denier Jerry Taylor that has become a beehive of thoughtful, analytical carbon tax advocacy rooted in free-market ideology.

This page summarizes recent activity by these groups, which flies in the face of the climate science denialism that has become a hallmark of the Republican Party, prior to and during the Trump Administration.. It also compiles statements from conservative commentators and other right-leaning public personages supporting carbon taxing — often but not exclusively as a potential revenue source to reduce the U.S. budget deficit or to finance reductions in other taxes such as the Corporate Income Tax.

Before we dive in, we have three survey articles to recommend.

One is Ben Adler’s 2015 post in Grist dissecting three contrasting streams of thought on climate policy among so-called conservative policy intellectuals. Adler’s thumbnails of positions on climate policy and economics voiced by prominent conservatives including Ross Douthat, Charles Krauthammer, Reihan Salam, Greg Mankiw and 11 others make for a fascinating and informative read.

Another is Ted Halstead’s Nov. 2015 Atlantic article, The Republican Solution for Climate Change. Subtitled “Republicans have the ability to offer a market-based solution to climate change, so why aren’t they doing it?,” the article is more an exploration of why the GOP should support carbon taxing than an explanation of why they don’t. Halstead founded the Climate Leadership Council a year later.

The third is a penetrating March 2017 story in Yale Environment 360 (published at the college’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies), Climate Converts: The Conservatives Who Are Switching Sides on Warming.

2017 House G.O.P. Climate Resolution

In March 2017, 17 House Republican members re-issued a 2015 resolution “expressing the commitment of the House of Representatives to conservative environmental stewardship.” (Three more signed on in May.) In a blog post in March, we called the resolution “a positive if halting step in the possible emergence of a critical mass of Republican officeholders to endorse and eventually vote for a carbon tax to combat climate change.”

Map shows the 17 GOP House members who signed the March 2017 resolution discussed in text. Their ranks grew to 20 in May.

The resolution doesn’t call for a carbon tax or any specific climate action; it doesn’t even mention “climate change,” though it does refer to “a changing climate.” In fact, the resolution is word-for-word identical to one issued eighteen months ago, in September 2015, also by 17 House Republicans, a group that included 10 of the signatories of the new resolution. (The other seven signers from 2015 are out of office — five declined to run, and two lost their seats to Democrats last November; none were “primaried” out. Of the ten new signers — counting the three who signed the resolution in May 2017 — four were newly elected to the House in 2016.)

Nevertheless, the resolution stands as a positive if halting step in the possible emergence of a critical mass of Republican officeholders to endorse and eventually vote for a carbon tax to combat climate change.

The resolution was by and for Republicans only, a not unreasonable way to strike a small flame that would not be overshadowed by solid Democratic support for climate action. The 20 Republican House signers hail almost evenly from Trump states (nine signatories) and Clinton states (eleven), with six from New York, three each from Pennsylvania and Florida, and the other eight from eight other states. Only one represents a heartland state — Don Bacon, who just won election to the House from Nebraska — though three others are from the mountain West: Mark Amodei of Nevada, Mia Love of Utah and Mike Coffman of Colorado. (See map.)

Climate Leadership Council

Editorial endorsements of the CLC’s carbon tax proposal span a broad ideological range.

Far and away the greatest attention-getting development in carbon taxes this year (2017) was the emergence of the Climate Leadership Council and its Feb. 2017 brief, The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends. The paper was issued under the signatures of Republican icons James Baker and George Shultz, both of whom had served Republican presidents as secretaries of state and treasury and who personify an erstwhile (pre-Bush 43 as well as pre-Trump) Republican establishment.

The carbon tax outlined in the council’s brief begins with a $40/ton CO2 fee, which would rise over time at an as-yet unspecified rate. One hundred percent of the carbon revenues would be returned to households as dividends, making the proposal the first Republican-branded carbon tax employing the dividend approach championed by the Citizens Climate Lobby, rather than dedicating the revenues to cutting corporate income taxes.

CO2 reductions from CLC proposal will turn on escalation rate from initial $40/ton.

CTC endorsed the proposal on the date it was issued, including the council’s proposed swap” rescinding the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan in favor of the carbon tax. “The important work of the Clean Power Plan was largely completed anyway,” we said, pointing out that roughly 80 percent of the plan’s targeted reduction in electricity-sector emissions for 2030 had already been achieved by the end of 2016. “The proposed carbon tax is the logical and necessary next step,” we said, “instilling incentives throughout the U.S. economy to replace fossil fuels with clean energy.”

Details about CLC’s proposal may be found on their site.

CLC renewed its call for a $40/ton carbon fee “in exchange for a rollback of Obama-era climate rules” in a May 9 New York Times op-ed, The Business Care for the Paris Climate Accord, co-authored by Shultz and Halstead.

Niskanen Center

A signal development since 2014 has been the emergence of the Niskanen Center as a leader in conservatives’ (and especially libertarians’) interest in carbon taxing.

The center’s founder-director, Jerry Taylor, was an energy policy analyst at the Cato Institute, where he helped forge Cato’s unflinching climate denialism (“I used to write skeptic talking points for a living,” he said in an April 2017 interview) until an immersion in climate science led him to a change of heart and a 180-degree turnaround on climate.

In March 2015, the Niskanen Center launched a full-scale assault on conservative obstruction of climate policy with a provocative paper by Taylor, The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax. The paper argued that if conservative denial of climate science is grounded in ideological aversion to command-and-control regulation, as proposed in EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, conservatives should embrace and promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax as a more efficient, less burdensome, “free market” alternative and do so soon, because once established, EPA regulations will be almost impossible to uproot.

Taylor followed that paper with a series of bold blog posts further articulating his proposal, including these two in March 2015, Could Carbon Taxes Deliver a Double Dividend? and Debating the Carbon Tax, writing in the latter:

[C]onservatives ought to abandon their “just say no” policy towards addressing climate change. Global warming is real, industrial emissions are the main cause, and warming imposes risk that warrant a policy response… [C]arbon taxes are a far more efficient means of controlling greenhouse gas emissions than command-and-control regulation. [A] carbon tax at the levels presently discussed in Washington would not unduly burden the economy, and that’s particularly true once we consider the (non-climate) environmental benefits that would follow from the tax as well as the benefits of any offsetting tax cuts.

Taylor’s most recent (April 2017) paper, Debating Carbon Taxes With Oren Cass (And Bill Gates), is a lively and thoughtful survey of energy developments worldwide, particularly in the developing nations. In the lengthy (5,000 words) paper he tackles various precepts of conservative opposition to climate policy, e.g., unilateral U.S. action on climate is futile and self-defeating, and intentional abandonment of fossil fuels will consign poor nations and people to perpetual poverty. The paper is factual and filled with encouraging data on economic and technical progress in the solar and wind industries, and the clean-air co-benefits of phasing out coal, oil and gas.

Politicians

(Former Rep.) Bob Inglis, republicEn

During the fifth of his six terms as a member of Congress from South Carolina (Republican, 4th CD), in 2008, Bob Inglis introduced a bill proposing a revenue-neutral carbon tax whose revenue would reduce payroll taxes. Since leaving office in 2010 — he was primaried out by Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy — Inglis has become a vocal advocate of carbon taxes as a free-market conservative alternative to regulations, subsidies and cap-and-trade systems. His organization republicEn unabashedly calls on “Conservatives [to] unify America to thwart climate warming.”

Inglis sounded a strongly optimistic — some might say naive — note in a March 2017 interview with Ensia.com, when asked whether the Trump administration might warm to the Baker-Shultz carbon tax proposal enunciated in Feb. 2017 by the Climate Leadership Council (see description above):

I think we could see Donald Trump embracing this if he could think of saying it this way at one of his rallies: “America is going to act first. We’re going to lead the world to a solution on climate change. We’re going to put a tax on carbon dioxide. We’re going to offset it with a dividend to the people or by other tax cuts and then we’re going to impose it on Chinese goods and everybody else’s goods unless they’ve got the same tax on carbon dioxide. If they want to sue us in the [World Trade Organization], well, I’m used to being in court. So, we’ll meet you there and beat you there. And as we beat you, you make your own decision to whether you want to put the same price on carbon dioxide at home or whether you want to keep on paying our tax on entry. Either way it’s fine with us.”

I know [passage of a carbon tax] seems improbable or even impossible. It looks impossible, but I think it’s going to go to the inevitable without ever passing through the probable.

Inglis consistently points to efficient markets as a bedrock conservative principle, arguing that for markets to work, fossil fuel prices must reflect true costs. In a January 2016 piece in the Daily Caller advocating a revenue-neutral carbon tax, he wrote:

Conservatives need a solution which doesn’t grow government, which trusts in the power of accountable marketplaces to deliver innovation and which empowers individuals in the liberty of enlightened self-interest to make their own decisions. Eureka!

Inglis also unabashedly praises climate science as a window into “the intricacies of this glorious creation.” That quote and these that follow are from an interview w/ Inglis published in the Dallas Morning News on August 29, 2014 under the headline, “Q&A: Bob Inglis on the conservative case for a carbon tax.”

Q: Isn’t a tax government intervention? Make a conservative case for a tax.

A: There is a role for government. It is simply being the honest cop on the beat that says to all fuels that you have to “own your own costs” so that the market can judge your product. We should eliminate all the subsidies. No more Solyndras. No more production tax credits for wind. No more credits for electric vehicles. No more special tax provisions for oil and gas. Level the playing field. The big challenge is reaching fellow conservatives and convincing them that the biggest subsidy of all may be to belch and burn into the trash dump in the sky — for free. That lack of accountability may be the biggest subsidy of them all.

Q: A lot of conservatives don’t accept climate change. Why do you?

A: I do because there is every reason to celebrate the science. Science is the process of discovery of the intricacies of this glorious creation. Is science settled? No. Science is never settled and we will never know all of the glories of the creation. But what we are discovering in climate science is that there is a risk that we can avoid from the creative innovation that comes from free enterprise. We have a danger and an opportunity. As a conservative, I say what a great opportunity to create wealth, innovate and sell innovation around the world.

Q: So why have conservatives rejected the science?

A: It has been presented as doom-and-gloom, this apocalyptic vision. Denial is a pretty good coping mechanism. The second reason is the assumed solution is a bigger government that taxes more, regulates more and decreases liberty. Given that, conservatives doubt whether we have a problem.

The Dallas Morning News piece has other revealing quotes as well. For more about Inglis, see The conservative case for a carbon tax (Houston Business Journal, 2/20/14), and Could Republicans ever support a carbon tax? Bob Inglis thinks so (Washington Post, 3/14/13).

Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz

(Material in this sub-section should be viewed as precursors to Shultz’s co-sponsorship of the Climate Leadership Council’s 2017 issue brief discussed in detail above. Note that Shultz was one of the 32 signatories to the Carbon Tax Center’s November 2015 Call to Paris Climate Negotiators to Tax Carbon.)

Secretary Shultz, who served Pres. Nixon as Secretary of Labor and Treasury and OMB Director, and Pres. Reagan as Secretary of State, is a vocal supporter of the fee-and-dividend approach to carbon taxing.

In 2013, he and Nobel economics laureate Gary S. Becker published Why We Support a Carbon Tax in the Wall Street Journal. Their op-ed is a compelling and elegant articulation of the case for a revenue-neutral and steadily rising carbon tax.

George Schultz bouquet in Friedman column Stuff Happens to the Environment, Like Climate Change 7 Oct 2015

Tom Friedman writing in the New York Times, Oct 7, 2015

In October 2015, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman contrasted Shultz’s climate concern to the denialism of leading GOP presidential hopefuls. An excerpt appears to the right.

In July 2014, Shultz participated in an M.I.T. Climate Lab hour-long Webinar on carbon pricing and taxing, alongside former Reps. Bob Inglis (see above) and Phil Sharp (D-IN), president of Resources for the Future. In a bravura performance, Shultz articulated the rationales for a carbon tax (and against cap/trade), including cap/trade’s price volatility and vulnerability to market manipulation, a carbon tax’s straightforwardness, and the success (and revenue-neutrality) of British Columbia’s carbon tax, as well as the general power of pricing and the insurance value of a carbon tax. Audio of the Webinar is available via this link.

