In case you missed it: A recent poll shows that Massachusetts voters are increasingly alarmed about climate change:
“The pace of the change in Massachusetts was quite surprising to me,” Koczela says. “I was actually quite taken aback at it.”
Back in 2011, 77 percent of the registered voters Koczela surveyed said they believed the world was getting warmer. In 2015, it was 78 percent. Now it’s 88 percent — and Koczela says the public is coalescing around a cause.
… But on a personal level it seems climate, like politics, is local. Koczela found 74 percent of voters interviewed for the poll say they’d pay $10 more a month on their energy bill if it would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
I’m imagining the big jump happened at least partly because of Trump pulling us out of the Paris accord. That was a wake-up call: Having enjoyed a generation of environmental protection, we’ve tended to take it for granted. Now we know: No one’s going to do this for us.
On June 20 I attended a very heartening hearing at the State House addressing the two carbon fee bills before the legislature. Sen. Barrett’s S.1821 is revenue-neutral: A steadily increasing fee on carbon fuels, with the proceeds being returned to the public in the form of checks from the DOR. Rep. Jen Benson’s H1726 would start at a higher fee, and use 20% of the proceeds for efficiency programs, returning 80% to the public in dividends. Young state rep Solomon Goldstein-Rose suggested that the fee would stimulate innovation in efficiency and clean energy — and cannily suggested the bill be implemented at the beginning of an electoral cycle, so that residents can receive three quarterly dividend checks before the next election.
The room was packed; the atmosphere supportive, even festive. It was a good showing.
Where’s the Governor? Does he support it? Who knows? This is the difference between doing the least possible — and actually taking leadership.
I appreciate that Dept. of Transportation chief Stephanie Pollock understands that we are behind the 8-ball on climate. She realizes that meaningfully decarbonizing the transportation sector — moving to walking, biking, transit at scale — requires a really significant cultural shift. (This is readily apparent to bike and transit commuters throughout the Commonwealth.) She even says we need to spend more money — a lot more — on capital investment for the T — a jump from $600-$700M to $1-1.2B.
This is good talk. She gets it. But unless the Governor is willing to use his political capital to fund physical capital, we’ll continue to underachieve. We’ll continue to be a place where good, transformative, and necessary ideas get a nice hearing, a pat on the head — and die.
So I keep thinking … would a Democrat in office do better? Be bolder? More effective? Simply listen to the polls and do the popular thing? It sure looks like MA is ready to make a big leap. We just need a political culture that will follow along.
Baker and Republicans are climate change deniers when it comes to policy. If Democrats can’t or won’t lead on this issue, they should pack their bags and go home.
A few thoughts:
1. A carbon price may, in and of itself, not change behavior. Flies in the face of economics, right? Well, yes and no. We currently have a cap-and-trade fee on CO2 in the electric sector. It’s about $3/ton. It has virtually no impact on what power plants dispatch, because the discrepancy between no-carbon [nuclear, hydro, new RE], natural gas, and coal prices are bigger than that. If we gave the RGGI revenue back as a dividend, there would be no change in carbon emissions. But RGGI is successful precisely because it doesn’t give the money back (except in NH). In MA, we use that money to fund energy efficiency programs and grants for local governments who are doing carbon-cutting measures. It’s the expenditures that result in carbon-cutting, not the fee itself.
Paying a carbon dividend may be necessary politics, but it’s not very good public policy. We know that part of the transition to a no-carbon lifestyle will require public infrastructure. We’re talking everything from PV on government rooftops to substantial ongoing investment to bike and ped infrastructure to massive improvements to public transit, both existing and new, at the bus route, exclusive bus route, street car, subway, ferry, commuter rail, and Amtrak levels. We know it’s going to require more money spent on general research. More money on building inspectors and other regulators.
Some of the changes will result in net savings to be sure, but others won’t. We’ve got to get them done, and they’ll cost money. Giving the very source of the revenue back to the voters, only to then raise some other tax to pay for these things seems insane to me. By investing the carbon tax revenue in carbon-cutting measures will allow us to cut carbon much more quickly.
