America’s inaction on climate is getting embarrassing
President Joe Biden was in Glasgow, Scotland, this week trying to inspire the world to address climate change. This follows the Group of 20 countries summit, also billed as an opportunity for major economies to agree on climate-mitigating measures, that ultimately resolved with a weak-sauce voluntary (non-)commitment on coal. Biden blamed the result on a handful of holdouts.
“I think you’re going to see we’ve made significant progress and more has to be done,” Biden said Sunday. “But it’s going to require us to continue to focus on what China is not doing, what Russia is not doing and what Saudi Arabia is not doing.”
But, as bad as those countries have been, remember also what the United States is not doing.
For months, Biden and Democratic lawmakers have been trying, and failing, to shepherd a climate deal through Congress. It’s been a Democrat-only endeavor because most Republican voters have decided climate change either isn’t real or not worth addressing.
Even GOP leaders who claim to care about the planet’s future argue that human ingenuity alone will solve the problem and that big government incentives aren’t needed. To be fair, it is true that technological progress — in wind and solar, for example — has been faster than predicted. But it’s high risk to assume that, absent further government prodding, the remaining innovations will be developed and deployed before global temperatures reach the point of no return. Meanwhile, Democrats are squabbling among themselves. The best climate tool available would be a carbon tax that would harness market forces to nudge businesses and consumers away from carbon-intensive technologies. It would simultaneously incentivize investors and entrepreneurs to develop new, lower- or zerocarbon alternatives, since they know customers will demand them.
In other words, a carbon tax would supercharge that human ingenuity that Republicans rightly praise.
A carbon tax-and-dividend scheme, in which the tax revenue would be rebated back to Americans, has already been endorsed by 3,600 U.S. economists. Among them … are three of Biden’s top economic officials: Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Cecilia Rouse and CEA member Heather Boushey. The Business Roundtable and even the American Petroleum Institute also support carbon taxes.
But Biden effectively shot this strategy down when he … pledged not to raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000.
So, Democrats looked at second- and third-best options, which have now also been ruled out. Democrats have even wobbled on plans to penalize oil and gas operators that leak methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
The key problem: American politicians want to tackle climate change only through carrots, not sticks. … For this approach to work, though, the carrots must be much more generous.
“For a negative externality like climate, carrots are always going to be more expensive than sticks,” says Roberton Williams III, a University of Maryland environmental economist. “… So, if you want deep emissions cuts and you only want to use carrots, it gets really expensive.”
Unfortunately, lawmakers are also unwilling to spend more money. Instead, they have … packed the bill with … subsidies to buy solar panels, manufacture wind turbines and the like. These provisions … are unlikely to be sufficient. Worse, there’s no guarantee Democrats can get even this highly diluted package through.
No country has a great excuse for failing to address the climate emergency. But the United States has among the weakest and fewest excuses. We are both richer and higher-polluting than nearly every other country attending the ongoing climate summit. We don’t have to worry whether eliminating the dirtiest energy might make us more reliant on a hostile neighbor or jeopardize our country’s path out of poverty. Our aversion to accelerating the phaseout of coal is instead about the supposedly scary optics of hastening the inevitable displacement of 42,000 coal miners. For context: That’s less than half the number of people who work at Macy’s.
Unlike a developing country … we’ve met our country’s basic energy needs. We just need to change the mix of energy. And we are rich enough that we can afford … to “buy off” any losers, real or perceived. Yet, embarrassingly, we remain unwilling to do so, even as we scold others.