And in March 2015, Shultz penned “A Reagan approach to climate change” (Washington Post), reminding readers of President Reagan’s bold response to scientific alarm about thinning of the Earth’s ozone layer which led to the Montreal Protocol, a treaty phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals. Shultz urged leaders to follow Reagan’s example by setting aside doubts and taking out a climate insurance policy before we get “mugged by reality.” Shultz concluded that robust funding of clean energy research and development, plus a revenue-neutral carbon tax, “starting small and escalating to a significant level on a legislated schedule” would “do the trick” and are the kinds of policies Reagan would advocate to avert climate disaster.

Writers and Pundits

David Brooks, New York Times and Weekly Standard:

On the PBS New Hour (February 20, 2015), Brooks critiqued President Obama’s State of the Union address as a missed opportunity to take a bold step by proposing a carbon tax. Pointing to bipartisan support from economists, Brooks observed that a carbon tax would “raise revenue, help the environment, and is an economic plus.”

Peter Van Doren, Cato Institute:

The one concept that all students, even those sleeping in the back of the lecture hall, learn from an introductory economics class is that prices matter… As prices increase, the quantity consumed goes down. So if fossil fuel combustion produces byproducts that cause negative health effects on third parties as well as changes in the temperature of the atmosphere, the obvious lesson from economics is to increase fossil fuel prices enough through taxation to account for these effects. Then firms and consumers will react to these prices in thousands of different ways, the net result of which is less aggregate fossil fuel combustion… [Yet] voters and their elected officials resist this simple insight and instead prefer to impose only energy efficiency standards on manufacturers of consumer appliances and automobiles. A singular emphasis on energy efficiency rather than prices has two important drawbacks. First, more efficient appliances and automobiles cost much more to achieve equivalent energy savings than a tax on fossil fuel consumption. This occurs because higher prices encourage all possible avenues of reducing energy consumption — which efficiency standards do not.

Excerpted from “When Prices Are Wrong, Markets Don’t Work,” in NY Times, “Room for Debate,” The Siren Song of Energy Efficiency, March 19, 2012.

Andrew Moylan, R Street Institute:

A conservative carbon tax has three key components: revenue neutrality, elimination of existing taxes, and regulatory reform. When combined, these policies would yield a smaller, less powerful government; a tax code more conducive to investment and growth; and the emissions reductions the law says we must achieve … [R]eform must devote every dime of carbon-tax revenue to reducing other tax rates or abolishing other taxes altogether. Turning on one revenue stream while turning off others is how we prevent growth in government… [A] $20 per ton tax on carbon dioxide emissions could generate roughly $1.5 trillion in revenue over ten years. That’s enough to allow for the complete elimination of several levies that conservatives rightly regard as structurally deficient or duplicative: capital gains and dividends taxes, the death tax and tariffs.

From How to Tax Carbon: Conservatives can fight climate change without growing government (American Conservative, 10/2/13).

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Wall Street Journal:

A straight-up, revenue-neutral carbon tax clearly is our first-best policy, rewarding an infinite and unpredictable variety of innovations by which humans would satisfy their energy needs while releasing less carbon into the atmosphere.

Excerpted from “Birth of a Climate Mafia,” July 2, 2014 (which, apart from this excerpt, is unrelievedly anti-climate reform).

Economists

Gregory Mankiw (Harvard): Perhaps the most widely-published advocate for higher fuel taxes in the economics profession is Gregory Mankiw, Harvard professor and former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2003-2005), and former senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Mankiw was one of the 32 signatories to the Carbon Tax Center’s November 2015 Call to Paris Climate Negotiators to Tax Carbon., as well as a signatory to the Climate Leadership Council’s Feb. 2017 brief, The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends.

Mankiw made the case for a carbon tax in a forceful NY Times op-ed, One Answer to Global Warming (Sept. 16, 2007) which we discussed on our blog. His 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces (Jan. 3 and Oct. 20) are among the many lively pieces available on Mankiw’s pro-fuel-tax blog, The Pigou Club Manifesto. (Economist Arthur Pigou, 1877-1959, articulated the concept of economic externalities along with corrective “Pigovian” taxes.) On Dec. 31, 2006 Mankiw reiterated his 2006 New Year’s Resolutions from his Jan. 3, 2006 WSJ piece, including:

I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed CAFE regulations. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less, such as by living closer to where they work. I will tell people that tolls are a good way to reduce traffic congestion — and with new technologies they are getting easier to collect. I will advocate a carbon tax as the best way to control global warming.

In a Sept. 16, 2006 post to his blog, Rogoff Joins the Pigou Club, Mankiw listed some three dozen other economists and pundits who have publicly advocated higher Pigovian taxes, such as gasoline taxes or carbon taxes. The list includes, in addition to several individuals mentioned here, such notables from economics, finance and journalism as Alan Greenspan, Gary Becker, William Nordhaus, Richard Posner, Anthony Lake, Martin Feldstein, Gregg Easterbrook and Lawrence Summers. (Links are included.)

Mankiw publishes a column every six weeks in the NY Times Sunday business section. In his June 1, 2008 column, The Problem With the Corporate Tax, Mankiw wrote:

I have a back-up plan for [Sen. McCain]: increase the gasoline tax. With Americans consuming about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year, a gas-tax increase of about 40 cents a gallon could fund a corporate rate cut, fostering economic growth and reducing a variety of driving-related problems. Indeed, if we increased the tax on gasoline to the level that many experts consider optimal, we could raise enough revenue to eliminate the corporate income tax. And the price at the pump would still be far lower in the United States than in much of Europe.

In his Jan. 22, 2012 column, A Better Tax System (Instructions Included), Mankiw wrote:

Tax Bads Rather Than Goods: A good rule of thumb is that when you tax something, you get less of it. That means that taxes on hard work, saving and entrepreneurial risk-taking impede these fundamental drivers of economic growth. The alternative is to tax those things we would like to get less of. Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. They would be more likely to take public transportation, use car pools or live closer to work. The incentives they face when deciding how much to drive would more closely match the true social costs and benefits. Economists who have added up all the externalities associated with driving conclude that a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense. That would provide substantial revenue that could be used to reduce other taxes. By taxing bad things more, we could tax good things less.

Although this and some other pronouncements by Mankiw concern gasoline taxes rather than carbon taxes, they could be considered bold by a close adviser to the Romney for President campaign.

Arthur Laffer (prominent economic adviser to President Reagan): In a New Hampshire Public Radio interview (10/19/11), and in “Economist Arthur Laffer proposes taxing pollution instead of income” (Vanderbilt Univ., 2/20/12), Laffer recommended a carbon tax with revenue used to cut income taxes, a swap that he argued would create jobs, improve economic output and reduce pollution. As Laffer and (then) Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) wrote in the New York Times (12/27/08):

Conservatives do not have to agree that humans are causing climate change to recognize a sensible energy solution. All we need to assume is that burning less fossil fuels would be a good thing. Based on the current scientific consensus and the potential environmental benefits, it’s prudent to do what we can to reduce global carbon emissions. When you add the national security concerns, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels becomes a no-brainer.

Yet the costs of reducing carbon emissions are not trivial. Climate change may be a serious problem, but a higher overall tax rate would devastate the long-term growth of America and the world.

It is essential, therefore, that any taxes on carbon emissions be accompanied by equal, pro-growth tax cuts. A carbon tax that isn’t accompanied by a reduction in other taxes is a nonstarter. Fiscal conservatives would gladly trade a carbon tax for a reduction in payroll or income taxes, but we can’t go along with an overall tax increase.

Laffer has said little about carbon taxes since around 2012, however, so it’s not clear if he currently (2017) qualifies as a carbon tax supporter.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin (American Action Forum): Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy adviser to the 2008 McCain campaign, is now president of the American Action Forum. In “Make a carbon tax part of reform effort” (Concord Monitor, 9/19/11), Holtz-Eakin argues for comprehensive tax reform to include a carbon tax so that more of the “true cost of burning a fossil fuel… in the form of air pollution, a negative impact on human health, harm to the environment or climate change [is a] component in economic decisions [such as] include whether to invest in a coal-fired power plant or a wind farm.” He suggests that carbon tax revenue be used to reduce the payroll tax, income tax and corporate tax rate. His organization, AAF, criticizes EPA regulation of greenhouse gases as costly and largely ineffective.

Irwin Stelzer (Hudson Institute): In “Carbon Taxes, An Opportunity For Conservatives” (2011) Irwin Stelzer, Senior Fellow and Director of the Hudson Institute’s economic policy studies group, wrote:

A tax on carbon… would reduce the security threat posed by the increasing possibility that crude oil reserves will fall under the control of those who would do us harm, either by cutting off supplies, as happened when American policy towards Israel displeased the Arab world, or by using the proceeds of their oil sales to fund the spread of radical Islam and attacks by jihadists.

A tax on carbon… need not swell the government’s coffers — if we pursue a second, long-held conservative objective: reducing the tax on work. It would be a relatively simple matter to arrange a dollar-for-dollar, simultaneous reduction in payroll taxes… Anyone interested in jobs, jobs, jobs should find this an attractive proposition, with growth-minded conservatives leading the applause.

In The Carbon Tax Has Something for Everyone (National Review, Dec. 29, 2014), Stelzer observed,

We have a unique opportunity to end the rancorous debate about climate change, a debate that is poisoning the air — the political air, that is — and inhibiting progress on two fronts: progress on addressing the possibility that we are on the road to a catastrophic warming of the globe, and progress on reforming our anti-growth tax structure, which is so inequitable that it is straining the public’s belief in the fairness of capitalism and what we like to call “the American Dream.” All we need do is stop pretending that the cost of carbon emissions is certainly zero, and that regulation provides a more efficient solution than the market.

Stelzer urged the Republican leadership in Congress to integrate a carbon tax into broader tax reform. He also pointed out that World Trade Organization rules enable a U.S. carbon tax to form the template for an effective global carbon tax structure, thereby breaking the UN climate policy gridlock.

In April 2015, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, Stelzer reviewed and endorsed the new IMF book, “Implementing a U.S. Carbon Tax: Challenges and Debates” by Ian Parry, Adele Morris and Roberton C. Williams III. Stelzer remarked:

This collection of 13 essays finally provides empirical data—numbers, if you are an ordinary reader rather than a policy wonk—and analyses to help us to some reasoned conclusions. The broad conclusions to be drawn are that a carbon tax would: reduce emissions, raise revenues more efficiently than the taxes it might replace, and be relatively easy to implement, “a straightforward application of basic tax principles,” in the words of the volume’s sponsors, the International Monetary Fund, the Brookings Institution, and Resources for the Future.

Most recently, in A Deal Over Climate Change, also in the Weekly Standard, Stelzer opined that the Supreme Court’s 5-4 stay of the EPA Clean Power Plan could catalyze a bipartisan agreement to substitute a carbon tax for G.O.P. denialism and Democratic regulation. The Feb 2016 post’s subhead, “Why not a carbon tax? Both sides could do a lot worse,” encapsulated Stelzer’s belief that political forces would push the two sides toward such an accommodation.

Alan Viard, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute: Former Dallas Federal Reserve economist (1998-2006) and former senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (2003-04), Alan Viard is a regular contributor to the tax policy journal “Tax Notes.” In testimony to the Senate Finance Committee (2009), Viard explained the perverse effects of giving free allowances to polluters under cap-and-trade. When Senator Kerry asserted that “caps” are necessary to reduce emissions because polluters would “just pay” a carbon tax, Viard patiently and eloquently explained the bedrock principles of price elasticity that undergird both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Viard concluded by recommending a carbon tax with revenue used to reduce marginal tax rates.

Kevin Hassett, Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute: Conservative economist Kevin Hassett has long advocated a carbon tax as vastly preferable to costly regulations, subsidies or cap-and-trade schemes that induce energy price volatility and provide opportunities for manipulation and gaming by emissions traders. In early 2017, Hassett was named chair of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors.

Along with AEI colleagues Steven Hayward and Kenneth P. Green, Hassett authored “Climate Change: Caps vs. Taxes” (2007), a short and very readable article that deftly and systematically demolished the myths surrounding cap-and-trade with offsets while sketching the structure of a simple, effective carbon tax “shift.” The authors pointed out that many of the supposed advantages of emissions caps were based on assumptions about the success of EPA’s SO2 emissions trading program for power plants which was orders of magnitude smaller and simpler than the market that would need to be established for CO2 emissions. They argued that much of the EPA program’s apparent success in reducing SO2 emissions from power plants was due to simultaneous railroad deregulation which reduced the cost of delivering low sulfur coal strip-mined in the west. And they cautioned that a CO2 cap-and-trade program would induce price volatility, feeding speculators while starving legitimate investors in alternative energy.

