The New Civilian Climate Corps

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Immediately upon assuming office, President Biden issued an executive order addressing his climate objectives.  Prominent among these was the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps to tackle climate change resiliency and provide job training to underemployed youth.  The new CCC would be modeled on a popular New Deal program that put thousands to work on conservation projects during the Depression. From every angle the new CCC seems like a good idea, but its uncertain future is bound up with the stalled Build Back Better legislation.

The Depression-era program was known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which ran from 1933 to 1942 and employed roughly 3 million young men.  They were set to work fighting wildfires, building more than 100,000 miles of roads and trails, 318,000 dams and tens of thousands of bridges.  They strung telephone wire where it had never been before.  They dug erosion-control ditches on private land and helped farmers with other land conservation projects.  Many of the fire towers, state park buildings and other structures built by the Corps are still in use.

The participants in the Depression-era Corps were overwhelmingly male, white and poor.  A Time magazine article from the period described the 1938 Corps as 67% from “relief families” and another 29% from families “below the normal standard of living.”  Only 11% had finished high school.  Corpsmen were paid $30 per month, much of which had to be set aside either for dependents or to be drawn when the participants left the program.  This whole scheme was enormously popular with the Corpsmen and the public.  When back home the Corpsmen were treated as heroes.

The proposed new Civilian Climate Corps has a different name to reflect the needs of the present day.  The focus would be on job training for careers in the conservation space for urban youth who don’t normally have opportunities of that sort.  Biden proposes to spend a mere $10 billion on the new CCC, a small sliver of the proposed $1.75 trillion Build Back Better legislation. Pay would be $15 per hour plus health care and other benefits.  The jobs would mostly be short-term, following the model of AmeriCorps.  Perhaps 20,000 per year could be employed.

The new CCC would not become involved in politically charged climate issues. Its goals are noncontroversial and clearly stated in the executive order:

The initiative shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.

It is also unlikely to be a gap year for college kids from the suburbs.  Rather it would recruit from lower-income families and communities of color.

While the new CCC is not overtly designed to reduce political polarization, that would be a welcome byproduct.  The racial integration of military units during World War II and Korea, while not complete or perfect, went far better than critics thought it would.  It was largely responsible for a greater general acceptance of integration in later decades.  In 2006 a meta-study of over 500 studies in thirty-eight countries revealed strong evidence of the power of simple contact to reduce prejudice among groups.  Proponents of national service have recognized its power to serve as a binding agent and catalyst for democracy. Our racially and politically polarized society could use a dose of this. Instead, we sort ourselves into like-minded communities.

We are so polarized now that even the name Civilian Climate Corps causes opposition to the initiative. In October 2020, when the name was still Civilian Conservation Corps, 44% of Republican voters said they “strongly supported” the idea and 40% of Republican voters “somewhat supported” it.  In April 2021, after the initiative was renamed the Civilian Climate Corps, just 11% of Republican voters “strongly supported” and 33% “somewhat supported” it.  In a floor speech in the fall of 2021, Senate Minority Leader McConnell said the new CCC was “pure socialist wish fulfillment” and called it a “made-up government work program . . . for young liberal activists.”

Government cost accounting and revenue projections are often hard to penetrate and surely must be taken with a grain of salt. But since the new CCC would operate on a model similar to AmeriCorps, return on investment from that government program offers a clue of what to expect from a Civilian Climate Corps. The federal ROI for AmeriCorps and similar programs at the national level is 3.5.  That means that for every dollar spent on these programs the federal government alone receives $3.50 in returns from tax revenue gains and savings.  The federal cost-benefit ratio, calculated differently, is 17.3.  That means for every dollar spent on AmeriCorps and similar programs the return to society, program members and the government is $17.30.

Biden’s executive order directed the Interior and Agriculture departments to design the new CCC initiative “within existing appropriations.”  How this could happen is unclear. These departments were to have submitted a strategy report by April 2021, but that report is overdue.  Without financial support through the Build Back Better Act, or some other specifically targeted legislation, this worthy program is unlikely to get off the ground. And without support from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, Build Back Better cannot pass the Senate.

The Hot Air About Methane

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When President Biden left for the COP26 meeting in Glasgow recently, his primary plan for reaching the greenhouse gas reduction goals in the Paris Accords was in disarray.  The cause of this disarray was mainly the opposition of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.  But Biden had Plan B, which involves a two-pronged approach to sharply reducing methane emissions.  In Glasgow, Biden announced that more than thirty countries have pledged to cut emissions of methane 30% by 2030.  Given our decades-long focus on reducing carbon dioxide, this pivot to methane is a bit disorienting.

Carbon dioxide is by far the largest contributor to climate change, and it comes from recognizable fossil fuel sources such as coal-burning utilities, and automobile tailpipes. Carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, making the climate change it causes not just a current problem, but a future one as well.

Yet some experts say that methane (CH4) is a bigger problem than carbon dioxide (CO2).  While methane dissipates naturally after about 100 years, its pound for pound impact is 25 times greater than carbon dioxide in trapping heat reflected from the Earth’s surface.

Sources of Methane

Some methane occurs naturally from the decay of plant and animal matter. Domestic livestock, such as beef cattle, pigs and sheep, produce CH4 as part of their normal digestive process.  But human-produced methane far exceeds what is produced naturally.

Agriculture, including raising of cattle for human consumption and management of animal wastes, is the single largest source of methane. Natural gas and petroleum systems are the second largest source. The U.S. oil and gas industry emits more methane than the total emissions of greenhouse gases from 164 countries combined. Landfills are the third-largest source.

Some politicians call natural gas a “bridge fuel,” meaning that burning it emits less carbon dioxide than burning coal.  But it is wrong to call natural gas clean. Methane is the primary component of natural gas. Methane is emitted during the production, processing, storage, transmission, and distribution of natural gas.  In addition, burning natural gas still releases carbon.

Satellite imagery of the Permian gas field in Texas show huge plumes of methane erupting from hot spots throughout the area. No human artifice or industrial process is infallible, and that is certainly true with gas production and pipeline transmission. Major failures to capture methane and leaks from pipelines, pumps and valves are endemic.

