This commentary is by Peter Ehrlich of Jericho, a software engineer and founding member of the Zero Percent Club.
Six months ago I woke up at 4 a.m., worried and unable to sleep. I had been making the mistake of educating myself on climate, and was not feeling optimistic. How could we change our civilization in time to forestall certain doom?
That sleepless morning, and my quest for hopeful solutions, became a blog post on carbon pricing around the world. I discovered that more than 60 national and regional carbon pricing programs already exist — from Europe to China to Canada. And the best one that is politically viable is Carbon Fee and Dividend.
There’s a brilliant simplicity to this model: Industries that emit carbon pay a fee for the amount they emit. That money is then redistributed to the public as a “cash back” that (more than!) offsets any increase in consumer prices.
At the same time, the model incentivizes domestic and local companies to innovate and transition to cleaner energy sources and less polluting technology and processes.
With this policy, you might be concerned about countries without a carbon price undercutting the U.S. domestic market. Europe has the strongest carbon price in the world today, and is protecting its local businesses by introducing in 2024 a tariff on imported goods according to their “embodied” carbon, which matches their domestic carbon price.
This is already having a ripple effect. The U.S. Congress is considering its own version in response, with some groundwork already being laid out in the PROVE-IT act in the Senate.
Will conservatives support carbon pricing?
I recently traveled to Washington, D.C., as one of more than a thousand Citizens’ Climate Lobby members to meet with senators, House members, and their staff. By and large, we saw immense relief from conservatives when they saw that our policy, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, does NOT put the funds toward growing government programs. Instead, the money goes right back into the pockets of Americans. Given the sometimes life-or-death effects of marginal price increases for Americans living close to the poverty line, this makes a heck of a lot of sense.
We also saw a strong desire from lawmakers, especially on the right, to build up American innovation. They understand the benefit of investing in our own economies and know that a tariff could give U.S. manufacturing a competitive advantage.
Even speaking as someone who is likely as not to be labeled an environmentalist, I would rather see electric battery-mineral mining happening in our country, where we have more pollution regulations and protections for workers.
- What about the grid?
Transitioning our nation to clean energy as we leave fossil fuels behind will require substantial new infrastructure, but current permitting law stands in the way. It is complicated and heavily favors fossil fuel projects.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has the ability to site natural gas and other pipelines using eminent domain, with minimal input from the states through which the pipelines are built. If that same amount of energy were transmitted electrically instead, the project could easily have an added five to 10 years of costly permitting negotiations. As a result, pipelines are fast-tracked while fossil-free projects are faced with complex, often duplicative, bureaucratic delays.
- A reason for hope.
What I learned from D.C. is that, beyond the rhetoric, leaders in both parties value the well-being of their constituents highly. Both parties see the dangers of climate change as both a present and an imminent threat, and also see Carbon Fee & Dividend as an effective tool for the job which also will help people, especially those who are most vulnerable.