The article neatly described the potential for a “double dividend” obtained by tax shifting: imposing taxes on CO2 pollution while using the revenue to reduce other distortionary taxes such as payroll, individual and corporate income taxes that dampen desirable economic activity. Hassett and colleagues suggested that such a carbon tax “shift” could improve the overall output of the economy even without considering climate benefits and thus represented a “no regrets” policy for conservatives who aren’t convinced of the danger of global warming. The article cited authoritative works by a range of leading economists including Yale’s William Nordhaus and Stanford’s Lawrence Goulder who also support carbon taxes.

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ccl i was sure laffer w'd 180 2/17

https://citizensclimatelobby.org/5-conservatives-arguing-price-carbon/

Many conservative economists and legislators say the same principles will work to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Here are five of those conservatives and the arguments they make in favor of legislation that will price carbon.

#1: Art Laffer

Laffer was a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board from 1981–1989 and is currently advising President Trump on tax policy.

“If you’re going to handle global warming, you can do it in such a way that actually does not hurt the economy,” he says in “Change What We Tax,” a video posted by RepublicEn. “A carbon tax would be less damaging dollar for dollar than a progressive income tax.”

#2: George P. Shultz

Shultz served as Secretary of State under President Reagan from 1982–1989.

“Let’s level the playing field for competing sources of energy so that costs imposed on the community are borne by the sources of energy that create them, most particularly carbon dioxide,” Shultz says in his 2015 opinion piece for the Washington Post. “A carbon tax, starting small and escalating to a significant level on a legislated schedule, would do the trick. I would make it revenue-neutral, returning all net funds generated to the taxpayers so that no fiscal drag results and the revenue would not be available for politicians to spend on pet projects.”

#3: Jerry Taylor

Tayloris the president and founder of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank.

In “The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax,” Taylor says, “A carbon tax quantifies in dollar terms the risk associated with emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, although how well those risks are reflected in the tax depends upon policy design and the assumptions behind that design. Climate risks, after all, are associated with costs, and those costs are not accounted for in the price for fossil fuels at present. Prices for fossil fuels (the main source of man’s greenhouse gas emissions) do not reflect the total costs associated with consumption. Consumers consequently buy more fossil fuels (and generate more greenhouse gases) than would be the case if the information embodied in fossil fuel prices were accurate. The most direct way to better inform

#4: N. Gregory Mankiwmarket decisions is to correct inaccurate price signals with a tax.”

Mankiwserved as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush from 2003–2005 and in 2006 became an economic adviser to Mitt Romney.

In the New York Times article “A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included),” Mankiw doesn’t directly address pricing carbon, but he illustrates the economic argument for that type of policy by discussing the gasoline tax.

“A good rule of thumb is that when you tax something, you get less of it,” he explains. “That means that taxes on hard work, saving and entrepreneurial risk-taking impede these fundamental drivers of economic growth. The alternative is to tax those things we would like to get less of. Consider the tax on gasoline. Driving your car is associated with various adverse side effects, which economists call externalities. These include traffic congestion, accidents, local pollution and global climate change. If the tax on gasoline were higher, people would alter their behavior to drive less. They would be more likely to take public transportation, use car pools or live closer to work. The incentives they face when deciding how much to drive would more closely match the true social costs and benefits.”

#5: Bob Inglis

Inglisrepresented South Carolina in Congress from 1993–1998 and again from 2004–2010. He is the executive director of RepublicEn, educating fellow Americans about free-enterprise solutions to climate change.

“What if we were to reduce taxes on income and shift the tax onto pollution?” Inglis asks in the “Change What We Tax” video quoted above. “What if we did that by eliminating all subsidies for all fuels, and attaching all costs to all fuels, following the free enterprise principle of accountability? Then we’d see the free enterprise system delivering the fuels of the future.”

In a joint opinion piece with Laffer, Inglis writes, “We need to impose a tax on the thing we want less of (carbon dioxide) and reduce taxes on the things we want more of (income and jobs). A carbon tax would attach the national security and environmental costs to carbon-based fuels like oil, causing the market to recognize the price of these negative externalities. [B]oth Democrats and Republicans could support a carbon tax offset by a payroll or income tax cut.”

#6, 7, 8…

These conservatives are not alone. Many economists support using carbon fees to move us, and the world, on to clean, renewable, non-polluting energy sources. Many conservative organizations also support pricing carbon, such as the R Street Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

Citizens’ Climate Lobby is nonpartisan, but we’re interested in getting both conservatives and progressives on board with this sensible, effective solution. CCL calls for a revenue-neutral Carbon Fee and Dividend in which the net revenues collected go right back to American households as a monthly dividend check or automatic deposit in our bank accounts. This does not grow the government. As George Shultz says, “It’s not a tax if the government doesn’t keep the money.” To see which conservative thought leaders, national security leaders and others support climate action or have endorsed carbon fee and dividend, log in or sign up for CCL Community and check out the full list.

We’ve had enough smoke and mirrors with people saying we can’t have a good economy, create jobs, and reduce our emissions. We can, we must, and with your help, we can work with our representatives in Congress to reach a bipartisanagreement to enact the Carbon Fee and Dividend.

Since the carbon fee increases steadily, the dividend also increases, which benefits Americans in several ways:

A family of four would receive $288 per month, or $3,456 per year, after 10 years, and $396 per month after 20 years.
Products made with clean energy become relatively less expensive, and consumers have more money to spend.

The Carbon Fee and Dividend can usher in true energy freedom, job growth, and lower emissions. And what could we do with our dividend checks? Insulate your home, or take that vacation you’ve been putting off. Buy energy efficient appliances, or go out for a nice dinner. Maybe treat yourself to a bright red electric car!

We can reduce emissions while growing jobs and supporting the economy as a whole. As Bob Inglis reminds us, “It’s an incredible opportunity.” Let’s seize it.

Tags:Art Laffer, Bob Inglis, carbon fee and dividend, Carbon pricing, conservatives, George Shultz, Gregory Mankiw, jerry taylor

New Carbon Tax Bill Suggests a Future Republican Shift on Climate Change

On Thursday, July 19 The Hill reported that the Republican controlled Congress passed a non-binding resolution saying a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions "would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States."

But the next Monday, a Republican duo introduced and co-sponsored the MARKET CHOICE Act (H.R. 6463) that would implement a carbon tax and funnel the proceeds towards improving infrastructure.

The two approaches, Time Magazine reported Thursday, could represent the past and future of the Republican party.

"The pendulum will swing," former Republican South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis, who heads the non-profit RepublicEn, which promotes conservative solutions for environmental problems, told Time. "And when that pendulum swings…it may just be the solution you don't want on climate."

The two congressmen who introduced and co-sponsored the carbon tax bill could be the beginning of that swing.

Carlos Curbelo, the Florida Representative who introduced the bill, represents a district stretching from Key West to outside Miami.

He has been a unique Republican voice on the reality and threat of climate change since he was first elected in 2014, according to Grist.

"I tell my skeptical colleagues: When my district is underwater, I'll move to their district and run against them," he told Grist. "That usually breaks the ice."

He formed the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus with fellow Floridian and Democratic Congressperson Ted Deutch, which is designed to have an even number of Republican and Democrat members.

As of now, Time reports it has 43 Republican members, even though many still vote against climate action despite claiming to believe in its necessity.

"We're seeing trends in the House that should give us all hope," Curbelo told Time.

The bill's co-sponsor, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, voted in line with the environment 71 percent of the time in 2017 according to the League of Conservation Voters' scorecard, the highest percentage of any Congressional Republican, Grist reported.

One reason a carbon tax might be a gateway climate proposal for Republicans is that it is actually favored by companies who see climate policy as inevitable, and prefer a tax to more complicated regulations, Time explained.

On Wednesday, 34 major companies including BP America, Shell and General Motors wrote a letter to Curbelo thanking him for introducing the bill, though they did not endorse it outright.

"We believe that an economy-wide, market-based approach to valuing or pricing carbon, when carefully crafted, can both strengthen our economy and reduce carbon emissions by encouraging technological innovation and stimulating new investments in infrastructure, products, and services," the letter said.

Curbelo's current bill is not likely to pass, given the opinions of the rest of the Republican majority in Congress, but it might model a way forward for the party in the future. Time reported two polls by the Alliance of Market Solutions and the Pew Research Center respectively that showed that more than half of younger Republicans care about climate change and that almost 25 percent of people under 30 who identified as Republican in 2015 had since left the party.

However, Emilie Prattico, director of development at We Mean Business, a private-sector climate mobilization non-profit, cautioned in a Huffington Post opinion piece that carbon tax supporters could do better than Curbelo's bill.

While it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions 27 to 32 percent by 2025 and 30 to 40 percent by 2030, its other provisions would not go far enough to adequately address climate change.

It would devote as much as 70 percent of generated revenue to updating existing fossil-fuel-based transportation infrastructure and only a small percent to developing carbon-free transport options and it would allow emitters a chance to perform their way out of having to obey Clean Air Act regulations if they followed the law.

"A successful carbon tax bill, whether it is proposed by Democrats, Republicans or both, would not only impose a levy on fossil fuels but steer the economy toward innovation, less-polluting alternatives for high-emitting sectors, and fairness to consumers and citizens," Prattico wrote.

https://www.alternet.org/environment/exxonmobils-support-carbon-tax-total-sham

ExxonMobil executives just had another opportunity to convince skeptics that their support for a carbon tax is genuine.

They blew it.

On July 23, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL-26) introduced a bill that would place a $24 per ton tax on carbon emissions and dedicate 70 percent of the revenue to rebuilding U.S. infrastructure. ExxonMobil’s reaction? “We appreciate Rep. Curbelo’s effort to help generate a constructive discussion on this important issue” was all a company spokesman was willing to say.

ExxonMobil’s reluctance to seriously engage, however, should not come as a surprise.

Yes, the company has consistently paid lip service to a carbon tax since 2009. And yes, it is a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council—which supports a $40 per ton carbon tax—and it recently endorsed Americans for Carbon Dividends, a new bipartisan lobby group promoting a carbon tax that would return revenues to taxpayers.

But more telling is the fact that the oil giant has never publicly supported a carbon tax bill and consistently funds members of Congress who oppose a carbon tax.

How does that square with the company’s avowed position?

Just say no

It doesn’t.

Curbelo’s bill is hardly the first carbon tax legislation that ExxonMobil has snubbed. When Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA-33) asked ExxonMobil lobbyists to support a carbon tax bill in 2015, they refused. And when Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced the “American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act” in 2016, the company would not endorse their bill or lobby on its behalf.

“Regarding ExxonMobil’s alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we’ve seen no meaningful evidence of that,” the senators wrote in a letter they sent to the company in August 2016. “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.”

Besides ExxonMobil’s unwillingness to support actual legislation, it rewards members of Congress who oppose a carbon tax by consistently funding their reelection campaigns.

Scalise has introduced similarly worded measures before—with similar results. In March 2013, 156 House members cosponsored his resolution stating that “a carbon tax…is not in the best interest of the United States.” Ninety-three percent of the cosponsors, including Scalise, were funded by ExxonMobil. Three years later, the House passed a Scalise resolution with the same wording as the one earlier this month. Eighty-five percent of the 237 House members who voted for the resolution received ExxonMobil funding since 2013. The day before that vote, a reporter asked an ExxonMobil spokesman for the company’s opinion. Given its supposed support for a carbon tax, surely it would encourage the House to vote no. His response? “We’re not commenting on the resolution.”The most recent example of ExxonMobil’s upside-down funding priorities was a nonbinding carbon tax resolution in the House, which stated that such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. The measure, which Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA-1) sponsored just days before Curbelo introduced his carbon tax bill, passed by a 229 to 180 vote, and a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers lined up in favor of it. All told, 78 percent of the 174 House members who have received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for the resolution.

Most of ExxonMobil’s beneficiaries in the Senate also oppose a carbon tax. In March 2013, for example, Whitehouse offered a budget resolution amendment that would ensure that “all revenue from a fee on carbon pollution is returned to the American people.” That’s exactly what ExxonMobil claims to support: a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Regardless, 39 of the 48 senators on the floor that day who had received contributions from ExxonMobil between 2010 and 2014 opposed the amendment, which was defeated by a 58 to 41 vote. Two years later, the Senate voted 58 to 42 in favor of a budget resolution amendment introduced by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who received ExxonMobil campaign contributions, including Blunt, voted in favor of the amendment.