Biden’s Plan B 

Not surprisingly, Biden’s plan to reduce methane emissions focuses on the oil and gas industry.  Regulations issued under President Obama placed controls on methane emissions from new and modified sources in the industry, but failed to address existing wells, production facilities and pipelines.  Even as toothless as they were, these regulations were shelved during the Trump Administration.  In April 2021, Congress restored the Obama-era methane regulations.

Then on the eve of Biden’s trip to Glasgow, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed new rule that covers existing sources of methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The proposed rule involves a comprehensive monitoring program for new and existing well sites and compressor stations, and proposed performance standards for other sources, such as storage tanks, pneumatic pumps, and compressors.

The proposed rule would reduce 41 million tons of methane emissions from 2023 to 2035, the equivalent of 920 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That’s more than the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from all U.S. passenger cars and commercial aircraft in 2019. The EPA will receive public comment for 60 days and projects a new final rule by the end of 2022.

Also Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which just passed both houses and awaits the President’s signature, contains a provision to spend $4.7 billion to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells, many of which spew methane into the atmosphere.  Central West Virginia is littered with these orphan wells.

But the stronger second prong of Biden’s Plan B is a methane tax contained in the Build Back Better social spending bill that has not passed either the House or the Senate. As described in a recent Forbes article, the plan would tax methane emitted in excess of specified thresholds and begin at $60 per ton. It would take effect in 2023, with the revenues used to administer the program, provide technical and financial assistance to companies for monitoring and reducing emissions, and to support communities affected by pollution from oil and gas systems.

A fee on methane would boost the incentive for companies to reduce emissions and require companies to internalize the cost of the pollution they emit. A methane fee would have double duty – raising revenues and discouraging pollution – while holding industry accountable. Climate policy experts say that the two-pronged approach – regulation and fee — is necessary to shut down methane emissions, particularly because executive regulations alone could be undone by a future administration.

The Ball is in Manchin’s Court

By now, we are all aware of the immense power that has fallen to Senator Joe Manchin purely because he is a key vote in a balanced Senate.  Unfortunately for the environmental community, his power has been exercised to block legislation that is widely seen as necessary to meet the challenge of climate change.  Having already caused the removal of Biden’s plan to radically reduce CO2 emissions in the electric power sector, all eyes are now on Manchin regarding the methane tax in the Build Back Better Act.

Initial signs are not good, even though Democrats reduced the starting fee level from $1500 per ton to $60 to win Manchin’s support.  But Manchin appears still to be opposed, arguing that since we have the technology to reduce methane then the technology should be used, not a fee that he regards as punitive.  One wonders how it is “punitive” to impose a fee designed to cause the largest industrial producers of methane finally to end their harmful practices.  Instead, it seems exactly the sort of measure required to make them internalize the true cost of their behavior. The language of money is the language this industry understands.

 

Industry To West Virginia: We Can’t Be Bothered

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They’re at it again. Under the cover of the Covid pandemic, when citizens can’t rally in numbers, the West Virginia legislature is poised to gut one of the key protections of the Aboveground Storage Tank Act enacted after the 2014 water crisis. Remember the crisis? When 300,000 Mountain Staters had no access to safe water? Apparently, the legislature does not. The bill is pushed by tank owners and backed by industry. The reason? As Charlie Burd of the Gas and Oil Association of WV says, according to Gazette-Mail reporter Mike Tony, the regulation is too burdensome. Translation: We can’t be bothered.

We can’t be bothered to operate responsibly, they’re telling us. We can’t be bothered to make sure dangerous chemicals don’t foul drinking water supplies. We can’t be bothered to make an honest dollar — one with a reasonable return that does not force people to live under the specter of mass contamination.

The bill in question is HB 2598. It would exempt more than 1,000 oil and gas waste tanks — tanks near drinking water supplies across 27 counties — from Aboveground Storage Tank Act regulation. That’s right. The legislature wants to make our water less safe by throwing out common sense rules.

Oil and gas waste tanks contain a mixture of produced water and crude oil. The mixture is composed of a variety of pollutants that can contaminate drinking water supplies. This is true for surface water systems and surface water-influenced groundwater systems, or SWIGs, appropriately. There are some 20 SWIG systems along the Ohio River.

The Aboveground Storage Tank Act helps ensure that tanks in “zones of critical concern” are properly inspected and maintained. These zones are areas along streams located upstream from a public water system’s intake or well. This seems sensible. Rather than having the public pay for leaks, spills, and disasters in the water supply, let’s inspect tanks closest to drinking water supply more often, and keep them in working order.

That’s it. Seriously.

How can inspection and maintenance of a business asset be too burdensome? This is the same old trope industry rolls out every time it can’t be bothered. Installing seat belts in every car, the auto industry said, would make cars unaffordable. Too burdensome. The food industry said the same thing when the FDA required companies to state the ingredients on packaging so that people actually can know what they are eating. Too burdensome. It’s the same story every time.

We all face regulatory “burdens” every day. Like the 70 miles per hour speed limit on our wide-open interstates. Rules for safe food storage and handling in restaurants. Restricting hunting to certain seasons.

We accept these rules as minor inconveniences because we know, in our great big West Virginia hearts, that we do unto others as we would have them to unto ourselves. And that’s what the aboveground storage tank rules do, especially in the Ohio River Valley, where the vast majority are located. Call it the Good Neighbor Rule. It ensures people that their government cares and takes its responsibilities seriously. That their government is up to the task of fulfilling its most basic function: to protect the health and safety of its citizens. We need these protections.

In nearly laughable displays of feigned outrage, tank owners may level the ultimate threat — leaving the state altogether if they don’t get their free pass. For good. Take their ball and go home. I say, Good Riddance. Bye bye. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. We don’t need you in West Virginia. We don’t want you in West Virginia if you’re not willing to play by the rules.

Another company, one that accepts the responsibility that comes with handling and storing dangerous chemicals, will step in and find a way to make an honest buck. Now that’s the free market. And then maybe other industries that value clean air, safe water, and responsive government will move in to create 21st century jobs.

I keep hoping that one day our legislature will have the courage to acknowledge one existential fact. That the states with the weakest environmental and public health and safety rules are consistently among the poorest. Exempting tanks near drinking water supplies will make us not only less safe, but poorer. A slap on both cheeks to people who live in the Ohio Valley and across West Virginia.

— David Lillard is on the board of directors of Conservation West Virginia; he lives in Jefferson County.

