Senator Sanders' carbon tax proposal

Sigh… So Senators Sanders and Boxer have come out with proposed legislation for a carbon tax — which sounds like great progress, but turns out to be just another measure of how far we have to go to face reality. To begin with, the ostensible goal of the proposal is to decrease carbon emissions 80% by 2050. This might have been a worthwhile goal a few years (or decades) ago, but the effects of warming are so fast outpacing the projections it is now clear that 80% by 2050 is not even close to what is truly necessary (more on that in a later post).

But even if the goal were enough, there are two huge problems with this proposal. First, the price for carbon is set at $20/ton initially, rising to $35/ton over 10 years. This is practically guaranteed to have virtually no effect. Just think about it — we know that a cross-country roundtrip flight spews the equivalent of 2 tons of carbon per passenger, so this would add a big $40.00 to the price of that roundtrip ticket! (even if all of those emissions were fairly counted, which they usually are not). Is that really going to keep anyone from flying? I understand the airlines have been tacking on that much just in luggage fees and whatnot lately — I haven't read of a huge drop in air travel because of it. There is also a really easy conversion factor for car travel: dollars/ton of carbon approximately equals cents/gallon of gas — so that $20/ton will add about 20 cents per gallon. Excuse me, but — big deal! The price of gas fluctuates more than that, all the time, with little effect on driving (how many folks do you think would stop driving to work if gas went up a measly 20 cents?). Getting an 80% cutback is going to take pricing carbon orders of magnitude higher than that.

The second big problem, of course, is that this is not a real carbon fee-and-dividend proposal, it is a carbon tax proposal — and that makes all the difference. The beauty of true fee-and-dividend is that all of the proceeds go to reimbursing the people, so that it's not just another regressive tax: the proceeds are collected according to consumption, but distributed per-capita, so that those who consume a lot (frequent flyers, living in and heating giant houses, etc.) pay a lot, and people who consume little end up getting back more than they put in. This proposal, on the other hand, returns only 60% to the people; the other 40%  would be used for various purposes, including "energy efficiency" and (naturally) paying down the debt (!). This is, of course, only the starting place — this is the part that is ripe for loading up with lots of pork for lots of political contributors. And all for naught, as only a few senators will end up voting for even this. So far we have to go, to face reality...