The $130-million question

A few years ago, a top ExxonMobil official claimed that since 2009, his company had been vigorously promoting a carbon tax with federal lawmakers as the most viable way to curb carbon emissions. “ExxonMobil executives,” he wrote, “have echoed that message in countless private briefings with members of Congress on carbon tax policy options.”

Since 2009, ExxonMobil has spent nearly $130 million on its Washington lobbying operation—more than any other oil and gas company—and another $9.6 million on federal campaigns. The $130-million question: What have ExxonMobil executives been saying during those countless private briefings?

To be sure, ExxonMobil is not the only fossil fuel company plying the halls of Congress, and Koch Industries and Murray Energy are definitely not trying to sell a carbon tax to anyone, so perhaps ExxonMobil lobbyists—no matter how hard they try—are overmatched. That said, the voting record compiled by ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers, the company’s refusal to back a bona fide carbon tax bill, and the fact that it continues to finance a climate disinformation campaign all suggest that the company is deliberately misleading the public while it sabotages federal efforts to address climate change.

This article is part of a content partnership between the Union of Concerned Scientists and Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media inst

july 25

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Carbon Tax and the Art of the Deal: Time for Some Horse-Trading

Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo has introduced a carbon tax bill in Congress. What would he have to trade to win enough votes for it to pass?

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When a Republican introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to put a tax on carbon dioxide emissions even those who spoke approvingly of the bill tended to refer to it as a way to start a "conversation."

For the bill to have any chance, it'll also have to start some horse-trading.

Without some give and take, this carbon tax bill is likely to go where all others have landed: nowhere.

Rep. Carlos Curbelo's billwould set a tax on carbon emissions starting at $24 per ton in 2020. The tax would rise 2 percent a year above inflation until 2030. It would go up an additional $2 a ton in any year when emissions failed to fall. As carbon prices go, this is pretty low.

Curbelo also put together some novel ways to spend the money—chosen, the Florida Republican admitted, largely for raw political appeal. Most of the revenues would be spent modernizing highways, but at minimal additional expense to drivers. That's because it would repeal the federal excise tax on gasoline. The carbon tax would be imposed not just on motorists, but across the entire economy in an effort to dial back the human drivers of climate change.

Some of the remaining revenues would go to other needs that are popular in one constituency or another: income assistance for the poor, flood protection for coastal cities threatened by sea level rise and extreme weather as the climate warms, retraining for coal miners and the like. But these amounts would be mere fractions of the highway spending.

"Those invested in the depressing paradigm of bipolar politics will dismiss it summarily," Curbelo said at to discuss the proposal. "It's probably going to require bipartisan support to get it done."

So what would it take to get that bipartisan support?

Here are a few areas where the horse-trading may be especially intense as carbon tax advocates attempt to bridge some profound political divisions.

Tax and Spend, or Carbon Dividend?

Most recent carbon tax proposals have been revenue neutral—they would recycle the money they raise back to taxpayers, rather than spending it on government programs.

That was the case with the other prominent Republican proposal floated recently by a group of conservative elder statesmen who called it a "carbon dividend." Even Democrats in the Senate, led by two climate hawks, took that approach in their own proposalto tax carbon and funnel the money back in tax breaks.

Curbelo's proposal is just the opposite: a frank tax-and-spend approach in which the only money returned to taxpayers is a sliver funneled to low-income households, while the lion's share is spent on highways.

One potential horse trade: To gain support of conservatives, increase the share of money that's recycled through tax cuts.

Gas Taxes and Highway Dollars

The main novelty in Curbelo's plan is the creation of a new funding mechanism for highways and mass transit, replacing a trust fund financed mostly by gas taxes with one paid for by putting a price on carbon. Gas tax revenues have fallen as cars get better mileage, and Congress, unwilling to raise gas taxes, has had to cough up general revenues to cover the gap.

Curbelo calls his "tax swap" an act of political pragmatism. He believes that Democrats and Republicans both want to spur infrastructure spending and lack only a way to pay for it. That burden would now be put on the back of a carbon tax.

But some environmentalists bristle at the way Curbelo finesses the financing. His bill puts only a modest additional cost on drivers, creating little incentive to drive less or buy cleaner cars. As a result, it is expected to produce only modest emissions reductions from the transportation sector.

To some, it seems unfair that so much of the new revenue this bill would spend on highways comes not from motor fuels but from other sources of greenhouse gas pollution, like the burning of coal and other fossil fuels by power companies and utilities.

The horse trade: Congress could leave existing excise taxes on transportation fuels in place, and expand the transportation infrastructure programs with a booster shot of new carbon-tax money. Then it could spread the infrastructure spending around on other programs, like modernizing the electrical grid.

Where to Spend the Rest of the Money?

Curbelo's bill is expected to raise about $1 trillion between 2020 and 2030. If less of it is put into highways, and the gas tax isn't abolished, how might the remainder be allocated?

This is a wide open field for horse-trading.

Corporations will argue that a fair chunk of it should be returned to them in another round of corporate tax cuts. And some economists argue that this, indeed, would be the most economically efficient way to recycle carbon tax revenues.

But corporations just got a rich tax cut from President Trump and the Republicans.

Democrats would probably favor various federal spending programs meant to stimulate green energy or conservation.

Curbelo's bill offers only modest support for spending on advanced energy research. Compared to spending 70 percent of the available money for highways, he offers just 0.5 percent to ARPA–E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, which Trump wanted to flat out eliminate.

Curbelo has several other priorities for spending the remainder, but these could also be open to trading:

10 percent would become grants to the states to help poor people pay their energy bills. That's a matter of fairness, and also an inoculation against some of the panic that would ensue as energy prices go up because of taxes. (His formula for doling out the money state by state might need to be renegotiated to draw votes.)
5 percent would be set aside to shore up coastal flood defenses. (Curbelo represents a vulnerable, flood-prone South Florida district.)
3 percent would be for retraining workers, mainly those like coal miners who lose their jobs as the economy cuts carbon emissions. (That has special appeal in Appalachian and other coal states.)
2.5 percent would be for modernization of airports and air traffic control, with possible efficiency gains resulting. (These are paid for by fuel taxes, which would be abolished under the plan, as well as by ticket taxes.)
2.5 percent would go to environmental incentives for farmers, plus another 0.5 percent for other Farm Bill conservation programs such as building up soils and reducing methane pollution. (Farm state votes matter, especially in the Senate.)
2 percent or less would go to each of the following: reclaiming abandoned mines (benefitting coal states); weatherization of homes (a perennial favorite in places like New England); and various forms of carbon capture and sequestration (a fossil-fuel boon).
A pittance would be set aside for research into advanced batteries, cleaning up leaking underground storage tanks and for other odds and ends.

All of this is open for horse-trading. Nuclear, anyone?

Regulatory Relief—Maybe

To sweeten the pot for Republicans who hate regulations just as much as taxes, he would delay either the Clean Power Plan or any replacement version proposed by the Trump administration.

As bargaining chips go, this is a pig in a poke.

The Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of climate regulation in the Obama era, was already stayed by the Supreme Court in 2016 pending litigation, and has been in limbo ever since. It's not clear that the Obama plan can be revived, and a Trump replacement has yet to be formally proposed.

The coal industry and its allies in Congress might like to see the Clean Power Plan put on hold, but not at the cost of a carbon tax that would steeply reduce demand for coal, the dirtiest of fuels.

The oil industry, which says it doesn't mind carbon taxes in principal but hasn't endorsed Curbelo's plan, would like to see the threat of future EPA regulations on their refineries deferred, perhaps along with rules on auto gas mileage. For them, Curbelo's regulatory relief falls short.

In a sop to environmentalists, Curbelo would leave intact EPA's authority to regulate tailpipe emissions from cars. (But here, too, Trump is about to propose a significant rollback.)

And although Curbelo's draft bill says EPA's regulatory powers could be revived if emissions don't go down on a specified glide slope, the slope he establishes in the bill is not very steep. It's an insurance policy that's unlikely to impress environmentalists who have fought tooth and nail for EPA's regulations on carbon.

The horse trade: Industry will demand broader relief from regulations. Environmentalists will call for EPA's powers to be retained at least until after emission goals are actually achieved via the tax.

Is This All Too Little, Too Late?

Curbelo enlisted economists and modeling experts from Columbia University and Resources for the Future to analyze the effectiveness of his approach, and in a sense, they gave it good reviews.

They concluded that it would allow the United States to exceed President Obama's commitments for a first round of emissions reductions under the Paris climate agreement—pledges that Trump has since renounced. And they found that it could be done at only a modest penalty to economic growth, with benefits exceeding the costs.

But beyond the relatively short term, one shouldn't exaggerate the contribution the bill would make to solving the global warming problem. Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center called it "underwhelming."

By 2020, the year Curbelo's bill supposedly would take effect, signatories to the Paris treaty are supposed to present new, even more ambitious emissions reduction targets. Scientists say that to meet the Paris treaty's overarching goals, net emissions from energy need to reach zero early in the second half of this century. The sooner the better, they say.

Many will call the carbon tax starting point of $24 a ton too low. The competing Republican proposal outlined by lobbyists and luminaries said that a "sensible" starting point would be $40 a ton, with gradual escalation.

In Congress, tax bills only project their impacts 10 years into the future. That's one reason Curbelo's only extends to 2030. While it might do nicely at meeting modest, short-term climate goals set a few years ago, modeling does not show it sparking an energy transformation of the kind the climate crisis demands.

And that's if it can be enacted at all. There is almost no visible Republican support for this or any other carbon tax bill—the House voted to disavow carbon taxes a few days before Curbelo released his plan. Unless a carbon tax bill is miraculously passed before the election of 2020, there's no way to say whether Democrats or Republicans will be in charge of the stables when the real horse trading occurs.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

POLITICS

GLOBAL CLIMATE TREATY

COAL

OIL/TAR SANDS

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https://www.ecowatch.com/gop-new-carbon-tax-bill-2590411558.html

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New Carbon Tax Bill Suggests a Future Republican Shift on Climate Change

On Thursday, July 19 The Hill reported that the Republican controlled Congress passed anon-binding resolutionsaying a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions "would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States."

Butthe next Monday, a Republican duo introduced and co-sponsored the MARKET CHOICE Act (H.R. 6463)that would implement a carbon tax and funnel the proceeds towards improving infrastructure.

The two approaches, Time Magazine reported Thursday, could represent the past and future of the Republican party.

"The pendulum will swing," former Republican South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis, who heads the non-profit RepublicEn, which promotes conservative solutions for environmental problems, told Time. "And when that pendulum swings…it may just be the solution you don't want on climate."

The two congressmen who introduced and co-sponsored the carbon tax bill could be the beginning of that swing.

Carlos Curbelo, the Florida Representative who introduced the bill, represents a district stretching from Key West to outside Miami.

He has been a unique Republican voice on the reality and threat of climate change since he was first elected in 2014, according to Grist.

"I tell my skeptical colleagues: When my district is underwater, I'll move to their district and run against them," he told Grist. "That usually breaks the ice."

He formed the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus with fellow Floridian and Democratic Congressperson Ted Deutch, which is designed to have an even number of Republican and Democrat members.

As of now, Time reports it has 43 Republican members, even though many still vote against climate action despite claiming to believe in its necessity.

"We're seeing trends in the House that should give us all hope," Curbelo told Time.

On Wednesday, 34 major companies including BP America, Shell and General Motors wrote a letter to Curbelo thanking him for introducing the bill, though they did not endorse it outright.

However, Emilie Prattico, director of development at We Mean Business, a private-sector climate mobilization non-profit, cautioned in a Huffington Post opinion piece thatcarbon tax supporters could do better than Curbelo's bill.

While it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions 27 to 32 percent by 2025 and 30 to 40 percent by 2030, its other provisions would not go far enough to adequately address climate change.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19072018/anti-carbon-tax-resolution-house-vote-climate-solutions-caucus-curbelo-scalise-koch-influence-congress

U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a resolution denouncing the idea of a U.S. carbon tax as detrimental to the economy, one week before a Republican-sponsored bill to create a carbon fee is set to be introduced.