What President Biden Could Do for the Environment in His First Ninety Days

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I recognize that some of my readers may be Trump supporters who would prefer not to see a Biden administration. And, of course, one should not count one’s chickens too early. That said, there can be little debate that the Trump administration has been more hostile to sound environmental policy than any administration in modern history. From the start President Trump identified environmental protection as the territory of Obama liberals and played strongly to his populist base and big fossil fuel industry donors by dismantling every protection in sight. So, a Biden administration has a lot of work to do restoring the positive direction set in previous administrations. Here is where I think he should start.

Rejoin the Paris Accords

Almost every nation in the world, including the United States, signed the Paris Accords in 2015. The central aim of the Accords is to coordinate a global response to climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to find the means to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But Trump is a climate change denier, and his fossil fuel backers have a financial stake in things remaining as they are. On November 4, 2019, the Trump administration began the official process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris Accords, which will not be completed until the day after the November 2020 election. Upon withdrawal, the U.S. will no longer be committed to reach its emissions reduction targets under the Accords.

Why does this matter? First, the United States is one of the two largest emitters of greenhouse gasses in the world so relaxing our efforts to reduce these emissions will have a hugely negative effect on the world’s ability to reach the Paris goals. Second, the United States is an environmental policy and technology leader in world. Our absence from the Accords takes our gravitas and leadership out of the equation. It weakens our international soft power and opens the door to preening by the Chinese.

How could a Biden administration reverse Trump’s withdrawal? The Paris Accords are a non-binding expression of national commitment. President  Obama was able to enter the United States into the agreement through executive action, since it imposed no new legal obligations on the country. Candidate Biden has pledged to recommit the country to the Paris Accords, and can do so most likely through similar executive action. Legislation is also possible.  Experts believe that the United States could rejoin the Accords in a matter of a few months. It is inconceivable that other nations would oppose our rejoining.

Appoint Environmentalists to Head Environmental Agencies

What a concept. But President Trump’s first appointment to head the EPA was Scott Pruitt, a notorious climate change skeptic. As Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times. Pruitt’s replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal industry lobbyist who has proposed dubious rules limiting the kind of scientific information the EPA can consider. One that called on the EPA to consider only “double blind” studies of the sort used in drug trials was called “breathtakingly ignorant” by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Biden administration should be able to improve upon the quality of the EPA Administrator in short order.

The Department of the Interior sets policy and manages the implementation of many environmental statutes through a group of key agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and others. Having a Secretary with environmental sensitivity and purpose could make a huge difference.

President Trump has seemed mainly interested in using the Department of Interior as a conduit to reward his friends in the extractive industries by shrinking protected land and opening federal lands to resource exploitation. Trump’s first appointment to Interior, Ryan Zinke, has been called “the most anti-conservation Interior secretary in our nation’s history.” President Biden’s appointment of a Secretary of Interior will be significant and closely watched.

Revive Obama’s Executive Order Requiring All Federal Agencies to Enhance Climate Preparedness and Resilience

In 2013, President Obama issued Executive Order 13653 instructing all federal agencies to identify global warming’s probable impact on their operations and take the actions necessary to protect against that impact. The importance of this is obvious. In 2016 alone the United States suffered 15 extreme weather and climate-related disasters each exceeding $1 billion in losses. Moreover, the Pentagon has for years regarded global warming as a significant threat to American national security.

But in March 2017, shortly after taking office, President Trump rescinded Obama’s Executive Order. In this order, Trump clearly set out the reason for this rescission:

It is the policy of the United States that executive departments and agencies immediately review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources [oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources] and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect the public interest or otherwise comply with the law. “Burden” means to unnecessarily obstruct, delay, curtail, or otherwise impose significant costs on the siting, permitting, production, utilization, transmission, or delivery of energy resources.

It is not immediately obvious why unburdening the production of domestic energy required the rescission of Obama’s direction to plan for climate disasters, but there you have it. President Biden should immediately rescind this absurd Order and restore good sense to the nation’s efforts to protect itself against the effects of global warming.

Establish Science, Not Politics, As the Guiding Principle of Environmental Policy

President Trump has politicized agencies that are only effective and credible when they rely on the best science. This has happened since the beginning of the Trump administration. For example, he has marginalized the EPA’s Science Advisory Board by prohibiting any member but the Chairman from reviewing decisions regarding agency regulations. His 2021 budget proposes eliminating funding for that agency’s Climate Change Research Program. Pursuant to a direction from a Trump executive order EPA terminated the National Advisory Council on Environmental Policy and Technology. The BLM issued a final environmental impact statement for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and concluded there was no climate crisis.

The list of anti-science policies and actions during the Trump administration is quite long. These have been catalogued by Columbia University Law School’s “Silencing Science Tracker.” Within the first ninety days of a Biden administration, he could issue an executive order directing federal agencies to act only after giving heightened consideration to the best data and scientific opinion available, and he could restore to a prominent role the various science advisory bodies Trump has marginalized or dismantled.

Reversing Anti-Environment Regulations

President Biden will be unable in the first ninety days to reverse many of the harmful regulatory rollbacks and changes wrought by the Trump administration. All of these have been listed by the Harvard Law School’s Regulatory Rollback Tracker. This is because any such action must proceed deliberately and be based on a reasonable assessment of all factors, usually involving public testimony or input. He will not simply be able to change a regulation because he believes it is the ill-conceived product of the previous administration. Trump learned this lesson the hard way, most recently in connection with reversing Obama’s DACA order deferring deportation of children brought here illegally.

But President Biden can direct that these be triaged and that the process for reversing the most significant of them be started. The list is long and tantalizing. It includes Obama’s Clean Power Plan setting standards for power plant emissions, which the Trump administration repealed. The Clean Power Plan was a primary means to reach the nation’s Paris Accords emissions commitment.

There may be other, more important steps President Biden could take immediately to restore the correct course on the environment. The plate will certainly be full. One thing is certain — January 2021 cannot come soon enough for the environment.

Solar Energy and the Legislature: A Power Play in Charleston

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For a state beholden to the coal and natural gas industries, solar energy generated a lot of heat at the recent West Virginia legislative session. Two initiatives concerning alternative energy, including solar, were introduced. One survived and will become law. Unfortunately, the survivor is a timid effort to attract a specific hi-tech enterprise that will involve no new solar energy facilities unless that enterprise locates here. But progress on renewable energy in West Virginia will have to be made in small steps, and this was a start.

