We Applaud Proposed Conservative Case for Addressing Climate Change
Mark Tercek
Advisor to companies, countries, and non-profits on financial and business strategies to scale and accelerate environmental progress
Mark Tercek is the president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy and author of Nature’s Fortune. Follow Mark on Twitter: @MarkTercek.
We should all welcome the carbon dividend proposal announced by the Climate Leadership Council today. This distinguished group of former Republican economic officials and corporate leaders, led by three Treasury Secretaries serving President Reagan and both Bushes, offers a simple plan to address the threat of global warming while making the size of government smaller. Americans will easily grasp their approach and I believe most will support it.
The plan has four pillars: tax the carbon in fossil fuels at $40 per ton of carbon dioxide for the emissions they will produce; rebate all of the revenue to American households in quarterly dividend payments; repeal federal regulations that will no longer be needed because carbon prices produce greater and more efficient investments in emissions reductions; and assure that the program does not damage U.S. trade by adjusting its impact on exports and imports that are energy intensive.
It is often said these days that in their hearts many Republicans in Congress know that we need to act on the global warming threat, but they are imprisoned in their anti-climate position by fierce partisan politics and the threat of interest group money supporting their primary opponents. Well, this is the day for the prison break. And as our Republican friends come out, I hope that Democrats and environmentalists will happily welcome them to a new, bipartisan conversation on this carbon dividend proposal.
One way we can put out the welcome mat is by reexamining our insistence on implementation of the Clean Power Plan as the Climate Leadership Council suggests. A gradually increasing price on carbon dioxide emissions starting at $40 a ton will do more to reduce emissions from the electric power sector, and do it sooner, than the Clean Power Plan. And it is a tax that reaches across the entire economy, so we won’t have to wait for new rules on oil refineries, paper mills and steel plants.
The second thing we can do is agree to send all of the revenue back to the American people as dividends rather than keeping it here in Washington and spending it on special interest nostrums, many of which we have supported in the past. Climate change legislation was defeated in 2010 mostly because the American people saw Congress using it as a way to make government much bigger by doling out subsidies and favors to those who had the best lobbyists. Let’s not make that mistake, again. Let’s just send all of this revenue back to the American people without any haircut for Washington-designed programs.
I don’t mean to suggest that there shouldn’t be any discussion about the details. For instance, low-income households spend much more of their budgets on energy than the more well-to-do. To make sure that the combined carbon tax and dividend does in fact have an equal impact on all Americans, perhaps the dividends should tilt a bit toward lower income families. We might also want to think about keeping the automobile fuel efficiency standards that President Obama created because they will for the next few years do more to reduce emissions in the transportation sector than a carbon tax. And by the way, the fuel efficiency standards also save Americans money in lower fuel costs.
In other ways, members of the Climate Leadership Council have done much to identify the impact of global warming on our economy and the most vulnerable economic sectors in each region of the nation through reports such as Risky Business. With this proposal today they have given us a simple, efficient and effective way to address those risks. It is an invitation drawn from principles that Republicans have long endorsed and should not be ignored by current officeholders who know they need to step up. I hope that it is an invitation that will also be welcomed by my colleagues in the environmental community as it draws on a principle we have long supported. A price on carbon is the most efficient policy to stop the threat of global warming.