It was a win for a coalition of groups funded by the petrochemical billionaire Koch brothers and other wealthy, right-wing opponents of climate action. And it revealed weak resolve for bucking GOP leadership among most of the 43 Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus.

If the bipartisan caucus had held firm, the resolution would have been handily defeated.

Instead, only six Republicans—four of them caucus members, including Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, who plans to unveil the carbon fee measure next week—joined most Democrats in opposing the resolution. Seven Democrats voted with the GOP.

The 229-180 vote marked a slight erosion in the GOP wall of opposition to climate action. In 2016, an identical measure passed the House 237-163with no Republicans opposed. Such resolutions are meant to express the views of the chamber and have no real-world impact, but with a different Congress in place now, carbon tax foes wanted a new vote. The American Energy Alliance (AEA), the Heartland Institute, and 18 other conservative advocacy groups had urged House Speaker Paul Ryan earlier this month to bring the resolution to the floor.

AEA president Thomas Pyle said in an interview with InsideClimate News that the impetus was not the prospect of Curbelo's bill, but an effort to put members on the record before November. The groups put it this way in their letterto Ryan: "As we approach the 2018 midterm election, American voters need to know whether their elected representatives support the implementation of a new tax on the energy they rely on every single day."

The House's affirmation of a fossil fuel-friendly agenda comes in a week when President Donald Trump's administration did the same on multiple fronts.

The Environmental Protection Agency's new administrator, former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, finalized a plan to ease requirements for handling the toxic coal ash from power plants—rules developed by the Obama administration after costly spills in Tennessee and North Carolina. The Treasury Department announced it would scrap requirements that certain tax-exempt nonprofits disclose their donors, helping to cloak a key avenue for campaign contributions used by the Koch brothers and other wealthy political benefactors.

2 Views on How Climate Solutions Caucus Voted

The House vote showed the flimsiness of the Climate Solutions Caucus, the bipartisan coalition that Curbelo and others have sought to build behind the concept of a market-based solution for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

RL Miller, president of the advocacy group Climate Hawks Vote, said the caucus' credibility is in tatters after its GOP members, whom she has frequently criticized for their weak environmental voting records, failed to hold off a resolution that strikes at the heart of their purported purpose.

"It would be a joke were the subject not so serious. The caucus has no credibility, and no ability to do anything," Miller said. "The climate is changing far more quickly than Republican attitudes. That's why we do not hold faith in bipartisan solutions."

But Steve Valk, spokesman for the Citizens Climate Lobby, a grassroots advocacy group that favors a carbon tax and that helped bring together the caucus, noted the non-binding resolution has no real effect. Valk said he did not expect that its members would go out on a limb against such a measure, especially since it was sponsored by House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), the No. 3 Republican in the chamber and a potential successor to Ryan, who is retiring.

"Anybody who votes against this resolution—it's going to be a mark against them in the eyes of the leadership, which decides what assignments you get, whether or not you're on the committee you want, and who's chair," Valk said. "There's a lot of calculations that go into a decision like this. We're willing to look at that and say, yeah, it's not a simple choice for them.

"In my mind, if you can get a handful of Republicans to vote no on this, that's a victory."

The Conversation Is Shifting: Republicans Consider Carbon Pricing

Other carbon tax advocates expressed glass-half-full optimism, arguing the mere push for a vote by fossil fuel allies betrays their concern about the increasing support for the idea of putting a price on carbon to fight climate change.

"They feel that the momentum is shifting as the conversation commences, and they are trying to beat down any thoughtful analysis with a tribal drum that they are nervously beating louder," said former Rep. Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina and founder of a conservative carbon tax advocacy group republicEn.

"If we were able to discuss this, we'd find that this is something that could bring conservatives and progressives together," he said.

Conservative advocates for a carbon tax have been trying to make their case in Washington since the start of the Trump administration with little success.Trump's former chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, reportedly earned the derisive nickname "Carbon Tax Cohn" in the West Wing for giving a hearing to a revenue-neutral tax plan proposed by prominent Republicans, including former Secretary of State James Baker and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

But since then, other groups have popped up. The nuclear-heavy energy company Exelon, the American Wind Energy Association and First Solar are funding a coalition called Americans for Carbon Dividends, which has hired former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, to lobby on the issue. Twenty-two college Republican groups came together earlier this year to form Students for Carbon Dividends. Its founding president, Alex Posner, an American history major at Yale, says the plan they favor would address international competitiveness and jobs creation and would look nothing like the carbon tax described in the Scalise resolution. "We want to see a plan that's pro-growth and pro-environment while shrinking the size of government," he said.

Pyle, of the American Energy Alliance, argues that no matter the design of a carbon tax program, consumers are worse off. "There's revenue generated, and then you haggle over how to spend it," he said. "It's no different than other taxes and fees. If you're giving back some to low-income households, it's a still a redistribution. And since poorer people pay a higher percentage of their incomes on energy, they are worse off."

A series of four reports released this week by Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy calls that argument into question, however, and provides ammunition for carbon tax advocates. The reports analyze various carbon tax legislation scenarios and conclude that they would increase government revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars a year and drive down U.S. emissions, far more than current policy, with minimal effects on the U.S. economy, families or businesses, or even on oil and gas production and consumption.

Curbelo: Resolution Presented 'a False Choice'

For now, the House vote preemptively throws cold water on Curbelo's planned introduction next week of legislation that wouldimpose an escalating tax on carbonemissions, while pausing federal regulations on climate change.Although Curbelo would not discuss details of his plan, reports said the revenue generated would be directed into infrastructure and in helping communities adapt to sea level rise and other impacts of climate change.

Curbelo did not speak on the House floor during the one-hour debate allotted for the Scalise resolution. But when asked by InsideClimate News to comment, he criticized the measure in an emailed statement.

"The resolution presents a false choice," Curbelo said. "While I agree a carbon tax on its own would not be the best way forward and could have negative effects on the economy, there are smarter, more innovative solutions that would not only reduce carbon emissions and mitigate for the effects they have on our planet, but also grow the economy and provide opportunities for American workers and businesses at home and abroad.

"I look forward to engaging with my colleagues on this topic next week, and sharing my own proposal in the near future," he said.

Curbelo, who represents the southern tip of Florida, one of the regions of the country most vulnerable to climate change impacts, is seen as one of the most vulnerable House Republicans. Cook Political Report and other political odds-makers call his race a toss-up.

With Democrats expected to gain between 20 and 35 seats in November, and just 23 needed for them to retake the majority, Inglis argues that Scalise wasn't doing his own party any favors by forcing a carbon tax showdown. "Steve, what are you doing, running for minority leader?" asked Inglis. "He's putting people at risk for an idea that is clearly going to become very passé and very retro looking."

The House Debate

During the House debate on the measure, Republicans urged a stand against carbon taxes while taking pains to assert that they were not denying the science of climate change.

"I'm not a climate denier. I'm not a science denier. I'm a climate thinker," said Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) "And real science isn't just about assessing costs only. It's about looking at benefits as well. ... Coal provides cheap, plentiful, reliable energy over the long term. We should not want the most carbon-free energy, but the best energy."

Democrats used up much of their 30 minutes of time attempting to change the subject from the anti-carbon tax measure to spotlight Trump's controversial meeting this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), managing the resolution for the GOP, repeatedly refused.

A handful of Democrats, most of them members of the Climate Solutions Caucus, offered full-throated defense of carbon taxes.

"For decades, economists from across the ideological spectrum have argued that a carbon price is the most efficient way to discourage the use of fossil fuels and the best way to encourage energy efficiency measures and market decisions on everything from housing to transportation," saidRep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). "The science continues to accumulate in prodigious amounts that the pollution is changing our Earth and the cost is staggering into the billions. Carbon pricing is the most market-oriented policy we can take to combat this."

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, (D-Ore.) said the resolution "encapsulates what's wrong with the Republican management of this Congress. It is a cartoon that doesn't deal with the underlying issues," he said. "We could have a debate about real legislation that would satisfy their answers and be able to deal with what our responsibilities are to the future. ... Instead, we're dealing with empty gestures."

In addition to Curbelo, Republicans voting against the resolution were Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mia Love of Utah—all members of the Climate Solutions Caucus—and Reps. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana and Francis Rooney of Florida. The Democrats who joined the GOP in voting for the resolution were Reps. Sanford Bishop of Georgia; Henry Cuellar and Vincente González of Texas; Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania; Stephanie Murphy of Florida; and Tom O'Halleran and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

CLIMATE CHANGE

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Larry Summers

President Emeritus of Harvard University, Former Chief Economist of the World Bank

My sense is that cap and trade is not the route to the future. It did not make it politically in the US at a moment of great opportunity in 2009. And European carbon markets have been plagued by constant problems. And globally it’s even harder. My sense is that the right strategy has three major elements. First, as the G20 vowed in 2009, there needs to be aconcerted phase out of fossil fuel subsidies. This would help government budgets, drive increases in economic efficiency and substantially reduce global emissions. Second, there needs to be assurance of adequate funding for all areas of basic energy research. As a practical matter my guess is the world will produce non fossil fuel power in the next 25 years at today s fossil fuel prices or it will fail with respect to global climate change. Third, there is a strong case for concerted carbon taxes to further discourage greenhouse gas emissions. But this is a follow-on step for after the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.

https://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-tax-proposals-mit-2556887586.html

If the U.S. does decide to stay in the Paris agreement, a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has confirmed a policy proposal that would enable us to meet our 2030 commitments, an MIT press release reported Friday.

Researchers studied various carbon tax proposals and found that they would be an effective means of reducing emissions and would have minimal impacts on the economy.

The joint MIT and NREL study was one of 11 such reports to look at the impact of a carbon tax in Climate Change Economics. The studies all started from the same set of assumptions; while the details of the studies' conclusions varied, all agreed that a carbon tax could be both effective environmentally and fair economically.

3/18

primer 5/17

https://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-pricing-climate-change-2414547547.html

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The Failure: Abandoning the Social Cost of Carbon

The social cost of carbon, or SCC, is a calculation that estimates the long-term economic impact of carbon dioxide emissions. It's a highly significant number—lawmakers use the SCC to figure out whether rules that tackle pollution are worth the investment. In 2009, the Obama administration established a group called the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases that eventuallyset the cost of one ton of CO2 emissions at $41, which is why the former president estimated the Clean Power Plan would ultimately yield up to $54 billion a year in health and environmental benefits.

Just a couple of months after taking Obama's spot in the White House, Trump disbanded the Interagency Working Group with his Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth Executive Order. He said its findings were "no longer representative of governmental policy." Trump decided the SCC should be calculated differently, with each government agency determining its own dollar figure. This could mean interagency inconsistencies as well as an increased emphasis on the domestic, rather than global, impact of CO2—pivots that would make the emissions seem far less costly than they actually are. The Trump U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan, for example, calculated that the SCC would be just $1 to $6 by 2020.

But some courts find fault with this plan. In cases across the country, judges are ruling that the SCC is necessary, and fossil fuel projects like coal mines and pipelines are now tied up as a direct result of the administration's failure to consider the climate costs.

Meanwhile, numerous states, including Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, are ignoring Trump's moves and still using an SCC above $40 to guide policy decisions.

https://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/take-action/put-price-carbon

statoil

TRANSITION

Who is Myron Ebell?

Evan Lehmann, E&E News reporter

Climatewire: Monday, November 21, 2016

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, testifies at a 2009 hearing on cap-and-trade legislation in the House. Ebell, a prominent climate change skeptic, is leading the U.S. EPA transition for the Trump administration. Photo courtesy of C-SPAN.

Andrew Moylan was about to make waves. So he arranged a meeting with Myron Ebell, to lay out his plan to push Republicans toward supporting a carbon tax.

Moylan was giving early notice to one of Washington's biggest critics of climate science. He didn't expect the bespectacled Ebell to lend his support. Still, Moylan described what happened next as "unusual."

"Myron just cut right to the chase and said, 'Listen, you're wrong, and we're going to beat you,'" recalled Moylan, now executive director of the libertarian R Street Institute.

The encounter, which occurred several years ago, encapsulates Ebell's unmoving attitude against climate action or even a willingness to discuss it, according to people who have tried.

E&E News' ongoing coverage of the new administration and the changes taking place on Capitol Hill. Click here to view the continuing coverage.]