The unsuccessful initiative – SB 759 – contained a number of wonderful ideas that would have enabled commercial and individual property owners to develop alternative energy for their own consumption.  The bill would have accomplished this by authorizing municipalities to establish low-cost alternative energy revolving loan programs to assist the property owners. Interest rates charged on the loans from these programs would have been below prevailing market rates.

The alternative energy technologies eligible for loans from the municipal loan program included solar photovoltaic projects, solar thermal energy projects, geothermal energy projects, as well as wind energy, biomass or gasification facilities for generating electricity.

SB 759 was introduced by Democratic Senators Robert Plymale and Mike Woelfel, both from District 5 (Cabell and Wayne counties). It was referred to the Government Organization Committee, the place where bills of this sort go to die. At the end of the session 67 bills, including SB 759, had expired in that committee with no action.

The survivor of the two initiatives — SB 583 — was introduced by Republican Senator Patricia Rucker of Jefferson County, among others. This bill will authorize electric utilities in the state to construct or purchase solar energy facilities on sites that have previously been used for industrial, manufacturing or mining operations. Wind and other alternative energy sources are not covered.

Demonstrating how timorous this initiative is, solar facilities under the law can only be built in 50 megawatt increments. When 85% of the power from the first increment is under contract, facilities for the next 50 megawatts can be built. No single such facility can generate more than 200 megawatts and the state-wide cumulative generating capacity of renewable energy facilities can’t exceed 400 megawatts. Evidently, neither the utility industry nor the coal industry wanted a lot of excess solar power sloshing around that would require companies to reduce coal-fired power generation.

This bill surprisingly had the support of the West Virginia Department of Commerce. It seems that whenever the business recruiters at the Department tried to lure tech companies to the state, these companies insisted on the availability of solar energy. Well, of course, we have had no such capacity.

The particular focus of the Department’s recent efforts is a company that proposes to build a research and development facility in Preston County that will test ultra-high speed transportation systems. The provisions of SB 583 that enable utilities to recover their costs for constructing solar facilities will sunset in 2025, by which time this company will either have located in West Virginia or not. So despite the high-sounding rhetoric about the need for West Virginia to enter the twenty-first century world of renewable energy, the real driver of this legislation was immediate business development and not a long-term commitment to renewable energy.

A similar bill – HB 4562 – was introduced in the House and debated extensively in the House Energy Committee, where it appeared to be stalled by objections from the coal industry. When SB 583 was passed by the Senate and sent to the House, it sidestepped the troublesome Energy Committee and went straight to House Judiciary and then to the House floor. Debate there was contentious. Delegate Tom Bibby, a Republican from Berkeley County, grumbled 

If renewable energy and solar energy were so good they (the tech companies) could afford to pay for it themselves. Renewables may sound nice and good, but they are heavily subsidized. To say coal-fired power plants won’t suffer from this legislation is just sticking your head in the sand.

House environmental advocates were initially considering an amendment that would broaden SB 583 to include solar power purchase agreements (PPAs). These are contractual arrangements where a third-party developer designs, finances and installs a solar energy system on a customer’s property at little to no cost. The developer sells the power generated to the host customer at a fixed rate that is typically lower than the local utility’s retail rate.

However, the idea for an amendment allowing PPAs was dropped. Democrats favoring the amendment had little time to gather support and it was feared that complicating the process would threaten passage of the main bill. Karan Ireland, lead lobbyist for the West Virginia Environmental Council, lamented that “what we see is utilities calling the shots and getting everything they want in the process.”

So West Virginia will move forward with a solar facilities law limited in scope that was carefully managed by electric utility and coal interests to avoid any threat to the existing carbon-based power generation monopoly in the state. The motivation for this law had nothing to do with any recognition that burning coal is fouling our air and literally killing us. Nevertheless, it is a first step and progress will have to be made this way.

Paper or Plastic?

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Remember when grocery clerks would ask this question at the checkout counter? Now you practically have to leap over the counter to prevent your groceries from immediately going into plastic bags. I have always assumed that plastic bags became the grocery industry’s packaging of choice because of the cost savings to the grocers. This is basically true. I have also assumed that paper bags are both biodegradable in landfills and recyclable into other products, while plastic bags are not biodegradable and rarely recycled. But going beneath these assumptions a little further, the environmentally sound choice between paper and plastic bags is not at all clear.

Plastic bags started to appear nationwide in the 1970s and soon captured 80% of the bag market. The principal grocers in Jefferson County – Food Lion, Martins and Walmart all default to plastic bags at the checkout counter. Paper bags are available only on request at Food Lion and Martins, which are both owned by the Dutch company Ahold Delhaize. Walmart does not offer paper grocery bags at all. One won’t find any explanation of the default to plastic bags on the websites of these chains.

All the chains offer reusable bags for sale at around a dollar a pop, and these are probably a better alternative than either paper or plastic bags. But even this turns out to be debatable depending on what they are made from and how many times they are used. Most of these reusable bags are woven plastic of some sort.

There are several factors to consider when deciding whether paper or plastic bags are more environmentally friendly. First, whether the raw materials that go into the manufacture of the bag are renewable. Next, how much electricity and water are used to produce them and how much greenhouse gas is emitted in each manufacturing process. Then how readily each type of bag can be recycled. Finally, how biodegradable each type of bag is at the end of its life cycle.

On the question of renewability of resources, paper bags are the clear winner. They are made from trees. Paper bag manufacturers do not typically use trees from Amazon rain forests, but rather tree farms of fast growing species. While they are growing these trees capture carbon. Plastic bags on the other hand are made from petroleum, which is a non-renewable resource that produces greenhouse gas when burned.

But when considering the use of resources and the release of greenhouse gas in the manufacturing process, plastic bags are the clear winner.  Making a paper bag consumes four times as much energy and three times as much water as making a plastic bag.  And because 1000 paper bags weigh over nine times the same number of plastic bags, transporting them also consumes more energy.

It is difficult to pin down exactly how much more greenhouse gas is emitted by the manufacture of paper bags than plastic bags. But it is a certainty that paper bag manufacturing is dirtier. The Sierra Club reports that you have to reuse a paper bag four times to reduce its carbon footprint to that of a plastic bag. Another study from 2008 asserts that paper bag manufacturing emits 80% more of this gas. A plastic bag manufacturer asserts that “solids” emitted into the air in the manufacture of paper bags is roughly twice what is emitted in the manufacture of a plastic bag.

