Climate activists have been bruised and bloodied over the past few months. And yet there’s a group in Rochester that still has hope that Congress will act to cut US carbon emissions.
The local chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby has watched its numbers swell since President Donald Trump’s election. It now gets around 40 people at its meetings, says chapter co-leader Sarah Mittiga.
“We’ve been exploding,” Mittiga says. “We used to have 10 people at a meeting; 15 people would be like ‘Oh! Big turnout!'”
And while the members have watched the White House assault on climate regulations, programs, and agreements – some long-standing, and some new – they’ve seen something encouraging. Citizens’ Climate Lobby has two priorities: growing the size of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the House and getting Congress to pass a carbon tax known as “carbon fee and dividend.” And both are gaining support among Congressional Democrats and Republicans.
Under Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s plan, the federal government would slap a fee on any fossil fuel, whether it’s extracted domestically or imported. The money from those fees would be refunded entirely to American households, with each getting an equal share of the proceeds. The carbon fee and dividend concept differs substantially from past cap and trade proposals, which were complex and would have directed revenues from emissions fees back into federal programs.
In Congress, the year-old Climate Solutions Caucus has grown to almost 50 members, with an even mix of Democrats and Republicans. And members of both parties are warming to carbon fee and dividend in a way that hasn’t happened with past carbon pricing proposals.
The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which started in 2007, has earned a reputation for pragmatism and civility, which is helping it win over members of Congress. And right now, the local chapter really wants to win over Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter, who has so far resisted joining the Climate Solutions Caucus and backing carbon fee and dividend.
Climate Lobby members have enlisted Paetec founder and renewable-energy entrepreneur Arunas Chesonis in their cause. He recently wrote Slaughter encouraging her to support carbon fee and dividend, which he frames as an economically competitive approach to cutting carbon emissions. The group also convinced Rochester City Council to pass a resolution supporting carbon fee and dividend.
Slaughter has been through a few legislative battles over climate and energy policy, and she knows just how contentious the subjects can be. She’s wary of both the carbon fee and dividend concept and the Climate Solutions Caucus.
Slaughter’s a member of the all-Democratic Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, which supported the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act. That legislation was a comprehensive bill that boosted federal investment in renewable energy and laid out a cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put a price on carbon. The bill passed the House with no Republican support and never received a vote in the Senate.
Slaughter still stands by the proposal. Revenue raised through any carbon pricing plan should be used progressively, she says, and should, in particular, be invested in renewables.
“I’m going to stick with what I’ve got,” she said last week. “I’ll be happy to look at the new bill if they file it, but I’m not holding my breath for them to file one.”
She’s also skeptical that any carbon tax proposal could succeed under the Trump White House and the current Republican controlled Congress.
But some GOP Congress members are open to the idea of carbon fee and dividend. Republican Tom Reed, whose district covers much of the Southern Tier and stretches into Ontario County, says Republicans saw cap and trade as a new tax accompanied by bureaucratic bloat.
“The dividend model is more attractive to an individual like me, because that makes sure that the money goes right back to the people as opposed to just feeding the beast of the federal spending,” says Reed, who acknowledges the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change.
And, he says, details need to be “ferreted out” on carbon fee and dividend before he can “wholeheartedly support it.”
Past carbon tax proposals have also been dogged by concerns that they might lead to higher energy prices, which could strain low- and moderate-income households. But a think tank’s analysis of Citizen Climate Lobby’s proposal says that 70 percent of households would break even if energy prices go up, says Rob Levine, a member of the Rochester Citizens’ Climate Lobby chapter.
“If you really want this to work, citizens have to be OK,” Levine says. “You can’t raise prices on a vital product, being energy, and expect them to be OK with it if you don’t help offset the costs.”
The Climate Solutions Caucus was formed in 2016 by a pair of Florida House members, Republican Carlos Curbelo and Democrat Ted Deutch, who’d become increasingly concerned about the problems climate change was already causing in their state.
They saw an opportunity to bring members of their respective parties together to work on meaningful climate proposals. Citizens’ Climate Lobby sees the same potential in the caucus and views it as a logical conduit for carbon fee and dividend legislation. That’s why members of the local chapter are urging Slaughter to join it.
Some of the Democrats in the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition have already signed on, including Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon representative who started the Congressional Bike Caucus, and Jerry McNerney, a California representative who sponsored a carbon fee and dividend bill in 2015.
A few New York Republicans, including Reed, are also members. “I do recognize climate change,” he says, “and I do recognize the need for prioritizing solutions to address climate change, as we’re seeing the effects of it today. And the caucus, to me, was a natural fit to get like-minded members who want to spend a little extra time focusing on those solutions.”