Now, after a career of advancing theories that question the scientific underpinnings of global warming, he is overseeing U.S. EPA's transition into President-elect Donald Trump's administration. It's not lost on many observers, liberal and conservative alike, that Ebell is not a scientist and has never worked for the agency whose environmental mission he has attacked for years.

Environmentalists have called his selection a "sick joke." Even some Republicans wonder how someone who has spent most of his career at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, could be thrust into a prominent role that includes interviewing agency staff, identifying potential employees and designing a new direction for EPA under a president who has threatened to shrink its authority.

"Given that Arrhenius sussed out the mechanics of global warming in the 19th century, it's kind of sad that we have a physics denier leading the environmental transition for a 21st-century president," said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an environmental group leading efforts to end the use of fossil fuels.

He was referring to the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 pioneered the "greenhouse law," a mathematical formula that is still used to calculate carbon dioxide's impact on temperatures.

Ebell declined to comment for this story. But it's likely that he would welcome a debate with McKibben about how much the Earth is warming, or not warming, because of human activity. It's also plausible that Ebell would feel victorious at the end.

Those who know him shrug off the idea that Ebell is a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry. He's a true believer, they say.

Professionally, he's fought with lawmakers and criticized the pope. He's declared war, and victory, over climate advocates. And he takes partial credit for convincing Republicans to avoid action on warming.

Away from work, Ebell is married to a Sunday school teacher, and he has four grown children. Along the way, he has stumbled financially on his house and with the IRS.

Before all of that, he was a bookish kid who shot mule deer.

A homestead on fire

Ebell grew up in the sagebrush hills of eastern Oregon, in a town settled by gold miners at the beginning of the Civil War. Baker City is nestled in a small bowl at 3,500 feet, and tall mountains climb toward the sky in most directions.

It's closer to Idaho geographically, and politically, than to the liberal coastline and Portland. Ebell would have seen the strong influence of the federal government, which owns more than half the land in Baker County, on policies affecting cattle grazing, land access and wildfire.

To this day, Ebell criticizes the "bicoastal urban elite" who insist on being "hysterical" about the idea that climate change affects everything from storms to drought. Environmentalism isn't about protecting nature, he has said, but about advancing "eco-imperialism."

The Ebells homesteaded their Oregon farm in the 1860s. It grew to several thousand acres, and to this day, a creek and other features carry his family name. Ebell's childhood property, named Sky Ranch, is still in the family. Much of its evergreen forest burned in a wildfire last August.

Ebell was there, watching the trees crackle with flame from the base of small Cassidy Mountain at his cousin's barn lot. He blamed the government, not climate change. Mismanaged federal forests left too much tinder in the mountains, and rules preventing roads slowed response times, said John Ebell, the cousin.

"He knows what the problems are," he said of Myron.

As children, they sometimes hunted deer together and rode horseback. They grew apart in high school because of divergent interests. Myron was focused on "learning and book reading," said John Ebell, who preferred fixing tractors and other machinery.

Ebell left his family's remote mountain home in 1971 to attend Colorado College. But he carried his childhood convictions with him.

After graduating, he attended the London School of Economics, where he earned a master's degree, according to a two-page biography written by Ebell. He appears to have been unhurried during that period of his life, taking postgraduate classes at Cambridge University and the University of California, San Diego.

The first professional job Ebell lists on his biography is assistant to the chairman of the National Taxpayers Union. News reports suggest that occurred sometime in the late 1980s.

By 1990, then in his late 30s, he was representing the National Inholders Association as a lobbyist. The group fought against federal policies on behalf of people with cabins and other property in national parks and forests — so-called inholders.

It was then that Ebell first tussled with former Rep. Barney Frank, the Democratic gay lawmaker from Massachusetts.

Ebell arranged for himself to testify, at the last minute, about private easements to public lands. At one point, he called environmental groups "radical," and Frank, who was acting chairman of the subcommittee, pushed him to cite those that were and were not on the fringe.

Ebell: "Well ... some are more radical than others."

Frank: "Why don't you start with the most radical and we'll go from there."

Ebell later provided a list in writing.

Ebellian or Orwellian?

He kept appearing in Congress, though usually in the audience. In 1994, Democratic Senate staffers summoned three U.S. Capitol Police officers when Ebell refused to remove fliers from a press table describing Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as secretary "of the inferior." Ebell was verbally reprimanded.

Six months later, in early 1995, Ebell showed his willingness to antagonize authority again. This time, he poked the top Republican. In a leaked memo, he claimed that House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was going to be a "big problem" on loosening the Endangered Species Act. The memo said Gingrich has "soft feelings for cuddly little critters."

Ebell also served as a legislative assistant to former Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) and as policy director at Frontiers of Freedom.

At about that time, Ebell and his family ran into financial trouble. Public records show that his house in Prince George's County, Md., was foreclosed on in 1996. He had purchased it eight years earlier for $130,000. The Maryland Department of Assessment & Taxation lists the current owner as Citicorp Mortgage Inc., but court records from last year involving the bank say Ebell and his wife "are the owners of the property."

Ebell and his family still live in the house.

His finances were again pulled into public view in 2011, when the IRS applied a federal tax lien to his finances in the amount of $114,780. Court records indicate that Ebell satisfied that debt in 2013.

I think he understands other people's viewpoints. I think he just dismisses them.

Andrew Moylan, R Street Institute

Ebell began working on climate policy in earnest just before he joined the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 1999.

A year earlier, he and 12 other people representing the fossil fuel industry and conservative groups wrote the "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." The memo by the American Petroleum Institute outlines a strategy to "undercut" mainstream findings on global warming. Its goal was to persuade journalists, teachers and others to highlight scientific uncertainties in climate change.

Over the years, Ebell has argued that warming is a good outcome, especially for Minnesotans and other northerners who face bitter winters. He said a report released this year by the National Intelligence Council is "filled with gems of junk science." And he promised to make the idea of a carbon tax politically "toxic" in 2012, so that Republicans would think twice before supporting initiatives like the one proposed by Moylan, of the conservative R Street Institute.

In person, Ebell sometimes talks with razor blades. Those who have dealt with him, even Republicans, say he tends to categorize people as adversaries or allies. There isn't often an in-between.

He has been known to treat those on the right who accept the scientific underpinnings of rising temperatures as "traitors" and "enemies," according to sources.

"He's very Orwellian," said one Republican. "If there's a Republican who wants to be constructive [on climate policy], they're an enemy."

Some believe that Ebell's dissenting voice can benefit serious discussions about climate action. One Republican, who believes that warming deserves Congress' attention, said meaningful legislation should be shaped by everyone in the debate, even those who question the science.

"I think his value is that he shares such a passion. It will help thread the needle" on drafting policy, the Republican strategist said. "You need both opposing viewpoints to get to the art of the possible."

To others, Ebell seems to be eagerly impolite, especially in the world of think-tankers who are used to having their ideas challenged, if it happens, in a starched-shirt kind of way.

Or he's just blunt.

That's how Moylan sees him, even after the meeting in which Ebell promised to fight his carbon tax idea tooth-and-nail. He describes Ebell as a smart, honest, and "exceedingly interesting" person. He also happens to be rigidly adhered to his worldview.

"I think he understands other people's viewpoints; I think he just dismisses them," said Moylan.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/nicolas-sarkozy-proposes-carbon-tax-us-goods-if-trump-pulls-out-paris-climate-deal

Former French President Nicholas Sarkozy suggested Europe impose a carbon tax on all U.S. products if President-elect Donald Trump pulled the country out of the Paris climate change agreement.

Over 100 countries have ratified the 2015 Paris deal to curb carbon emissions in an effort to tackle climate change. Trump, a climate change denier, promised to withdraw from the agreement during his campaign.

Speaking to French broadcaster TF1, Sarkozy said late Sunday: “Donald Trump has said – we’ll see if he keeps this promise -- that he won’t respect the conclusions of the Paris climate agreement. Well, I will demand that Europe put in place a carbon tax at its border, a tax of 1-3 percent, for all products coming from the United States, if the United States doesn’t apply environmental rules that we are imposing on our companies.”

Sarkozy, who is running for presidency again, also reportedly warned that Europe cannot afford to be “weak” or “naïve” when it comes to free movement of people and trade, referring to Trump’s promises of putting the American worker first and preventing jobs from going to foreign employees.

President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks at the Shale Insight energy conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sept. 22, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/JONATHAN ERNST

Trump is looking for a quick exit from the Paris deal, Reuters reported Sunday, citing an anonymous source who is part of the president-elect’s transition team. The source said the real estate mogul was looking for ways to bypass the four-year procedure to exit the agreement.

“It was reckless for the Paris agreement to enter into force before the election,” the source, who works with Trump on international energy and climate policy, said.

Trump, during his campaign, called President Barack Obama’s speech at the Paris climate talks “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, or perhaps most naïve.”

The outgoing president said in November last year, “When it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us. But if we act here, if we act now, if we place our own short-term interests behind the air that our young people will breathe, and the food that they will eat, and the water that they will drink, and the hopes and dreams that sustain their lives, then we won’t be too late for them.”

Trump, who was then a frontrunner in the Republican race, told CNN: “I think one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard in politics, in the history of politics as I know it, which is pretty good, was Obama’s statement that our No 1 problem is global warming.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112016/washington-state-carbon-tax-i-732-ballot-measure

:{:{}:

Washington State voters rejected a proposal for the nation's first carbon tax Tuesday, defeating a landmark attempt to address climate change that had divided environmental activists. Despite being a major effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, some environmental justice advocates argued the measure would work against working people and the poor, a stance that put them uncomfortably aligned with the fossil fuel industry that also opposed the measure.

The carbon tax was expected to raise $2 billion annually through higher prices for gasoline and fossil fuel-fired electricity. It would have given all the money back, and then some, to the state's residents and businesses through a sales tax cut, rebates for working families and a tax break for manufacturers. Like all carbon taxes, Initiative 732 was designed to drive down global warming emissions by reducing demand for high-carbon fuels.

But it was unpopular with many social justice, environmental and health advocates who sought to use the revenue for renewable energy, mass transit and other green infrastructure projects, and to aid communities most affected by fossil fuel pollution or climate change.

The measure garned about 42 percent of the vote.

Among those who decided not to support the carbon tax wereSierra Club,the Washington Environmental Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists,Climate Solutions, and 350Seattle.org. Of the major environmental groups, only Audubonsupported it and raised money for the "yes" campaign, but climate scientists and even the actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio were vocal supporters.

"While tonight's outcome is disappointing...we have awakened a sleeping giant, and we look forward to continuing the fight for commonsense climate solutions for birds and for people," said Gail Gatton, executive director of Audubon Washington.

Proponents of the initiative hoped it could serve as a model for breaking the political gridlock that has stymied federal action on climate change.

For groups on the forefront of the climate action movement, the decision to withhold support from a carbon tax was wrenching.

"The people who came up with the idea of 'revenue-neutral' did it for a good reason, to defuse the partisan bomb that keeps us from getting everywhere on climate. But we can't find any political 'there' there," said KC Golden, a senior adviser to the Washington State nonprofit Climate Solutions.

"To tell labor and communities of color, 'We're going to change the incentives and benefits are going to flow' sounds...a lot like 'trickle-down' economics. They justifiably don't trust that story."

It put environmental activists in a challenging place, said Alan Durning, director of the Seattle sustainability think tank Sightline Institute. I-732 has "divided climate hawks so deeply that even writing about it is a task we undertake with trepidation," he wrote. Some Washington chapter members of the Sierra Club quit over the national organization's decisionnot to support the measure.

That put the Sierra Club and other climate action advocates on the same side as the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers. Environmental groups didn't spend money on ads opposing the measure, but they stood on the sidelines as Koch Industries and other oil refiners and energy-intensive industries poured $1 millioninto opposing it in the two weeks before the election.

The carbon tax was the brainchild of Yoram Bauman, an iconoclastic Seattle economist and founder of a small advocacy group, Carbon WA, who designed the proposal to attract support from the right.

"Climate action historically in this country has been in the purview of the Democratic Party," saidBauman. This, he said, was "a budget-friendly, business-friendly, market-friendly, pocket-book friendly approach. We think that's a model for action in other states and in Washington, D.C."

But I-732 preempted a separate carbon tax effort that had been underway in the state, led by a large coalition of environmental and public health groups, communities of color, and labor unions. The coalition had been working to design a plan that would spend the tax revenue on clean energy and water initiatives that would create jobs, as well as projects to alleviate the burden of pollution and climate risk in communities of color. The coalition said it tried to initiate discussions toward a compromise with Bauman's group, but Carbon WA was committed to the tax-swap approach.