The question of recycling further adds to the muddle. While paper bags can be recycled into other paper bags, the recycling process is inefficient, often taking more energy than it would to make a new bag. Furthermore, it takes about 90% more energy to recycle a pound of paper than a pound of plastic. But plastic bags are a recycling nightmare – most curbside recycling operations are not capable of recycling these bags because the thin plastic melts and fouls the machinery. It is estimated that only 12% of plastic bags are recycled.

So plastic bags often end up in landfills, where they can sit for 500 to 1000 years.  And plastic bags don’t ever “biodegrade.” Instead they “photodegrade” when exposed to light into smaller plastic particles. The more serious problem with plastic bags is that they don’t end up being disposed of properly but end up as litter. They are everywhere, fouling land and water. Plastic waste is deceptive to birds and mammals, who often mistake it for food. This would lead you to think that paper is the better choice. But here is the big surprise. A paper bag that ends up in a landfill does not biodegrade much faster than a plastic one photodegrades.

So perhaps the way to avoid this bag conundrum is not to use either type of single-use bag. The reusable bags offered for sale by grocery stores are a good option – if you use them long enough.  Heavier reusable plastic bags and cotton bags also have the freight of energy and resource consumption in their manufacture and their own greenhouse gas emission problems.  A heavy-duty plastic bag must be used five times to reduce its carbon footprint to that of a single-use plastic bag. A reusable cotton bag must be used 173 times.

There might also be a political solution to the problem. Eight states—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont—have completely banned single-use plastic bags. Some cities and localities have also instituted bans, including Montgomery County, Maryland. Jefferson County Delegates John Doyle and Sammi Brown introduced legislation in the 2019 Legislature that would ban single-use plastic bags in West Virginia. The legislation was referred to committee, where it awaits some sort of action in the next session.

Most likely, however, we will have to change our behavior voluntarily. That’s not to say we couldn’t use a nudge. The German grocer Aldi, which is a small player in the market, provides that nudge. That chain will happily sell you a plastic or paper bag for about 10 cents each. Aldi claims this saves them money that they return to customers in the form of lower prices. Perhaps.

But there is no doubt that Aldi’s price on single use bags acts as a tax with the predictable result of encouraging shoppers to come up with their own bags or reuse bags they have previously purchased at Aldi or elsewhere. While this approach doesn’t completely eliminate the problems associated with single-use bags, it gets us moving in the right direction without government intervention. My conservative friends like this.

Charter Schools: The Real Threat to Public Education

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Those who have been following the Brexit debacle in the UK will be familiar with the terms Leavers and Remainers. Leavers are the faction who want Britain to leave the European Union, where it has prospered for decades. Remainers are the faction who want Britain to stay. West Virginia has its own version of Leavers. Our Leavers, led by Senator Patricia Rucker of Jefferson County, want to set up a system of charter schools that would permit parents to remove their children from public school. But the evidence does not show that students at charter schools perform better. Worse yet, the Leavers want the rest of us to pay for this scheme with our tax money, draining funds from already underfunded public schools.

Senator Rucker was appointed by the Republican leadership in the West Virginia Senate to be Chair of the Senate Education Committee. This Committee has first crack at any legislation affecting our public schools. She is an odd choice for this role. Her education views have been described as “extremist and in many ways anti-public education.”

Senator Rucker has five children, all of whom have been home schooled. At the very least, this shows some sort of distaste on her part for public schools. For this and other reasons the Charleston Gazette-Mail, West Virginia’s largest and most influential newspaper, declared that she was a poor choice for Education Committee Chair.

The Republican members of Senator Rucker’s Committee recently advanced SB 451, known as the Omnibus Education Bill. This 133-page Bill covers many topics, including teacher pay raises. It contains a complicated charter school provision and a provision for Education Savings Accounts into which the state would deposit money for parents to spend on private school education for their children, including religious schools and home schooling.

The Bill was passed out of the Education Committee to the floor of the Senate, from where it was scheduled to be referred to the Finance Committee. But the Republican leadership somehow forgot that they did not have the votes on Finance.  As a result, they quickly resorted to parliamentary hard-ball by declaring the full Senate a Committee of the Whole and bypassing the Finance Committee. This has been done only four times in state history. A revised Bill will probably pass the Senate and move to the House in the week beginning February 4, 2019.

Since the late Nineteenth Century, American public education has produced legions of well-educated students who have gone on to productive lives. Our system has been the envy of the world. Recently, our system of public education has been weakened by poor funding and low teacher pay.

It has also been undermined by conservative ideologues like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos pushing alternatives to public school, such as charter schools, mostly in the name of parent choice. But there are already private schools in West Virginia – Jefferson has two and Berkeley has five. And there are over 11,000 home school students in West Virginia. So it cannot be a desire for alternatives to public school that is driving the Leavers.

Private schools charge tuition for attendance. These private schools are not the charter schools contemplated in SB 451, although private schools could qualify if they successfully complete the application process. Unlike private schools, SB 451 prohibits charter schools from charging tuition or fees.  Instead, they would be funded by a portion of the tax money that would otherwise fund public schools.

One issue that is not addressed in the text of SB 451 is whether private religious schools may qualify as public charter schools. An applicant for a charter must be a 501(c)(3) organization, but religious schools can possess that tax designation. Although there is a provision entitled “Prohibitions” in SB 451, it does not include a prohibition on a religious course of instruction. So SB 451 has the potential to allow public religious charter schools.

Charter schools would carve students and revenues from public schools and would recruit public school teachers. There is no way that public schools can be as strong after this bleeding. Charter schools might benefit students who attend them, but would harm students who don’t. This was precisely the issue raised by teachers in the recent strike in Los Angeles. That strike resulted in a moratorium on new charter schools.

Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that charter schools don’t deliver superior student performance. In a 2011 study of 36 charter middle schools in 15 states, the researchers compared charter school performance with local public schools. They found that charter schools showed some positive achievement results versus disadvantaged public schools but some negative results versus the more advantaged schools.  On average, however, charter middle schools in the study were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement.

