Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The push by corporate America and some large environmental organizations to support some form of a national carbon tax should be followed closely. I expect the battles between progressives and moderates will burn red hot before it’s all over.
The gathering coalition of interests willing to support imposition of a national carbon tax is impressive. Most impressive—perhaps—is the willingness of so many Republicans to stand up and be counted as and with climate defenders.
Carbon taxes are witnessing a huge uptick in attention. The advent of the Trump era is causing clean energy and climate defenders to pursue alternative policy priorities to those of the Obama era.
With atmospheric levels of CO2 recently jumping at a rate of 3ppm per year, CO2e levels could soon be increasing at 4-5ppm per year. A level of 550 ppm CO2e, consistent with a 3 degree centigrade rise in temperatures, would then be reached in the early 2030’s.
Washington state may implement the first carbon tax in the nation. Initiative 732 would motivate households and businesses to cut down on the burning of fossil fuels, the major source of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. By raising the price of fossil fuels it would encourage conservation and efficiency and the substitution of low-carbon and carbon-free sources of energy by making these energy sources more cost-competitive.
How do we create a marketplace that will pay landowners and others to double the carbon content of their soil?
Some people object to the concept of “natural capital” because they say it reduces nature to the status of a commodity to be marketed at its exchange value.
With Australia’s standing as the world’s highest per-capita emitter of carbon dioxide, one would think the country would be the last to repeal a pollution tax.. Think again.
East-West tensions spiralled to levels not seen since the end of the cold war as Russia annexed Crimea this week.
A more radical approach to the crisis of climate change begins not with a long-term vision of an alternate society but with an honest engagement with the very compressed timeframe that current climate science implies.
There is one segment of U.S. industry that ought to be cheering for expanded U.S. natural gas exports–though I doubt that its leaders will be offering their support in anything above a whisper. The renewable energy industry would benefit from higher natural gas prices.
Amid all the complex data and opinion about climate change, the dirty secret is quite obvious, so simple and awkward that it’s rarely discussed. The dirty secret is that, under present conditions, at least in the short-term, alternative energy costs more than fossil fuels.