"We think it's essential to have the revenue reinvested in climate solutions," said Aiko Schaefer, coordinator of Front and Centered, a coalition of 60 social justice and community groups that opposed I-732. The coalition includes the NAACP, the Urban League, Coalition, the Asian-Pacific Island Coalition, and the Latino Community Fund. "Pricing carbon, and then giving the money away in tax breaks—including corporate tax breaks—is not something we could support."

Although I-732 would give tax rebates to poor working families, there are about 340,000 low-income families who would not be covered by the program, Sightline Institute estimated. It would also not be fast or easy to fix that, since under Washington law, the state legislature cannot amend a voter initiative for two years.

Bill Corcoran, western director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, called the measure a missed opportunity to help accelerate the move away from fossil fuels while addressing worker dislocation and environmental and climate injustice.

"This is a transformational moment for our economy if we choose to take that opportunity. Unfortunately, Carbon WA has chosen a flawed political strategy and a small-bore approach that fails to grasp the opportunity to lift folks across the state of Washington."

Battle Lines: The Fight Over I-732

The carbon tax that Washington voters rejected was designed to levy $25 per metric ton of carbon by 2018, ramping up over 40 years to $100. At $25 per ton, the levy would add about 25 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline, 2.5 cents to each kilowatt-hour of coal-fired electricity, and 1.25 cents to electricity generated by natural gas.

The money raised would flow immediately out of the state's coffers in a 1 percent cut in Washington's state sales tax, virtual elimination of the business taxes for manufacturers, and tax rebates of up to $1,500 per year to 460,000 low-income households.

The approach earned a key endorsementfrom pioneering climate scientist James Hansen, who has long favored a carbon tax with a 100 percent rebate of the proceeds to citizens as the most effective and fairest means of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

"I-732 is not perfect, but it would be the best approach so far." Hansen wrote an op-ed in The Seattle Times. He urged a yes vote "for the sake of government transparency, and to provide an example for other states and the rest of the world, but most of all for young people, future generations, and nature."

More than 50 scientists from the University of Washington signed an open letterin support of the initiative, and DiCaprio used Twitter to urge voters support the measure. Audubon Washington stood apart from other major environmental organizations, taking a strong standin favor of the measure and raising $1.3 million for advertising and other pro-carbon tax campaigning. Noting that the movement may not get another opportunity to enact a carbon tax, Audubon said, "The cost of inaction is too great."

Texas billionaire John Arnold and his wife, Laura, were the top donors to the effort to pass the carbon tax, contributing $250,000 to Audubon's campaign. Arnold, who made his fortune trading natural gas for Enron and his own hedge fund, now is a full-time philanthropist. Other top carbon tax supporters who gave through Audubon were Seattle engineer-turned-entrepreneur David Guiliani (whose company pioneered the Sonicaire toothbrush) and the Durst Organization, one of New York's largest family real estate empires and a pioneerin environmentally sustainable buildings.)

Together, Audubon and Carbon WA spent $3 million in support of the carbon tax. That was more than a 2-to-1 advantage over the $1.4 millionraised by opponents, 70 percent of which came from oil refiners and energy-intensive industries in the final two weeks of the campaign. The American Fuel and Petroleum Manufacturers, the national trade group, led the late charge with a $250,000 donation. Other large contributors included Kaiser Aluminum, Nucor Steel, Ash Grove Cement, the Northwest Pulp and Paper Association, Puget Sound Energy, the state's mostcarbon-intensiveelectric utility. Koch Industries, which has no businesslocations in Washington state, gave $50,000.

The campaign to defeat the bill was relatively small for a measure with impact on big business; in contrast, the food industry spent $33 million to defeat a GMO-labeling ballot initiative in Washington State in 2013. For environmentalist opponents, the puny "no" campaign was proof that the fossil fuel industry did not view the measure as a threat. Proponents said, on the contrary, it demonstrated their success in crafting a measure that could gain wide support.

The measure's biggest challenge, however, was confusion over what it meant. Polls showed the number of undecideds increased from one-fifthof voters at the beginning of October to nearly one-third of voters by the end of the month.

Revenue-Neutral Controversy

The goal for I-732 was to be "revenue-neutral," but number-crunchers at the Washington state budget office concluded it would bring in about $225 million less annually than the payout in tax breaks. Others disputed that finding, but budget pressures are particularly acute because the state is currently in contempt of court for underfunding K-12 schools in violation of the Washington constitution. State employees have not seen a wage increase since 2008, while their pension and health care costs have risen. The divided legislature narrowly avoided a government shutdown in its last state budget session.

"Our state right now is under great turmoil, and let's be honest about which schools are going to be feeling the impact of more strain," said Schaefer. "And there will be other budget cuts, and often that means cuts to programs that impact people with low income. From our perspective, I-732 is written on backs of poor people."

Due to the budget concerns, Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat and an outspoken advocate of climate action, opposed I-732. Inslee, who is set to implement a new rule in January capping carbon emissions of the state's largest polluters, won re-election.

New York energy policy analyst Charles Komanoff, director of the Carbon Tax Center, said he believes that proponents of I-732 made a tactical error by framing the tax-swap as a way to appeal to fiscal conservatives, instead of stressing and explaining how it would protect low-income and middle-income families.

Washington State, which has no income tax, relies more heavily on sales taxes than other states, resulting in a regressive tax structure: Poor families pay a far greater percentage of their family income on tax than wealthy families. The sales tax cut helps address that inequity, says Komanoff, and poor and working families will see the benefit far more quickly than if the money went into infrastructure projects. "I think the policy they devised is fantastic, he said. "I think it's really fair and smart."

Carbon Tax: What's Next?

Bauman said the opposition from environmentalists was "not entirely unexpected."

"There's two stories you can tell about how to get climate action. One is our story, a bipartisan revenue-neutral approach, and the other story is kind of what I would refer to as a unite-the-left, or progressive takeover of the world," he said. "For folks who are very committed to the second story, the first story doesn't look so good.

"Our position all along has been not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good...We think that they're going to look back on this as a mistake that they made, of being on the wrong side of history," Bauman said.

With I-732 defeated, Schaefer said her coalition would move forward with an effort to gain support for its carbon tax proposal that uses the revenue to help communities and accelerate a clean energy transition. But they'll face the difficulty of explaining to voters why the approach is different than the measure they rejected. "Definitely, Carbon WA has made the job more difficult of everyone who wants to see climate action," Schaefer said.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

CLEAN ENERGY

CARBON TAX

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/british-columbias-carbon-tax-has-been-so-successful-that-businesses-want-to-increase-it/

A carbon tax may be a controversial topic in the United States, but in one Canadian province, this eight-year-old policy has been such a success that on Wednesday more than 100 businesses said they support a tax increase.

In a letter addressed to Premier Christy Clark, who governs the province of British Columbia, more than 150 companies said they back a plan to increase the carbon tax by $10 — about $7.70 U.S. — per metric ton a year starting in July 2018, an idea the government-sponsored Climate Leadership Team unveiled earlier this year.

Since 2007 British Columbia has been setting greenhouse gas reduction targets based on findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most respected authority on the subject. Four years after introducing the first carbon tax in North America in 2008, British Columbia froze the tax rates at 2012 levels to allow other provinces to catch up. However, that freeze could be lifted under a new Climate Leadership Plan that could be approved this spring.

The proposed plan includes myriad recommendations, like reducing emissions in the so-called built environment, industry, and transportation sectors by 40 percent compared to 2007 levels. Yet among the 32 recommendations, raising the carbon tax could be the most salient to the public as it affects everyone. It also brings direct monetary benefits, since the carbon tax is revenue neutral — meaning every dollar generated goes back to the public through reductions in other taxes. So the extra money that British Columbians pay for gas, for instance, is offset by a tax refund elsewhere.

Although it’s received some criticism, the carbon tax has been widely deemed a success by the government,nonprofits, and academics. Studies have found that the carbon tax reduced fuel usage by at least 16 percent, and that emissions have fallen 3.5 times faster per capita than the rest of the country. The tax has also creatednegligible impacts on the economy. In fact, British Columbia’s economic growth rebounded at the same rate as the rest of the country following the recession....

:{:{}:

http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/31/brave-new-world-carbon-pricing/

Oil companies are pretty much the last ally you'd think of when it comes to advancing big-picture solutions to climate change. These are the companies, after all, whose product is responsible for causing a significant amount of climate change in the first place—and pretty much every proposed fix for global warming necessarily involves burning less oil.

So it came as a bit of a surprise Monday when six of the leading European oil companies, including BP and Shell, unveiled a letter addressed to the United Nations climate chief calling for a price on carbon emissions (read the full letter below).

"We believe that a price on carbon should be a key element" of ongoing UN-led international climate negotiations, the letter said. This week representatives from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, to prepare for a summit in Paris this winter where they hope to produce a powerful global accord on fighting climate change. The letter called on the world's governments to create new national carbon markets where they don't currently exist (like most of the United States, for example), and to eventually link those markets internationally.

:{:{}:

Most environmental economists and policy wonks agree that making companies pay for their carbon pollution—whether through a tax or a cap-and-trade system—is a fundamental step for any meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The basic idea is that making carbon pollution expensive will drive big polluters to clean up. Policies like this are already gathering steam across the globe, from Canada to China. (California and a few Northeast states have regional carbon markets, but a national carbon price is still a non-starter in the US Congress.) Recently, Australia demonstrated just how effective carbon pricing can be, in a counterintuitive way: Carbon emissions dropped immediately after the country implemented a carbon tax, then jumped right back up when the tax was repealed.As Bloomberg Business pointed out, the letter is "unprecedented," in that it's the first time a group of major oil companies have banded together to advocate for a serious climate change policy. It waswelcomed by the UN's top climate official, Christiana Figueres, who said that the "oil and gas industry must be a major part of the solution to climate change."}:

If Monday's letter is any clue, oil companies are reading the writing on the wall, and they know that one way or another, it's time to start planning for a future when carbon pollution is more expensive and tightly regulated. Well, some oil companies: Conspicuously absent from the letter are any US oil companies, like Chevron or ExxonMobil; all the signatories are European. In fact, just last week Exxon chief Rex Tillerson implicitly blasted his European peers for cozying up to the UN on climate issues, saying his company wouldn't "fake it" on climate change and that investing in renewable energy is tantamount to "losing money on purpose."

The head of French oil giant Total addressed the cross-Atlantic schism in comments to Reuters, saying that the European companies were set on throwing their weight behind carbon pricing "without necessarily waiting for an American to come on board."

Although carbon pricing "obviously adds a cost to our production and our products," the letter says, the companies would prefer consistency and predictability over the patchwork of policies that exists now. In other words, it's easier to justify and plan investments in lower-carbon projects, such as replacing coal with natural gas, when carbon prices are stable and "even-handed," the letter said. At the same time, these companies have come under increasing pressure from shareholders to address how they'll stay profitable in the future, as restrictions on carbon emissions are tightened.

To that end, a few of the signatories already have their own internal "shadow" carbon price, where investment options are calculated with a hypothetical carbon price added in, as a way of anticipating future policies.

Still, progressive-sounding statements notwithstanding, oil companies are oil companies, and the letter gives no indication that any of them have plans to replace fossil fuels as their primary product. Shell, for one, is just weeks away from a new foray into offshore drilling in the Arctic. And according to Bloomberg, the European companies are no better than their American counterparts in terms of their actual carbon footprint. So it remains to be seen how committed the companies will be to supporting sweeping changes to the global energy system, or if letters like this are just a clever way to stay relevant as the international climate talks forge ahead. Either way, the paradox of a corporation calling for a carbon price while still pursuing fossil fuel extraction is just more evidence that the free market won't fix climate change voluntarily—governments have to create new policies, like an international carbon price, that energy companies can't evade.

Here's the letter:

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/06/guess-who-just-came-out-support-bold-fix-climate-change

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/a-climate-rescue-plan/

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TIPPING PT? iccc defectors: video carbon tax laffer, inglis

http://climatecrocks.com/2013/06/15/the-weekend-wonk-conservatives-debate-carbon-tax-carbon-tax-wins/

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It occurred last June between two groups of conservatives.