Photo: ? Dave Lauridsen for The Nature Conservancy
Chemical Engineer, modeler and gardener
7 年Why is it that we can perpetually block progress on KNOWN issues by claiming that there is not enough data to show with absolute certainty, that a new method of clean up will produce not only a better, but a perfect result? Yet with a nearly 20 year unpredicted "pause" in global warming and one of the thickest antarctic ice sheets we've seen on record, we still are relentlessly pushing for solutions to a problem we cannot even show actually exists. Two of the cases I'm thinking of is the Yucca mountain nuclear waste repository issue and the Hanford liquid hazardous waste site issue. Both of these have demonstrably better solutions to a multitude of problems that are far more dangerous than a few more ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet for the last several decades, we've gone through the political/media hype of "an in ice age coming! we're all gonna die"... to "there's a heat wave coming! we're all gonna die!"... to "OMG! There's a pause! We have no idea what will happen but we better make drastic changes now!". During that same time period we have known exactly what to do with the nuclear waste in both of these areas. Yet we have been blocked because...now get this...drum roll please... "the science isn't proven". Really? OK. Let's think this through. If we bury the waste 1000 ft below a mountain and 1000 ft above the water table we can't tell if that's better than leaving it above ground with a few civilians with M-16's behind a chain link fence...in an earthquake zone...a few feet above the aquifer? (Hmmm...tough choice, better study that one some more). There are millions of gallons of nuclear acidic waste left over from the 50's a few hundred yards from the Colombia river in a steel tank and we have the technology to turn the mess into solid glass. Can we seriously not figure out if the science proves if glass would be safer than a leaving it in a rusting tank in the ground or not? What is proven is that steel corrodes, these tanks leak and glass doesn't move as fast contaminated water. (I think the appropriate response would be..."doh!") For 40 years we've been laboriously debating over remarkably simple choices that a 4th grader can make. We've spent billions studying and fretting over absurdly obvious solutions and we still can't agree. By default, we have done nothing...not optimum, not preferred, but the world still turns and if you're reading this, you are not dead. Compared to climate change, these are simple solutions to simple issues. Yet for some reason we are told we must accept the paradigm that we absolutely have to change the entire economic structure of the western world based on models that can't even predict the weather next month...oh yeah we have to do it now or we're all gonna die! We are also told to we have to trust these models/people because "98% of scientists agree". These are the same folks who predicted the coming ice age by 2020 for crying out loud! (insert face palm here) We are also supposed to accept the fact that the scientists in the "98%" statistic are merely a handful of social, economic and political scientists not climatologists. The climatologists were voted off the panel! (oops, not supposed to look behind that curtain!...nothing suspicious here) If proving the science beyond a doubt is a prerequisite for approving a clean up project or god forbid, a pipeline route, then please, let's all be grown ups and apply that same standard before enacting ANY global warming policy.
Citizen Scientist/Researcher
7 年Approx. l58 Million Trees died in California due to drought!
Founder at The Proxy Project
7 年At this point, anything at all that can be done to counteract the threats this Congress and administration pose to the environment is worth doing. I've always been a fan of a carbon tax for its simplicity and lack of loopholes. I would argue, though, that some of the revenues should be used to accelerate research in green energy and even lower the cost of bringing the revolutionary new -- and safe -- nuclear technologies online as soon as possible. And investment in mass transit infrastructure would also make sense as people look for painless ways to reduce their carbon consumption. Rebating citizens their share of the carbon tax by making municipal transit free and interstate mass transit cheaper will really pack a punch in this do or die battle with global warming.
ATIVISTA AMBIENTAL voluntário de campo em servi?o ambiental, ambientalist, finding ways to make differences, volunteer.
7 年My friend, beutiful and touching words, but you know what I see, I seeing a litlle thing that I noted that almost nobody see . We have a strange point of view, I say that I could generate infinty energy. My country on time doesn't care, and I like that, because this kind of technologie it's not good in wrong hands. Just for remember everybody, we
Life-long learner
7 年Almost 100 years later, we still find wisdom in the logic of internalizing external costs first advocated by Pigou in the Economics of Welfare: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Welfare-Palgrave-Classics/dp/0230249310 There's nothing new about this proposal and that is probably its chief merit. The major technical obstacle to applying effluent taxes or even the more egregious regulatory approaches to carbon emissions seems to be understanding the relationship between inputs and outputs well enough to set a rational policy. One can accept the interpretive science of climate change (NOT be a climate denier) and still have significant doubts about whether we can predict consequences well enough to make good policy choices. Perhaps this "gradualist" approach to setting the tax can overcome rational concerns about the predictive science. Certainly the Pigouvian approach is better than the ill-advised Clean Power Plan and its regulatory cousins. But advocates of a carbon tax have a long way to go to make the sale.