Despite high-sounding language about improving student achievement, the oversight and accountability under the Bill would be weak. HB 451 requires the authorizing School Board to supervise the performance of charter schools, but only allows it to terminate a charter school for failure to perform after five years of performance or lack thereof.

The second major initiative proposed by the Leavers is the creation of Education Savings Accounts (ESA), in use in only five states. These would be different than the vouchers that have been tried in 15 states over the last two decades. Vouchers are usually issued to parents and submitted by them to qualified private or charter schools in partial payment of the tuition. Money flows from the government to the qualified schools when they present the vouchers for payment. With an ESA, the money flows directly to the parents of a qualifying student. The amount would be 75% of the state’s share of per pupil spending — $3,172 in 2018-2019.

The parents would agree to spend the money on tuition to a private school or an institution of higher learning, tutoring, textbooks, educational hardware and software, school uniforms, transportation to school and several other things. The West Virginia Treasurer would be tasked with developing rules for determining if funds have been misused. The Treasurer does not currently perform these duties in connection with any similar program.

As with charter schools, the ESA money provided by the state could be spent on defraying the cost of attending a religious school. This would be an unprecedented failure to respect the separation of church and state embedded in our Constitution. It would be wrong.

The revised SB 451 limits the number of ESAs to 2,500, but there is no means test for eligibility.  A substantial number of these ESAs could be created for parents who would otherwise send their children to private school even without an ESA. In that way the ESAs would benefit the wealthy, not those who presently cannot afford private school.

Furthermore, the amount of the state’s contribution to the ESA would be short of the typical West Virginia private school tuition of $4,761, leaving a financial hurdle for low-income parents. Finally, private schools in West Virginia are not evenly distributed. Over half of the state’s private school students attend school in one of five counties. Nineteen counties in the state have no private schools at all.

SB 451 is not only ant-public school, it is anti-public school teacher. Some wags around the Capitol have called the Bill “Mitch Carmichael’s Revenge,” referring to the current Senate President’s annoyance at last year’s teacher’s strike. Not only does SB 451 contain charter school and ESA provisions, which most teachers oppose, it contains a provision making union dues harder to collect and a provision barring teachers for receiving pay even if School Boards close schools during job actions as they did last year.

Clearly the Leavers are in control of the West Virginia Senate and its Education Committee. But SB 451 doesn’t become law unless it is also passed by the House of Delegates and signed by the Governor, who has threatened a veto. There is hope for our public schools.  Our leaders simply need to come to their senses to protect them.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

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The West Virginia Legislature began its main 2019 session on January, 9, 2019. All bills introduced in 2018 that were not then acted upon were re-introduced on the first day of this session. New legislative proposals have also been introduced early in this session. A review of both categories introduced in the House and Senate shows that there are several serious attempts to deal with the state’s problems.

But it also shows that many legislators are in love with tax exemptions and credits, which benefit one class of taxpayer and disadvantage everyone else. Sometimes these proposals have merit, but taken cumulatively they show the Legislature’s willingness to bleed our government of the revenue required for it to function effectively, drop by drop.

Legislators from both parties have proposed tax exemptions or credits, although Republicans have done so by a margin of roughly three to one. Here are some of the many proposals:

  • To exempt law enforcement officers from the payment of personal property tax (HB 2075);
  • To reduce the federal adjusted gross income figure used in West Virginia tax calculations for volunteer fire department and rescue squad members (HB 2208);
  • To exempt firefighters and volunteer firefighters from the payment of income tax, and real and personal property taxes (HB 2403)
  • To permit honorably discharged veterans to hunt, trap and fish without a license (HB 2030);
  • To exempt all motor vehicles from personal property tax (HB 2094);
  • To exempt the pension benefits of Department of Natural Resources police officers from state income tax (SB 12);
  • To exempt income earned by primary and secondary school teachers from personal income tax (HB 2370); and
  • To establish an income tax credit for practicing physicians who locate to West Virginia (SB 80).

For the last several years, this state has struggled with large budget deficits created because in earlier periods, when coal severance revenues were high, we reduced or eliminated other taxes. Among these were the business franchise tax and a reduction in the corporate income tax. Then the coal market, as it always does, went bust. We are now again operating with a surplus from an improved coal market and revenues from gas pipeline construction. But these sources of revenue are not permanent. Tax exemptions and credits, on the other hand, often become permanent.

Effective government costs money. Nobody likes paying taxes, but many of us like even less the failure of our government to create a successful, modern state that we don’t have to apologize for. Jim Justice is right about one thing – we are all tired of being 50th. Yet our tax choices don’t reflect an understanding of how to change this.

I am certain that cogent supporting arguments can be made by the legislative sponsors of each of the proposed exemptions and credits mentioned above. And it is difficult for opponents to argue that, say, school teachers aren’t worthy of tax relief. That sort of debate, though, is limited to the worthiness of the constituency to be favored.

What is missing is an analysis of the opportunity cost of granting exemptions and credits. What more important thing would we be able to do with the money we propose to confer on teachers or DNR police officers? There is very little of this analysis in the Legislature beyond the legislative fiscal notes, which are little more than a bookkeeping of what a proposal might cost. These fiscal notes are routinely ignored. You can be sure, however, that every nick in the general revenue fund created by a tax exemption or credit is ultimately felt somewhere else in the budgetary process.

This is not to say that tax exemptions and credits can’t be useful in achieving important policy goals, so long as they rationally fit those goals and are not one-off gifts to a particular constituency. Some of the recent legislative proposals fit well and seem worthy of enactment. For example, a refundable state earned income tax credit of 50% of the existing federal earned income credit. (HB 2108). This credit would further supplement the incomes of low and moderate income working adults. Doing that would increase the attractiveness of work and reduce the need for other public benefits like food stamps.

The idea of raising taxes is like the third rail in West Virginia politics. Nobody in the Legislature wants to touch it for fear of being punished by voters. But maybe we can be more careful about “spending” the revenues we do have on tax benefits for narrow constituencies. One way to do this is to resist the temptation to open any more small fiscal wounds in the body politic for the sake of momentary political benefit.

Going through all the bills that have been introduced in the Legislature so far, I came upon another idea. In each of the last two sessions, a bill has been introduced in the Senate proposing a five year sunset period for all tax credits in the Code (SB 23 and SB 48). Now that is a breath of fresh air.