2. We’re not going to reach our CO2 goals with biking and walking and transit and telecommuting. Those are all important things, we should encourage them, and they’ll be part of the solution… but they’ll never be enough. What will? electric cars, trucks, buses. We must transition our entire transportation fleet to electric while we simultaneously transition our electric fleet to zero carbon. Not just a few EVs in town, not just a few on your block, not just one EV car out of everybody’s two cars. Every single vehicle must be electric. This isn’t about philosophy — this is just the math. If you want to hit 80 percent reductions by 2050, you need zero-carbon electricity and zero-carbon automotive transportation. That’s the reality. And so part of the revenue from (1) could easily be used to build the additional infrastructure for EVs. Beef up the distribution lines, build out the charging stations, the works — to say nothing of making up for the declining gas tax revenue.
3. Codes and standards! ACEEE ranks Massachusetts number 1 on energy efficiency, but we’ve got room for improvement. We stretched our building code a half-decade ago; let’s do it again. Let’s allow communities even more room to use the building code, for things like EV rollouts (see 2), water conservation through greywater, yadda yadda. And while I’m at it, MA has not implemented California efficiency standard requirements on all of our appliances. H.3404 would push things along, but there’s still more work to be done there, and that’s a layup.
Careful with the changes to building code. Construction costs are already exorbitant in the state. A new school in my town is projected to cost $65M – a colleague appropriation committee member visited a town in Virginia, and reports that a new school of similar size costs about a third of what we’ll be paying.
I encourage you to dig deeper into those costs.
For example, do those reflect lifetime cost-of-ownership, or are they limited to initial construction costs?
During the few years that I worked with a solar-thermal startup, we helped with dozens of public housing retrofits, several here in MA. We were removing ELECTRIC baseboard heating elements, and replacing them with hot-water baseboard radiators where the heat transfer fluid was heated by solar panels.
Those electric heating elements — hugely inefficient — were required by building codes and regulations at the time because their INSTALLATION cost was significantly lower than alternatives. The regulations at the time prohibited the agencies from considering lifetime cost of ownership.
You also haven’t specified where in VA this new school was built. We have a very different climate. We have a very different energy supply infrastructure. We don’t know whether your town is urban, suburban, or ex-urban, nor do we know the same about the cited building in VA.
Certainly the costs of building a new school in a densely-populated metro-Boston town will be VERY different from the structure built to serve, for example, a rural school in southern VA.
I want to see much more data about what you consider to be “exorbitant” before I put too much credibility in such comparisons.
This sentence suggests that you think all changes to building codes results in increased cost of construction. Why would you think that?
65 million might be, actually, a little low. Leominster High upgraded their existing (60+ year old) building and added a science wing a few years ago at 45 mil. BIllerica got some 72 mil from the state last year to add to the 100 million they are spending on an entirely new high school.
Of course, property values being what they are in Virginia and whether or no they need to purchase new land, might explain the difference… but you’re very short on details so I’ll just add a little salt to the mix…
Thanks for all this.
How do you square the notion that a carbon fee isn’t effective with the experience of British Columbia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax
What exactly is the experience of BC?
1. It’s about a 10 percent total delta in refined petroleum products over a six year range, at roughly $10/ton CO2. Not very much.
2. We haven’t isolated any other changes in market viz a viz other provinces in the age of fracking and tar sands. Given Canada’s relatively modest pipeline infrastructure system, we don’t know how much of the change is resulting from differences in import/export both provincial and national.
3. What about coal and natural gas? The wiki page doesn’t have any information there.
4. What about leakage, where the fossil fuel is procured out-of-province? Simplistically, this is filling up your gas tank elsewhere. More complex, this is moving your heavy fuel-use industries to the neighboring province, which serves to “lower” your number while keeping the nationwide number identical, making a change apparent but not functional.