On the do-nothing side were well-known climate-science deniers, James Taylor of Heartland and David Kreutzer of Heritage Foundation. On the other side was R Street senior fellow Andrew Moylan along with former 6-term GOP congressman Bob Inglis (SC). Inglis leads theEnergy and Enterprise Initiative (E&EI), an organization dedicated to finding a conservative approach to climate change built around a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Here is the interesting part. The debate was in front of a largely conservative audience, and yet:

At the conclusion of the debate, a straw poll was taken and approximately 80% of the audience indicated they favored taxing carbon emissions in return for a dollar-for-dollar tax swap on something else(FICA taxes, corporate income taxes, etc.).

So in an actual debate for conservatives and by conservatives, the winner by far was serious climate action. Here is a video story on the debate, courtesy of the Showtime TV series —tonight’s episode features Taylor and his work with ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) to kill windpower, as well as a story on methane leaks:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/19/3439162/bob-inglis-debate-carbon-tax/

When a promising cap-and-trade bill failed in the Senate in 2010, oil and coal companies everywhere must have breathed a sigh of relief, then probably wiped the sheen from their collective brow with a spare Benjaminand got back to work.

It now looks like some of that work involved planning for a time when they would actually lose the battle over their climate sins.

In a report [PDF] released by the UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), 29 companies — including the five biggest oil-producers, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP, and Shell (not that we’re keeping track) — report that they are using carbon pricing estimates to plan for hypothetical future regulation in the U.S. This generally means that an estimated carbon price is applied to a corporation’s big-investment projects — new drilling rigs, for example — which will likely be subject to some kind of emissions tax in ten or twenty years.

For climate hawks and economists disappointed by the failure of carbon tax schemes in the real world, this may sound hopeful: At least SOMEONE believes that carbon-pricing stands a chance, and soon, too. But it’s also just good business: With California’s fledgling cap-and trade market getting under way, and public opinion on climate change swinging back toward sanity, carbon tax is looking less and less utopian and more like a plausible business expense.

The CDP claims that the usage of internal carbon prices demonstrates the “assumption that addressing climate change will be both a business cost and a possible business opportunity.” Basically, if companies start planning now, maybe our global economy won’t go into a tailspin when we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Plus, lots of international companies, especially ones operating in regulated Europe or Australia, are already dealing with carbon taxes in some form. Australia prices all consumer fossil fuels at about $21 per ton of carbon; for European countries it falls somewhere between $5 and $80.

ExxonMobil, king of the big five, is no stranger to the carbon debate. Despite a sordid history of funding huge anti-climate-science campaigns to widen the consensus gap between scientists and the general public, the company publicly supported a carbon tax in 2009 (while lobbying against the actual bill in Congress). In the CDP’s report, ExxonMobil had the highest reported cost — $60 per ton of carbon, by 2030 — while BP and Shell were more tentative with $40 a ton. (The U.S. government, by comparison, has set a tentative “social cost” price between $37 and $57 for 2015 [PDF].)

Even companies like Google and Disney got in on the carbon-pricing action, using auction prices from California’s cap-and-trade scheme to help set the bar. Not everyone is as committed: Walmart claimed only that their estimated price is set “flexibly,” whatever that means.

One conspicuous absence (drumroll, please): everyone’s favorite climate-denying multinational conglomerate, Koch Industries! The multibillion dollar corporation, with its history of campaigning against all things climate-science-y, has not joined the herd of oil companies in budgeting for carbon tax. The Koch-funded American Energy Alliance has spent $1.2 billion this year alone in attacking candidates who allegedly support a carbon price.

Of course, no one can guarantee that any of the companies reporting internal carbon prices aren’t engaging in other forms of shenanigans, hanky-panky, or mustache-twirling in this and other environmental areas. Xcel Energy, one of the 29 companies, was recently embroiled in an attempt to restrict access to local, renewable energy in Boulder, Colo. ExxonMobil, with all its pinkie-promises to be more sustainable, has started investing in natural gas — which is a smart move if carbon starts being taxed, but still lets them get away with plenty of other environmental shenanigans. And planning for a future carbon tax is a long way from actually supporting one.Color us cynical, but we have a hard time believing any energy company is that gung ho to undermine its business model.

“It’s climate change as a line item,” Tom Rivett-Carnac, the CDP’s North American director, told the New York Times. “They’re looking at it from a rational perspective, making a profit. It drives internal decision-making.”

I guess it’s good that someone is looking at it from a rational perspective. Maybe U.S. lawmakers will follow suit.

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern.

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on hayes doc iglis says pal in 90 min made arg rev neurtral, govt shrinking http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/52769181#52769218

http://grist.org/climate-energy/the-positive-economic-impact-of-a-carbon-tax-in-uh-hang-on-10-charts/ 7/13

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-coming-gop-civil-war-over-climate-change-20130509?print=true

LIGHTING THE WAY

While those groups work from the bottom up to help push Washington to move on climate issues, a constellation of prominent conservative economists is bolstering the cause. These conservatives include such intellectuals as Art Laffer, the former senior adviser to President Reagan; George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of State; Gregory Mankiw, who was an economic adviser to the Romney campaign and the former chief economist for George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the influential conservative think tank American Action Forum, a former head of Bush’s Council on Economic Advisers, and an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; and a host of other well-respected conservative economic thinkers.

Laffer spoke to National Journal by phone from his home in Tennessee, where he lives next door to Gore. The Reagan economist and the liberal global-warming crusader disagree on many issues but are united on the wisdom of a carbon-tax swap as good environmental and economic policy. “Al is a dear friend, and I think he’s a damned good public servant,” Laffer says. “I am ignorant-squared on climate change, but what I do believe is that the risks of reducing carbon in the environment are less than the risks of putting more carbon into the environment.”

Last year, Laffer wrote a detailed paper on how best to structure a carbon-tax swap, presumably as part of the broader tax-reform effort Congress appears to be moving toward. “What I believe in, and Al Gore believes in, is if you’re going to do a carbon tax, you need to offset it dollar-for-dollar with marginal tax reduction on income or employment,” he says. “Anyone who goes through what I just went through, they’ll agree with me. I’ve had more experience than anyone in the financial thinking on this.”

At the beginning of this Congress, a group of Republican lawmakers, along with a few coal-state Democrats, sponsored a measure that vowed they would never back a carbon tax, and given the antitax mood in Washington, prospects for such a tax appear dim. Still, both opponents and proponents concede that the idea will certainly be on the table if Congress makes a serious attempt at tax reform in the coming years.

Laffer said that as with so many of the policies he’s proposed before, the time will ripen for a carbon tax as it moves from impossible to inevitable. “My policies are always the North Star,” he says. “Right now, this is viewed as a third-order problem. But if we take over in 2016, this will have huge traction.”

Laffer spent last year promoting the idea on college campuses. The climate-change advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet flew Holtz-Eakin to New Hampshire to participate in living-room chats with voters about the economic costs of climate change and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

In March, Schultz went to Capitol Hill to talk about climate change and push the carbon tax to congressional aides. In a standing-room-only gathering in the Rayburn House Office Building, he argued, “Good work on conservation and the environment is in the Republican genes; we’ve been the guys who did it.… My proposal is to have a revenue-neutral carbon tax.” Schultz got a standing ovation. Among the audience were staffers from the offices of Republican Reps. Phil Roe of Tennessee, Billy Long of Missouri, and Randy Neugebauer of Texas—ranked as the most conservative member of the House in a 2011 NJ survey.

A SLEEPING GIANT

It’s long been taken as a truism that the powerful oil lobby is the reason nothing happens on climate change in Washington. For many years, that was indeed true. In particular, Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company and a major contributor to Republican candidates, was associated with a campaign to fuel skepticism about climate science. From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil contributed more than $600,000 to the Heartland Institute, a well-known nonprofit group that holds conferences and publishes books aimed at debunking the science of climate change. Exxon Mobil’s support of Heartland made sense. The oil company stood to take a financial hit from “cap-and-trade” climate-change proposals that would have priced carbon pollution from oil.

For a number of reasons, that equation is changing. Exxon Mobil has ended its support of Heartland’s agenda. It’s not that the oil giant has had a green awakening; it’s just that a series of internal changes have positioned the company to profit from at least some policies that price carbon emissions.

In 2010, Exxon Mobil bought the natural-gas company XTO Energy, which transformed the venerable oil producer into the world’s largest natural-gas producer. Around the same time, the company began making a noticeable shift in its climate policy. The reason: Natural gas, which is used to generate electricity, is the lowest-polluting fossil fuel, emitting just half of the greenhouse gases as coal, the world’s top electricity source. In the event of a tax on carbon pollution, demand for coal-fired electricity would freeze, while markets for natural gas would explode.

Every year, Exxon Mobil puts out a widely read report with projections on the global state of energy development. The most recent one included the assumption of a future price on carbon and a corresponding surge in natural-gas consumption. “We assume there’s going to be a price on carbon in the future, and that assumption drives our investment strategy,” says company spokesman Alan Jeffers.

And the position on climate change at Exxon Mobil that once helped fund the Heartland conferences? “We have the same concerns about climate change as everyone. The risk of climate change exists; it’s caused by more carbon in the atmosphere; the risk is growing; and there’s broad scientific and policy consensus on this,” Jeffers says.

In 2010, during Senate negotiations on the cap-and-trade bill, Exxon Mobil told the White House that it wouldn’t back that bill, but it would support legislation with a straight carbon tax, ideally, a carbon-tax swap along the lines of what Inglis and Laffer propose. Ultimately, of course, all of those attempts failed. And, today, Exxon Mobil is not actively lobbying for the tax. The company’s position remains the same, though, Jeffers says. “Our approach has been, if public policymakers have decided they want to put a price on carbon, we see a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most efficient way to do that.”

In the 2012 campaign, Exxon Mobil gave $2.7 million in political contributions, with 88 percent going to Republicans. One of the world’s biggest and most profitable oil companies—a lobbying powerhouse and major influence in GOP politics, particularly in deep-red oil states—has accepted the science of climate change and figured out how to profit from a carbon-price policy. While Exxon Mobil won’t be leading the green revolution, its shift could make a difference in the way many Republicans approach the issue.

exxon favored,to head off cap and trade see frontline

fee and dividend; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-james-hansen/the-american-party_b_3358546.html?view=print&comm_ref=false hansen

Among Republicans, is there anyone pushing to address climate change?

Outside of Congress, there are a lot of Republicans who are very concerned in the way their party talks about climate change. They’re afraid the Republicans will end up on the wrong side of history, and this view will come back and hurt them badly. So they’re outside the political process having conversations on how to push the issue.

The Energy and Enterprise Initiative is made up of Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost his job in part for support of climate change and is working with conservative economist Art Laffer, with the support of Romney adviser Greg Mankiw to push for this idea of the carbon tax.

There is also the Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, a Christian Coalition linked up with [Young Republicans], that fears that the party is morally on the wrong side of the issue.

So there’s a growing conversation of Republicans who aren’t in public office, who are worried, who want to tell Republicans that if they go back to a moderate place on this issue, we will still support them.

But a much more powerful voice is fossil fuel groups and SuperPACs. They haven’t had nearly as much of a voice as the SuperPACs, like Americans for Prosperity, or the coal groups, like the American Coalition for Clean Coal and Electricity, which are spending very heavily to influence the campaign and make sure Republican candidates don’t move on the issue.

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:{:{Grover Norquist Abruptly Changes Position On Carbon Tax:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}: After Facing Criticism From Koch-Backed Group}:

By Stephen Lacey on Nov 13, 2012 at 1:27 pm

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist raised a lot of eyebrows on Monday when he told *National Journal* that acarbon tax might be on the table if it were swapped with a cut to the income tax.

“It’s possible you could structure something that wasn’t an increase and didn’t violate the pledge,” he reportedly said.

As president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist has convinced hundreds of members of Congress to sign a pledge that they will never raise taxes. While his influence appears to be waningin Washington, Norquist’s tax pledge is still considered gospel for many Republicans. That’s why his willingness to consider a tax on global warming pollution is a big deal in political circles.

But one day later, after being criticized by the American Energy Alliance, the advocacy arm of aKoch-supportedenergy think tankdevoted to promoting fossil fuel development, Norquist has completely reversed his statement, saying there virtually “no conceivable way” he could support a tax on carbon....http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/13/1182511/grover-norquist-abruptly-reverses-position-on-carbon-tax-after-facing-criticism-from-koch-backed-group/