 

Microplastics: An Emerging Concern for Animal and Human Health

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I cannot claim to be the most environmentally aware person in my neighborhood. I drive a car that is way too fond of gas, and often leave the lights on when I shouldn’t. So maybe I can be excused for not having heard of microplastics until now.

Plastic, which is a petro-chemical product, is produced in prodigious quantities around the world and has been an important advancement in modern life. But all this plastic has created its own set of problems. One visible problem is the huge amount of plastic trash – containers, fishing nets, straws – that floats around on the surface of the oceans. Plastic products also shed or deconstruct to tiny, sometimes invisible, particles and fibers. The effects of these microplastics are poorly understood now, but they are sure to become a concern for animal and human health.

Since plastics were first widely used in the mid-20th century, roughly 9 billion tons of it have been produced, most of which has become trash. This trash doesn’t biodegrade. A November 26, 2018 article in the excellent magazine High Country News speculates that scientists in the distant future will come upon a brightly colored layer of plastic material deposited in our time. Some geologists today refer to the current period as the Plastocene, and even recognize a type of rock made from naturally fused plastic and sediment called plastiglomerate.

Microplastics are particles smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter. Some have broken down from larger objects like tires or plastic bags. Some have been intentionally manufactured. Concern about microbeads, tiny plastic scrubbers in toothpaste and exfoliant washes, led to a federal ban on them in personal care products beginning in 2017. But perhaps the greatest concern now is the tiny synthetic fibers shed by clothing.

Synthetic fibers are long, thin strands of plastic woven into threads, much like wool. It is estimated that 58% of today’s clothing is woven with them. The fleece that keeps us warm in the winter is full of synthetic fiber. Synthetic blankets, sweaters and shirts also. A researcher in Australia set up three washing machines with special filters that trapped the microfibers after washing fleece garments. He found that they shed up to 1900 tiny fibers each time they were washed. These are too small to be captured by typical washing machine filters or municipal sewage systems. They go directly into our open water.

We are beginning to realize how widely microplastics are being taken up by animals in the lower orders of the food chain, such as invertebrate sea creatures, worms and insects. Mosquito larvae are also capable of eating microplastics and then retaining the plastic as adults. Dragonfly and midges, which also begin life as underwater larvae, are similar. Larger fish and sea animals that predate on the lower level creatures are likely to take up microplastics into their gut. And birds that make meals of insects are equally likely to take up microplastics.

Studies between 1962 and 2012 have revealed that 59% of examined seabird species have ingested plastics. Albatrosses, petrels and shearwaters contain more plastic that other species, probably because they feed in the open ocean and mistake floating plastic for prey. Most of this comes from pecking or otherwise ingesting small pieces of bottle caps, plastic bags, balloons, buttons and plastic lighters.

In the case of birds and other animals, it is unclear whether the plastic transfers from the gut to other organs and muscles. It may simply be ground up and pass through undigested. It is clear, however, that mortality rates increase among the birds that ingest large amounts of plastic. This could be caused by obstruction in the digestive tract, or an inverse correlation between the amount of plastic ingested and the amount of body fat the bird produces.

There have been no proper studies of the effects on humans of plastic uptake by fish and birds. Even scientists who work in the area concede that we have more serious environmental problems like carbon dioxide emissions and coastal erosion that require attention immediately.

But you can expect more attention to be paid to microplastics in the future. One reason is that they often act as sponges for other organic pollutants such as dioxins and PCBs. The molecules of these notably harmful chemicals shelter in the water-free environment found between the long carbon chains that make up plastics. A Japanese study found that 3-millimeter-wide plastic resin pellets found in Tokyo Bay contained organic pollutants one million times their concentration in ordinary sea water.

So how can an environmentally retarded person such as my own personal self act appropriately when it comes to plastic? One thing I do is ask for paper bags at the Food Lion. The check-out people see me coming and immediately go on break. Too bad – they will just have to get used to it. I also try to buy products packaged without plastic, but this is near impossible. Recently I found a big jug of olive oil in a glass bottle and snagged it. The more people do this the sooner manufacturers will get the message. And I will start buying cotton and wool garments, avoiding space-age synthetics. No more Speedo swimsuits.

But aside from modifying individual behavior, what can be done? West Virginia counties and cities still have the freedom to pass ordinances prohibiting one-use plastic packaging like shopping bags and water bottles. Last year, our ultra-libertarian Senator Patricia Rucker led a group of like-minded legislators in an effort to prohibit municipalities from passing ordinances relating to packaging and similar sinister left-wing topics. This effort failed, but she is likely to try again this year. If our newly-found environmental consciousness in Jefferson County has continuing strength, perhaps we can prevail on our local governments to tackle the plastic issue promptly.

Finding A Practical and Effective Solution for Carbon Emissions

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Can we talk? We need to stop wasting time and come up with a way to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions – now. The recent U.N. report on climate change should scare us into action if nothing else has. Earth’s surface temperatures are virtually certain to rise at accelerating rates between now and 2050, with many serious heat-related consequences, including the disruption of agriculture, wildfires and sea level rise. These will threaten world economic and political stability. This is no hoax. Existential threat would be a better term.

Many of the best minds today believe that the solution lies in putting the right price on the production of carbon-based fuels. Carbon producers like the coal industry create “externalities” – costs that are not part of the price of the coal paid by consumers.  Chief among these are the environmental effects of the greenhouse gasses emitted when coal is burned.  These costs are foisted onto the public in general.

Finding the right higher price for carbon would make carbon-based fuels less attractive than cleaner sources of energy, such as wind and solar. The right price for carbon would also encourage the development of energy efficient machinery and processes. Individual consumers would make better energy choices.

For those who believe the conservative ideology that free markets can solve all of our problems, here is a wake up call.  Free markets have totally failed us in pricing carbon. This is because neither the seller nor the buyer of carbon has an incentive to take externalities into account in the price.  Nearly everyone outside the Trump Administration – liberals and conservatives alike – believe that government must intervene. The question is how. There are two candidates for the job.

Cap and Trade

One system, called cap and trade, is currently in use in a group of New England states and California. Government’s role in a cap and trade system is to determine how much total carbon it will permit to be dumped into the atmosphere each year.  Government also sells permits to emitters up to the carbon limit and then supervises a secondary market.