5. That includes a ~25 cent per gallon gasoline tax increase. You think that’s got legs in Massachusetts, even with tax cuts elsewhere?
6. The data is 3 years old (and older), so it’s hard to know how much more impact this has had. I would expect that the gasoline consumption reduction would continue as a response to the increased price — it takes a while for everybody to get a new (to them) car, which is the big decision point for fuel efficiency. And now we’ve got EVs kicking around, another opportunity to cut further.
So,
(a) yes, BC seems to be showing some reductions,
(b) no, they don’t appear to be significant, but
(c) we don’t know much, because we don’t have comprehensive or up to date data.
Let me ask you a question, Charley. If they took that revenue and used it to improve energy efficiency in homes and businesses and non-profits and government buildings, if they used it to procure even higher mpg vehicles for provincial and city agencies, if they used it to subsidize the construction of new renewable electricity generators, do you think they’d have more reductions or the same amount of reductions, however deep they are in actuality?
It started off at $10/ton and was increased to $30/ton in $5/per increments
The wiki page has a link to the British Columbia page that explains the tax where you can find out the tax covers gasoline, diesel, jet fuel (presumably kerosene and/or derivatives) propane, natural gas and both high and low energy coal (taxed at different rates).
They soundly bested the Kyoto targets set for all of Canada…. So I call that significant. Why won’t you?
> increased to $30
That’s even worse! Even higher taxes for pretty thin results.
> covers gas and coal
Yes, I know it covers it. My question, albeit unclear, was: how much reduction has BC seen in coal and gas use in light of the tax? It isn’t on the wiki page, and I’m not interested in doing the legwork.
> It bested Kyoto… Why won’t you call it significant?
Because, relative to others, it isn’t. Massachusetts didn’t implement a tax anywhere near that large nor that comprehensive, and our state-wide CO2 emissions fell from 87.9 MMT in ’08 to 74.6 MMT in ’14 — a 15 percent reduction. Hell, the entire US fell from 5809 MMT in ’08 to 5405 MMT in ’14 — a 7 percent reduction — all without implementing a CO2 tax at all. (source).
It’s simply not at all obvious from the wikipedia page and its data that the carbon tax had a significant effect, if any effect at all.
We’re seeing carbon reductions across first world countries for a variety of reasons. In North American, fracked gas is a huge reason — we’re substituting gas for coal, and not accurately including the fugitive methane emissions.
So again, I’m not arguing against a carbon tax. I’m making the point that if we’re going to meet aggressive CO2 goals, we’ve got to implement smart and cost effective public policy. In this case, that means (a) making sure the CO2 tax is high enough to generate the efficiencies, substitutions, and other emissions reductions methods, and (b) using some if not all of the revenue to re-shape our physical infrastructure so that we can get all the way down to 80 percent reductions by 2050. When asked “What about BC’s system?” my answer remains “What about it? I’m not sure that it’s really accomplished very much at all, but could be convinced with a good analysis not found on the wikipedia page.”
I think this is where you are not understanding. There was no revenue. None. They increased the tax on fuels in a completely revenue neutral fashion. British Columbia lowered income and other taxes to increase the carbon tax. They taxed and fuel use decreased. End of story. No slight of hand. No passive aggressive hoping that pressure here will have an affect there…. They straightforwardly just shifted the focus of taxation and it had a clear and significant and predicted effect.
Are you even trying? There was revenue, and they gave it back. It’s net revenue neutral, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t revenue. At every carbon transaction, when the carbon tax was paid, it was collected. It was revenue.
Sure, with simpleton analysis. But correlation does not equal causation. I just showed you both a single state and an entire country that had similar results with dramatically different carbon taxing schemes. So you can simplistically assert that BC’s carbon tax resulted in reduced emissions, so it worked. I won’t. I’ll readily acknowledge that (a) we don’t have enough information, (b) haven’t done enough analytical work, and (c) there are economic and practical reasons why it may have worked well and it may not have had a tangible effect at all.
