EcoMonkey

I fear that you've been misinformed on climate change's impact on agriculture. According to the 2018 National Climate Assessment[0], a rigorous accounting of climate change's impact on the United States by 13 federal agencies [1]:

"Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability. "

Higher carbon and a warmer climate is going to mean smaller and less nutritious harvests, and food crises the world over. It is in your own self-interest to want rapid decarbonization.

Also, you may not have heard that many climate policies call for a border carbon adjustment, which puts a WTO-compliant fee on imports from countries that are not effectively curbing their emissions. Well-designed national climate policies generally include this, as it largely addresses your valid concerns about making other countries play fair.

Here's more[2] from NASA on it the impacts of climate change on agriculture.

[0] https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/#sf-10 [1] NOAA, the DOA, DOC, DOD, DOE, HHS, DOI, DOS, DOT, EPA, NASA, NSF, Smithsonian Institution, and the USAID [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3124/global-climate-change-imp...

Yale's Climate Opinion Maps[0] would suggest that more Americans than not are with the majority of economists, also. It gets less complex politically when you pair it with carbon dividends, which return the revenue back to households.

It's also fun to compare the effectiveness of pricing carbon with other solutions using En-ROADS [1], built by MIT and Climate Interactive.

However, this is a national policy thing that requires our direct participation in politics. Our elected officials need to be hearing about this from an increasing number of citizens and, frankly, be put into a position of worrying about their re-election chances if they don't support it (and other robust climate policy).

[0] https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc... (look for "Require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax")

[1] https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=22.4...

I am not an economist, but I'll point out that all of these economists would respectfully disagree with John Cochrane: https://www.econstatement.org/

Including 28 Nobel laureates, former Federal Reserve chairpeople, and a few thousand other economists.

But intuitively, I do agree that simply making carbon more expensive won't work. You have to take the money and inject it back into the economy in a way that alleviates the regressive nature of a plain carbon tax while making the revenue available to boost the low-carbon economy. Carbon dividends, if you trust most economists, is the most efficient way to do that.

We'll definitely need carbon removal of some kind. As the article states, we could shut emissions off today, but still deal with the effects of the cumulative emissions for centuries to come. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot that I personally can do other than to perhaps invest in some of these technologies.

The most important thing for the climate right now that most of us can do anything about is for anyone with Democratic senators to call their senators and express to them how important it is that climate provisions in budget reconciliation aren't watered down.

https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Yes, I know the Democratic party is struggling to get its act together. But we have to make sure that come what may, the deal that gets struck is serious about addressing climate change. It may be a long while before the next time the US political system is even slightly in a state to develop meaningful climate policy.

She sounds like some kind of villain from Parks and Recreation.

This is a primary reason that we need a carbon tax. Building out renewables and stopping there will just make energy cheaper and induce demand. A carbon tax will actually change the energy mix by making carbon-intensive energy sources more expensive relative to less carbon-intensive sources.

Speaking of visual reality checks, check out En-ROADS, which was built in collaboration with MIT to simulate different policy interventions. Check out the carbon price slider compared to everything else: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7....

My favorite thing to do with the money from a carbon tax is to just give it back to everyone as equal dividends, to offset any regressive effects of the carbon tax without creating tons of loopholes with another more complex disbursement scheme. This is called carbon fee and dividend.

The IPCC finds with high confidence that we need a high price on carbon to stay under 1.5C. PDF warning: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15...

A policy framework without a carbon tax is not serious about getting emissions down.

This is exciting to see. Like it or not, we live in a market-driven society, and the biggest climate solutions will ultimately be market based. If business isn't on board, it won't happen.

Make no mistake, the government is going to have to do a lot, too. The single biggest intervention the government can make, according to the IPCC[1] is to set a high price on carbon emissions. And one of the closest times that the economics profession has come to a consensus is when thousands of economists signed a statement[2] that the most effective way to price carbon is to put a high, steadily increasing price on it, give it back to people as dividends, and use a carbon border adjustment to maintain trade competitiveness. This approach is called carbon fee and dividend [3], or sometimes just "carbon dividends".

MIT built a climate policy simulator[4] called EN-ROADS that lets you move sliders to see what moves the needle most in terms of energy mix, and by extension global average temperature above pre-industrial average by the end of the century. It's hard to get anything real to happen without moving the Carbon price slider.

We need to pass carbon fee and dividend legislation at the national level. The legislation that has so far gained the most traction is the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act [5], but ultimately we just need something that actually solves this problem while being fair to people and good (or at least not bad) for business. It also needs to be as bipartisan as possible so that it doesn't get tossed around every time there's a shift in administrations.

The bottom line is that there's a cost to society from continuing to use fossil fuels, and that cost should be reflected in energy prices from carbon-intensive sources. That cost is currently reflected as $0, despite the billions of dollars in damage that climate impacts will have on our economy, according to the 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment[5], a massive and rigorous report from more than 300 experts and 13 federal agencies.

We have to supercharge capital investments into the future of clean tech. VC funding like Lowercarbon Capital is part of that, but we also need carbon dividends to greatly multiply that effect.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/climate/carbon-tax-united... [2] https://econstatement.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/climate/carbon-tax-united... [4] https://energyinnovationact.org/ [5] https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/

Carbon dividends offset the regressive nature of a carbon tax. In fact, even if you exclude the benefits of cleaner air and just look at how the carbon dividend offsets the carbon fee, folks at the lowest incomes tend to come out way ahead, at least under the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/...

> Carbon Tax systems also end up not actually reducing carbon, but instead allow "trading" of carbon heavily producers with monopoly lock in can simply gouge their customers with higher prices to pay for "offsets", it is akin to wealth redistribution but rather with carbon

You're confusing carbon taxes with cap and trade and carbon credits. There are no pollution permits to trade under a typical carbon tax regime. Please check your facts before sharing inaccurate information.

That part about funding unrelated agendas is partially why many leading economists recommend returning the revenue as a flat dividend. The revenue from the carbon tax is just divvied up and given back to everyone as a monthly direct deposit. https://econstatement.org

This also addresses the other concerns you pointed out below. The dividend helps to both (a) allow you to invest in improving your energy efficiency or (b) soften the blow where you can't. You may remember the Yellow Vest movement when France tried to apply a carbon tax. If France had given money back to the people, they probably would have had a lot more success with it.

> The best solution would be to bring future costs into the present and charge for co2 emissions. That way the truly valuable uses could still happen and the more optional uses of co2 would be discouraged.

Yep. A price on carbon is actually the most powerful lever we have to bring down emissions. Very nice visualization when you move the carbon price slider here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7....

And you can make it both equitable and politically viable if you use the money from the carbon fee to provide direct payments to households, then combine with a border adjustment to maintain trade competitiveness. https://econstatement.org/

Ultimately we just need something in place that corrects this obvious market failure with as few side effects as possible, and carbon fee and dividend does that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

At least on this climate policy simulator built by MIT, planting trees is indeed not a big winner for achieving climate goals. And actually, neither is limiting deforestation. (But we should do those things for other great reasons like preserving and restoring habitat.) This simulator doesn't address wetlands specifically, unfortunately.

If you really want to see what gets emissions down, move the carbon price slider.

https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=2.7....

According to tons of leading economists, we can make a steadily rising fee on carbon emissions economically sustainable and politically viable by returning the net revenue from the fee to households as carbon dividends.

https://econstatement.org/