Imagine that government decides it will tolerate 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide in year one.  It divides this amount into 1,000,000 permits worth 5,000 tons each.  The permits could be auctioned, generating revenue.  Some carbon emitters might be priced out of an auction, so they could go onto the secondary market to purchase pollution rights from emitters who, through technological improvements, do not need the right to emit all 5,000 tons authorized by their permit.

In year two the overall amount government will tolerate might be reduced to 4.5 million tons.  Each of the 1,000,000 permits in year two would authorize 4,500 tons, less pollution than the year before.  The price of these would be much higher than the year before at auction and also on the secondary market. The financial pressure on emitters to find ways to reduce their own carbon emissions would be intense. The carbon limit would be steadily reduced year to year until the goal is met.

The criticisms of cap and trade are several. First, emitters chafe at the government setting overall emission limits and call this “command and control,” a buzz-phrase for top down regulation. Actually these limits would be politically negotiated and might not be set low enough to avoid climate disaster. Second, if the overall limits are too low some emitters would be forced out of business, harming the economy. Third, and most important, cap and trade does not involve a mechanism to soften the impact of higher energy prices on consumers.  While environmentalists will favor the certainty that emissions would be reduced at predictable rate down to the level that will avoid climate disaster, this system would be subject to intense political pressure from emitters and consumers and would be politically unstable.

A Carbon Tax

The other method for solving the problem is a carbon tax. Under this method, government would decide the appropriate price for discouraging carbon emissions and then impose an escalating tax until that price is reached. This seems to be as much “command and control” as setting the carbon limit in a cap and trade system, but surprisingly conservatives seem to like the carbon tax better.

Voters in Washington state had the opportunity on November 6 to impose a “pollution fee” on emitters in that state. This fee would have operated exactly like a carbon tax. It would have been the first such tax to be adopted by ballot referendum anywhere.  Unfortunately voters turned down this measure 56% to 44% in what is now the typical divergence between rural and urban voters.

The Washington proposal was to impose a fee on large emitters, beginning at $15 per metric ton of carbon content and escalating $2 each year until it reached $55 per ton. For comparison, Sweden has the highest carbon tax in the world at $140 per ton. The Washington fee would have applied to fossil fuels sold or used within the state and electricity generated within or imported for consumption within the state.

The measure was expected to generate $2.2 billion in the first five years, which would have been directed to a trust fund. As a fee instead of  a tax, the proceeds could not be spent for general governmental purposes. Every cent raised would have gone toward solving climate-related problems, protecting the state’s environment or aiding communities affected by climate change or by the fee itself. This measure was designed to appeal to left-leaning and environmentally concerned voters.

An earlier measure for a carbon fee in Washington also failed because it was opposed by Democrats and labor. It aimed to gain support from more moderate voters by providing for the return of the proceeds from the fee directly to Washington residents, without reserving the money for alternative energy and conservation purposes.

The 2018 ballot initiative was opposed by petroleum producers who argued that the fee would not make a dent in global warming but would damage the state’s economy. They also argued the fee’s impact would be borne by consumers and small business. Commenting on the defeat of this measure, David Roberts, a reporter at Vox, wrote that “it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the public is not quite ready for state carbon taxes.”

A Carbon Tax With Public Dividend

So it is with healthy skepticism that I come to the recent proposal made by a group called the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), consisting of the heads of large energy companies and Republican heavy-hitters like James Baker, George Schultz and Janet Yellin. Their plan is called The Carbon Dividend.

This plan involves a tax on carbon-based fuel producers determined by the carbon content of the fuels.  For example, coal would be taxed at $96 per ton, natural gas at $2.28 per thousand cubic feet and oil at $18 per barrel. This would work out to an average of $43 per ton of carbon dioxide. It would increase 3 to 5% per year as determined in the legislation.The purpose, as with any carbon tax, is to raise the cost of carbon-based fuels to discourage their use relative to cleaner sources of energy. Exxon-Mobil has pledged $1,000,000 to promote the plan.

The tax would be imposed on energy producers at the point the fuels enter the economy. But the financial impact of the tax would be passed on to consumers, indeed the scheme won’t work unless the costs are passed on because part of the design is to get consumers to economize and make the right energy choices.

Unlike the Washington proposal just defeated, revenues from the tax would be distributed to the public in a carbon dividend paid monthly or quarterly through the Social Security Administration. It would not be devoted to developing alternative energy or softening the blow on communities affected by the tax like Southern West Virginia would be. The CLC estimates the dividend will be as much as $2,000 per year for a family of four and is intended to offset the higher cost of goods caused by the tax.

The CLC further estimates that two-thirds of American families would be financial winners because the increased cost of energy for them would be less than $2,000. This is because only higher income families consume enough to outweigh the dividend. The proposal banks on the carbon dividend becoming as popular as Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend of $1,000 per year to citizens.

Why, you ask, would big oil companies be interested in a program that reduces the consumption of their products? One answer is that these companies are afraid of future lawsuits blaming them for the effects of climate change.  The Carbon Dividend plan would involve some sort of litigation immunity much like the settlement with tobacco companies. Perhaps a more important reason is that the plan involves a grand trade-off whereby current regulations on carbon dioxide emissions like Obama’s Clean Power Plan would be eliminated as “unnecessary.”

Obviously, there are things about the Carbon Dividend plan that will be unpalatable to the environmental community. But keep in mind how quickly we must act. It will be politically necessary to have leading Republicans and much of industry on board if we hope to do anything beyond arguing about what should be done.

I for one am willing to allow conservatives to have their “revenue neutral” solution wherein the government doesn’t get the proceeds from the carbon tax to spend in ways I would like — so long as the plan effectively reduces carbon emissions. On this point the CLC says that the Carbon Dividend plan will reduce emissions by 32% compared to 2005, meaning the U.S. would exceed the upper end of the Paris Accords which called for a reduction of 26-28%.

The real beauty of the Carbon Dividend plan is that it addresses the psychological resistance people have to acting in their own best interest on the climate issue. The threat of global warming lacks immediacy to most people. It is difficult to convince them to endure costs now that will benefit others in fifty years. The dividend provides immediate benefits for behavior that is required to secure a much larger, though long-term benefit. It would make political support for adoption much more likely and help to insulate the plan from amendment through later legislation. Because of this the Carbon Dividend might be the practical and effective solution we are looking for.