Reed’s interest is largely in tax and trade policies. He is sponsor of legislation that would extend investment tax credits for renewable and alternative energy technologies; Slaughter is one of the bill’s many cosponsors. Reed says he wants to work on other policies that would advance clean energy technologies and encourage energy-efficient buildings, in turn reducing domestic reliance on – and market demand for – fossil fuels.
But he’s unlikely to join climate activism groups in their calls for an immediate halt in new fossil fuels development and infrastructure. He says a longer transition period will be necessary, since the US economy is based on fossil fuels.
“I think you still need to have reliable fossil fuel sources,” he says, “but we can do that at the same time, in my opinion, we’re incentivizing and promoting and supporting innovation as we go forward.”
The caucus, in other words, isn’t a panacea. But it may be, for now, the best chance for getting some serious climate legislation through Congress. And it may also be the most promising route for a long sought-after price on carbon emissions.
“There’s a lot of good plans out there, but if they don’t pass you’re tilting at windmills,” Levine says.
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2017.
We definitely have to get our planets temperature down quickly and a carbon fee makes economic, ethical, and physical sense. Efforts by Citizens’ Climate Lobby, both locally and nationally, to put a laser focus on this strategy are freaking amazing.
And yet Louise Slaughter supports plan 2014 which is flooding her own constituents and polluting the lake like crazy. The crap in the lake right now is unbelievable and the water looks milky. Good work Louise. Keep polluting our drinking water.
The toughest challenge here, ironically, may be to get the Democrats on board with this. A lot of them, including apparently Rep. Slaughter, are loathe to give taxes and fees back to the public because they are overflowing with ideas on how to spend federal money. But this issue is too important to get hung up on that. We need to get carbon under control ASAP, and there is a lot of merit in the CCL proposal, which many conservatives will support. We need to ask our politicians to get on board and get this moving. It will take years to get this worked out, and Trump won’t be around forever – even though it will seem that way.
How Low Will We Go?
Thanks to Mr. Moule and City for providing some solid coverage of the important Carbon Fee and Dividend bill (CF&D) championed by the Citizens Climate Lobby. A good follow-up would explore further the ramifications of this bill, and what it says about where our society finds itself.
CF&D gets at the basics for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by setting a more accurate market price for carbon. At the same time, it is utterly silent with regard to the suffering that climate change will (already is) unleashing. Our decades of delay have now loaded the pipeline with an onslaught of extreme weather, and CF&D has no answer as to how to prepare for and respond to these new stresses, which at this late stage we can only hope to reduce, not eliminate, by cutting future carbon emissions. This deficiency results from the dividend component of CF&D, a sop to conservatives, who claim that government is not capable of spending money wisely (a proposition easy to dispute, but that’s another topic).
Given today’s political climate (free market ideology plus short-termism), there is much to recommend CF&D. It’s a big step in the right direction, and holding out for better alternatives can be seen as risking the good for the perfect. It’s unlikely in the extreme that conservatives or the public in general will soon warm to the idea that we face a collective disaster and that government is the only entity that can begin to adequately address either mitigation of or adaptation to the coming tragedies. Thus, what CF&D effectively proposes is that we cut carbon emissions, but we’re on our own as far as facing the consequences of what we’ve unleashed.
The key question for climate advocates is: are we better off in the future if we get carbon emissions down sooner but continue to view the world through the lens of free market consumerism, with its consequent suffering for our weakest and most vulnerable? Or is there any reasonable chance that we can achieve better results by holding out for a more holistic approach to the problem? It is certainly mandatory that at some point human society dispenses with free market ideology else we are all doomed, so this is a bridge that must be crossed regardless of our other actions. Isn’t passage of a CF&D policy likely to cause too many to step back from advocacy, thinking that the problem has been largely solved, or at least sufficiently for their purposes? Even if it were true that the well-off can avoid the worst consequences while the poor suffer (a dubious proposition), the consequences for social stability and moral development may render the safety of the “screw the poor” strategy illusory for all.
I do not know what the right answer is as far as CF&D. But the very fact that those of us who know its full ramifications must nevertheless consider it shows how far we are on the path to disaster. Holding out for better is NOT a sacrifice of the good for the perfect — perfect would have been where we would have acknowledged our dilemma and taken sensible moderate actions decades ago, when science was first sounding the alarm. But the point now is that CF&D may or may not be the best we can do now. Whatever else it is, CF&D is a capitulation to the idea that humanity is incapable of removing its blinders, and so we must take what positive steps that we can even knowing that we may be dooming thousands if we do. Given what we know of human potential, this is a sorry sorry state to be in.
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/…