Significant? Nope. Not relative to their peers, at least not on a first glance. Predicted? Maybe. Show me the prediction.
First, a cap and trade system is an entirely different beast from carbon pricing. Secondly, any cap and trade system that does not have a direct impact on emissions is incorrectly incentivized: the cap is too high, or the trades are incorrectly costed out, or the number of permits is off, or some combination of the three…. Meaning that (thirdly) the recoup and distribution of the fees into the government efforts at reduction, rather than back into the market, is likely recognition of an unwillingness to either implement or maintain a proper, functioning cap and trade marketplace.
Maybe that’s the way you want it, and I have no problem with that, but I don’t think you can draw a straight line from these compromises to the statement “paying a carbon dividend [… is] not very good policy.”
Oh good grief. RGGI is a cap-and-trade system where the cap was set to result in a market price that hit the price target the regulators wanted. Nominally, it’s cap-and-trade. In practice, it’s functionally identical to a carbon tax on the electricity generation sector.
It depends on what the goal was. If the goal was to raise a bit of revenue to do good things with it, then RGGI nailed it. If the goal is to change the order of dispatch, that’s another story. The problem is that there aren’t that many different marginal emissions rates — the least cost non-free resource on the dispatch horizon is combined cycle (CC) gas plants — and they already have the lowest emissions rates for fossil fuel resources. That means that increasing the carbon price for electricity generation will have no effect on dispatch in the short run, because the CCs are running as much as they can already. It’s true that in the long run the price signal will persuade existing carbon-free generators to stay in the market who might otherwise retire, and to persuade new carbon-free generators to enter the market. But that’s a very expensive proposition with a difficult-to-gauge impact that might be achieved more cheaply and directly through other means (like the RPS or another 83A-style procurement law).
Not at all. It’s recognition that Adam Smith’s hand doesn’t solve all problems. MA spends most of the RGGI money on cost effective energy efficiency programs — wherein the societal benefit exceeds the societal cost, but a mismatch of market incentives precludes that EE happening under Adam Smith’s watchful eye.
You put it in quotes, but I didn’t write that. I think that a carbon tax may or may not have significant carbon reduction effects, depending on its magnitude. I also think that there are proven government investments that can have dramatic carbon reduction results, and therefore if we’re interested in reducing carbon we’d more rapidly (and cheaply!) achieve those goals by investing the revenue into carbon cutting actions, rather than return it and then go look for other money to implement those programs and practices.
I gotta be honest, it feels like you’re taking this personally. I’m not sure why. I’m not trolling, I’m an expert in this very field, and I’ve got a long history on this site using facts and evidence to justify my arguments in favor of strong regulation and policy to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions. I’m pushing back on this particular public policy tool because it seems that it’s thrown around as a panacea when, in fact, it’s not easy to implement it effectively and that trend appears likely to continue in MA, wherein it’s better than nothing but nowhere near as effective as it could be at the same level of cost.
You absolutely did write that. It’s right there. I cut a portion and put ellipsis in square brackets to indicate that I didn’t quote the entire sentence. That’s the rules of quoting. Are you saying I made something up and then took the time to apply rules of journalism to this phantasm…?
The very best experts are always looking for different perspectives on the field in which their expertise lies. That’s one of the traits that makes them expert.
You made a blanket statement citing a whole bunch of things that are, in themselves, both true and acceptable but which do not support the blanket charge. RGGI is a weakly implemented cap and trade system the undisputed success of which does not indict more strongly implemented cap and trade systems which is where you were going before I attempted to head you off.
I sure did. When I searched, I must have mistyped because I didn’t see it. Apologies.
I continue to think that net-revenue-neutral carbon tax schemes are not very good public policy. Not terrible, but not very good, for precisely the reasons I’ve laid out — there are very real places where private spending can’t allow for the carbon reductions needed, but public spending can.
Indeed. And to be glib, based on this conversation, that’s why I’m expert and I don’t think you are. You’ve outright refused to consider anything but your evidence-free assertion. I’ve reviewed data from various sources, demonstrated correlations contrary to your assertion that got similar results, and acknowledged that the answer is ambiguous. Go figure.
