This is from a thread on the Sierra Club's FRED list that asks whether we support a carbon tax. Ned Ford is one of the most informed experts on energy that I know in the Club. Below he discusses why a carbon tax proposals are a disruption and will not happen fast enough.
Enjoy.
JBK
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ned Ford Ned.Ford@fuse.net Date: Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 1:25 PM Subject: Re: [GW-ACT-LEADERS] Sierra Club position on carbon fee and dividend proposal to put a price on carbon? To: CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS@lists.sierraclub.org
I have spent many years trying to explain why carbon taxes are not going to be a big part of the picture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM is about disruptive technology and it disrupts my own thinking even though I have been following most of the trends he speaks about for many years. In short we don't need carbon taxes because the technologies are producing the price differential more effectively than a tax could.
That flies in the face of the often-repeated claim that carbon taxes are more efficient or better than other strategies. What those people usually mean is that carbon taxes are better than command and control. We haven't used command and control for the major pollutants for several decades, so it's a false premise.
What carbon tax advocates neglect is the huge differential between the effect of a price on carbon on coal, and the same price's impact on petroleum or natural gas. We seriously could use a natural gas or petroleum tax. But it would have to be absurdly large as a tax on carbon, compared to the price needed to end coal. About ten times larger. It would be easy enough to separate the fuels and have different tax rates, but the discussion never gets that far.
The fact of the matter is that carbon reductions are happening because efficiency and wind and solar are cheaper. The more we use those three technologies to address coal and natural gas generation, the lower the prices and the faster the process. We are at a point today where an EV costs a third or less than a gasoline car to drive any distance, and the price differential will get greater. So we need a lot more clean electricity than the nation is presently expecting to need, if just replacing the current fuel mix (including the nuclear plants that can't run forever) is the target. About 40% more total electricity by 2040.
If you view the link above you will understand how narrowly I'm talking about the coming changes. Disruptive energy changes affect everything we do. But the most important thing we can do is to concentrate on direct state level activism to remove obstructionists from the path of efficiency, wind and solar. Utility scale solar must come before distributed solar, even though in ten years we may see the order of priorities change to solar, wind and efficiency. If that happens, as Mr. Seba says, it won't be purely economic. Or at least it won't be purely economic as we think about it because people will be factoring in their convenience as a "cost" where no dollars are involved. This means we probably won't ever become truly efficient. But at the same time, efficiency in some form is driving every single one of the technological disruptions he identifies and many more that he doesn't.
I hope the Sierra Club ignores carbon taxes. Even if the Republicans are demolished in ten weeks we can use the opportunity far better to remove barriers to efficiency and to speed development of cost-effective wind and solar than to spend another decade trying to get a tax package into position that really works.
- Ned
On 8/22/2016 12:44 PM, Carolyn Amparan wrote:
Hello,
Does anyone know the Sierra Club's position on the Citizen Climate's Lobby carbon fee and dividend proposal? If so, what is the status on the specific proposal and a price on carbon in general?
I found there was a resolution considered in 2013 but have not found anything more current on the national website.
Thanks, Carolyn
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