A ha! Here is the problem! You incorrectly assumed what I was arguing for when I was arguing against something else. And, You. Are. Wrong.
I’m not arguing for cap and trade instead of a net-revenue-neutral carbon tax. Not in the slightest. That wasn’t where I was going, and you succeeded in making an ass out of you and me in your argument. Maybe next time you could do me the courtesy of asking me what I think rather than going ahead and assuming it. That would be great.
Indeed, I told you I was not expert (at least not in the sense you mean) when I forthrightly stated my perspective was outside that of your ‘expertise.’
The manner in which you attempt to discount my opinion because It’s not ‘expert’ is exactly my point. Be careful… you may be an expert because you are right. But many an expert has tripped themselves up when they decide they are right because they are an expert… I don’t think you possess any special immunity to this.
Another common trait of experts is that they complicate the simple: it makes them feel even more expert, more of the time.
Not at all. It’s clear that you are arguing for something (I make no assumptions) but the manner in which you are doing it is to attempt to deflate the arguments against that which you are arguing for… even when they don’t actually contradict what you for which you are arguing. This is seen by the many more words you’ve expending telling me I’m wrong than in making an actual case that you are right…. this is quite aside from, but not apart from, your use of pejoratives (‘simpleton’, ‘ass’, etc…)
It’s not complicated. It’s quite simple. Correlation does not imply causation.
That is an assumption in itself, is it not? I’m not arguing for any policy. I’m arguing that because price curves are more like staircases, product or fuel switching isn’t assured. I’m arguing that the BC reductions in petroleum aren’t remarkable given reductions in other regions with much more limited or with no carbon tax, in the same time period. And given those two realities, I’m arguing that BC having a carbon tax and having reductions does not imply that (a) BC’s carbon tax was especially effective, or (b) that other carbon taxes will be.
I can’t prove the negative. You made the claim that A implies B. I pointed out other cases where not A implied B, and where A doesn’t imply B. You refuse to even acknowledge that, simply restating “They taxed and fuel use decreased. End of story.”
To anyone with analytical skill or experience, it’s simply not the end of the story. An assertion based on a simplistic understanding of economics and energy, no analysis, and no comparison, and then a steadfast insistence that the person who’s spend the last ten years studying issues exactly like this one is in the wrong… well, whatever. People can decide for themselves.
I think that’s jus a handwavy method of saying “since we lack the balls to either enforce regulation strongly or tax directly we’ll pretend to do the former and whatever comes out of it we’ll call the latter… “
That’s your opinion. I don’t find it to be a very good one, but so be it..
Thanks for the good information.
If you want a Democrat who understands and will act on climate change, you probably want Bob Massie. He’s spent the majority of his working life working on sustainability issues and knows the field backwards, forwards, and sideways. Personally, I think he could have done more good by staying at UMass and organizing and networking the local universities around sustainability and environmental issues but he’s decided to run for Governor instead.
As for carbon pricing, I wrote about the current cost of carbon two years ago at https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/16/1412568/-The-Current-Cost-of-Carbon when a little over 40% of world production included a cost of carbon. With China’s carbon pricing scheme going national this year, I believe at least 60% of world production will include a cost on carbon by the end of 2017. It would be good if MA considered doing something, it would be better if the USA considered doing something but there will be a cost on carbon in our economic system whether we act or not. However, the International Energy Agency estimated a couple of years ago that the global price on carbon was about $7 per ton while the global subsidies for fossil fuels was over $100 per ton of carbon emitted. Putting a price on carbon is only a half measure if we don’t remove some or all of those subsidies on fossil fuels.
Bob Massie called out Faker for aiding and abetting climate change denier Trump for withdrawing US from the Paris Agreement ; this morning on OTR . He was a strong, articulate and passionate leader on the environment.
Well, whaddayaknow ! A Democrat who fights !